New Truman Biography Offers Tips for ’92 Hopefuls

If Bill Clinton and George Bush need outside inspiration to win the 1992 presidential election, they can curl up with a good book.

Not just any book, but David McCullough’s definitive 992-page biography of Harry S. Truman, who snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, winning the 1948 presidential election when everyone--his party, the pollsters and even his friends--had written him off.

The new book, called simply “Truman” (Simon & Schuster), offers a blueprint on how to stand at 31% in the polls in September and win the White House in November.

As McCullough, a leading U.S. historian, is quick to point out, it does help to be Harry Truman, a straight-talking man who delighted in setting a crowd afire and spent little time worrying about polls, strategy or even winning or losing.

“I am going to give them hell,” Truman said of the Republicans. And he did.

His position going into the 1948 election as an unpopular incumbent President was not much different from Bush’s today.

As in 1992, Congress was controlled by the opposition party, the economy was hurting, the President’s ratings in the polls were at a record low and an outraged public blamed the White House for everything.

“To Err is Truman” was an oft-repeated jibe in 1948.

There are also similarities with Clinton, who like Truman has faced skepticism from within the Democratic Party.

As McCullough describes it, what Truman did to win in 1948 was take the longest train ride in U.S. politics--a 21,928-mile whistle-stop tour in which he tore into the Republicans from one end of the country to the other.

His opponent, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, meanwhile, tried to be as bland and “presidential” as possible.

Truman’s strategy worked because he went directly to the people--as the 1992 candidates are trying to do with varying success, appearing on every possible television talk show.

But to succeed this year the candidates may have to learn to talk as straight and convincingly as Truman, not bob and weave when hit with unpleasant questions.

Bush has tried to pin his failings on a Congress controlled by the opposition, as Truman did in 1948.

Most pollsters gave up on charting the 1948 election two weeks before the vote, saying there was no point in further pulse-taking since Truman was certain to lose.

But Truman, whether he realized it or not, was turning the election around in the last two weeks of the campaign. It turned out the pollsters were right--up to the moment they stopped taking polls and things began to change.

Whatever comparisons are made between 1948 and 1992, McCullough insists there was only one Harry Truman, who he says was a politician who could not be duplicated.

“I admire his ability to take punishment and not be defeated,” he said. “He was a man who knew who he was. He was a man of true grit and iron will.”