Product Description

Harry S. Truman is remembered today as an icon--the plain-speaking president, "Give 'em Hell Harry," the chief executive who put "The Buck Stops Here" on his desk. But Alonzo L. Hamby shows that there was more to Truman than the pugnacious fighter so prominent in popular memory. Insecure, ambitious, a man of honor, a partisan loyalist, an agrarian Jeffersonian Democrat who became a champion of big government, Truman was a complex figure who fought long and hard to triumph over his own weaknesses.

In Man of the People, Hamby offers a gripping account of this distinctively American life, tracing Truman's remarkable rise from marginal farmer in rural Missouri to shaper of the postwar world. Truman comes alive in these pages as he has nowhere else, making his way from the farmhouse, to the front lines in France during World War I, to the difficult small-business world of Kansas City--all the time struggling with his deep feelings of inadequacy and immense ambition. Hamby provides an honest, incisive look at the rising politician's relationship with Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast, who sponsored his career from the county court to the U.S. Senate. We see how Truman, a ferocious and skilled fighter in factional party battles, tried to balance his sense of honor with his political loyalties. Free of corruption himself, he nevertheless refused to repudiate Pendergast even when the boss was sinking under the weight of his ties to organized crime. Hamby also offers the best account yet of Truman's critical years in the Senate, covering not only his World War II probe of the defense program but also his neglected and revealing populist investigations of the railroads during the 1930s. He demonstrates that Truman was one of the most popular and respected members of the upper house.

Hamby is particularly acute in his portrait of Truman's volatile presidency. He criticizes some aspects of the decision to drop the atomic bombs against Japan but concludes that, considered in context, the act was understandable and justified. Providing new insight into the Cold War, he identifies the Turkish and Iranian crisis of 1946 as crucial turning points in Truman's attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Thoroughly covering Truman's struggle for "liberalism in a conservative age," Hamby also sheds great light on the president's Fair Deal domestic program.

Harry Truman, Hamby writes, was a flawed man--insecure, often petty and vindictive--yet one of the great presidents of the twentieth century. But Americans cherish him less for what he did than for who he was: an ordinary person who worked his way up the political ladder to the summit of power. In Man of the People, Alonzo L. Hamby provides a richly perceptive biography, giving us the best look yet at who Truman was, how he changed, and why he triumphed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #910586 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 784 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Harry Truman became an American icon after his death in 1972, but as Hamby (Beyond the New Deal) reminds us, he was widely discredited by the end of his second term in the White House: "During the later years of his presidency, the public would increasingly see not his fundamental generosity or his great decisions, but his gaffes, pettiness, and unpredictability." Hamby's rich portrait reveals a man devoted to honesty and efficiency in public service, who excelled at building bipartisan coalitions, displayed an ability to make hard decisions and was "magnificently right" in his contributions to the early civil rights movement and to the mobilization of the West against the Soviet challenge. In Hamby's view, Truman personified the evolution of American social and political democracy in the first half of the 20th century. His biography vividly defines the man, both public and private.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Following David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative Truman (LJ 6/1/92) and Robert Ferrell's scholarly Harry S Truman: A Life (LJ 12/94), is there need for another comprehensive Truman biography? Yes, and noted Truman historian Hamby provides it. Unlike McCullough, Hamby offers an analytical model for viewing Truman, a liberal president serving in increasingly conservative times. Current fascination with Truman, Hamby notes, has more to do with his typically middle-class struggle to achieve success than with what he actually accomplished as president. Truman, an honest politician operating in a corrupt political environment, was overly defensive about his family and his association with the Pendergast political syndicate of Missouri. Yet with the unraveling of the New Deal and World War II consensus, he was successful in mustering bipartisan support for his great foreign policy successes?the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine and, to a lesser extent, his progressive civil rights plank. This balanced assessment, although well written, lacks McCullough's narrative grace. Yet it presents a more dispassionate interpretation that will be welcomed by students of the presidency and public administration. Strongly recommended for large presidential studies and Truman collections.?Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, Pa.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A massive, engaging, and revealing political and personal study.... Hamby has taken us a step beyond mythology."--Chicago Tribune
"Hamby presents a beautifully constructed and scrupulously researched portrait of Truman that strips away the mythologizer's varnish to give us the authentic, gutsy politician whose life was a potent testimony to burning ambition, good judgment, and blind luck. "--The Washington Post Book World
"What Mr. Hamby has done, with great skill, is to remind us of the real Harry Truman, to demythologize him without slighting his accomplishments or his rough road to success."--The New York Times Book Review
"An altogether splendid biography."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Customer Reviews

Superb bio without the mythology that has obscured Truman
Hamby uses the tools of a professional historian -- excellent documentation and sources, superb prose, and healthy skepticism -- to brilliantly move beyond the standard adoring view of Truman as a plain-talking, quick-deciding everyman. While he is shown to have been those things, he is also revealed to have shared much of the pettiness, anger, and impulsiveness that have marked many of his predecessors and successors. He is (surprize, surprize) a human being rather than an icon. Especially good is Hamby's narrative of the downhill trajectory of Truman's second term and the post-Potsdam evolution of his anti-communism. Historical biography at its absolute best. And by rendering Truman human, he ultimately produces a more admiring portrait than other books that set out to be adoring.

An Excellent Biography of a Great President!
David Mccullough's book on Truman is great. It is well written, full of great information, and though many people think too pro-Truman it does show why he was a Great Man. Unfortuantely many professors and especially those with Revisionist Tendancies don't feel Mccullough's book is scholary. They see it as Pop History. I think this is academic snobbery, and also stubborness upon the part of the revionists to admit Truman was a great President. However, a good way to silence the revisonists and to read another great book on Truman is to read Hamby's Man of the People. Though a little more critical than Mccollough, Hamby again paints a great portrait of a great man. For whatever reasons, Hamby is considered more scholary and his book more scholary. Whatever makes our Professors happy. But regardless, this is a great book. Though long like Mccollough, it tells a great story. Hamby is a fine historian who was also on c-spans look at Truman for its President's series. So in short, a more "academic" but just as great book on Truman.

Whatever you do, READ MCCULLOUGH BEFORE THIS!!!
I was unfortunately persuaded by a review of this book that it was a better one to start with than McCullough's Pulitzer-prize-winning book "Truman." So I gave it a try, but had to quit about 100 pages in because it was SO bad.

I suspect that Hamby (who wrote a book on Truman in 1972) had this book in the works when McCullough came out with his tour-de-force a few years before. Not wanting to lose out on his efforts to date, he packs his text with the most meaningless minutiae (eg, endless quotes of dollar figures regarding Harry's business ventures) just to show the reader, I think, how many hours he spent slogging through county records and such -- but at the cost of any flow to his narrative.

Now this is actually a very favorable spin on his writing, but I suspect the truth is that -- even without this junkyard of data -- he is not a writer capable of holding the reader's interest. SO many times while I was reading this book I kept a running argument with the author over why he was not providing more backstory to the events in Harry's life. When I finally dove into McCullough's book it was a man starved for oxygen finally breathing it in.

Perhaps the most telling part of Hamby's book is his dig on McCullough's book (p722). He describes it as "a nicely told story but (despite its length) episodic and lacking much in the way of historical perspective." From this I can assure Hamby that he has succeeded beyond his wildest expectations in producing a book that is A POORLY TOLD STORY. Congratulations.

As for his own implication that he, and not McCullough, has provided historical perspective for Truman's story, well, I guess he's right if "historical perspective" is defined as "a mind-numbing recitation of meaningless but accurate little facts."

Using the "forest-for-the-trees" analogy, McCullough is a pilot carrying you effortlessly over the forest with a flawless narration. Hamby is a blind stuttering lumberjack who gets off on the texture of tree bark while you quitely go insane with boredom. (My apologies to any blind stutterering lumberjacks who may take offense.)