History's Verdict
Harry Truman wasn't popular in office, but he is now. George Bush is hoping for the same treatment
Only 32 percent of Americans approve of his job performance. Forty-three percent say that his war was a mistake. Critics deride him as too stubborn and inflexible. Others dismiss him as an intellectual lightweight. But the president sticks to his guns. "I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt?" he writes. "It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It's right and wrong."
Sounds like President Bush, defending his policies in Iraq and the war on terrorism. Actually, it was Harry Truman in 1952, defending his conduct of the Cold War and the war in Korea.
As Bush struggles to salvage victory in Iraq and regain some political traction with his State of the Union address, the 43rd president increasingly sees himself—rightly or wrongly—in the mold of the 33rd. Bush recently told congressional leaders his own policies would be vindicated by history, just as Truman's were. Others aren't so sure.
"Both men happened to be in office when a new international challenge took place, and each dealt with it in a different way," says Boston University historian Julian Zelizer. Adds presidential scholar Doug Brinkley: "What they have in common is that both are presidents who operate out of certitude" and stayed the course despite opposition from their adversaries in Congress and doubts among the American people.
In a commencement address at West Point last May, Bush praised Truman for restructuring both government institutions and the armed forces to deal with the communist threat, and for showing bold decisiveness by ordering an airlift to break a Soviet blockade of Berlin. "By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged, and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the Cold War," Bush told the cadets. He added that America's adversaries today are similar to those Truman faced—enemies who pursue a "murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions, and pursues totalitarian aims."
The problem is that at least some presidential scholars believe Bush may be exaggerating the parallels. They wonder whether his response in Iraq or his approach to terrorism measures up to the sort of hard-eyed realism or long-term vision displayed by Truman. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker. "President Bush can draw a lot of false analogies."
Adds presidential scholar Robert Dallek: "Everybody who gets into serious trouble in the presidency invokes the Truman history and the Truman experience. But there's only one Harry Truman."
These historians also tend to draw a distinction between the magnitude of the decisions thrust on Truman and those facing Bush. While Bush and his allies say he is "trying to reposition America for a new world order" in the wake of 9/11, Brinkley observes, "the Bush argument is a huge stretch. It dishonors the legacy of Truman to make the comparison."
Truman, who took over the presidency following the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, presided over the end of World War II. He ushered in the atomic age by ordering the bomb dropped on Japan. He and his aides devised a series of pathbreaking institutions to contain communism during the Cold War. Among Truman's innovations: the founding of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in 1945; the creation of the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the promotion of the Truman Doctrine, which declared America's intention to help nations combat communist insurgencies around the world, all in 1947; starting the Marshall Plan to provide massive economic aid to Europe in 1948; the Berlin airlift in 1948-49; and the NATO treaty in 1949, which placed Europe under an umbrella of U.S. security.
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