Truman Books

This book is right out of the KGB's disinformation file. It is the line they peddled for 40 years, until the whole corrupt system collapsed around their ears. Apparently there are still true believers living as free men in the USA (thanks to the likes of Harry Truman & Ronald Reagan) where they are able to diseminate the tired old, and now defunct, party line without fear of censorship.
Has this guy read none of the voluminous material that has been made available during the 1990's by both the Russian government (ie. KGB archives - published by Yale UP) and that of the US (ie. the Venona transcripts)? Or does he think, as many of the comrades do, that they are all forgeries?
Had this author been a Soviet academic living under the Communist regime who wrote a book accusing Stalin of being responsible for the Cold War not only would his work not have been published, but he would have found himself in the GULAG.
Such are the blessings of American Democracy and the American Capitalist system that even someone who has nothing intelligent to say can do so without fear of govenment reprisals, and find a publisher willing to publish his nonsense in the hope of making a few bucks.
Stanford UP should have more sense than to publish such rubbish.
There are plenty of Marxist/Maoist publishing houses around where this kind of book could find a more appropriate outlet. What's more the History Book Club should be ashamed of itself for diseminating it.

Harry S. Truman, the accidental president from Independence, Missouri, has enjoyed a rebirth of popularity since the 1970s, after leaving office with exceptionally low approval ratings in January 1953. His more recent popularity revolves around the Truman story of humble origins, machine politics, and a good man having greatness thrust upon him. Truman rose to the occasion and demonstrated effective leadership in a time of crisis. He took decisive action to end the war and win the peace, carrying forward the plan to create a strong international entity in the United States and championing the Marshall Plan to help Europe recover from World War II among other initiatives. Moreover, his resolute resistance to the Soviet Union as the cold war began to dominate international politics in the latter 1940s proved critical to ensuring a democratic Western Europe. For most historians, especially those of the dominant consensus mindset that assign blame for the origins of the cold war to Stalin and Soviet adventurism, Truman acted forthrightly to counter Soviet might. Couple that with an apparent homeiness and frankness and Truman's resurrection was assured. That is essentially the story told in David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman biography and a host of other publications.

Offner takes issue with this dominant interpretation and assigns the preponderance of blame for the origins of the cold war to Truman. Like revisionist historians of the 1960s and 1970s, he contends that Truman was essentially a small time politician from a backwater who proved unable to master the tides of history around him. While acknowledging his successes with the Marshall Plan and selected other initiatives, Offner finds that the Truman should nonetheless receive the lion's share of the condemnation for the cold war. Representative of many such statements in "Another Such Victory," Offner writes that "Stalin put the interests of the Soviet state before the desire to spread Marxist-Leninist ideology, pursued pragmatic or opportunistic agreements, recognized America's vast military and industrial power, and always calculated what he called the `correlation of forces'" (p. 27). In other words, Offner asserts that Stalin and the Soviet Union was never the threat that Truman believed. Truman's lack of experience on the international stage and a raft of character flaws made matters much worse than they ever had to be with the Soviet Union.

Offner presented a restatement of a standard revisionist conception about the origins of the cold war. Truman and several of his advisors, he wrote, "were American politicians of limited international experience and vision suddenly thrust into positions of global leadership. Their soles, their sensibilities, were undoubtedly hardened by witnessing a global war of unparalleled devastation and atrocities. They were appalled and frightened by Soviet advances in Europe and Asia and readily equated Communists with `Nazis and Fascists' or other imperial or `Tsarist' aggressors. They quickly persuaded themselves that if they got `tough,' they could make the Russians more `manageable' and willing to accede to American principles and interests..." (p. 99). At the same time, according to Offner, Truman mishandled the Soviet Union at every turn, misjudged intentions in Eastern Europe, failed in China and Korea, and engaged in nuclear threats and innuendo in an effort to force greater pliability from cold war rivals.

In the end, Offner's "Another Such Victory" is largely a restatement of the criticisms of American leadership offered in the revisionist work of such authors as Gabriel and Joyce Kolko's "The Limits of Power," first published more than thirty years ago, and Daniel Yergin's "Shattered Peace" (1977). Additionally, Offner's work abandons much of the nuanced criticisms present in Melvyn Leffler's masterful "A Preponderance of Power" (1992), which also seeks to roll back the arguments of the pro-Truman community but does so with more balance and reason. Indeed, a major criticism of Offner's book is that despite its in-depth research and detailed documentary approach, he says little in this book that moves the historiography beyond where Leffler left it more than 15 years ago. What he does do, and it is an important contribution, is provide a massively referenced presentation of the story well-grounded in documentary sources.

Beyond that, we learn that Truman was parochial, given to fits of rage, racist and biased toward others, limited in experience and judgment, and manipulative in his dealings with Stalin. He might have taken a different approach, Offner states, by seeking a true collaborative arrangement with the Soviet Union. His personality and limitations would not allow it, according to Offner.

As a counterpoint to the Truman revisionist position present in such works as David McCullough and Robert H. Ferrell, "Another Such Victory" may prove useful. Offner, however, goes too far in his zeal to tarnish Truman's image. Melvin Leffler's work is much more useful as thoughtful criticism of Truman and the origins of the cold war.

This is an interesting book, with its own eccentricities. When Truman left office he was one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. But his fundamental decency and frankness only endeared people after the presidencies of Johnson and Nixon, and his academic reputation only increased after the first clash with the cold war revisionists in the early seventies. Whereas his next five successors were all tarred by the Vietnam debacle, Truman's confrontation with Stalin and the formation of the western alliance appears to be the hallmark of responsible realism. Offner's critical account, by contrast, is the lengthiest denunciation of his foreign policy since Gabriel and Joyce Kolko's The Limits of Power, published thirty years ago.

The greatest weakness of this book is how little new there is in it. Although this book has 98 pages of notes to 474 pages of text, the most common primary source are the documents published in the foreign relations series, most of which were published two decades ago. Although Offner cites more than 30 sets of private papers, most have been readily available for years. Indeed, this book is not all that different from Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Power (1992). The most important difference is that whereas both books provided a large amount of damning criticism of Truman, Leffler's overall verdict was somewhat softer than Offner's. Offner's book is also more focused on Truman's own personal role. Offner does provide more on the creation of Israel, and the partition of Germany, though he says little about the cold war's consequences in Latin America, where the confrontational atmosphere helped cut short a brief liberal interlude. There are a few errors: Thomas Dewey won 189, not 89, electoral votes in 1948 and Klement Gottwald in 1947 was Czechoslovakia's prime minister, not its president. Somewhat more discouragingly, Offner, in his criticism of the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, does not discuss the counter-arguments of Richard Frank in his book Downfall. And many scholars would vigorously disagree with his assertion that half the Palestinian refugees in 1948 left voluntarily or at the instigation of their leaders.

With these caveats in mind, Offner provides a compelling case. It may not be new, but it is based on strong evidence. Truman was a parochial man, giving to making blandly prejudicial comments about blacks, Asians and Jews. The history he read was uncritically patriotic, didactic and melodramatic and this encouraged unhelpful tendencies in Truman's diplomacy. Offner does not say the cold war was Truman's fault, but clearly he did many things to make things worse. He accused the Soviet Union of clearly breaking treaty committments when the language was ambiguous, simplied complex problems in Korea and Greece to Soviet agression, and wrongly viewed Mao as a Soviet puppet.

Truman's positions usually had considerable support from the other members of his adminstration. But it is also true that Truman ignored Harriman's advice to be more accommodating towards the Soviet Union in Japan. He failed to support Byrnes' suggestion of demanding Chiang Kai-Shek's support for a coalition government as a quid pro quo for transporting Nationalist troops to Manchuria, and in doing so lost his best chance to stop a civil war, that Chiang would almost certainly lose. He ignored Kennan's and Elsey's belief that the Truman Doctrine was overstated, and he believed that the Russians were about to attack Turkey when even the Turks knew that was not going to happen. Truman ignored General Clay's and General Marshall's calls for compromise in Germany, which lead to partition. He ignored Acheson and Lillienthal's proposals for sharing atomic energy and by choosing Bernard Baruch to head the plan, guaranteed that the Soviet Union would never support it. Truman ignored the consensus of most State Department experts that recognition of Mao was inevitable. Truman never dealt with Enrico Fermi's opposition to making an H-bomb, and he and Acheson ignored George Kennan's belief that they should at least try to negotiate in good faith with Stalin over the latter's offer to reunify Germany in 1952.

One should point out that Truman's bombing of Nagasaki, if not Hiroshima, showed a horrifying moral blindness and indifference. Truman and Acheson did not even try to discuss Mao's offers of a relationship in 1949. Truman and his advisers also ensured that the Marshall Plan would only offer aid to the Soviet Union on terms that they knew it would reject. In the Korean war Truman unwisely supported MacArthur's expansive plans, ignored clear Chinese warnings, supported elements of MacArthur's dangerous policy even after firing him, and probably extended the war two years because he did not recognize that "voluntary repatriation" of POWS violated the Geneva Convention and under South Korean and Taiwanese police was often a farce. Even in Poland, where Stalin's conduct was most unforgivable, the United States could have conceded the Oder-Neisse border, which it eventually did. If one had to point out the fundamental flaw of Truman's foreign policy, it was that it sought to rehabilitate Germany economically without doing the same for the Soviet Union it had so viciously ravaged. Ultimately, Offner provides a clear case against the limitations of Truman's foreign policy.

In this book, Harry Truman is not the common man who makes good, but rather a small town politician who was unable to rise to the demands of high office. The narrow and petty viewpoint espoused by Truman and those advisors he trusted led to constant provocation of the Soviets and was a large factor in the division of Europe between Western democracies and Eastern satellites.

Offner reviews the key moments of early post-war foreign policy and uses each to demonstrate how Truman and his advisers were unable to win the peace and instead locked the world into Cold War trench lines that became as immutable as those on the front lines of World War I. Offner believes that American intransigence played a major role in provoking the USSR to descend its Iron Curtain. Seen by many as a usurper to Franklin Roosevelt's mantle, Truman was in no position to implement the decisions of Yalta or forge a new policy for the post-war world.

Offner contends that Truman's decisions from the beginning were confrontational rather than cooperative. The author presents Truman's initial meeting with Russian Foreign Minster Molotov and shows how the president dresses down the envoy and enjoins him to "keep his promises." It is with this attitude that Truman attends the Postdam Conference in July 1945

The ultimate disposition of Europe is a key area for Offner's analysis. The division of Europe that came in the post-war days was not the inevitable outgrowth of Stalinist greed, to Offner, but was rather the natural and expected reaction of a war-weary Russia that felt itself being once again encircled by hostile forces. The introduction of the Marshall Plan was viewed by the USSR as an attempt on the part of America to purchase Europe at cut-rates.

When the Western Powers announce a plan to rearm their sectors in Germany it is countered by a Soviet proposal to create a unified but unarmed and neutral county. The eventual separation of Germany into the Western Eastern halves is the result of years of increasing tension and the desire by the United States and Britain to re-arm their erstwhile enemy as a bulwark against the communists to the East.

By 1947 Truman was confident enough to promulgate his own policy and abandon the façade of the wartime alliance which had all but disintegrated. The Truman Doctrine was the central policy for the rest of the president's time in office. It stated a willingness to fight against communism anywhere it attempts to overthrow a non-communist government. It made no distinction between "outside pressure" as opposed to "armed minorities," thus linking internal revolutions with the perceived threat of the USSR and its attempts at world conquest.

Offner comes closest to proving his thesis when he discusses the disastrous events in Asia. Inheriting support for Chang Kai-Shek and his GMD from Franklin Roosevelt, Truman was boxed in by his own policies. Even sending over General Marshall as a mediator between Chang and Mao was pre-ordained to fail as long as the American government simultaneously supplied materiel to the GMD during the negotiations. The failure of the Americans to recognize the People Republic of China caused Mao to turn to the USSR for assistance creating, at least temporarily, the self-fulfilling prophecy of "Monolithic Communism."

The fear that China was the first of the Asian dominoes to fall caused Truman to misperceive the North Korean attack on South Korea as another attempt by the Soviets to expand their empire. The Truman Doctrine meant this could not be allowed to succeed. Korea quickly became a quagmire with three years of fighting and thousands of American deaths all to re-establish the status quo. Much of the delay was caused by Truman's refusal to return POWs on an "all for all" basis. Instead, he attempted to prevent any POW from being involuntarily returned to his home nation. This was in fact contrary to the custom of war and the most recent Geneva Convention. While Truman's reluctance in part came from the poor treatment the USSR had given to repatriated POWs from World War II, it was small comfort to those who fought and died while this point was debated.

Another Such Victory is a well-written overview of the key issues in foreign policy faced by Truman. Each chapter contains an introduction summarizing the events to be presented a content section with details of the events and decisions, and a summary/conclusion section to review the chapter. The tendency to use the same quote over and over again throughout the chapter can go beyond adding emphasis and lead instead occasionally to a feeling of repetitiveness on the author's part.

Offner gives short shrift to the domestic politics and attitudes that prevailed during the Truman years. Though the book centers on foreign policy, the Truman presidency did not exist in a vacuum and domestic pressures played a large role in the ongoing development of policy abroad. Certainly throughout this period the red-baiting of Joseph McCarthy, the passage (over Truman's veto) of the MaCarran Act, and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee were forces to be considered in any decision involving Communism.

Offner has the advantage of time and perspective as he judges the actions that Truman took sixty years ago. However, lost in the distance of time is the context of the period in which these decisions were made. Munich may have become a tired analogy by the 1990s, but Truman was living with the results of Chamberlain's appeasement less than a decade after it happened.


Offner has the temporal advantage of sixty years and the editorial advantage of choosing what material he will include to develop his viewpoint, both of which he uses liberally. It is true that mistakes were made, but Another Such Victory falls short of a convincing condemnation of Truman for provoking the Cold War.

This is a good read for those interested in one of our Great Presidents. It also shows the machine politics which infected Missouri in the 1930-1940s. Tom Pendergast was the leader of the Kansas City, Missouri machine which put forward its candidates for local, state, and national politics. The real election was not in November, but during the primary when the Democrats made the choice of who their candidates would be. During the general election,the Pendergast machine rigged their wards well with only marginal votes for Republican candidates.
It was not true democracy. Pendergast was convicted of income tax evasion after he didn't declare bribes he "earned" in an insurance settlement scheme. The book details Truman's 1940 Senate election campaign as he attempted to revive his fortunes following the fall of his mentor Tom Pendergast. Truman did not forsake his mentor (neither did he mention him) but managed to defeat the seating governor and prosecutor for his Senate position.
This is a short book. The first chapter doesn't read correctly and the flow is not there. The detail and interest are, and the following chapters have more page turning drama in them. Truman won the campaign and must have impressed FDR since in 1944, Roosevelt gave him the Veep position. The book also details the duplicity of FDR in his dealings with other Democrats.

The title of Truman and Pendergast implys that there is some meaningful and new knowledge regarding the relationship between these two men. This is simply not the case. There is very little about that relationship but rather a rehash of frequently publish information in other bios. This book, while it may be well written, adds nothing to the pile of information already out there. Three-percent of this very short book explored the relationship and ninety-seven percent was about the difficulties experienced by Truman because of the stigma of the relationship. Nothing new. If you want to read some great bios on Truman read TRUMAN by McCullough or MAN OF THE PEOPLE by Hamby.

Robert H. Ferrell's "Truman and Pendergast" is a fine addition to the ever increasing pantheon of written history of our 33rd (32nd) president. Ferrell focuses on a period which, until now, has not been the main focus of any Truman biography. The author paints a vivid picture of the necessary evils one faces when choosing a life in public service while maintaining one's own countenance. Ferrell centralizes his work on several main points, beginning with the initial years of Truman's political career when it was necessary for the backing of Pendergast (especially in the political machine controlled era of the earlier part of the century) and culminating with Truman's Senate re-election campaign of 1940. These main points bookend a gradual separation of Truman and Pendergast, as Truman ascends in stature and Pendergast descends into a downward spiral culminating in his incarceration in a federal penitentiary. Throughout the course of the book Ferrell maintains an anecdotal style of storytelling, which allows the reader to gain deeper insight into a very different period of political history then we find in today's day and age. "Truman and Pendergast" is a must-have for any student of Truman, as well as an excellent addition to the history of politics of the early 1900s.

Walker writes a wonderful book that easy to read and gives a strong argument for why we dropped the atomic bomb. He covers most of the relevant issues and gives a good picture of why certain avenues for resolving the war just would not have been feasible.

My only major problem is the lack of references for the points he makes. While I realise this is not an academic book, it would still be nice to have references to back up what is presented. There are a few, but they are just that, few and far between.

Still, if you are looking for an easy to read, concise explanation of the dropping of the bomb, I would most certainly recommend this book.

Although the book suffers from poor editing, and somewhat unorganized writing, Walker still delivers a cogent argument for using the most powerful and terrifying development of 20th Century technology.

This book is a collection of war stories that, for the best part, have absolutely nothing to do with the title of the book. Never the author analyses really the so-called "Truman's dilemma". His book (that has clearly not been proof-read, since it's full of typos and repetitions) develops a theory which is to me close to revisionism. According to Paul D.Walker, the dilemma did not exist : Truman did a good thing when he ordered to drop the 2 atomic bombs to obtain Japan's surrender, since he spared not only the lives of many young GI's, but also (paradoxally) the lives of (cruel and barbaric) japanese civilians, who all would have died in vain if the war had continued for too long. The two-thirds of the book are there to prove that the casualty rate of a Japan invasion would have been so high among the US army troops that it was better to nuke two cities without prior warning and shock the Japanese High Commandment (the fact that this Bigh Commandment refused to surrender after the bombings and had to be forced by the Emperor to do so is one of the numerous paradoxes of Walker's theory). The author does not hesitate to say that, all in all, the 150,000 nuked japanese civilians are nothing compared to the 350,000 chinese people killed during the infamous "Rape of Nankin" by the japanese army. Never does Walker balance really the different options that Truman had (well, he did not only have invasion or the bomb, you know, he also has blockade, intensive traditional bombings, etc.). Never does he reflect about the fact that the Allies wanted "total and absolute surrender" from Japan, and nothing else, when all the intelligence gathered about the Japanese people proved that this could not be an option, because Japanese hate to lose their face - which is a basics to anyone who studied just a little bit the japanese culture - and that this stubborness from the Allies led to a "cul de sac" in terms of negociation to end the war...
To summarize, this book is not about the dilemma. If you want to be reassured that these bombings were the right thing to do, go ahead and read the book. If you have doubts, spare your money, because you will not learn anything new, and will not be exposed to a real historian work.

I was amazed when I read this book. I thought it was going to be about mostly Clinton, but it dives deeply into the personalities of the last ten presidents. I really enjoyed reading about all these men, and I loved the author's analysis of why they would do the things they did.

Also recommended: Sexual Styles: A Psychologist's Guide to Understanding Your Sexual Personality by John Michael Berecz, Ph.D

This book could have been interesting; but it is full of goofs: typos; poor sentence structure; table of contents inaccurate. It must have been rushed to market without any editing and proof reading. A disgraceful job.

The book definatly follows the stereotypical portrayal of Tecumseh, but does not follow history. If you want an inspiring story about the greatest "noble savage" then its fine, but if you want to know what really happened I wouldn't reccomend the play or the book.
If you want historical facts check out:
The Shawnee Prophet (Bison Book)
or
The Shawnees and the War for America: The Penguin Library of American Indian History series (Penguin Library of American Indian History)

This is Timothy Truman's beautiful graphic novel adaptation of Alan Eckert's outdoor drama Tecumseh! which is performed every summer in Chillicothe, OH. It is based on the life of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and tells the story of the rise and fall of this great Indian hero and his ambitious plan to unite the eastern woodland tribes in a final war to remove the threat of white expansion into the trans-Alleghany west. Truman has done a number of other wonderful graphic novels relating to this period and this one is just as great. If you can get ahold of a copy, buy it.

I've really enjoyed this series, because the authors have tried to be faithful to Howard's creation, and they've done a fine job. Savage Sword and the Dark Horse series are the two best comic titles I've ever read. The King Conan series is good too. Hopefully Dark Horse will publish it once they finish the regular Conan title.

The biggest question a reader will have after reading this latest story arc from Dark Horse may be "How did this series get so bad?".
After four outstanding story arcs from Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord, Conan hit a major bump in the road with Volume five; "Rogues in the House", which was obviously rushed to meet impending deadlines and plagued by creative team strife. The outcome of that volume was some bad fill-in art by Thomas Giorello and a botched coloring job half way through the book by Richard Isanov.
In The Hand of Nergal, Dark Horse promotes Tomas Giorello to regular artist and straddles him with another round of poor coloring. Giorello, who is obviously not ready for such a prestigeous assignment, also ruins his own pencil work with some heavy handed inking. Judging by the sketches in the back pages of the book, Tomas can do much better than what we see throughout the story, but he has yet to fully master perspective and some of his figures are very blocky and rigid. His creatures also look quite clumsy in places. With all the artists who have contributed to the Conan relaunch, he is by far the poorest.
Tim Truman, who I think is very talented as both a writer and artist, has yet to impress with either of his two adaptations so far. Former writer Kurt Busiek was much better at adapting Robert E. Howard's work to the comic book medium seamlessly, as well as building a framework of original stories around each adaptation. I feel Tim's approach is not quite as reverent or in keeping with the tone of the original work. Some of his added dialogue sticks out from the rest of the work, and while Busiek took minor stories from the Conan canon and built an epic around them, such as with "Frost Giant's Daughter" and "Bowl", Truman appears to go the opposite direction, diminishing the impact of Howard's fragment. His conclusion of the "Nestor saga", building since the Hall of the Dead storyline, is very anticlimatic.
This is the last collection of work from the current Dark Horse comic book series, ending the stories of Conan's career as a thief. Dark Horse recently relaunched the book as Conan of Cimmeria with the same creative team, but with the awful results of this volume, I doubt I will be back for more. Tragic.

Although the quality of design varies with the homes of the thirty celebrity subjects, this is an interesting time-capsule look. Some interiors stand up better to the scrutiny of today's standards of designs than others, but all have an element of interest. See my review shown with another listing of this same edition.

I listened to these tapes just after finishing McCullough's Truman bio. I felt it was a rehash of the highlights of that work, sensationalized by mixed narration of Lauren Bacall, Gregory Peck, and Jack Lemmon, except with a little more of an additional focus on Margaret than McCullough's book. It did not cover much of Truman's life before or after the presidency. "A Journey to Independence" was a tribute and should be judged as such, rather than a bio. It's a passable listen, but I certainly would not recommend hunting down a copy.

Some interesting stuff about dog racing, although Trocheck does not sound an enthusiast for the sport. Poverty-stricken retired journalist Truman Kicklighter and nineteen year old waitress Jackleen are great characters, and so are some of the others (although a few stereotypes).My problem was with the plot. The central idea of a computer program so certain to produce wins at the dog races that three murders are committed for it was implausible. I was not even sure if this was the central plot. An Alzheimer victim is falsely accused of murder. Kicklighter is afraid of being evicted from his SRO hotel. His daughter is dating a cop. His grandson is kidnapped. A fake evangelist is swindling elderly victims. All these sub-plots are stitched together by coincidences and the action is punctuated by gunplay.

It's great to see a new book on West Texas music that is Buddy Holly related,but the book lack's very much new information on Buddy and the Lubbock music scene in the 1950's.
Some names were not spelled correctly that have appeared in many other books and some of the memories don't ring true. At one point the book states Tinker wrote "Raining In My Heart".
Tinkers claim to be an original "Cricket" may be true, I wasn't there. I would be interested in Jerry Allison's opinion on that.
All and all it's a must have for all Buddy Holly fans who collect anything Buddy.
It's a little expensive, but I'm very happy to own it.
So buy the book and enjoy it for what it is- Tinkers story of the Lubbock music scene as remembered by this West Texas musician.