A history lesson—and an absorbing book

 

From time to time, someone on Facebook asks about everyone’s earliest memory of a public event. I am not quite old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, but I’ve been told about the moment my family knew so often that I almost feel I remember. I would have been three, and I was playing on the kitchen floor while Mom worked in the kitchen. Dad, a veteran of WWI, stuck his head in the door and said, “We are at war.” It was a momentous thing, and my parents told the story over and over.

The first public memory I have is of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We lived on a park, and I was outside playing, probably with neighbor children. I had been raised in a household where FDR was a minor god, and I assumed everyone loved him as much as my parents did. Not so. This day a woman jumped out of her car and shouted, “Hooray! Hooray! Roosevelt is dead.” I went home and told my mom, who said, “Don’t talk like that.” Soon enough, she found out it was true.

Now a book recommended by a friend is bringing back all those memories and more. The book is The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World, by A. J. Baime. From the blurb to the book: “The first four months of Truman’s administration saw the founding of the United Nations, the fall of Berlin, victory at Okinawa, firebombings in Tokyo, the first atomic explosion, the Nazi surrender, the liberation of concentration camps, the mass starvation in Europe, the Potsdam Conference, the controversial decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of imperial Japan, and finally, the end of World War II and the rise of the Cold War. No other president had ever faced so much in such a short period of time.”

Truman was the most unlikely man—accidental is a good term—to deal with such challenges. Small, bespectacled, from a poor family, and until he was in his thirties and assumed a military command, a failure at almost everything he tried. The only thing he didn’t fail at was his courtship of Bess Wallace, and it took him years to convince her to marry him--and then more years before he felt he could support her. Even then, he moved into her family’s home and lived under the disapproving eye of his mother-in-law. He lost the first election he tried, but won later ones, and with the help of Kansas City political boss Tom Prendergast, found himself vice-president of the United States.

Roosevelt almost didn’t know who he was, never involved him in the policies and problems of government. He had little to do, as vice president, besides preside over Senate meetings. All that changed on April 12, 1945, when FDR died. It was a sudden death but should not have been a surprise—the president had been in failing health for some time.

For Truman it all happened in a whirl—the call to the White House, the swearing in, and then he went back to the modest apartment he shared with his wife and daughter, Margaret (he called her Margie, with a hard “g”). The telling of all this is full of names that now I remember, whether from the actual time or from the history books-- Alben Barkley, Dwight Eisenhower as a general and not a president, General George C. Marshall, Frances Perkins, the labor secretary and first female member of the Cabinet, Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton. And it fills in m knowledge of those crucial days—the apparent collapse of the Nazi regime, the discovery of the first concentration camp, the conference between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR at Yalta.

There is one object lesson here that I wish today’s Republicans could take to heart as they resist funding Ukraine in its efforts to stop Russia from greedily absorbing more and more territory, as it has done with Crimea. After the agreement at Yalta, Stalin backtracked on all that he had promised, such as access for international troops to Poland and other Russian-occupied territories. Russia could not be trusted then, and it cannot be trusted today.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes an amazing daily column, “Letters from an American,” in which she uses history to help readers understand today’s world, with all its conflicts, and the importance of our democracy. Her work is a living embodiment of the familiar caution that he who does not know history is doomed to repeat its mistakes. Another reason to fear the rampant censorship of what is taught in our schools today. Baime, in this book, also uses history to help us understand leadership and international relations—and, yes, that endangered concept known as democracy. And he gives us an intimate portrait of a period in the life and presidency of a man some have named among our greatest presidents and others among our worst. You read it and decide.