Quotes About Truman

Harry S Truman, then a senator from Missouri, went a step further: The U.S. should extend aid to Europe, he contended shortly after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, but give it to "whatever side seemed to be losing. If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible.

As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.

Now about those ghosts. I'm sure they're here and I'm not half so alarmed at meeting up with any of them as I am at having to meet the live nuts I have to see every day.

By God, was Gary like Harry Truman, mediocrity enlarged by history?

but Rhee's police-state tactics concerned the Truman administration enough that it refused to provide the republic with much in the way of heavy arms—thus leaving South Korea vulnerable to attack.

Means of destruction hitherto unknown, against which there can be no adequate military defense, and in the employment of which no single nation can in fact have a monopoly.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination, and unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

The American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC) embarked on a well-financed publicity campaign that helped by late 1947 to generate large majorities—some polls said over 80 percent—of the American people in favor of such a homeland. AZEC's efforts helped induce thirty-three state legislatures to pass resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine. In addition, forty governors, fifty-four senators, and 250 members of congress signed petitions to Truman on the issue. 34

By 10:00 P.M. it decided to pull out all the stops: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. An early election-eve edition of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin carried a cartoon depicting a jubilant elephant and a doleful donkey. Only in the next edition was there a fast retouch: the elephant was now startled, the donkey joyous.62

An anonymous GI poet added: Please Mr. Truman, won't you send us home? We have captured Napoli and liberated Rome; We have licked the master race, Now there's lots of shipping space, So, won't you send us home? Let the boys at home see Rome.9

Although Truman and his advisers still hoped to ameliorate gathering tensions, they made only half-hearted efforts to accommodate the Soviets, or even to negotiate seriously with them. In the third phase, clear by February 1947, the administration hit on a more consistent, clearly articulated policy: containment. The essential stance of the United States for the next forty years, the quest for containment entailed high expectations. It was the most important legacy of the Truman administration.

Let me tell you the first president to recognize the state of Israel was Harry Truman, a Democrat and every president since, Democrat and Republican, has stood closely with Israel.

Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest to keep from having to read a two-foot stack of cables every morning.

The final word belongs to one of Truman's aides, George Elsey. "It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing," he commented subsequently. "The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.

1948 President Truman signs legislation establishing the Marshall Plan.

As for his piece, Truman had been struggling with writer's block since In Cold Blood and couldn't finish the assignment.

I went to a little liberal-arts college in Missouri called Truman State University.

Now I know why they say Lincoln's ghost walks around up here at night," President Truman chuckled. "He's just looking for his bed.

The next evening, Fields, his pride hurt, dumped two big splashes of bourbon over the ice and served it to Mrs. Truman. She tasted the drink. Then she beamed. "Now that's the way we like our old-fashioneds!

With the precedents of Soviet unilateralism in Europe all too clearly in mind, there was no desire within the new Truman administration to see something similar repeated in Northeast Asia. Here, then, the Americans embraced Stalin's own equation of blood with influence. They had done most of the fighting in the Pacific War. They alone, therefore, would occupy the nation that had started it.

The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman's presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating 'Reds' in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed.

History has proven that Truman deserves credit for containing Soviet expansion on several fronts, including Korea, despite his missteps during the crisis.