At Long Last, a Truman Building

Ronald Reagan has his airport and a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson each have their monuments on the Mall. And Friday, Harry S. Truman finally got his due, as President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright formally conferred his name on the State Department’s massive, block-square headquarters.

That Truman’s name now adorns a polished granite slab in front of the nation’s diplomatic nerve center is no accident. As Clinton observed in his dedication speech, the self-effacing former haberdasher from Independence, Mo.--who took office on April 12, 1945, on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt--was a driving force behind the active internationalism that defined U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War and beyond.

“In 1946, at the close of his visit to Great Britain, the London Daily Telegraph called Harry Truman ‘the living and kicking symbol of everything everyone likes best about America,’ ” Clinton said at a sun-splashed ceremony attended by several hundred diplomats, State Department officials and lawmakers.

“That’s a pretty good reason for putting his name on the State Department, but it really doesn’t even get into the top 10,” Clinton continued. “History will credit Harry Truman for creating the architecture of postwar internationalism in politics and economics; for drawing the line against communism and for democracy [and] setting us squarely on the trail of freedom we continue to blaze today.”

Among other things, the nation’s 33rd president pushed through the Marshall Plan for rebuilding war-ravaged Europe and sought to use American military and economic aid to beat back communism under the so-called Truman doctrine. He helped form the NATO alliance, sent U.S. troops to battle communist forces on the Korean peninsula and--against the wishes of some advisors--recognized the foundling state of Israel.

He also became the first and only head of government to order the use of nuclear weapons in war.

Congress ordered the building named after Truman in legislation that Clinton signed into law in June. The bill was sponsored by Missouri lawmakers led by Ike Skelton, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, who Friday praised Truman for “guiding the United States away from our established pattern of peaceful isolationism.”

Among those who spoke Friday was George Elsey, who served as a foreign policy advisor to Truman in the days when, as he put it, the entire White House staff was small enough to “gather comfortably in a semicircle of chairs around his desk.”

Truman’s family was represented by grandnephew John Truman, who as a child in Missouri carried on a correspondence with his uncle while Truman occupied the White House. “He would have been very proud and humbled by the step you are taking today,” Truman said. “To me and to my family, Uncle Harry was the honest, plain-spoken embodiment of Uncle Sam.”

Despite the focus on foreign policy, the ceremony also highlighted Truman’s role in promoting racial integration and other forms of social progress. To that end, the speakers were introduced by African American actor James Earl Jones, who recalled that he entered the Army as a second lieutenant shortly after Truman’s July 1948 executive order that ended discrimination in the armed forces.