EDITORIAL: Harry Truman for President!

May 5—As director of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Kurt Graham hears from lots of visitors about the former president.

And one thing he hears again and again, he told us, is the comment: "Would to God we could find another Harry Truman."

Would to God, indeed.

It's the right time to put Truman front and center because Saturday is Truman Day in Lamar, where he was born May 8, 1884. The Harry S Truman Birthplace State Historic Site, the city of Lamar and the Barton County Chamber of Commerce celebrate with historical demonstrations, vendors and musical entertainment from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

It's also the right time because Monday is Truman Day — a state holiday.

But mostly, it's the right time because finding the right leader for our country continues to bewilder and bedevil both parties as well as voters.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt consistently rank as our top three presidents, according to historians.

Guess who ranks in the next tier, along with presidents like Theodore Roosevelt? The farmer from Missouri. The failed businessman without a college education. The man of limited political experience.

He was so unprepared to be president, according to historian Ian Toll, that when a band played "Hail to the Chief," Truman did not know the protocol. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Toll writes, "It became painfully clear that Truman was not up to speed," either on the war or what Toll calls "the latest moves in the global geostrategic chess match."

Toll gives Truman credit, however: "Historians have concluded that Truman grew into the role of commander in chief and eventually proved more than equal to the job."

Truman would, in less than 11 years, go from a Jackson County judge, responsible for paving roads, as Graham told us, to the White House, responsible for ending World War II and preventing World War III.

It was just last year that Truman became only the 10th U.S. president to be represented in the U.S. Capitol rotunda with a bronze statue. "He is a 21st-century standard for presidential leadership and public service," Alex Burden, executive director of the Truman Library Institute, said at the time: "I think we're all benefiting from living in almost eight decades of peace and prosperity of the world order that Truman put in place in the late 1940s."

What made him great?

In his biography of Truman, the historian David McCullough said the decision to name George Marshall as secretary of state was "one of the best, most important decisions of Truman's presidency."

It was also one of the most revealing of Truman's character and willingness to check his ego for the good of the country.

Truman's decision to appoint a man of Marshall's stature was seen as a great political risk because Marshall would soon overshadow Truman. When Truman was about to appoint Marshall, one of Truman's political advisers said to him, "Mr. President, you might want to think twice about appointing Gen. Marshall as secretary of state. ... Because if Gen. Marshall becomes secretary of state, in three or four months people will be saying he would make a better president than you."

But it was Marshall who later said of Truman: "I want to say here and now that there has never been a decision made under this man's administration, affecting policies beyond our shores, that has not been in the best interest of this country. It is not the courage of these decisions that will live but the integrity of the man."

McCullough ends his biography with a quote from journalist Eric Sevareid, witness to those dangerous days: "Remembering (Truman) reminds me what a man in that office ought to be like. It's character, just character."

Would to God we could find another person like Harry Truman.