INDEPENDENCE, Mo. - The last time I'd toured the Truman Library, as a young
graduate student in history at the University of Missouri, the guide was the
library's namesake. Always dapper - after all, he'd been a haberdasher in
another failed career - Harry Truman was, well, Trumanesque. He was crisp as
the white, pointed handkerchief in the breast pocket of his single-breasted
dark blue suit.
With his natty bow tie and eyeglasses always in place, he could have stepped
out of a political cartoon. He was folksy without being folksy, his style
no-style, but just plain Missouri show-me. His manner might have been
practiced, his best lines well rehearsed, but the whole effect seemed
natural to the man and the place - right here. Independence.
While aware of the impression he was leaving - he was, after all, a
politician of some note - the man had no airs, certainly not intellectual
ones. He'd been there, done that, and didn't need to philosophize about it.
He was an earnest student of history - the old-fashioned kind with heroes
and villains, right and wrong. None of this Toynbeean murk for him. He knew
what he knew, the rest he would learn - if he thought it worth learning.
Mr. Truman never did have much patience with the pretentious. At a
particularly low point in his presidency, his party having just lost the
midterm elections, a distinguished senator from Arkansas on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee suggested that he resign the presidency in the
best British tradition. Much like a prime minister leaving office after a
vote of no confidence.
Harry Truman didn't think much of that idea. And as for the senator who'd
come up with it, he dismissed the Hon. J. William Fulbright as someone who'd
been "educated above his intelligence." And that was one of his milder
descriptions of the gentleman from Arkansas.
About the only feature I remember from my earlier visit to the Truman
Library was a huge Persian carpet that had been suspended from the balcony.
We'd pass it more than once during our brief tour, and each time Mr. Truman
would say, "Yeah, that's a rug the Shah of Iran gave me."
The rug isn't there any more. The shah is out of fashion and the rug is no
longer in sight. Political correctness must have overtaken even this
monument to Give 'Em Hell Harry. A captain of artillery during the First
World War, he may have acquired a certain familiarity with the stock
profanities, but the elementary decency of the man shone through. He tended
to rise above his surroundings. Maybe that's how he could be in Kansas
City's old Pendergast machine but not of it.