Harry Truman

Harry Truman is the Republican Party's favorite Democrat. He has been since Barry Goldwater startled his conservative supporters in 1964 with lavish praise for the president the GOP had learned to loathe. So it comes as no surprise to hear George Bush vow he will wage a Truman-style comeback campaign with plenty of "give 'em hell" for the Democratic Congress.There are obvious parallels between the re-election plights of these two politicians: Both running far behind at convention time. Both deadlocked with a Congress dominated by the other party.

"You will be our president when you read this note," George Herbert Walker Bush wrote to Bill Clinton, the man who defeated him in the 1992 campaign, denying Mr. Bush the provisional vindication that reelection provides until history has its chance to judge from a distance. Nonetheless, in Oval Office tradition, Mr. Bush left a note for Mr. Clinton to read on taking office, and it echoed the message of transitions past, even between bitter political rivals: "I am rooting hard for you. " Note the pronoun: You will be our president.

Just as wise generals try to avoid fighting the last war, so should President Clinton avoid strict adherence to the Harry Truman model for Democratic victory after mid-term defeat. His overall strategic goal, of course, is a Truman-like comeback for a second term in 1996. But the political realities of present-day America argue for a much different tactical approach.Mr. Truman veered leftward in confronting his Republican tormentors who controlled Capitol Hill after the 1946 election.In vetoing the Taft-Hartley bill, he secured the fervent backing of organized labor.

What's wrong with George W. Bush? Doesn't he know America has already been defeated in Iraq? Doesn't he realize that as a lame-duck president, he's just conducting a holding operation? Doesn't the man keep up with the opinion polls? Hasn't he noticed the growing tide - the tidal wave, really - of anti-war sentiment? Shouldn't it have dawned on him, even in his snug presidential cocoon, that at this low point in his presidency, there's no hope he'll regain the country's confidence? Doesn't he read The New York Times?

WASHINGTON -- In his speech before graduating cadets at West Point, President Bush made clear who he sees as his historical guide: Harry Truman, whose name he invoked 17 times. "By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged, and the doctrines he set down," Mr. Bush declared, "Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the Cold War." And now, the president argued, "like Americans in Truman's day, we are laying the foundations for victory." It's easy to see why Mr. Bush and others in the administration regularly invoke Mr. Truman when explaining their circumstances and choices.

The baseball commissioner's job is to save the club owners from themselves. They don't tolerate that.George claims the mantle of Harry Truman who came from behind in '48. It's really that of Harry Truman hounded from office as a bumbling failure in '52.Some other guy named Berger wants to tear up Baltimore County schools. Don't blame me.And to think that Gandhi formed his ideas for nonviolence in South Africa.

GEORGE Bush is running as Harry Truman. Harry Truman did the same thing in 1948. Ran as Harry Truman. Afterward he said, "It was a lot easier than I thought it would be."That was the year everybody said Harry Truman couldn't win. Since nobody wants to run as a sure loser, Harry Truman naturally toyed with the idea of running as somebody else, but Mrs. Truman said, "Over my dead body." That's why Harry Truman called Mrs. Truman "the Boss."Afterward Mrs. Truman said she had no use for men who lost their grip on their own identities every time a political campaign came along.

If only Harry Truman were in the White House, he would invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, declare a national emergency, seize the clubs, draft the players and say, "Play ball!"The NAACP has gone to war against the NAACP.Leon Panetta is taking charge. He may even fire Bill.An agency no one heard of built a $310 million spy shop without telling Congress and to evade prying eyes put it next to Dulles Airport. And to think we won the Cold War.

Fifty years ago today, Harry S. Truman awoke for the first time as president. His nation was stunned by the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose passing at the end of a wrenching war was compared to Lincoln's assassination.Now Mr. Everyman was moving into the White House. "If Harry Truman could be president, so could my next-door neighbor," was a widespread reaction.From the perspective of half a century, Truman's mythical next-door neighbor would have had to be one helluva guy. For the plain man from Missouri was to emerge as one of this nation's great presidents.

RECOLLECTIONS of where they were when they learned of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, 50 years ago this week:"I was a teen-ager in Atlanta in 1945. The afternoon of April 12 I was playing basketball or volleyball in the 'large court' of the downtown YMCA. When the man who handed out towels in the locker room came up to the gym and breathlessly announced the news of FDR's death, three men in their 40s or 50s who were working out on the sidelines of the large court laughed, cracked jokes and danced a jig."

KEY WEST, FLA. // Only one road leads from Key Largo all the way to Key West, so you'll get wet before you get lost. For the directionally impaired, that makes things easier. Yet the 100 or so miles between Key Largo in the north and Key West on the southwestern end cover a lot of territory. The Keys comprise 1,700 islands, after all. Harry Truman visited 11 times between 1946 and 1952. Ernest Hemingway spent 11 years in Key West. I had two days to take it in. For the most part, U.S. 1 is two lanes -- sometimes highway, sometimes city street.

WASHINGTON -- In his speech before graduating cadets at West Point, President Bush made clear who he sees as his historical guide: Harry Truman, whose name he invoked 17 times. "By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged, and the doctrines he set down," Mr. Bush declared, "Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the Cold War." And now, the president argued, "like Americans in Truman's day, we are laying the foundations for victory." It's easy to see why Mr. Bush and others in the administration regularly invoke Mr. Truman when explaining their circumstances and choices.

American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman - and the Shoot-out that Stopped It Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr. The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch Jules Witcover The Johns Hopkins University Press / 368 pages Jules Witcover may feel he's still an ink-stained wretch at 78, after a half-century in the news business. But he has loved every minute he has spent in newspapering. Or at least pretty many of them. "I've spent thousands of hours sitting, drinking, singing, writing and only occasionally sleeping on whistle stop trains, press buses, and planes from New Hampshire to California," he writes.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Something good might come from Bill Clinton's "homecoming" to Harlem if it focuses our attention on what taxpayers pay to subsidize all of our former presidents. Congress began helping out ex-presidents in 1958 because Harry Truman was a relatively poor man and because it was thought proper to help ease the transition of former presidents back into private life. Before that, no formal federal pension or any other benefit was paid to ex-presidents. Like most other government programs, the relative pittance ($25,000 annual pension)

WASHINGTON - There was a time when departing presidents dropped the keys to the White House in the mail chute and headed back home to a quiet and inconspicuous retirement. Take Harry Truman, for instance. When his presidency was over, he went back to Independence, Mo., and pretty much stayed there. Merle Miller, in his oral biography of Truman, "Plain Speaking," quotes a local television commentator: "I, like everyone else, thought that when Harry Truman came home, he would stay a brief period and then, like almost everybody else who goes to Washington, he would find some reason to go back and live there.

American ideals don't preclude leaders stressing their faith I'm a registered Republican who will probably vote for Texas Gov. George W. Bush. I'm also a practicing Catholic. While I do not like to see religion pushed down anyone's throat, I do not disagree with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's inclusion of faith in his speeches. Those who feel he should stick to political issues should remember that political promises are only meaningless campaign rhetoric. It is sad when someone states, as Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abraham H. Foxman did, that "appealing along religious lines, or belief in God, is contrary to the American ideal" ("Groups decry talk of faith," Aug. 30)

David McCullough, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer and host of "The American Experience," makes no bones about his take on Harry S. Truman."One can debate whether Harry Truman was a great man or a great president. I didn't have any strong feelings one way or the other when I started my own work on Truman, but I concluded that he was both -- a great man and a very great president," McCullough said during a press conference to promote "Truman," a two-part biography beginning tomorrow night on PBS.McCullough serves as host and chief expert of "Truman," and his single-minded take on the 33rd president suffuses virtually every frame of the film.

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. -- If President Bush wants a blueprint for an incumbent who is an underdog in his bid to stay in the Oval Office, he can find it among the memorabilia of the 1948 "give-'em-hell" campaign here at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum.But Mr. Bush may need more than a blueprint of how an upset was pulled off 44 years ago, for at least three reasons. First, this is 1992, not 1948. Second, opponent Bill Clinton is not the stuffy Thomas E. Dewey. And finally, George Bush, as former First Daughter Margaret has reminded him, is no Harry Truman.

At first glance, the resemblance isn't obvious. But when he dons the glasses and a spiffy tie and blends the gray from his temples into the wig he wears, Gerald L. Riley becomes Harry S. Truman. Since February, Riley has been touring Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Delaware performing the one-man play "Give 'em Hell Harry," which traces the political life of the 33rd president. He will bring the play to Florence Bain Senior Center in Columbia on Sept. 7. Riley said he had been searching for the right play, and this one fit the bill.

"Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World," by James Chace. Simon and Schuster. 495 pages. $30.Voila un homme. "There's a man," Charles de Gaulle said of Dean Acheson after one of his many encounters with the brilliant, tough-minded secretary of state who fostered the international institutions that led to America's stunning triumph in the Cold War. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank - these and many other initiatives owed their clarity of purpose to the man who was Harry Truman's diplomatic "right arm" in the chaotic years just after World War II.Despite its extravagant title, this first full-fledged biography of Acheson provides the kind of realistic appraisal he would have approved.