Wounded Titans by Max Lerner

Author:Max Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781628727685
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2017-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

The brief months as vice president were a relief from Truman’s close to a decade of hard work, as senator, but also an anticlimax. Truman managed a large correspondence and visitors’ schedule in his old Senate office and spent some time in the new ceremonial vice president’s office, and presided over the Senate when he had to. He performed a chore for FDR in pushing through his payoff nomination of Wallace as secretary of commerce against a resisting and hostile Senate, casting the vote that broke the tie. But otherwise the president, absorbed with his arrivals and departures, with the breaking and re-forming of nations, with a European war drawing toward seeming victory and another waiting to be ended by a dangerous assault on Japan, and with his own rapidly dying body and mind, had no time for talking with a vice president whose existence he and his little ruling group scarcely acknowledged.

Writing some forty years later one cannot fail to be struck by two almost staggering realities about Truman as vice president. One is how utterly he was ignored by the inner FDR circle who must have known that, sooner or later, they would have to be working under a man they had allowed to be preternaturally cut away from them. The second is how isolated Truman was in fact from the great shaping world events that would soon form his universe, how trivial by comparison were the daily routines he concerned himself with, how much in fact the war and peace being shaped were one man’s war and peace, which even the most powerful senators over whom the vice president presided had almost nothing to do with, and little real notion of. If ever the image of Plato’s cave fitted a group of men, it was Truman and the senators whose working day he opened and closed, who saw not the realities of the world outside but the distorted shadows they cast on the walls of the cave of illusions that enclosed them.

Just as strange, however, is the fact that Truman made little effort to become more familiar with the outlines of the wider world he would probably soon have to deal with. He was the man who had boned up on the life of every colleague when he first came to the Senate, yet the same man was now spending his time on routine mail and visiting firemen when he knew he might at any moment be hurled into a maelstrom.

That he did know it is clear. He recalled FDR’s pallor at lunch, how he slurred his words, how his hand shook when he held the cream pitcher. On the night of the election victory, at the Hotel Muehlebach, in Kansas City, he had talked at length about the presidency with a close friend. And walking past the White House with another, he admitted he knew he would probably be living in it.

Why then his passivity, and why his evident surprise when he heard of FDR’s death? The fact was that Truman was a present-minded man who avoided probing the future.

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