An Election Apart: Harry Truman and the Last Time an Incumbent President Was Strapped for Cash

In our hyperbole-infected 24/7, anywhere, anytime news cycle, many reporters have become too quick to judge elections in exaggeration. If you believed stories from the Obama-Romney coverage chapter and verse, you’d think this was “the most negative campaign ever.” Never mind that contest between two chaps by the names of Adams and Jefferson, in which Jefferson’s election managers slammed Adams as a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Sniping back, Adams’s team dismissed Jeffersonas "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

Depending on where your political sympathies lay, you’d also be resolved that Mitt Romney orpresident Barack Obama were the two most mendacious candidates of any that have vied for the White House. Hmmm. Because political candidates never stretch or bend the truth to further their arguments, of course. Like the time that Al Smith’s detractors took their anti-Catholicism line intocomical territory by circulating a photo of Smith dedicating a new tunnel and claiming he was planning to extend the passageway under the Atlantic to Rome, so he could take direct orders from the Pope if he became president.

But one claim about this year’s Obama-Romney face off that is accurate is that it is the most highly funded election in US history, with more than $6 billion dollars flowing into Democratic and Republican coffers, and then out again to pay for TV ads, logistics, calling campaigns and the rest.

This cash-rich election is the opposite of another that I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time studying lately: The Harry Truman vs. Tom Dewey presidential election of 1948.

Clifford K. Berryman, October 19, 1948

Before we look at the money side, let’s first look at the context of this election. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been president for 12 years, authored the New Deal, forged the historic wartime alliance with Winston Churchill and become an indelible imprint on the nation’s consciousness, died on April 12, 1945. In his place was a man who had been vice president for just 82 days, and was as unlike Roosevelt as was possible. FDR was born into privilege, had been to the best schools, and mixed in the elite East Coast liberal circles, making his ascension to the presidency seem natural and, in some ways, almost pre-destined. In contrast, Harry Truman had been a soldier, a farmer and a failed haberdasher, had never been to college, and preferred to mix with his old friends from Missouri. Yet, with FDR gone, he was now at the helm of the US, which had become an industrial powerhouse during World War II.

Just three months into his presidency, Truman was charged with brokering a lasting peace with Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Potsdam – though Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe was a fait accompli and Stalin wasn’t well known for bending for anyone, let alone a rookie president, albeit it a fiery one.

Then, in August 1945, Truman was faced with the monumental decision of whether to use the fruits of the Manhattan Project to force Japanese surrender. Believing his generals’ assertions that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki would save up to 500,000 American troops, he authorized this decisive, and most deadly, action.

When the war ended, organized labor wanted pay rises to compensate for stagnant levels during the war, while industrial leaders desired increased prices and keeping wages steady. Massive strikes ensued, with 116 million of work days lost in 1946. Truman recognized the need to keep the Democrats’ traditional labor voting happy, but couldn’t tolerate it when the UAW, AFL, CIO, coalminers, John Lewis’s steelworkers and others brought the country’s economy to a standstill. So he seized the mines, the steelworks and the railroads, telling train worker leaders A.F Whitney and Alvanley Johnson in the Oval Office, “I’m going to give you the gun.” Truman was pulled back by special counsel Clark Clifford when he wanted to tell Congress he should hang a few strikers to send a message to Big Labor, though in his revised speech to a joint session on May 26, he did ask for the right to draft strikers into the Army – a proposal that didn’t become law.

To add to Truman’s woes, the GOP seized control of the House and Senate in the 1946 midterms. And as Truman’s lame duck Presidency continued to struggle, his pursuit of a bold civil rights plank, passage of Executive Orders to desegregate the US armed forces and ensure equality for civil servants of all ethnicity and speech to the NAACP caused Southern Democrats to break away and form the States Rights Democratic Platform. One split in the party would’ve been bad enough, but former vice president Henry Wallace captured the imagination of the far left when he formed the Progressive Party. To make matters worse, the New Deal old guard, including Eleanor and James Roosevelt, had little to no confidence in Truman, considering him to be a poor substitute for the giant of the age, FDR.

The hapless Truman had no reprieve in foreign affairs. Not only was Stalin securing his grip on Eastern Europe, he was also demanding bases in Turkey, providing support to Greek Communists and threatening the vital British trade route through the Suez Canal. In Asia, Moscow was backing Mao’s takeover in China and, foreshadowing the coming conflict, periodically cutting off power to South Korea. And then, Truman controversially recognized the nascent Israeli state on May 14, 1948, the first world leader to do so. A month later, the Soviets started the Berlin Blockade, refusing to allow food, medical supplies or other aid to flow from the Allied-controlled zones.

With such calamities at home and abroad, Truman would have struggled against any Republican opponents in the 1948 election. But when the GOP nominated the ‘dream ticket’ of New York Governor Thomas Dewey and popular California Governor Earl Warren, a whole forest was thrown onto the fire. Clare Booth Luce, wife of Time publisher Henry, spoke the opinions of many when she said that the Man from Missouri was a “gone goose.”

Click here to read the rest of this post at the blog of Boston University's The Historical Society

What's the Story Behind Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech? Find out at the National Churchill Museum on Sunday, November 11

In March 1946, Winston Churchill arrived in the unlikely venue of Fulton, Missouri, where he introduced the world to the phrases "the iron curtain" and "the special relationship" in what he later called the most important  speech of his career.

How did he end up in the American heartland?

Who was the college president who brought him to Westminster College?

How did Fulton prepare for the arrival of Churchill and thousands of visitors?

What role did Harry Truman play?

And what's the lasting significance of this speech, which articulated the divide between liberal democratic principles and Communism?

To find out, come to see me speak at the The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, in Fulton, MO, which houses the wonderful National Churchill Museum, on Sunday, November 11 at 2:00 pm. Click here for directions.

I'll be selling signed copies of my book on the topic, Our Supreme Task: How Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance, after the talk.

I hope to see you there. Can't make it but still want to buy a signed copy? Then e-mail me at philwhite7@gmail.com

A Better Boris: Johnson's Prime Ministerial Showcase at the Conservative Party Conference

David Cameron's speech at the recent Conservative Party Conference was billed as the headlining act. After all, he is prime minister. And he did very well, boldly communicating his vision for the party, how to build on current successes - such as the establishment of independent schools, and - how to do better, including bold plans on Britain crime, terrorism and, of course, the still-stagnant economy.

But despite Cameron exceeding expectations at the podium, he was upstaged by a man who might one day take his place (though of course, he won't overtly admit this): Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Boris swept into Birmingham with a large entourage, his trademark blond mop tousled further by the autumnal breeze and his voluminous personality pulling in all those in the near vicinity. Buoyed by his starring role as cheermeister at the Olympics and Paralympics, the launch of his well-received book and, of course, a hard-fought win over nemesis Ken Livingstone in the mayoral election, Hurricane Boris blew into the conference centre threatening to destroy all in its path.

And yet, by the time he took the podium for the pre-speech teaser (as only Boris can do, at a welcome reception the night before the main event) he was atypically reserved, disciplined (aside for the odd imaginative meandering) and even follically presentable. He didn't do away with his Borisness - wit, irreverence, unnatural confidence - but managed to keep his exuberance in check enough to come across as a, gulp, statesman. The question was whether he could repeat the feat the following morning. And, much to the chagrin of the Cameroons who view him as a usurper and a loose cannon, he did.

The audience in the crowded hall laughed at his jokes not because they were obliged to, but because Boris is genuinely funny. They were inspired by his bold policy statements about Britain's future as "a creative, confident, can-do country" because he has vision, and doesn't worry about towing the party line. He instinctively knows what is important to this country, and can explain this in clear, jargon-free terms. Furthermore, Boris can simplify the principals of the party he represents as mayor: "I am a Conservative. I believe in a low tax, low regulation economy."

More so than any other current British politician, there is something distinctly Churchillian about Boris, though Winston's wit was less overt. Yes, the Mayor does on occasion go off tilting at windmills as Churchill did. And true, he is certainly not lacking in ego. But on the big things - including keeping the EU's greedy hands off the City of London's assets, the need to do better for the middle class ("the backbone of London"), and supporting entrepreneurship, Boris is quite correct. As Churchill's career proved, this is perhaps the defining assessment of any politician's body of work.

Much like the Churchill that Peter Clarke brilliantly portrays in his book, Mr. Churchill's Profession, Boris has made his living by his pen. And, as with Winston, he actually writes, or at least is a significant contributor to, his own speeches (or, in some cases, just speaks extemporaneously). Cameron cannot claim that, nor can his counterpart across the Atlantic, whose inauguration address was, for good or for ill, crafted by a 27-year-old in a Washington DC Starbucks. (Yes, blogging police, I've used this example before.) The reason that Boris's rhetoric resonates is because there is a consistency between his writing, his off-microphone conversation and his public addresses. In all settings, Boris is Boris, and people can either take him or leave him.

Click here to read the full story via The Huffington Post

The College Writing Problem: Stop the Presses for Journalism and English Majors

In the course of the Atlantic’s recent series, The Writing Revolution, contributors have explored how to inspire struggling students, discussed the need to go beyond curriculum requirements, and delved into the disparity between how American society treats its high school athletes and their star student classmates.

Each of these pieces has merit, and yet as I read them, I was inspired to move beyond what works and what doesn’t for K-12 writing instruction and jump ahead to the problems of writing in higher education.

In his fine essay, Arthur Applebee writes that in 2011, 40 to 41 percent of public school students at grades 8 and 12 were assigned less than a page of writing homework per week, and that 80 percent of these assignments didn’t involve composition.

You may think and hope that this dearth of practical writing is overcome once students pack their bags for college and that our higher education institutions have challenging syllabi that prepare able students to write the next great American novel, become the new David McCullough, or, heck, just eke out a living as a poet or freelance journalist. But, in many cases, such an assumption is ill founded.

The composition courses required at liberal arts colleges (typically Comp 1 and Comp 2) are usually a joke, covering the basics of grammar and style that previous generations mastered in high school or before. If you don’t know a verb from an adverb by the time you’re 18, what hope is there for you? Indeed, enterprising students can and should do all they can to avoid such rudimentary instruction—and the cost of six useless credit hours—by taking a CLEP test that exempts them from Comp course requirements.

The picture is little brighter when it comes to those brave and creative souls who choose an English or journalism degree. The typical limitation of the former is a lack of practical exercises that allow students to critically evaluate a text in a way that sharpens analytical skills applicable outside academia. The length and scope of such essays have been steadily reduced, to the point where a two-page, double-spaced exercise in brevity is the norm. There’s nothing wrong with being succinct, but such an assignment is a cakewalk for most able undergraduates. Many won’t excel unless they’re pushed, and a few hundred words now and again just isn’t going to cut it.

There are many challenges for journalism degree programs, but these can be distilled into two main points. First, the newspaper game has changed so much with the closing of many dailies and weekly publications, the staff cuts at others and the rise of online-only pubs like The Huffington Post, which rely ever more on unpaid contributors from its vast blogging network.

The same is true of magazines: while there are an increasing number of specialty publications and overall reading stats are up (if you believe the claims in the 2010—2011 Power of Print campaign run by the Big Five of Time Inc., Hearst, Advance Publications' Condé Nast, Wenner Media, and Meredith), many more have folded and many of the surviving titles are run by skeleton crews. Still more titles have become online-only ventures that require Web 3.0-ready writing—complete with tags, optimized search terms and such—elements all too often ignored by behind-the-times journalism programs.

Click here to read the rest of the post at the blog of Boston University's Historical Society

On The Road Again: Upcoming Speaking Events

Hello all. Hard at work on the next book so it has been a while since the last post.

I've got a couple of speaking events for Our Supreme Task coming up. I hope you can make it to one of these:

1) Olathe Library Foundation Fundraising Dinner

When: Saturday, September 22, 6:30 pm CST

Where: Ballrooms A & B, 101 West 151st Street, Olathe, KS

How to Get Tickets: Call Library Director, Emily Baker at 913-971-6880 (RSVP before Sept 17th)

The Olathe Library Foundation raises supplemental funds for literacy programs, adding books and updating facilities. We need to get our kids more involved in reading, and your support of this event will help. 

2) International Churchill Conference

When: October 11-14

Where: Toronto, Canada

How to Get Tickets: Click here to register online

This is the annual convention for the Churchill Centre, which provides educational materials worldwide to educate people on the life and legacy of Sir Winston Churchill. I'll be speaking about the impact of Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech on the relationship between Britain, the US and Canada. 

3) Communiversity Address, MidAmerica Nazarene University

When: Friday, October 26, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Where: Bell Cultural Events Center, MNU campus, 2030 E. College Way, Olathe, KS

How to Get Tickets: This is a free lecture, with seats provided on a first-come, first-served basis

Communiversity is a free lecture series designed to provide access to university alumni of note, and to promote innovation and scholarship. It is held during MNU Homecoming each year and this year I will speak on “Liberal Arts and Leadership: Preparing the Next Generation for a Rapidly Changing World.”

4)  National Churchill Museum

When: Sunday, November 11, Time TBA

Where: National Churchill Museum, 501 Westminster Avenue  Fulton, MO 65251

How to Get Tickets: Contact Mandy Plybon at (573) 592-5369

This is coming back to the place where my book project started. Museum Director Rob Havers and his staff were a great help with my research and manuscript review, and if you've never been to the museum you're in for a visual treat, as it's housed in a Christopher Wren-designed, white Portland stone church that was shipped to Fulton from London and re-assembled stone by stone. 

Why America Will Top The Medals Table Again

After a week of competition at the London Olympics, we're seeing two countries vie for domination of the medals table. The first, China, has more than one billion people, focuses on events such as weight lifting that have many medals up for grabs and puts its athletes into a rigorous, bootcamp-like state training regimen from the ages of 11 or 12 with little to no freedom. Effective, sure, but not exactly something democratic countries would want to model. See this fine article in Time for more details.

The second is the United States. 

Certainly, it is also a country with a large population (more than 300 million), but sheer number of people is not the primary reason for its Olympic dominance. Having played two sports at the US college level, basketball and football (our kind, irritatingly still called "soccer" Stateside) and lived here for 11 years, I've compiled several reasons why the US will continue to produce the likes of Michael Phelps, LeBron James, Hope Solo and Ryan Lochte for the foreseeable future:

1) College Sports
When I first visited the US in 1999, I stayed at two small (less than 2,000 students) colleges in Ohio. I was amazed to find that both had a full-size swimming pool, synthetic running track, indoor and outdoor tennis and basketball facilities, an American Football stadium and a weight room you'd expect to see at an Olympic training facility. Turns out that this is the norm at hundreds of American colleges and universities, and merely increases in scope for the big schools such as the University of Texas, which crammed over 100,000 fans into its stadium for an American football game last year and where the athletics program generates around $150 million in annual revenue.

The conference that Texas teams compete in, the Big 12, is certainly big in the plus side of the balance sheet, recently inking a new television deal with ESPN/Fox worth $2.6 billion. And the Big 12 is just one of several top conferences in the college sports system, which feeds the professional leagues of the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL and MLS through draft systems. Though not every college sport is played in front of 100,000 fans, each is hotly contested and the top athletes receive full scholarships that pay for their education.

During the championship week in collegiate American football (Bowl Week) the country is hopped up on gridiron while they're freebasing turkey and stuffing around the Thanksgiving holiday and 21.9 million people watched the college basketball final in spring 2012. The level of competition is so high that the athletics championships regularly boast performances that would shame many countries' Olympic trials and events such as the Kansas and Penn Relays draw some of the world's top sprinters. Simply put, the collegiate sports system fosters, nay demands, excellence. Outside of rowing, what British university sports foster the same?

2) Youth System
In 2011, more than three million American children played organized football (soccer). The leagues they play in are well coordinated and most training facilities are somewhere on the good-to-out-of-this-world spectrum. There are two world-class complexes within 20 minutes of my house in the Kansas City metro, and one attracts 13,000 youth players, 2,000 coaches, and 800 teams each year. So it's no surprise that the US women's team enters the 2012 Olympics as a favorite and the men's team continues to rise in the world rankings. And football isn't anywhere near as popular as American football, baseball or basketball (though, of course, the first two are not Olympic events).
Click here to read the rest of this piece at The Huffington Post

Book Review: 'The Blind Spy' by Alex Dryden

The Blind Spy, the third volume of Alex Dryden's series of novels on Putin's Russia, has been out in the UK for some time, but has just been released as a U.S. hardcover by Ecco. For me, the 18-month delay was worth the wait.

Dryden's opening book, Red to Black, focused on the British spy Finn and his forbidden love, the KGB colonel Anna Resnikov. Proving that great fiction writers don't care so much for their characters that they prevent them from harm, Dryden dramatically offed Finn in the final pages, as his protagonist dug deeper and deeper into the shadowy world of illicit Russian billions and the illegal activities that both fueled and profited from them.

Book two, Moscow Sting, saw Resnikov defecting to the United States with her son, Finn, after their cover in France was blown by a bitter and confused ex-CIA agent, Logan Halloran. He had offered her location to the Russians, British and Americans, and it was the American private security firm Cougar -- created with more than a nod to Blackwater and its ilk -- that paid top dollar. Though she had little choice in the matter, Resnikov is happy to work with Cougar and its dominant, brilliant and larger-than-life supremo, Burt Miller, who may just be more powerful than the CIA Director he frequently works with, for her own ends. Though she is driven by revenge for Finn's death, she has realized that Putin's Moscow is rotten to the core, and will stop at nothing to bring about change in her homeland.

In The Blind Spy, Resnikov's involvement with Cougar is intensified. She has successfully brought an influential countryman and former member of Putin's inner circle, a man known only as his cover name, Mikhail, over to the intelligence firm. And rather than sit back as a consultant, she has reluctantly given up her son, who is being raised by ex-operatives on a farm in Connecticut, so she can focus full-time on bringing down Putin's administration. At her insistence, she is acting as a field operative in Ukraine, attempting to discover how Russia's attempts to stamp out nascent democracy in the former Soviet state and bring it back under Moscow's control.

To complicate matters, Miller is allowing Halloran to work in the same area. In addition to being aware of his betrayal, Resnikov was the unwilling subject of his affections during her first few months in the U.S., and is now trying to focus on her work in spite of his continued ardor and loose-cannon personality. She also has to contend with a leak in either Cougar or the CIA that compromises her safety in the Crimea, and the ire of the KGB, which will stop at nothing to capture her and make her pay for her defection. Their point man for this is Balthasar, a formidable operative whose blindness is more than compensated for by intuition and an uncanny knack for sensing the motivations of those around him.

When reading such a book, I have to be convinced that the author is credible, and when it comes to Putin-era Russia, there is no question that Dryden knows his stuff. From detailed descriptions of time and place to a masterful understanding of what makes today's Russia tick, he creates a realistic and, at times, terrifying portrayal. Dryden's development of his heroine is also first-rate. While he mentions her physical beauty and the impact of it on male colleagues too often, Dryden has expertly drawn a complex, conflicted and intriguing character who is living trapped between the Russia of her past, the America of her present and the unknown destination of her future. At first I struggled to reconcile her decision to give up the son who was the living reminder of her great love, Finn, and yet as Dryden's narrative progressed, it became clear that his was necessary for his safety and to her success in the field. Dryden could have fallen into the trap of sentimentality here or its opposite, callousness, but he avoids both, showing a mother who loves her son with all her being, but also exists to secure a better world for him to grow up in.

Click here to read the rest of this review on The Huffington Post website