Plain Speaking

Plain Speaking

Author: Merle Miller

Publisher: Rosetta Books

Published: 2018-04-24

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 0795351283

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“Never has a President of the United States, or any head of state for that matter, been so totally revealed, so completely documented” (Robert A. Arthur). Plain Speaking is the bestselling book based on conversations between Merle Miller and the thirty-third President of the United States, Harry S. Truman. From these interviews, as well as others who knew him over the years, Miller transcribes Truman’s feisty takes on everything from his personal life, military service, and political career to the challenges he faced in taking the office during the final days of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. Using a series of taped discussions from 1962 that never aired on television, Plain Speaking takes an opportunity to deliver exactly how Mr. Truman felt about the presidency, and his thoughts in his later years on his accomplishments and the legacy he left behind. “The values of Plain Speaking, on the whole, are those of the highest form of political communication: the bull session. As with all good bull sessions, what is said here ranges widely in quality and seriousness, as one should expect when dealing with a complex man.” —The New York Times “Plain Speaking has a nostalgic, downhome quality of good friends gossiping over the back fence, or saying their piece of a twilight eve rocking on the porch—and if those fellas back in Washington have their secret machines running, well, they won’t like what they overhear. Not one little bit.” —Kirkus Reviews


Dear Bess

Dear Bess

Author: Harry S. Truman

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 614

ISBN-13: 9780826212030

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This correspondence, which encompasses Truman's courtship of his wife, his service in the senate, his presidency, and after, reveals not only the character of Truman's mind but also a shrewd observer's view of American politics.


Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Author: Dean Acheson

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1987-09-17

Total Pages: 858

ISBN-13: 1324064609

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize With deft portraits of many world figures, Dean Acheson analyzes the processes of policy making, the necessity for decision, and the role of power and initiative in matters of state. Acheson (1893–1971) was not only present at the creation of the postwar world, he was one of its chief architects. He joined the Department of State in 1941 as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and, with brief intermissions, was continuously involved until 1953, when he left office as Secretary of State at the end of the Truman years. Throughout that time Acheson's was one of the most influential minds and strongest wills at work. It was a period that included World War II, the reconstruction of Europe, the Korean War, the development of nuclear power, the formation of the United Nations and NATO. It involved him at close quarters with a cast that starred Truman, Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Attlee, Eden Bevin, Schuman, Dulles, de Gasperi, Adenauer, Yoshida, Vishinsky, and Molotov.


The Man of Independence

The Man of Independence

Author: Jonathan Daniels

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780826211903

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Having worked closely with Harry S. Truman in the triumphant campaign of 1948, Jonathan Daniels believed that President Truman was an "everyday" American, an ordinary human who aspired to greatness and achieved it. Thus, it was Daniels's intention that The Man of Independence not be a conventional biography; rather, he wanted it to reveal in real terms "the Odyssey of the 'everyday' American through our times." As a result, this comprehensive work not only presents Truman's life, it also details the development of the America in which the president grew up. Truman spent his youth and his political life believing that old- fashioned, determined conservatism was vital to the preservation of personal liberty. Daniels re-creates Truman's remarkable journey through life--employing newspapers, letters, memos, family papers, as well as interviews with Truman, his family, and his close acquaintances. In the process, Daniels provides powerful evocations of the time during which Truman lived. Daniels tells this extraordinary story by following this simple farm boy from Missouri through his youth and his years as a farmer, a veteran, and a businessman, on to his early career in politics, and then his presidency. Along the way, Daniels deals with issues, events, and ideas that were part of Missouri and American politics in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s; ultimately, he gives us the Truman who was to become the legend. This inside account provides thought-provoking and personal information about Truman. His relationship with Thomas Pendergast, the seeming conflict between Truman's midwestern conservatism and his belief in equality for American blacks, and his momentous decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war--these are just a few of the topics touched on. Ending in 1949 when Truman was for the second time sworn in as president, The Man of Independence provides a fascinating and valuable look at one of America's most important and beloved presidents, as well as a crucial look at the America from which he emerged.


Harry Truman and Civil Rights

Harry Truman and Civil Rights

Author: Michael R. Gardner

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780809388967

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Given his background, President Truman was an unlikely champion of civil rights. Where he grew up--the border state of Missouri--segregation was accepted and largely unquestioned. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents had owned slaves, and his beloved mother, victimized by Yankee forces, railed against Abraham Lincoln for the remainder of her ninety-four years. When Truman assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, Michael R. Gardner points out, Washington, DC, in many ways resembled Cape Town, South Africa, under apartheid rule circa 1985. Truman's background notwithstanding, Gardner shows that it was Harry Truman--not Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, or John F. Kennedy--who energized the modern civil rights movement, a movement that basically had stalled since Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves. Gardner recounts Truman's public and private actions regarding black Americans. He analyzes speeches, private conversations with colleagues, the executive orders that shattered federal segregation policies, and the appointments of like-minded civil rights activists to important positions. Among those appointments was the first black federal judge in the continental United States. Gardner characterizes Truman's evolution from a man who grew up in a racist household into a president willing to put his political career at mortal risk by actively supporting the interests of black Americans.


Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine

Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine

Author: Denise M. Bostdorff

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781603440349

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In this work, Denise M. Bostdorff considers President Truman’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947. She focuses on the public and private language that influenced administration perceptions about the precipitating events in Greece and Turkey and explores the news management campaign that set the stage for Truman’s speech. Bostdorff even examines how the president’s health may have influenced his policy decision and how it affected his delivery of the address and campaign for congressional approval. After a rhetorical analysis of the Truman Doctrine speech, the book ends with Bostdorff’s conclusions on its short- and long-term impact. She identifies themes announced by Truman that resound in U.S. foreign policy down to the present day, when George W. Bush has compared his policies in the war on terror to those of Truman and members of his administration have compared Bush to Truman. This important work is a major contribution to scholarship on the presidency, political science, and public rhetoric.


Sailor in the White House

Sailor in the White House

Author: William M. Rigdon

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2019-11-01

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1789128722

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Sailor in the White House, first published in 1962 as White House Sailor, is author William Rigdon’s fascinating account of his 11 years of personal service to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. As Rigdon states “with two of the three Presidents under whom I served, I was to make at least forty trips away from Washington working as their secretary, mess officer, mailman, baggageman, banker, storekeeper, photographer, custodian of secret files, and keeper of official logs. I went with Roosevelt to Cairo, Teheran, Great Bitter Lake, Yalta, both Quebec conferences, Honolulu, and the Aleutians. I was with him, too, on his inspection and political trips within the United States, on his mysterious fishing vacation to Georgian Bay in Canada, at Bernard Baruch’s place in South Carolina where the President went to recuperate after Teheran. And there were many weekends at Hyde Park and trips to Shangri-La, the President’s mountain hideaway in the Maryland mountains. On these and other occasions I saw close-up such famous figures as Prime Minister Churchill, Generalissimo Stalin, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, and many others. Also, on these trips away from Washington I served Harry Hopkins as secretary, when my duties with the President allowed. When President Truman took over I served him exactly as I had served President Roosevelt, going in his party to the Berlin Conference, where he met with Generalissimo Stalin, Prime Minister Churchill, and his successor Prime Minister Clement Attlee. I was with him en route home when he received King George VI in the cruiser Augusta, and in mid-Atlantic when he announced the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.” Included are 8 pages of photographs.


Dean Acheson

Dean Acheson

Author: Gaddis Smith

Publisher:

Published: 1972

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13:

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An appraisal of Dean Acheson during his time as Secretary of State. -- Dust jacket.


Twice Forgotten

Twice Forgotten

Author: David P. Cline

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-12-17

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1469664542

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Journalists began to call the Korean War "the Forgotten War" even before it ended. Without a doubt, the most neglected story of this already neglected war is that of African Americans who served just two years after Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of the military. Twice Forgotten draws on oral histories of Black Korean War veterans to recover the story of their contributions to the fight, the reality that the military&8239;desegregated in fits and starts, and how veterans' service fits into the long history of the Black freedom struggle. This collection of seventy oral histories, drawn from across the country, features interviews conducted by the author and his colleagues for their American Radio Works documentary, Korea: The Unfinished War, which examines the conflict as experienced by the approximately 600,000 Black men and women who served. It also includes narratives from other sources, including the Library of Congress's visionary Veterans History Project. In their own voices, soldiers and sailors and flyers tell the story of what it meant, how it felt, and what it cost them to fight for the freedom abroad that was too often denied them at home.