Villainous Company

I see it a bit differently. I think all four of Truman's Supreme Court appointments show a desire to reward those who were nice to him when he was an obscure first-term senator and was presumed to be a hack controlled by the corrupt Pendergast machine of Kansas City. This was evidently Franklin Roosevelt's view, since he supported Gov. Lloyd Stark over Truman in the 1940 Senate primary (Thomas Pendergast had been successfully prosecuted by Roosevelt's Justice Department). Truman narrowly won, with the endorsement of St. Louis boss Bob Hannegan and heavy support from black voters. The story is colorfully told in historian Robert Ferrell's Truman & Pendergast.

Truman paid his political debts. Two of his Supreme Court appointees served with him in the Senate in his first term: Republican Harold Burton (appointed in 1945 when there was only one other Republican on the court ) and Democrat Sherman Minton (appointed in 1949 after two justices in their 50s dropped dead over the summer). I'll bet they were two of the few senators who treated Truman with respect during his first term. His appointee as chief justice in 1946 was Fred Vinson, who served in the House during Truman's first Senate term and was appointed Treasury secretary when Truman cleaned out Roosevelt's Cabinet; Vinson was a regular at Truman's poker parties. The fourth appointment, in 1949, was of Tom Clark, whom Truman had earlier made attorney general. He was known as a friendly man who presumably did not patronize Truman.

But Barone does note some similarites as well:

You could argue that their common decision-making style was almost forced on them by circumstances–or, at least, that if they didn't have that style they would have been quick and visible failures. Truman had to make the peace in Europe and figure out how to end the war with Japan (with the possibility of 1 million casualties staring him in the face). Bush had to determine how to pursue the war on Islamist terrorism. Both won hugely high approval ratings when they seemed to face up to the challenge. Both had ratings far lower when troubles loomed and war efforts seemed to be unavailing–Truman's far lower than Bush's, around 25 percent versus around 45 percent.

All the other presidents but one of my lifetime had wanted to be president for a long time. Eisenhower surely anticipated the possibility by 1945 and pursued it shrewdly thereafter. Kennedy was forced by his father to run. Johnson and Nixon seethed with ambition. So did Jimmy Carter. Only Gerald Ford was an accidental president–and perhaps a quick decision maker like Truman and Bush (e.g., the Nixon pardon). Reagan, in my view (see my obituary piece on him in U.S. News), was an ambitious man all his life, who always saw that it was to his advantage to be seen as an ordinary guy rather than the intellectual he was. Bush 41 was ambitious too: I remember wondering in the late 1970s why a guy who had spent only brief times in a series of resume jobs (and never fully mastered any of them to judge by his pre-presidential autobiography) thought he was entitled to serious consideration as a candidate for president. But he got there. Bill Clinton is an obvious case: He clearly had wanted to be president since he was a small child.

Stuntz points out another similarity, which I noted also in my 1990 book Our Country. Truman and Bush both won by carrying the South and much of the West and Midwest, while running weakest in the Northeast. Both were scorned by Ivy League elitists. And that didn't bother either of them very much at all. And both, as John Lewis Gaddis argues, reshaped American foreign policy in a fundamental way, although Gaddis gives credit to Roosevelt as well as Truman for the reshaping.

For more background on Bush's place in history as seen by Gaddis, see my earlier post here. Gaddis' Middlebury speech is lengthy, but is one of the best things I've read on Bush, especially if you're interested in Gaddis' view of what he likes to call the President's "grand strategy". I especially liked this passage:

What is new is this: previous presidents tended to distinguish between ideals and interests. The expansion of freedom was an aspiration – but the interests of the United States lay elsewhere: in securing independence, suppressing secession, winning world wars, containment, deterrence, the maintenance of a balance of power, the promotion of capitalism, the encouragement of predictably pro-American regimes elsewhere, even if they didn’t meet our own standards for representative government and the defense of human rights.

Bush has now conflated ideals and interests. As he put it in the inaugural: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Freedom itself is to be the strategy, not just the aspiration. It may, in this sense, be radical. It is hardly un-American.

This, in a nutshell, is why I continue to support this President, and why I will fight to the death to maintain support for him against all comers. To me, everything else is really rather trivial, because this is where it all begins: the maintenance and defense of our most cherished ideals (read freedom and democracy). All else flows from those two things and though we must always stay in the right, we must never forget that if we do not take care of the larger things, all these smaller issues which so perplex us will rapidly cease to matter.

We live in cynical times. But in a world where madmen can transport the raw materials for suitcase bombs across continents and make entire cities vanish in an instant, if we cease to champion freedom, who will be left standing?

There is no one, in the end. Europe has long since failed the test. I truly believe those words spoken long ago by Edmund Burke: in order for evil to triumph, little is required - only that good men stay home and do nothing. That is what a good part of our Congress would have America do: nothing.

I make no apology for thanking God every day that we have someone in the White House with the vision and the courage to do otherwise, and I curse, with every breath in my body, those who want to bring him down.

There are larger issues at stake, people. Wake up.