Author in Chief by Craig Fehrman

Author:Craig Fehrman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

In Baltimore, a man looked at a drugstore’s display of paperback books—each one priced at fifty cents.

That made Senator Truman an upper middlebrow, and he enjoyed his era’s literary bounty. In Kansas City he could browse the book department at Kline’s department store or the paperback racks at one of Missouri’s many Katz drugstores. But his favorite bookstore was run by Frank Glenn, a local with a passion for pocket squares and antiquarian books. Glenn’s shop occupied a prime spot inside Kansas City’s Muehlebach Hotel—a narrow room with fifteen-foot ceilings and bookshelves that scaled their full height. At the front of the store, two windows peered into the hotel lobby, previewing the newest releases; in the back, Glenn kept the rare stuff.

Despite his senatorial schedule—a schedule that only became busier after Roosevelt chose him to be his running mate in 1944—Truman read a stunning number of books. In Washington, especially during stretches when Bess stayed home in Independence, he read at night until he fell asleep; occasionally he decided to ignore his duties, like the morning he escaped Capitol Hill to listen to an author lecture on Robert E. Lee. (“I played hooky from the Appropriations Committee,” Truman confessed in his next letter home.) When he was in Independence, he preferred to read in his study, in an easy chair next to a window and its natural light. Both his friends and the journalists who covered him noted that Truman always seemed to be in the middle of the latest big book: Carl Sandburg’s final volumes on Lincoln, a fresh account of World War II, even a new military history on Ulysses S. Grant, whom Truman had softened on as he studied the Civil War more closely.

In the spring of 1945, only a few days before Roosevelt’s death, a reporter interviewed Truman for a story. Even as vice president, Truman had asked to keep his old Senate office. He was, the reporter wrote, “as homespun as an old linsey quilt.” The reporter described the many books in Truman’s office, including recent volumes on the British-Palestine relationship and on Florida’s recovery since the Depression. “He is, to put it mildly, an odd bookworm,” the reporter concluded. But that got Truman wrong. There was nothing odd about his devotion to the great men of history or his desire to read about current affairs. All around the country, people were making those same choices. Truman was more than just a regular American—he was a regular reader too.

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