The Language of Leadership : Words from Harry Truman

No one but a fool would want to be President and no one could possibly understand the responsibilities of the job except from experience, Harry S. Truman confided privately to his family. Further, to be a good President, one had to be a combination Machiavelli, Louis XI of France, Cesare Borgia and Talleyrand, “a liar, double-crosser and unctuous religio (Richelieu), hero and whatnot,” and he didn’t have the stomach for it.

Once, after Truman had taken the unpopular, and for him painful, step of firing Henry A. Wallace from the Cabinet, and his soft-spoken press secretary, Charlie Ross, tried to cheer him up by saying he’d shown he would rather be right than President, Truman responded, “I would rather be anything but President.”

But these were observations from the low points. In truth, Truman loved the job, once he found his stride. He was also far more than just a “good” President. For all the recent fuss about him during the campaign, with George Bush and Bill Clinton both claiming the Truman mantle, there is far more to be learned from Truman the President than from Truman the whistle-stop barnstormer of 1948. He rose to the occasion of the presidency as few ever have, and in times no less uncertain than our own. He made mistakes. But in his vivid way he showed us that in the presidency the kind of person one is often matters most of all--more than experience in foreign affairs, say, or a memory-bank mind.

On the eve of the Clinton era, the Truman example is one the new President could well take to heart--just as Truman’s chief failing, his limited capacity for eloquence, should not be overlooked.

Clinton is a hearty, middle-American career politician, Democrat and populist, with a good mind, high vitality, and a natural down-home interest in people--all very like Truman. As the country witnessed during his Truman-esque campaign by bus, Clinton genuinely likes people. He thrives on people and on talk. He talks, he listens. Yet, the task ahead demands more. He will have to work harder, draw more on other inner resources than ever before, or than he can yet imagine. “Live up the oath you take, to ‘ faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and to the best of my ability , preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,’ ” I can imagine the man from Missouri telling the man from Arkansas. No President of this century worked harder than Truman, serving every day to the best of his ability. Up every morning before dawn, at it still at day’s end, he could outwork anyone on his staff. That way, he said, one never had to suffer regret over how things might have gone had one only tried harder.

Be of good cheer. As much as possible enjoy yourself as President, for your own benefit, but also because the country likes to see a President enjoying the job. It was no coincidence, Truman knew, that his two most popular predecessors since the turn of the century also most openly delighted in being President--Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And, of course, courage and horse sense are prime attributes to be drawn from the Truman example. “Here is to be seen no flaming leadership,” Arthur Krock of the New York Times wrote of Truman in 1946, “little of what could be called scholarship and no more that is profound. But it is very good and human and courageous. Common sense shines out.”

That same year, Truman called for a radical reorganization of the Pentagon under a single secretary of defense, this against entrenched tradition, not to say the views of his own most important political adviser, Robert Hannegan, who saw no cause for the President to get into a fight he might lose. But Truman insisted. It was his duty to send the message to Congress, he said, because it represented his conviction. The job needed doing, and it was done.

Judge Samuel Rosenman, an adviser to both Franklin Roosevelt and Truman, later said the main difference, of all the many differences, between these two presidents was that Truman paid so much less attention to the effect his actions might have on his own political fortunes.

In 1951, during the Korean War, in the most controversial decision of his presidency, Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he felt duty-bound to uphold civilian supremacy over the military, as specified in the Constitution.

Read history, book-loving Harry Truman would now surely counsel the new President. It will help keep things in proportion, give you balance. And ballast when storms come--as they always do for a President. What saw Truman through the storm of abuse over the MacArthur firing was, above all, his faith that the country and history would, in the long run, judge him to have done the right thing. That he and his presidency have so well stood the test of time is due in large measure to the fact that he saw the test of time as the one that counts.

Truman, the only President of the century who never went to college, also never stopped reading. History for Harry, his favorite cousin Ethel Noland explained, was not just something in a book, it was part of life and had to do with people. He himself liked to say, “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.” Few events in his long career meant more to him than the day in 1956, three years after he had left office, when he received an honorary degree from Oxford, the same ancient seat of learning later attended by the Rhodes scholar from Arkansas. Truman was moved to tears by the ceremony. “Never, never in my life, “ he whispered to a reporter, “did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.”

If history teaches anything, Truman might caution Clinton now, one Oxford man to another, it is that leadership demands more than telling people only what they want to hear.

One evening at the White House, in the darkest hours of the Korean War, Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and others, gathered to go over the draft of an important speech Truman was to deliver to the nation.

Truman and Acheson differed over the use of a preposition in a seemingly innocuous sentence that said: “Now, I want to talk to you about each of these things.” Acheson thought it would be better if the President said “talk with you.” Why? Truman asked. Because “with” would sound more informal, Acheson said, whereas “to” made it sound a little as if Truman were “laying down the law.”

“Somebody has to lay down the law around here some time,” Truman said. “Some people confuse liberty and license; they think this country owes them nothing but privileges, and that nobody ought ever to lay down the law to them about their moral responsibilities. Let’s just say ‘to.’ ”

But unlike Franklin Roosevelt--or Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson or Abraham Lincoln--Truman had little gift for moving the country with words. Nor, thus far, has Clinton shown much cause for hope in this regard. Indeed, if the recent campaign was notable for anything, it was for the total lack of strong or eloquent or memorable lines from any of the candidates, for all the deluge of talk.

Truman had his moments. Still, he had nothing like the platform power of Franklin Roosevelt and could never adequately explain U.S. involvement in Korea--or rally the country behind him as Roosevelt would have.

It is no small matter that Roosevelt had as his speech writer one of the leading playwrights of the day, Robert Sherwood; or that Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were themselves natural, even brilliant writers.

“Well, all a President is,” Truman once wrote to his sister, “is a glorified public-relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.” The power of the President was as great or little as his power of persuasion. If he was listening last fall to all those speeches in which his name so often figured, then Truman, I’m certain, would be telling Clinton now to get a new writer, the best he can find.

Say what you mean, Truman would also stress. Speak the truth. Keep your word. Beware of self-importance--Potomac Fever, he called it--in those around you and in yourself. And try always to do what is right for the country and for the world.

On a table behind his desk in the Oval Office, Truman kept a framed admonition from Mark Twain, “Always do right--this will gratify some and astonish the rest.”