EDITORIAL: Wild about Harry

Sep. 28—The American presidency was created with one man in mind: George Washington. More than that, it was created, according to biographer Ron Chernow, specifically with Washington's character in mind.

Chernow quotes Founding Father Pierce Butler who "doubted that the presidential powers would have been so great 'had not many members cast their eyes toward General Washington as president and shaped their ideas of the powers to a president by their opinion of his virtue.' "

John Hancock, whose name also was put forward in 1789 to be our nation's first president, was better educated. So were John Adams and James Madison, who best understood the new country and government that had just been created.

Yet, the Founding Fathers gave the presidency to a man who by his own measure had a "defective education" and was "deficient in many of the essential qualifications (for president) owing to his inexperience in the forms of public business, his unfitness to judge of legal questions and questions arising out of the Constitution."

We are reminded of the importance of character again today, as Lamar-born Harry S. Truman becomes the 10th U.S. president to be represented in bronze with a statue in the Capitol Rotunda.

Truman ranks among our best presidents, and we believe it is because he possessed the ingredient that the Founding Fathers were seeking when they created the presidency: Integrity. Virtue. Character.

In just over a decade, Truman went from a Jackson County judge, responsible for paving roads, as others have noted, to the White House, responsible for ending World War II and preventing World War III.

Like Washington, he lacked a formal education, although he was well read with a "strong sense of history," according to biographer David McCullough.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are universally rated today by historians as our top three presidents.

Truman shows up in the next tier, along with Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt — which we have always said was pretty heady company for a farmer from Southwest Missouri without a college education who wasn't sure of the protocol the first time that "Hail to the Chief" was played for him.

But then he had what Washington had, and that quality our Founding Fathers designed the presidency and its powers around: Virtue.

Former Secretary of State George Marshall said of Truman: "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 that is worth taking to the polls: "Remembering (Truman) reminds me what a man in that office ought to be like. It's character, just character."