Speaking in a Public Capacity
Harry Truman, a buck-stopper, a doer-of-right, alone, but his own man, never anybody else’s. They said he was Tom Pendergast’s man, but that wasn’t true either. You’ll see. Harry Truman never belonged to anybody. He once said, “Old Tom Jefferson wrote that ‘Whenever you do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world watching you, and act accordingly.’ ”
Old Harry was far too modest a man to make any comparison between himself and old Tom.
Plain Speaking by Merle Miller
Well, folks, welcome to Our Country. Fellow here wants to tell you about Old Harry Truman in a book that’s been causing some stir in these parts. Mr. Wicker, down to the newspaper, has been quoting from it, and it’s a Book-of-the Month Club selection. You’ll be hearing more about it. You’ll see.
If you can stand the cracker-barrel prose, you can find some enjoyable and even illuminating things in Merle Miller’s “oral biography” of Truman, PLAIN SPEAKING (Putnam’s, S8.95). The book started out some years ago as a television project, on which Miller was the writer. The shows never happened, but now Miller has reproduced transcripts of his interviews with Truman (and with friends, family, colleagues) as well as off-the-record conversations, and has added some generally embarrassing commentary of his own.
The book claims to present Truman speaking with unprecedented candor, and he does at least make a lot of sharp-tongued remarks. On Adlai Stevenson: “That fellow was too busy making up his mind whether he had to go to the bathroom or not.” On Nixon: “a shiftyeyed. goddamn liar, and people know it.” But for all the outspokenness, I doubt there is an unguarded moment in Plain Speaking.
An interview need not be an ambush to be good, but it should set up a situation in which the subject can be surprised by what he says— that is, a situation in which he has to do some audible thinking. Merle Miller seems to conduct this interview from Truman’s knee, asking questions or simply expressing his boyish admiration, in a way that invites easy and self-serving responses. “Mr. President, it constantly amazes me that you seem always to know what is the right thing to do.” Now and then Truman seems a bit discomfited. but generally he all too willingly plays the Grandfather. “Oh, I don’t think knowing what’s the right thing to do ever gives anybody too much trouble. It’s doing the right thing that seems to give a lot of people trouble.”
Miller is habitually reluctant to press a point and Truman is a staunch believer in the uselessness of hindsight, all of which works against reexamination of the controversial moments of his presidency. Of the decision to use the atomic bomb, we hear that it “ended the war.” The subject posed considerable difficulty for the television production. Truman was reluctant to talk, and when it was proposed that others might be interviewed he blackballed some of the suggestions. J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, was “unacceptable”: he had “turned into a crybaby. I don’t want anything to do with people like that.” At length it was planned that Truman should be filmed in Hiroshima. The trip never occurred, though Truman acceded to the idea, saying, “I’ll go to Japan if that’s what you want, but I won’t kiss their ass.” End of Truman’s reflections on the dropping of the bomb. Of Korea we hear considerably more, though once again controversy is avoided. Miller handily calls doubts about Truman’s actions “revisionist.” and as for revisionism. he says. “Hindsight is nonsensical, and as nearly as I can make out revisionist history is all hindsight.”
Plain Speaking is politically a lightweight and emotionally an untidy book. It is tantalizing, though: Miller and Truman achieved a certain intimacy—we surely see a Truman more faithful to his daily self than the statesman portrayed in his memoirs—and it would seem that a great many chances for more substantial conversation were lost. Maybe not. Perhaps the good feeling that prevailed depended on Miller’s accepting Truman’s selfcharacterization as a feisty yeoman. It’s reminiscent of Robert Frost’s platform personality in its willful simplification of character. The emotions that this guise must cover! Truman, by all odds a failure until he was forty, a man of remarkable self-education, wed to a woman who was his social better, whom we know here as “the Boss,” condescended to throughout his lifetime by his wife’s family—imagine the dramas of pride and ambition that were enacted beneath the surface. And what to make of that smug homiletic morality? (“Oh, I don’t think knowing what’s the right thing to do ever gives anybody too much trouble. . . .”) Truman, of course, performed acts of high moral courage as well as acts of immense moral ambiguity, and it is hard to believe that his later years were empty of thoughtful reflection. But what was introspective about his mind is not revealed by this book.
For all its faults. Plain Speaking takes on considerable resonance simply by virtue of being read in early 1974. In brighter times, I expect that the final moment of the book would seem rather hokey, but can you read it now and remain unmoved? Truman cites Benjamin Franklin on the nature of public office:
Franklin said. ”In free governments the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns. For the former therefore to return among the hitter is not to degrade them but to promote them. ”
Mr. Truman smiled, and he said.
“I kept that in mind when I was in the White House, and I’ve had it in mind ever since I got my . . . promotion.”
Using One’s Head
Some men have greatness thrust upon them, but for every one who does, several dozen have the greatness drained right out of them. Public life seems to have a way of sapping a man’s intelligence, or at least stilling its voice. We get used to vacuity, come to expect it. So we’re warmed beyond all reason by some Trumanesque “plain speaking,” or by gestures at eloquence, such as Theodore Sorensen’s rhythms in John Kennedy’s accents. (Of course, even the gesture is a thing of the past right now. The only memorable effort in that direction made by the thirty-seventh President—“the lift of a driving dream”—suggested that for him life’s most exalted moment is the one when the plane leaves the runway.)
Daniel P. Moynihan once began a speech by saying that he assumed he’d been asked to speak in “a public capacity,” that is. “asked not to say much.” The speech is one of the items collected in Moynihan’s new book COPING: On the Practice of Government (Random House, $10.00), a book that demonstrates Moynihan’s remarkable—one might almost say unique—success among current men of politics at preserving his intelligence in a public setting.
The essays collected here date back as far as 1961, and almost all are connected to a time and a purpose—not the sort of book that promises to reveal a mind at its best, but most of these pieces at a minimum justify Moynihan’s modest claim of “calling attention to situations of potential difficulty that could still be resolved by analytic competence and the willingness to think ahead just a little ways.” A few of them go further.
“The worst, the most corrupting lies [are] problems poorly stated,” said Georges Bernanos, a quotation Moynihan likes. In his view, one of the most important misdefinitions of our troubles concerns the society’s prevailing ahistorical approach to social welfare. Among people who are vocally concerned with progress—in questions of race, class, opportunity, and justice—it is felt to be useless to speak in terms of the historical progress that has in fact occurred. That it is vital that we do think in such terms is one of Moynihan’s central contentions. Another is that we must distinguish between what government can do, and what it can’t. Some of the things it can’t do. he points out, are: “provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had . . . provide a meaning to life . . . provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies. In particular. government cannot cope with the crisis in values that is sweeping the Western world.”
As assertions of general truth these ideas don’t carry unambiguous force—presumably Moynihan doesn’t mean to deny that moral leadership is a function of politics—but they gain some strength because of context: Moynihan is always writing in uneasy criticism of the liberal, academic tradition that nurtured him. He has gotten himself into difficulties of a high order because he has appeared not to share the goals of liberalism —no need to quote here the phrase that threatens to follow him to the grave. He plainly does share those goals, but he can also write with passion: “Liberals have simply got to restrain their enthusiasm for civilizing others.” (And he can have some fun citing with approval William Buckley’s remark that he’d rather be governed by the first one hundred names in the Cambridge phone hook than by the faculty of Harvard College.)
Skepticism, a sense of limits and of proportion: admirable traits, but like any other habits of thought they can become reflexive and inappropriate. Hard-nosed realism can occasionally be a cozy way to view the world, protecting one from daring to think large thoughts. In 1967, Moynihan could defend the Administration’s escalation by saying, “remember that the largest body of opinion in the United States would bomb the yellow bastards into the Stone Age . . .” not recognizing a pollster’s truth as the wail of anxiety that it surely was. But for the most part these essays hold up well, and they constitute a record of admirable intellectual poise.
The Oppressive Society
Like Moynihan. Richard N. Goodwin has explored the intellectual’s place in politics, and, like Moynihan, he has come away with some sober thoughts about the limits of government. But the comparison can’t be carried much further. Goodwin has little use for Moynihan’s genial meliorism. His new book. THE AMERICAN CONDITION (Doubleday, $10.00), begins with a contrary idea. The relevant measure of freedom in any society, he maintains, is not the difference between what was and what is, but the disparity between what is and what might be. Freedom, he says, is “the use and fulfillment of our humanity—its powers and wants—to the outer limits fixed by the material conditions and capacity of the time.” By that measure, Goodwin feels that it is just to call the United States an oppressive society.
At one level—forgetting, for a moment. about that incendiary word “oppressive”—this is nearly a truism. It is a way of saying, in the now fading cliche, that we “need to reorder our priorities.” But a question remains about our capacity to improve the material and spiritual conditions of life. Goodwin uses the term “capacity” in an almost mystical way: he means not actual ability but latent power. We could do better if we in some way were better. But the prospects for that, as Goodwin sees them, are bleak. The bulk of the book is devoted to describing those social forces that seem to Goodwin to inhibit change.
The American Condition offers itself as a major statement. (Its publisher has predicted that its effect will resemble that of The Greening of America, a title which has apparently come to stand for any book full of generalizations that might sell well. The books aren’t much alike. Goodwin is as baleful as Reich was full of good cheer. The American Condition is far more substantial and will probably be far less controversial.) Goodwin stakes out a large territory for himself, little less than the history of Western thought. Our problems have their root in those Judeo-Christian beliefs that gave rise to the cult of the individual. We suffer from a loss of community, and from the dominance of a technological economy. Marx, of course, looms large in the analysis, but it is Goodwin’s contention that contemporary alienation is of a different and deeper kind than the alienation that Marx described. We are all the “oppressed.” There is no ruling class to blame, there is only a ruling force: the impersonal but seductive power of the great public and private bureaucracies.
if these ideas seem familiar, they are—synopsis isn’t wholly to blame and their familiarity is one of the difficulties with this book. It can be said for Goodwin that he is aware of the problem. At one odd interlude he presents an extended parody of studies that try to make large-scale cultural statements. (The idea is that all our woes can be traced to the discovery of cooking.) Awareness, though, doesn’t get rid of the trouble. No doubt it is the heaviness of the themes, and Goodwin’s discomfort under their load, that explains the turgidity that afflicts The American Condition. The problem is in part formal. If you are, as Goodwin seems to be, driven to create a world view (and if you are not, say, William Blake), you are going to have to repeat other men’s discoveries.
The American Condition is an act of intelligent despair. Its arguments aren’t susceptible to proof, though they touch genuine anxieties in any reader. They also perversely remind one of sources of faith. Goodwin consistently undervalues the power of private, individual consciousness.
To say what a man’s book should have been about is always a presumptuous thing to do, but it is hard to read The American Condition without thinking that somewhere inside it there is a more modest, more useful book trying to get out. Some of its most telling moments are those when Goodwin allows himself to speak briefly from his political experience—an anecdote, for example, illustrating alienation in high places, about an anonymous White House official who argued in private against the war, but carried out official policy with alacrity, because that was professional behavior. At length he was fired. “The President who disliked, fired and humiliated him. gave him a medal. The man wept. They were not tears of shame.”
The question that Goodwin seems struggling to answer has to do with the way one political man, a liberal, ought to act, when the confidence of a decade ago has vanished, and when he feels himself in the grip of a cultural destiny beyond the reach of politics. Although this work is delivered with considerable certitude, it was, I expect, conceived in a confusion that has not been resolved.
It is always hard to acknowledge one’s confusion on the page, and Goodwin’s failure to do so here isn’t a sin, but it’s a shame. The American Condition seems to me one of those books that would have been stronger if its author had had the courage of his doubts.