"Boss Tom Prendergast: I've got a job for you.
Harry S. Truman: Well, that's mighty nice of you. What's the job, dog-catcher?
Boss Tom Prendergast: How would you like to run for Congress?
Harry S. Truman: Well, Jesus Christ and General Jackson. The answer's yes.”
Harry Truman, recently elected Vice President of the United States in January of 1945, ignored the nuanced political advice to toss a friend and mentor under the bus.
Boss Prendergast of Kansas City, MO had been convicted of income tax evasion and had died. The Vice President was advised that it would be unseemly to attend the funeral mass of this 'unsavory' man. Truman replied, "He was always my friend, and I have always been his." Truman attended the funeral Mass.
Harry Truman was anything but glib, but his deeds were eloquent. Harry Truman was a South Baptist and briefly was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, whose largest voting base were American Roman Catholics. He was a champion of the working man, but threatened to draft railroad workers in the service when a national railroad strike was called after World War II.
Truman ended WWII by heroically ordering the drop of the bomb developed and invented by Robert Oppenheimer who moused out pious quotes about his weapons inhumanity - pipe smoking phony.
Truman saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of American lives fated to invade Japan:
The alternative Truman faced was to order use of the atomic bomb which might shock the Japanese into surrender, or order the planned invasion of Japan's home islands; casualty estimates for Americans ranged very widely. Casualty estimates for Japan ranged into the millions. Secretary of War Henry Stimson made the real decision: to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan immediately surrendered on terms that allowed Emperor Hirohito to stay on the throne and not be tried as a war criminal. Truman put General Douglas MacArthur in charge of occupying and controlling Japan; MacArthur remained in charge until the peace treaty was finally signed in 1951.
Truman kept control of the bomb in civilian hands—the Air Force and State Department did not even know how many bombs existed until 1948, when only eight had been built. The postwar military strategy was not built around nuclear weapons.
Harry Truman was a very complex simple man. A simple because he was most like most Americans. Truman understood poverty and failure and steered a course for America that created the greatest peace time standard of living in world history.
The former Klan member ended segregation the military.
Truman fought the Progressives under Henry Wallace and the Dixiecrats behind Strom Thurmond.
Truman ignored the striped-pants intellectuals of the State Department and recognized Israel.
Truman ignored the Progressives and contained the spread of Soviet communism.
Truman signed the Taft-Hartley Act that gave workers the right to bargain in good faith, but not imperil the nation.
Harry Truman fought a conventional war against the North Koreans and Red Chinese and avoided a nuclear war with Russia. He fired MacArthur for insubordination and took the heat and damned the critics.
Harry Truman would be mocked by CBS,NBC, MSNBC, CNN and detested as a war-mongering, Zionist, racist, political stooge, were he in today's political arena.
Harry Truman was the last great American President.
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