President Biden will need leadership similar to Harry Truman’s
American isolationism dates to our first president, George Washington, who in his Farewell Address urged that the United States be a global model for staying out of foreign affairs. Isolationism kept the nation out of World War II until the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other Pacific military installations.
“America’s isolationist instinct had held sway from the Republic’s first days, and is again leading to America’s retreat across the globe,” Joe Scarborough writes in “Saving Freedom | Truman, the Cold War, and the Fight for Western Civilization.” The author is the co-host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC.
Saving Freedom was published in late 2020, prior to the November election; some of the global retreat has shifted into reverse with Biden executive orders.
Truman became president when Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, only three months after his fourth inauguration as president. Truman became “the most consequential foreign policy president of the past seventy-five years.” Only FDR compares “for shaping world events over the twentieth century.”
Greece was the focal point in containing Soviet Union expansion. Great Britain (United Kingdom) had its own recovery problems and “the United States would bear the burden formerly borne by Great Britain as a guarantor of world peace.”
TRUMAN DOCTRINE
The Truman Doctrine of 1947 “transformed the U.S. into an active participant in the political affairs of other “endangered nations.” Truman’s leadership, and bipartisanship in Congress, brought about the Truman Doctrine. Other key figures in “Saving Freedom” include secretaries of state George Marshall (The Marshall Plan) and Dean Acheson and U.S. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan.
Scarborough, a former congressman from Florida, makes a strong, readable case for presidential leadership, and congressional bipartisanship. The latter perhaps is not possible to the extent it was in previous times, when the nation was not as divided as today.
Truman was in his second Senate term (re-elected in 1940) when FDR named “the little man from Missouri” as his vice presidential candidate for the presidential election of 1944. Truman seriously did not want to be vice president. “At their first meeting after his selection as the vice presidential nominee, Truman had been shocked by the president’s condition,” Scarborough writes in a chapter with fascinating details of the day Eleanor Roosevelt told Truman, “Harry, the president is dead.”
UPSET IN ‘48
The 1948 presidential election was one of the most dramatic in U.S. history. The Republican candidate, again, was N.Y. Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who had opposed FDR in 1944. Dewey was by far the favorite. Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice president before Truman, ran as the Progressive Party. S.C. Gov. Strom Thurmond was the “Dixiecrat” candidate. “Give ‘em Hell Harry” campaigned hard and won 303 Electoral Votes and the popular vote by a big margin. Dewey received 189 Electoral votes, Thurmond 39.
Biden was a senator from Delaware for 36 years, then vice president with President Obama. Biden has blue collar roots similar to Truman, who was raised on a farm. He was an artillery officer in The Great War, then a failed businessman and rose in Kansas City and Missouri politics in the Pendergast machine.
Like Truman, Biden became president under terrific stress. Biden probably cannot expect the unity and bipartisanship of 75 years ago, and he surely will need the strong leadership Truman displayed.
D.G. Schumacher is a senior writer on The Sun News Editorial Board.