#424： How Harry Truman Handled Being Out of His Depth
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Summary
Writer A.J. Boehm talks about his new book, The Accidental President, about the unexpected rise of Harry Truman to Commander-in-Chief, and how he managed his self-doubt and insecurities after taking up residence in the White House.
Transcript
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I'm Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, have you ever been put in a situation that you weren't ready for at all,
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but somehow managed to rise to the occasion and do what needed to be done?
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Grew up a poor farmer's son in Jackson County, Missouri, didn't graduate college, failed at multiple businesses,
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and stumbled into politics before being thrust into the role of the world's most powerful man
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and required to make monumental decisions, including dropping the atomic bomb
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that would affect the course of history for the next 70 years.
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Today on the show, I talk to writer A.J. Boehm about his new book,
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The Accidental President, that highlights the unexpected rise of Harry Truman to Commander-in-Chief.
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We discuss how an unassuming, nerdy-looking fella commanded the respect of fellow soldiers during World War I,
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how he felt when Roosevelt died and had to assume the presidency,
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and how he managed his self-doubt and insecurities after taking up residence in the White House.
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After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash accidentalpresident.
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It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
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So you got a new presidential biography out about Harry Truman called The Accidental President.
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Harry S. Truman and The Four Months That Changed the World.
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Before we get into Truman and why he's the accidental president,
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Is this a time period that you've been writing about,
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and then you sort of naturally fell into talking about or writing about Truman?
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Firstly, let me just say, biography, I actually studied biography in graduate school,
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and especially a guy who studied writing biography actually writes biography.
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It's pretty rare. But this is an interesting book because it's sort of a portrait of a guy,
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but it's really just four months of his life. It's the first four months of his accidental
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presidency, which is basically the World War II presidency of Harry Truman. But my previous book
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was called The Arsenal of Democracy. And there's this chapter in there where this unknown senator in
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1943 is investigating Detroit car companies, wondering why these car companies are not producing
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military equipment as fast as they said they would.
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And it struck me as amazing that this guy who was so obscure in 1943, very few people really
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understood who he was, should become the most powerful man in the history of the world just
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two years later. And that's what the book's about is what happens after that. Suddenly he becomes the
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most powerful man in the history of the world. What does he do next?
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All right. So we're going to talk about, we're going to get to how Truman became president
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by accident. And like his whole political career, as we'll see, is like, it's a complete accident,
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pretty much. But before we get there, let's talk about, you know, his political education,
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like what allowed him to get to that point where he was kind of thrust into the world stage in this
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position of supreme power and do okay, as we'll say, as we'll see here. So first, I mean,
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like Truman, what was his childhood and teenage years like? Was he grew up in a farm? What was,
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what was that like? Well, one of the things that, well, let me just begin answering the
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question like this. People were amazed when he became president, that this was a guy who had
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never gone to college, never had the money to own his own home. And, you know, he's following in
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Franklin Roosevelt's footsteps and people are stunned who is this obscure man. And one of the things
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that was so interesting about it was his upbringing. You know, he came from rural Missouri. He was raised
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on a farm. He was a failed businessman. He was pretty much a failure at everything he'd ever tried.
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He was a haberdasher. He had a clothing store and that failed. And the only thing he'd have really
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been successful at was as a soldier. He was a captain in World War I and he led troops into
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battle successfully. And the only other thing, the only other tools he had were the teachings of his
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mother. His mother instilled in him these really basic rural principles, you know, sort of the fabric
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of a human being. Always tell the truth. Honesty is the best policy. Do the right thing. Those were the
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tools he had. No college education, but he did have these principles, you know. And the other thing
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he had was as a kid, he'd been ill a little bit as a kid and he was a voracious reader and he had read
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the entire Independence Library. So he didn't have a great education the way, you know, Roosevelt did,
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but he had this extraordinary knowledge of American history and American leadership.
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Yeah. Speaking about his mom, when he became president, I loved her advice to him. She said,
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be good, Harry, but be game. I just, I love that. I just, it's so, it epismized what you need to do in
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order to be a president or a politician. You got to be good, but you got to be kind of savvy too.
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I, that was one of my favorite moments in writing this book was actually typing out that line. Cause
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I remember when I found it during my research, I was like, oh, this is good. And it's really
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this dramatic moment where again, he becomes president by accident. It's the night of April
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12th, 1945. You know, we'll get to, we'll get to the point of how he gets there. But when he finds out,
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he has no knowledge of the atomic bomb. He's never been the mayor of the city, never been the governor
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of state. And all of a sudden he's president of the United States and he goes home. He's shocked.
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His wife is in tears because she doesn't want to be the first lady. She doesn't want her husband to
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be president. He goes into a room and shuts the door and calls his mom. And his mom says,
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dot, dot, dot. What you just said, be game, Harry. Be game, be good, but be game. Well,
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let's talk about his military career. Cause I thought it was interesting. Cause I didn't know that about
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Truman because as you highlight in the book, Truman as a kid was kind of a nerd. Like he had glasses.
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He wasn't very athletic. He hung out mostly with women, his mom, his sister,
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like those are the close people in his life. But somehow he was able to manage or command a lot
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of respect from the men that he led. So what was it about Truman, despite having the stature of like
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sort of being a pencil neck that he was able to command the respect of the men he led?
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But that's a great question. And you're right. He was a nerd. He would wander around in his glasses,
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you know, for a kid, his age growing up, it was very rare in a real place for a kid to wear glasses.
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Everybody called him four eyes. He was not allowed to play sports because glasses were very expensive
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in rural Missouri and at the end of the 19th century. And, you know, by the time he goes to
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war, he's already well into his thirties. And I think one of the reasons he was, he wanted to go,
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he enlisted was because he had nothing going on in his life. He was a farmer and a failed businessman
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and chasing this woman around, you know, who ended up being the first lady who really wanted not that
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much to do with them. And here comes this war. And he's like, you know what? I don't want to live
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my life in this boring, obscure way. I want to go and find heroism. I want to be a hero,
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like all of the people that I've read about in books. So he listened, he goes overseas and
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he suddenly finds himself for two reasons. One is because he helped recruit soldiers back in Kansas
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City and two, because of his age. So he takes a test to be a captain and he passes and he's terrified.
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And I found these really moving, I actually create the scene where he has to walk out in
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front of these troops for the first time and say, Hey, I'm the boss. And it's a very moving moment.
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And he finds in himself, he doesn't even realize he has these leadership qualities. And it's during
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World War I that he realizes that there's things in him that he doesn't know about that he wants to
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explore. And that's when he gets back, he begins his political career.
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Yeah. I think that's sort of the reoccurring theme throughout Truman's life. Like he
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was filled with self-doubt. He was put in positions. He thought, and he even said,
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I can't do this. He would tell his wife, he'd write letters. I don't know if I,
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but he somehow found it in him to rise to the occasion. And like, we'll see that started in the
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military and it goes all the way throughout his political career. Well, let's talk about his
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political career. So he didn't start off as a Senator. He started off as a County judge in Jackson
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County, Missouri, right? That's right. So he's a judge in a rural place and he becomes sort of
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well-known in the County where he lives as the sort of tool of a guy named Boss Pendergast.
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There was a gentleman named Boss Pendergast. Some wouldn't call him a gentleman who had liquor
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rackets and he owned a cement company. And he was basically kind of a crook and he was in control
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of the Democratic Party in Kansas City and in much of Missouri. And he liked Truman because Truman had
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served in the war with his son or nephew. I forget which way. It was his nephew. And so Boss
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Pendergast has his eye on this guy, Truman, and he gives him a chance. He gives him, you know,
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he has to be elected. So Truman runs for office. He's never run for anything in his life, but he has
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this guy who has tons of money and tons of backing who basically gets the job for him. And so now he's
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the judge in this County and that's where he gets his start. And his whole beginning of his political
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career is basically a table set by this guy Pendergast. So when he finally runs for Senate,
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he gets, he wins against all odds. He gets to Washington and no one will shake his hand because
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they think he's just the stooge of this crook named Pendergast, which is true. In fact, and
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eventually Pendergast goes to prison while Harry's a Senator. It's a great, it's a great embarrassment for
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him and appears to be at that time, the end of his career.
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Well, I mean, what's interesting about him being, you know, elected County judge,
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right? I mean, basically County judge in that, that it was like a County commissioner,
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Right. It was like, it was basically an executive position in the County.
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They had to decide, you know, who would get, who would be employed and where County money
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I mean, what was interesting is the way you described it. He, yes, he was elected by this
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Democratic, you know, machine boss, but at the same time, he was kind of a, he was a stooge,
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but at the same time, he had the reputation of being, of having integrity and making sure,
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you know, County money was spent wisely. I mean, how was Truman able to do that, both
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being like sort of a, you know, political pawn, but at the same time, develop this reputation
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as someone who, who got stuff done, but did it also with integrity?
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Well, that's a great point. Now the boss Pendergast, Tom Pendergast, everybody knew he was a crook.
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Everybody knew he controlled and fixed elections. And Pendergast, one of the things Pendergast
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really liked about Harry Truman was that Harry was a local boy. Everybody knew him in the county
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and these were in this rural County as being an honest little fellow. Nobody thought that Harry,
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nobody, you know, they thought he was little and that nor, I mean, normal, like there's nothing
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special about him, but he was a guy who could be trusted. And so boss Pendergast, you know,
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he tried it out. Harry Truman said, look, Truman's my boy. Nobody can say anything bad about Harry
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Truman. And Truman was in fact fought against corruption in the county. And there was this
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one point in the 1930s where he realizes it's a very dramatic moment. He realizes where he's at
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and what he's a part of. And the fact that, you know, Pendergast has created his whole political
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career and he's still just a little guy in this rural County. And he sits, he starts renting this
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hotel room in Kansas city and he sits up all night, probably with a bottle of bourbon. And he writes
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out this political philosophy and those documents exist. You see him exploring who he is, what is
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right? What is wrong? What is a political philosophy? Where do I fit into this whole thing? And through
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reading those diary entries, essentially, you really get this wonderful window of who he is and who he
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wants to become. As county judge, did he get stuff done? Like did he actually improve the lives of
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people who lived in Jackson County, Missouri? Absolutely. So basically one thing he did that was
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the most important thing that he did was he convinced the county to issue a bond. I think
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it was $6 million, which at the time was a tremendous amount of money for this rural county
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to build roads. And it's the 1920s. And Harry says, listen, you know, we have all these cars now,
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but you have to look 10 years from now, we're going to have five times this number of cars. So we should
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have paved roads that go, you know, within two and a half miles of every farm in this county. And people
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thought he was crazy. But he won, he won the public over to issuing this bond. And everybody
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thought that the $6 million raised by the county was going to go to crooks. And Harry Truman saw to
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it that it did not. The roads were built. That's really how he earned his reputation. And as I write
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in the book, you know, those roads, you know, those roads just created his career and he followed them
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all the way to Washington, DC. All right. So he gets elected as Senate. And I mean, even though it was,
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you know, the boss helped him get there, it was a, it was a fight. Like he had, it was kind of like,
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Absolutely. I mean, in Kansas City and in rural Missouri, politics at the time, especially during
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the depression, when it was so important who won an election, because everybody, if I won an election,
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all my friends have jobs. So it was, these, these were very bitterly fought contests. And in fact,
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during these elections, especially in Kansas City, there were instances of beatings, of murders.
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You know, election day could be a very violent affair.
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Yeah. I mean, whenever I read about elections in the past, I'm like, it's always crazy. Like how
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crazy it was. I'm always surprised at how nuts it was. People, you know, stabbings at the ballot box.
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Right. Right. Well, so he gets elected Senator. No one knows who he is. No one, everyone ignores him.
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I'm sure Truman was, you know, typically filled with self-doubt. So what did he do to rise the,
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rise to the occasion of being, you know, in one of the most hallowed halls of, you know, elected,
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For starters, he keeps his mouth shut. He remains very obscure. And he just votes pretty much on
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everything according to Roosevelt. However Roosevelt voted, he voted because he thought Roosevelt was
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the answer to the Democratic, Democratic Party's prayers. And in fact, he was. So Truman was an honest
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guy. He was accused of all of this kind of stuff of being Pendergast's stooge. He was called the
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Senator from Pendergast. But very gradually over these years in the late 1930s, he becomes friends
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with all these other senators. And they realize that he is a man of great integrity, of total honesty,
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super hardworking. And very slowly he gains the respect of all of these other senators who begin
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supporting him and working with him on different committees and things. He remains very obscure.
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And Tom Pendergast goes to prison in 1938-39 for fraud and all this other stuff. And Truman is sure
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his career is over at that point because he's Pendergast's stooge. And that leads to the 1940 election,
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which is one of the most exciting annals of politics is the 1940 Senate election in Missouri.
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It's incredible because everybody expects Truman to lose. Nobody gives him a chance. And he gathers
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his team together. He's got no money and he puts together this grassroots campaign and he wins. It's
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fascinating. Yeah. And one of the things that he did to build that trust is he was a Truman loved
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playing poker. That was his thing to do. That's absolutely right. And the descriptions of his poker
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games. And that's another way that he made friends and he loved to play poker. So there's quite a few
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scenes in the book where he's playing and, you know, especially when he becomes president,
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because one of the lines I have in Andromeda, you know, I can really, there's so much material,
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source material to work with that you really, I was able to really paint these scenes very vividly
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and cinematically. And there's this one moment where Fred Vincent, who's a fellow politician,
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Truman is president. He leans over and forgets, you know, you have one, you're supposed to address
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the president as Mr. President. And Vincent leans over to the table and says, you son of a,
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oh, I'm sorry, Mr. President. They're great. He loves poker.
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Yeah. All right. So he gets elected. Surprise victory. What is Truman? This is, I think it's
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this moment, this is where Truman started actually making a name for himself as a politician is after
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this election, right? That's right. So World War II starts and Truman founds this committee to
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investigate the defense effort. Now, you know, I think young people today would find it difficult
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to understand what happened in the United States during World War II, unless you've read a lot.
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The entire, everybody was affected. Everybody's life changed. To turn this capitalist economy we had
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into the great arsenal of democracy, as FDR called it, that meant closing any business that didn't have
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something to do with the war effort and turning all these businesses, car companies, insurance
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companies, farms, everything to serve the war effort, because that was the only way we were going to
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defeat Hitler. Now, as this conversion of our economy is happening, it's a bumpy ride. A lot goes wrong.
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There's a lot of war profiteering. There's labor strikes, all kinds of stuff going on.
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And Truman founds this committee to go around the nation and figure out where the bottlenecks are,
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who's cheating, and how to make sure that our soldiers are getting the best airplanes,
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the most airplanes. Because really, the great arsenal of democracy, World War II,
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was lining up to be a contest of mass production. Whoever could build the most trucks, tanks, airplanes,
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guns, field tents, field kitchens, helmets, cigarettes, you know, rations, whoever could build more
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would win. So Truman goes around and he starts reporting on national defense and fixing problems,
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right? And he creates this first report, and he slaps it on the desk. It goes all over Washington.
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And the next day, the New York Times wrote, the first question we have about the Truman report is,
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And it made a dent. And I'm sure that, I mean, he was sort of like a burr
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in the saddle of a lot of, you know, maybe even Roosevelt, too. Like, it was kind of sort of this,
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He absolutely made a lot of enemies in the process. But by 1943, you know, he's still very
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obscure, but he ends up, he lands on the cover of Time magazine, which at the time was an important
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thing. And he's called the Billion Dollar Watchdog. And that's how he sort of gets to be known in
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We're going to take a quick break for you, Ward, from our sponsors.
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00:21:34.020
And now back to the show. Yeah. Again, he's, again, building on that reputation of doing the
00:21:40.840
right thing, being good, but being game, right? As Ma, Ma Truman told him to do. Well, okay. So
00:21:47.980
1944, US is in the middle of World War II, got in fighting Japan, ending in Europe. There's a
00:21:56.960
presidential election. This is a big, big election because you don't want to, you know, Roosevelt
0.95
00:22:03.220
had been leading the war effort. You don't want to interrupt that. At the same time, Roosevelt
00:22:07.620
is sick. People are aware that he's not doing well. So there's a, people know that, okay,
00:22:13.820
whoever gets selected as vice president is probably going to be president within a few months and is
00:22:19.220
going to be leading the war effort. So you think, okay, we're going to pick a vice president that has
00:22:24.140
some experience with international affairs, experience with the war effort. So how the heck did
00:22:29.960
Harry Truman end up on the ticket with FDR in that election?
00:22:34.700
It's a great question. I spent a whole chapter talking about the 1944 Democratic National
00:22:40.640
Convention in Chicago, where Truman shocks the nation, ending up on as the VP on the ticket.
00:22:46.560
So basically what happens is everybody's talking about who's going to be the vice president for
00:22:51.000
exactly just what you said. People sort of assumed that FDR was going to beat Thomas Dewey and win.
00:22:57.400
And they also assumed that there was a good chance that FDR was not going to live through the next
00:23:03.080
term because he clearly just looking at him, it was apparent that the war had taken its toll and
00:23:08.480
he was not doing great. So there was a meeting in the White House, not long before the Democratic
00:23:14.160
National Convention in Chicago, where all these leaders from the Democratic Party get together and
00:23:18.380
try to decide who the VP is going to be. And they start bringing up all these names. And essentially
00:23:23.060
what happens is all of the most qualified candidates have something wrong with them. For example,
00:23:29.220
James Burns would have been the best choice for most of the American public. However, Burns had
00:23:37.040
left the Catholic Church to marry a Protestant woman and Catholics hated him. So you have this vast
00:23:43.020
population in America who might vote against the ticket just because Jimmy Burns was on it. Plus,
00:23:47.880
he was from South Carolina, which meant that the black vote in northern cities might vote against
00:23:53.080
the ticket because they didn't, you know, because they didn't like the South. Okay. Then you had
00:23:58.680
Henry Wallace, who was the current vice president, who was too far to the left, and he made everybody
00:24:03.160
very, very nervous. So he was out. Albin Barkley, he was a great choice. But Barkley had gotten in a
00:24:09.740
dust up with Roosevelt, they had an argument about something, there was some bad blood there. So the way it was
00:24:15.000
termed at the time was, quote, Truman just dropped into the slot. So Truman goes to the Democratic
00:24:20.780
National Convention expecting to nominate James Burns for the VP, for VP on the ticket. At the time,
00:24:28.000
a Gallup poll says 2% of Americans, 2%, actually 2% of Democratic voters think that Truman should be the
00:24:34.680
vice presidential candidate. But all of these machinations happen. And Truman himself is shocked
00:24:41.540
to find out that FDR wants him to be on the ticket. And he has no choice but to accept against
00:24:47.520
his wishes. He doesn't want the job. But when FDR gets on the phone and says, you have to do this,
00:24:52.240
or you're going to split up the Democratic Party in the middle of the biggest war in history,
00:24:56.060
you know, that's on you. So Truman ends up on the ticket. The nation is shocked. They don't really
00:25:00.020
know much about this guy. And of course, they win. Well, why didn't Truman want to be on the ticket?
00:25:05.280
I mean, a lot of people, I mean, today you think, oh, you know, everyone wants,
00:25:08.640
if you got asked to be vice president, yeah, heck yeah. Why would, what was Truman against?
00:25:13.120
Well, a few reasons. One is the vice president had relatively little to do. The only official job
00:25:19.400
that the vice president had was to preside over the Senate and vote if there was a tie in the Senate.
00:25:24.660
So it was basically, you know, it was, it was a boring job. The second thing is Truman was very
00:25:31.860
nervous. He didn't want to follow FDR's footsteps into the White House. If FDR died and he became
00:25:37.040
president, he was not prepared to lead the United States during the climactic months of World War
00:25:41.880
II. He had no college degree, never been the mayor of a city or governor of a state. He didn't know
00:25:47.280
how, how the, you know, he, he was not the, he was clearly not the best man for the job and he knew
00:25:52.900
it and he was terrified, but he had no choice. And when he becomes vice president, he basically is
00:25:58.760
just praying that FDR is going to live through the term. And 82 days later, FDR is dead.
00:26:03.800
What was interesting about this, you'd think, okay, the inner circle of Roosevelt, they know
00:26:09.240
he's not doing well. They know Truman's next in line because he's vice president. You'd think
00:26:14.140
they'd like educate him about what's going on with the war effort. You think they'd let them know about
00:26:17.640
the development of the atomic bomb, all the, but Truman, like he even said, like, I know about as much
00:26:23.420
about the war effort as the guy on the street knows. Like why, why did, why was Truman kept out of
00:26:29.500
what was going on with the war effort, even though he was vice president? Well, a lot of
00:26:34.120
historians have said that that was FDR's greatest fault. So soon after the election, FDR takes all
00:26:41.120
of his top advisors and they go off to negotiate with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. And Truman is
00:26:48.600
left in the dark. He's left at home. He has no knowledge of the atomic bomb project, the Manhattan
00:26:53.800
project. And so, you know, he just never worked his way into FDR's inner circle. And I think FDR,
00:27:00.840
that was his biggest mistake as president. So yeah, Roosevelt dies. Truman, suddenly he's
00:27:07.420
president. And the way you describe it, I love how you start off the book talking about how he became
00:27:12.340
president and sort of the cinematic. I mean, like you said, it's very cinematic. It's just so fun to,
00:27:16.340
so much fun to read. Again, I'm sure he, he feels completely out of his depth. Like what was going
00:27:22.820
through his mind and maybe his wife, what were the conversations he's having with his wife about
00:27:26.980
whether or not he could, you know, step into this job and do a good work, do a good job with it?
00:27:33.980
Well, thank you for saying that. Firstly, I spent the first 38 pages on one day. It's April 12th,
00:27:39.880
1945. And I, I lead the reader through Truman's day, wakes up that day, it's raining. He takes a car to,
00:27:46.680
he drops his daughter off at George Washington university. He goes to work. He's, he meets with a
00:27:52.260
buddy named McKim for lunch and they're planning this poker game. And he tells his butter to go,
00:27:56.620
buddy McKim to go make sure there was tons of whiskey. And they were going to play in a hotel
00:28:00.360
room at the Statler hotel. And then suddenly the day finishes, it's five o'clock. He goes over to
00:28:05.560
Sam Rayburn, speaker of the house. He's in the office and Sam Rayburn hands him a bourbon with
00:28:09.740
water and says, Oh, by the way, the president called, uh, no, the white house called, uh, call Steve
00:28:14.900
really at the white house. Truman calls over and he's told the event has to come to the white house
00:28:18.580
immediately. And he right away, you know, something's wrong. So the next thing, you know,
00:28:22.660
he's running, he's like sprinting through the halls of the United States Capitol,
00:28:26.600
gets down to the white house. And sure enough, Mrs. Roosevelt is there and he finds out that the
00:28:30.640
president is dead. And there's all of this stuff that has to happen. He calls the cabinet. He has
00:28:35.900
to get the cabinet together. He has to call the chief justice, you know, and get all these people to
00:28:41.360
the white house. So he could take this 35 word oath and that happens. And it's this extraordinary,
00:28:47.560
dramatic moment. He's sorry that his mother can't be there. So he asks if he can have a photographer
00:28:53.780
take a picture. That picture is now one of the most famous pictures of, of, you know, of World War
00:28:58.920
II of when Truman is taking the oath. Uh, his wife is there of course. And right after it all takes
00:29:04.260
place, uh, the secretary of war, Henry Stimson pulls him aside and privately says, Oh, by the way,
00:29:09.100
we have this secret weapon you should know about. And, uh, that's really all I can tell you about
00:29:13.680
now. So even then he still really doesn't know about the Manhattan project.
00:29:17.840
So, I mean, how did, I mean, Roosevelt for people who weren't alive at the time or don't know about
00:29:22.640
World War II history, Roosevelt was like a very beloved figure in America at that time. Like
00:29:27.380
people put up portraits of them in their house. How did the American people respond to this guy
00:29:33.860
from nowhere, Missouri, suddenly being president of the United States did, was he able to just as,
00:29:40.220
you know, when he was World War I, you know, a battalion commander command the respect of the
00:29:44.820
American public and maybe even the, you know, the inner circle of Roosevelt?
00:29:48.480
Well, that's really what the book is really about because I say right on the first page that you
00:29:53.640
cannot underestimate the shock to the world, the world felt when Roosevelt died. And you read this
00:30:00.040
in the diaries of everybody who was powerful at the time writing in their diary on April 12th,
00:30:06.620
oh my God, Truman will be president. You know, in Moscow, in Germany, Eisenhower is smoking cigarettes
00:30:13.980
and, you know, it's recorded what he was saying at that time. The world was stunned because they
00:30:18.480
don't know who this guy is. And the narrative of the book is, to me, very inspirational because it's
00:30:24.920
really the story of this guy who comes out of nowhere, stuns the world, becomes president,
00:30:29.380
completely unprepared to do so. And in four months wins the war and has an 87% approval rating higher
00:30:36.500
than FDR's had ever been. So he unites the nation, drops the bomb, wins the war.
00:30:41.900
I mean, how did he do it? I mean, I imagine like you talk about, he was filled with self-doubt. I
00:30:45.520
remember at one, he had a conversation with his wife and his wife was like, I don't know,
00:30:48.760
even his wife was like, I don't think you can do this.
00:30:52.440
Isn't that, I mean, so how, again, how did he rise to the occasion? Like, what was it about
00:30:59.060
Truman that allowed him just to keep plugging along and doing the job that he had to do?
00:31:06.220
That's an excellent question. And I'll go back to something that we talked about at the beginning
00:31:09.440
of this conversation. You know, he really didn't have an understanding of all of how anything worked
00:31:16.300
in the White House, who the people were who staffed the White House. He didn't have, you know,
00:31:21.060
experience in executive government. Again, never been mayor of a city, never been governor of a
00:31:26.080
state. But the thing he did have were these rural 19th century principles. Honesty is the best policy.
00:31:33.420
Do the right thing. Make yourself useful. And then of course, you know, he puts the sign on his desk
00:31:39.400
that says the buck stops here. And that meant that he understood that he was responsible. And it was
00:31:46.420
those sort of principles that carried him through.
00:31:48.360
Yeah. One thing that impressed me about Truman was his ability to make decisions. And I think
00:31:52.800
that impressed a lot of the sort of inner circle of Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, his kind of leadership
00:31:58.400
styles was he would pit, you know, cabinet members against each other and kind of see things play out.
00:32:04.080
But Truman, again, the buck stopped with him. He made a decision. He made sure that it got done.
00:32:09.040
That's right. His decisiveness at times alarmed people around him. And I don't want people to think
00:32:13.520
that the accidental president in this book is just a canonization of Truman. It's more than that.
00:32:18.520
You know, he made some big mistakes, one in particular, during the first four months of his
00:32:23.560
presidency. And that really had to do with his decisiveness. He felt like that was his job was
00:32:27.880
to decide things. And sometimes he would decide, you know, on a matter before he was entirely educated
00:32:33.920
and move on quickly. And so not everything went as smoothly as he would have liked. And he understood
00:32:39.120
that that was going to be part of the learning process. Well, I mean, one of his most controversial
00:32:43.540
decisions was using the atomic bomb. Was he just like, did he make that decision? Like,
00:32:48.980
didn't really think twice about it? They just, they had it. So they had to use it. Or did he
00:32:52.460
wring his hands about it? What was that process like for him?
00:32:55.640
I think it was a terrible, terrible decision to have to make. But I think actually, it was easier to make
00:33:03.060
than people may imagine today. For two reasons. One is, all the major advisors around him who knew
00:33:11.000
about the bomb, including Winston Churchill, there was never any doubt that the weapon should be used.
00:33:18.200
And the reason why was very clear to Truman. On June 18, 1945, he held a meeting in the White House
00:33:26.400
to figure out, we had already defeated Germany. Third Reich was gone. Hitler was dead. We were still
00:33:32.460
fighting the Japanese. And the Japanese were fighting us savagely. They would not, they would
0.99
00:33:36.700
choose death and suicide over defeat. We didn't know how to get what we wanted from the Japanese,
1.00
00:33:44.020
which was unconditional surrender. So at that meeting on June 18 in the White House,
00:33:48.900
General Marshall, head of the army says, okay, we're going to plan this ground invasion. It worked
00:33:53.940
with the D-Day invasion in Normandy. We're going to do that again in Japan. And they're sitting around
0.55
00:34:00.340
the table talking about, you know, how savagely the Japanese fought. We're going to fight if we
00:34:05.720
attack them in their homeland. Women and children are going to take up arms and fight to the last
00:34:10.000
square foot of land. It was going to be an awful, awful, bloody battle. And the attacking force was
00:34:16.060
going to be 766,700 American soldiers. Think about that number. That's how many soldiers we were going to
00:34:22.220
send over to attack the mainland of Japan. And Truman said, well, you know, he says to himself,
00:34:29.460
well, we have this bomb and we can end this war now, save potentially hundreds of thousands of
00:34:34.660
American lives, maybe even save Japanese lives if we just use this bomb and get it over with. And
0.98
00:34:40.720
that's what happened. He, you know, he talked about this decision for the rest of his life and it
00:34:44.640
remains the most controversial decision any president has ever made. But in the end, I don't think it was
00:34:50.300
as difficult to make as one might imagine. Right, right. Well, I mean, as you, you know,
00:34:56.060
another thing you, the thing you point out in the book, you know, it's about the first four months of
00:34:59.380
his presidency. So much happened in those first four months, you know, so that he won world war,
00:35:04.580
won the war in Europe, won the war in Japan, had to decide to use the atomic bomb. And basically he was
00:35:11.080
also part of the discussions that set the world order for the next 70 years or 60 years in the entire
00:35:19.160
world. And, uh, people don't, I think like people forget that, that that was Truman. He had a role
00:35:24.280
in that. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, uh, this book ends when, when the war ends, my next book
00:35:30.200
is about the year 1948. And that has a lot more of what we're talking about here, the Truman
00:35:35.780
doctrine, the Marshall plan, the founding of Israel, all of this stuff that really, you know, launched us
00:35:42.120
into the post-war war, war, war world. You could make the argument that the Truman doctrine and the
00:35:47.940
Marshall plan were the most influential public, you know, government, foreign policy government,
00:35:54.540
you know, plans since the war. And we're probably, you know, you could say we're, you know, highly
00:36:01.560
useful to us until the last six months or year. Right. And what's crazy, he was, he's a guy from
00:36:08.220
Jackson County, Missouri, just, he was a nerdy kid from Jackson County, Missouri who didn't go to
00:36:14.440
college. And he was the guy that put all that into place. It's very unexpected. I mean, he's
00:36:19.980
basically the ultimate underdog. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious as you were, you know, as you wrote this
00:36:24.740
book and, you know, there's a lot of debate about Truman's legacy with the bomb and even the fire
00:36:30.080
bombing that happened in Japan and some of the other decisions he made later on. I mean, as I read this
00:36:35.940
book, I thought there was like so much you can learn from his experience of being suddenly thrust
00:36:40.780
into positions that you didn't feel like you're ready for, but you somehow be able to rise to the
00:36:46.480
occasion. I mean, is that something you got out of the book? And if so, like, what do you think is,
00:36:51.640
what do you think besides the rule, like the sort of the rule advice that he got from his mom? Like
00:36:55.820
what, what was it about Truman? Is that replicable? Like, can other people do that? Or is that something,
00:37:03.600
I think yes. You know what really in the end is the guy just had guts. He had courage. I have to say
00:37:10.460
when I was writing this book, it was inspiring to me because when you write a book like this,
00:37:17.320
you spend thousands and thousands and thousands of hours reading and thinking and organizing and
00:37:25.460
you're by yourself and you can get very lost in your material and you can get very nervous that
00:37:30.520
you're not going to get hit your deadline. And it's, it's a difficult thing to do. And it's a
00:37:34.840
difficult way to make a living. You find you have to start taking your blood. I'm not an old guy,
00:37:39.500
46 now. I was younger than that when I was writing this book. And I'd have to take my blood pressure
00:37:44.060
every day because it can get that intense. Sometimes you find you can't sleep because you can't get the
00:37:48.580
stuff out of your head. And the reason why I bring that up is because the character I was writing
00:37:53.380
about sort of helped me through because I thought to myself that Truman can survive what he's going
00:37:57.960
through in the first four months of his presidency. I'm not going to start complaining about my life.
00:38:03.780
Well, AJ, this has been a great conversation. There's just some place people can go to learn
00:38:07.020
more about the book. Trumanbook.com or my Facebook page, which was facebook.com slash AJ Bame,
00:38:14.660
B-A-I-M-E. But you can get it anywhere. Amazon, I encourage people to just read the reviews on Amazon.
00:38:20.220
It's a new book. There's already 183 reviews up on Amazon and it's five-star book, man.
00:38:25.640
Awesome. Well, AJ Bame, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:38:29.680
My guest today was AJ Bame. He's the author of the book, The Accidental Presidents,
00:38:33.320
available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also, check out our show notes at
00:38:36.860
aom.is slash accidental president, where you find links to resources,
00:38:41.960
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:38:58.740
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy
00:39:02.120
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00:39:13.940
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