If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

Reevaluation of the Truman presidency

Kansas city being 'just' 250 miles away from us (let me help you out: 402 km), it was evident that our first trip would be to discover Dorothy's land. A couple of miles before you reach Kansas city, though, you stumble upon Independence, Missouri - a small but remarkable city, the hometown of Harry S. Truman. Independence is all about Truman - his presidential library, his home, the church where he married his wife. 

If you are not a history geek as much as we are, a reminder: Harry S. Truman was a US president between 1945-1953. And if you are not a history geek, probably that is all you know about him - that he was the president between Roosevelt and Eisenhower and he was the guy who dropped the atomic bomb. End of story. 

Not that I can blame anyone who didn't absorb more knowledge about Truman - unless dedicated specific effort to the case. His presidential heritage and image are very poorly maintained. (No, that's not because of the Presidential library - that is a great place, inspired me to write this post, you should go and visit.)

Truman himself was a small, thin man, looking as inspirational as a bookkeeper in Nebraska. (The only style part of his apparent was the Harry Potter-lookalike glasses.) 

His life was modest and simple - courted one woman for years before married her, got one child. That's it. No big scandals or pomp, millionaire parents or Ivy-league education. You struggle to create a narrative around his life for the pre-presidential years - you learn about a man who did farming, had interests in a zinc mine in Oklahoma, was a timekeeper for Santa Fe Railway and entered the military to serve in WWI. And then, somehow, he became the president of the US. 

Shortly after he did so, said the following statement to reporters: 'Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.' - not too comforting from a just-inaugurated war-time president. I can certainly relate to him - it is not easy to become a president after Roosevelt and in the middle of the biggest war mankind has ever experienced. But still, this sentence shadows greatly his capacity to lead and make hard decisions (and reveals his very direct, profane - yet deeply warm - style of communication).

This is the point where we all miss his grandeur - we know he dropped the bomb but fail to know anything else from the eight years during he served as a President. Just a couple of trivia - if it weren't for Truman, we didn't have institutions like the UN (he appointed Elanor Roosevelt as a member of the first General Assembly), the NATO and the Marshall plan - OECD in the long run. Truman was the one insisted on the Berlin airlift during the Berlin blockade. He recognized Israel as a state minutes after it claimed its independence. He led the country through the coldest years of the Cold War, in a midst of a foreign policy turmoil.

He created the National Security Council (NSC) and the position of the national security adviser - the must-have person in every presidential series since (like our favorite Nancy McNally). Among the regular attendees of the Council, you can spot the vice president - that is, I think, from his bitter experience to become a president with zero knowledge on foreign policy or national security updates. He was the one who established the CIA - as the world-class country ran without proper foreign intelligence until the start of WWII.

Of course, most people are familiar with these institutions and events - but we rarely connect them to the political insightfulness of Truman.

Truman was an organized man and created a greatly organized structure around him to foster his decision making. Basically, he is the one who created the system all the other presidents used to navigate in foreign policy or national security issues - and his system has been being intact until today. He was the transitional president under whose rule the USA reached its high status in the international scene - the 'leader of the free world'.

If this were not enough, Truman not only excelled in building up structures from chaos, he also found or kept in place the greatest people of his time  - a hugely important, yet most underestimated skill of politicians. Truman had Morgenthau, Marshall, Byrnes, Kennan - just to name a few of his staff. This list is like having a dream team in the 1950's. 

He didn't have an easy situation in domestic issues: end of war, troops coming home and they need to be disarmed and reintroduced into the civil society. The economy was transitioning from its wartime setup to a normal one - during the years '48-'50, civilians experienced shorts on many everyday essential products before the big economic boom started  (which is, by the way, also started during Truman's presidency).

Regarding his domestic policies, he was greatly progressive, should be in all the rooms where there is a Kennedy picture. (As it is usually the case with progressive presidents, he got a mainly conservative Congress to hinder his plans.) I will not discuss in great details how he was ahead of his time in a couple of issues - like housing, schools, civil rights for the minorities, and so on. He was so persistent on taking the progressive position that the Democratic Party almost split in the 1948 Democratic convention over the issue of civil rights.  (Finally, the debate did split the party, but only some 20 years later. Those southerners who walked away from Truman in the 1948 Convention were known as the Dixiecrats, whom would turn their back to the Democrats at the time of LBJ - over the same issue. Since then, Democrats haven't got a single vote back from the South.)

Okay, I know I can't get around the subject much more, we need to talk about the bomb, to put it into the narrative of his presidency. Let's start with the recognition of the fact that he was a vice president for just three months when Roosevelt died, during which period he rarely interacted with the President - obviously not knowing much about his wartime plans. (He wasn't even the first choice of Roosevelt for the VP position, but for the credit of Roosevelt, his first choice was also brilliant.)

Truman dropped the two bombs in August 1945 - when he was being a president for four shallow months. (In some other jobs, you are still on probation in the fourth month.) No, I am not saying this as of lessen the significance of his decision. I am just putting the frames in which I am aiming conclude regarding his act. 

The bomb is a controversial issue, to say the least - it fostered decades of academic and popular debates. J. Samuel Walker said in a 2005 article a perfect summary about the subject: 'The fundamental issue that has divided scholars over a period of nearly four decades is whether the use of the bomb was necessary to achieve victory in the war in the Pacific on terms satisfactory to the United States'. Those who support the decision argue that it led to a Japanese surrender - and saved lives by quickly ending the war. Those who are against is, usually argue with the moral angel - that atomic bombing is immoral and it was unnecessary from a military point of view. 

My personal opinion is that dropping the bomb had (and still has) obvious moral consequences, but someone at some point in those years would have dropped it anyway. I don't condemn Truman's act, I don't see it as a mistake or an immoral, evil thing. Don't get me wrong: this should never, ever happen again, and I probably wouldn't have been in favor of it if anyway present at the decision. But I respect that he made a decision, and can accept it. For me, this is the real meaning of leadership: these hardest moments when you have to choose between two or more wrong options, when you put yourself on the edge of the known things on Earth - and let history judge you later on. Face a moment like that and survive it - that's real leadership.

Truman faced the decision in a way that no other President had to - partly because after him every other President had the experience, what happens as a consequence of such an act. The weight of this decision had fallen on him at the dawn of the atomic era -  I don't think that anyone ever wanted to be in his shoes for those moments.

One of the most famous phrases the world inherited from Truman is the title of my blog post today - 'if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen'. He was reportedly using this phrase years before his presidency. I have goosebumps when I think of this, as it seems to me that this sentence is just the perfect metaphor of the turn of events in which he had to perform, and also of his attitude how he saw leadership. And we can all just be very grateful for the way he saw it.

Photos by David Dorosz, all but one were made about the displayed items of the Truman Presidential Libary. 
The Truman picture from 1945 is from the archive of the Truman Presidential Libary and Museum.