Truman

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I had been working that summer at the Truman Little White House in Key West, and sort of in my onboarding at that museum, they told us to read David McCullough's Truman biography. And, uh, it was in that book that I saw this one sentence about Thomas E. Jones and The Messenger.

And it was literally one sentence. One sentence in parentheses in the middle of a thousandpage book.

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His dozen books include two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, Truman and John Adams

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I was blown away by the Merle Miller biography of Truman.

I think that's one of the most unique presidential books.

It's Truman as Truman would want to be seen, but it's also, it's so folksy and accessible.

The crazy thing about that book where Truman intersects with my world is there's a scene in the Merle Miller book where Merle is asking him some question. Truman goes back to his room or his office or whatever, and he comes back with his copy of Marcus Reles' Meditations, and he gives it to Miller who goes through it and he sees-

Truman had a copy?

And you know, it's stuff about how, you know, first off that, you know, the Cardinal Virtues, it's stuff about how when people judge you, they don't understand your character.

There's a story in the Merle Miller book where he makes some obscure reference to something and a journalist goes, that can't be right.

So he makes some comment about Alexander the Great like in a speech Truman does. And the reporter goes, what's the president talking about? He's obviously wrong. And so he goes to prove that the president was wrong.

So he goes down this long rabbit hole. All the experts don't know what he's talking about. Finally, he ends up at the Library of Congress and he talks to the librarian who spent several days tracking down this anecdote and finds it in a book in the Library of Congress.

And they open up the front of the book and in the library card, the only person to check out the book in the last 50 years has been Senator Harry Truman.

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If you want to understand the Cold War, David McCullough's book on Truman,

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The late David McCullough who's Truman biography I've raved about a bunch of times and I carry at the painting porch, he once said that the hardest part about being a biographer is getting the reader to keep in mind that nothing was ever on track as he continues things could have gone any way at any point.

As soon as you say was it seems to fix an event in the past but nobody ever lived in the past only in the present he said.

The challenge he said is to get the reader beyond thinking that things had to be the way they turned out and see the range of possibilities of how things could have been otherwise.

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If you read the books, Truman by David McCullough, his whole first chapter is on independence. Missouri. He talks about the Civil War and how every single person in Jackson County was driven from their homes. And it's not that we delight in this.