Harry S. Truman’s Plain Speaking
A collection of anecdotes regarding honesty told about President Harry S. Truman.
- Published
Claim
A collection of anecdotes about honesty comprises real quotes from President Harry S. Truman.
Origin
Few figures in American political history have been as reviled as President
1952.
In the half-century since the end of Truman’s presidency, though, his popular image has undergone a remarkable reversal, and he is now held up by both Republicans and Democrats as the plain-speaking, tough-but-fair exemplar of what a president should be. A collection of anecdotes about
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” —
Harry S. TrumanAfter President Truman retired from office in 1952, he was left with an income consisting of basically just a
U.S. Army pension, reported to have been only $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an “allowance” and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year. When offered corporate positions at large salaries, he declined, stating, “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it’s not for sale.”Even later, on May 6, 1971, when Congress was preparing to award him the Medal of Honor on his
87th birthday, he refused to accept it, writing, “I don’t consider that I have done anything which should be the reason for any award, Congressional or otherwise.”We now see that other past presidents, have found a new level of success in cashing in on the presidency, resulting in untold wealth. Today, many in Congress also have found a way to become quite wealthy while enjoying the fruits of their offices. Obviously, political offices are now for sale.
Good old Harry Truman could have been correct when he observed, “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference. I, for one, believe the piano player job to be much more honorable than current politicians.”
The quote that opens this piece comes from President Truman’s Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, delivered on
[T]here are some people who wish us to enact laws which would seriously damage the right of free speech and which could be used not only against subversive groups but against other groups engaged in political or other activities which were not generally popular. Such measures would not only infringe on the Bill of Rights and the basic liberties of our people; they would also undermine the very internal security they seek to protect.
Laws forbidding dissent do not prevent subversive activities; they merely drive them into more secret and more dangerous channels. Police states are not secure; their history is marked by successive purges, and growing concentration camps, as their governments strike out blindly in fear of violent revolt. Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
When Truman left the White House and returned to life as a private citizen in Missouri in
We couldn’t find a source for the quote that has Truman declining offers of corporate positions at large salaries with the rebuff that “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it’s not for sale.” However, even if he didn’t use those exact words, Truman did express that sentiment regarding the acceptance of corporate positions in his 1960 book,
I turned down all of those offers. I knew that they were not interested in hiring Harry Truman, the person, but what they wanted to hire was the former President of the United States. I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and the dignity of the office of the Presidency.
In May 1971, towards the end of Truman’s life (he died in
I do not consider that I have done anything which should be the reason of any award, Congressional or otherwise.
This does not mean I do not appreciate what you and others have done, because I do appreciate the kind things that have been said and the proposal to have the award offered to me. Therefore, I close by saying thanks, but I will not accept a Congressional Medal of Honor.
(Truman ostensibly might have been awarded a “legitimate” Medal of Honor due to his service as an artillery captain with the
The legend-cum-joke about a respected, successful man who notes in retrospect that — had he enjoyed more advantages early in his life — he might have ended up as a piano player in a brothel is an old one, one which Truman echoed when he observed (as related in the book
And yes, it is appropriate to render Truman’s full name with a period after the ‘S’.