I never studied Truman much. but he had that sign on his desk, "THE BUCK STOPS HERE." Maybe it should have been "STARTS" in lieu of "STOPS."
Truman's presidential library is close to where I live, and I've visited there a good number of times, and read a lot of his personal papers. He was just a tad on the liberal side of center......unlike FDR. He seriously considered a "national healthcare" plan, but did some simple math and decided that it would bankrupt the country, and told his party leaders as much.....much to their dismay.
He was a pragmatist.....with vast reserves of common "horse sense", which I'd take any day, in lieu of a Harvard degree.
According to his biography, he had absolutely no presidential ambitions, but was "drafted" without his knowledge to be FDR's VP, when the Dem elites figured out that FDR was unlikely to live long enough to complete his fourth term. He found out that he was the VP candidate at the convention when it was announced from the podium.....no one was more surprised than he. Being the former soldier that he was, he reluctantly accepted.
As an aside, his wife HATED DC in general, and the White House in particular, and spent most of his presidency in Independence with her parents. Ironically, he never owned his own home, they lived in his wife's parents house, which is considered his "home", but
she inherited it when they died.
doc
