Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman, a politician from Missouri, was the Democratic president of the United States, 1945-1953.

Evaluations

Truman's reputation has gone from very low when he left office, to high after 1990. He is now widely considered to have been a tough-minded, decisive, and effective leader who ably guided the nation through the perilous waters of the early Cold War and whose policy of containment essentially laid the foundations for American "victory" in that prolonged conflict in 1989. For many historians, the down-to-earth Midwesterner now merits consideration as one of the greatest American presidents. In recent years presidential aspirants of both parties have claimed Truman as their own, especially if their election chances seem as hopeless as Truman's did in 1948. His reputation has been bolstered by scholarly biographies by Ferrell (1994), Hamby (1995), and especially McCullough's Pulitzer prize-winning popular biography (1992). The in-depth analysis by Leffler (1992), cautiously praised the Truman administration's essential wisdom in handling a myriad of problems.

A strong negative dissent comes from Offner (2002) who argues that Truman was a "parochial nationalist" whose "uncritical belief in the superiority of American values and political-economic interests," conviction that "the Soviet Union and Communism were the root cause of international strife," and "inability to comprehend Asian politics and nationalism" intensified the postwar conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, precipitated the division of Europe, and set Sino-American relations on a path of long-term animosity. Rather than being a great statesman who carefully weighed various policy alternatives, Offner asserts that Truman's myopia "created a rigid framework in which the United States waged long-term, extremely costly global cold war". As his title suggests, the Cold War was at best a pyrrhic victory for the United States.

Bibliography

• Robert Ferrell. Harry S. Truman (1994), scholarly biography
• Alonzo Hamby. Man of the People (1995), a standard scholarly biography
• Melvyn Leffler. A Preponderance of Power (1992), in-depth study of foreign policy
• David McCullough. Truman (1992), very well written popular biography; winner of Pulitzer prize
• Arnold A. Offner. Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War. 2002. 640 pp.

• Geselbracht, Raymond. "Creating the Harry S. Truman Library: The First Fifty Years," Public Historian, 28 (Summer 2006), 37–78.

See also

• Cold War
• Dean Acheson
• Korean War

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