This is not personal Pete Dovgan, and I understand the points you make, but you and I disagree on this.
Truman should have been impeached for obstruction of justice, plain and simple. And he should have been properly impeached by the rules in place at the time, not the idiotic rules and fashions of impeachment we have today. He presented one face to the public of the virulent anti-communist while the government was infested with communist spies. It is a given that any action against him would have failed, given how he played politics and built up his reputation and image with the laudatory press (even if there were, back then, more press entities in a more balance press corps willing to take a stand against him than in succeeding years up to today) and I don’t think he was the “only one” who could have made hard decisions. There were men at that time who could have. Perhaps your statement would be accurate if you specified “other Democrats”.
Truman, as President, proudly and defiantly removed OFFICIAL government files on people who were being investigated and had them brought to the White House so the access could be restricted as being under the watch of the Executive Branch. Kind of sounds like the Clinton White House to me.
That was done under his direction, by him.
Not his underlings or political allies.
Him alone.
And it wasn’t just one or two files, it was dozens, if not hundreds of files that he gathered under his wing in the White House, removed from the State Department record systems and other departments record systems. He gave the express orders to make this happen with the full and stated intent of stymieing Joseph McCarthy.
These were government employees, Administration employees, State Department employees, and employees from dozens of different branches who were being investigated, almost all of whom DID have ties to the Soviet Union.
It was he who set the rules for investigators. The investigators had to travel to the White House. Only one person at a time could examine the records. No documents could be checked out and removed from the White House. No notes could be taken. No documents could be brought in for comparison. No photographs could be taken. Formal requests and appointments had to be made in writing, in advance.
When documentation was provided, it was incomplete. Parts of records or whole records were removed, and instead of the standard process where a document was inserted in place of removed documents stating who had custody of the documents and when it was removed were NOT THERE. As said, an investigator would show up, and the record was mysteriously unavailable, mislaid, misfiled, or whatever.
These were Truman’s rules. HE was the source of them. He was the one who laid them down. And he was proud of it. It was the Presidential equivalent of Andrew Jackson’s public declaration of “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
I disagree with you. Truman was a scumbag. That he pulled the wool over the eyes of Americans with his “anti-communism” and crying poor when he left office is one thing. He understood all too well the importance of building an image and he did it damn well.
For reference, I suggest the best book on this era by the now deceased M. Stanton Evans: “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies”. It is important to note that, in stark comparison to the many, many anti-McCarthy books written, very few if any who did original research, but simply referenced other books who did not do any primary research, the author M. Stanton Evans was a cub reporter during the McCarthy era, has done extensive primary research on this, has seen time and time again with his own eyes viewing the actual records in question in the archives the evidence of file tampering of official records, often the only evidence the original document was originally there is a scrap of paper tauntingly left under a staple where it had been ripped out. He had fought long, officially documented battles with the New York Times over four decades about inaccuracy or outright lies in their reporting (backed up by official documentation from the archives) and never received any satisfaction from them.
This article posted by euram shows EXACTLY the type of man Truman was. I don’t blame people who don’t want to believe this article or M. Stanton Evans’ book. Truman wanted to make his legacy untouchable to the American public, and succeeded.
I cannot disagree with many of the points you make. You are well read. The issue with records altering, obstruction of justice, and obstructing of Joe McCarthy, are all probably as accurate as you can get. Truman was a politician, and so it goes.
Judging him by today’s standards of ‘obstruction of justice’ is like judging the founding fathers on owning slaves before 1790, it’s just not realistic. I believe the reason that Truman went after Joe McCarthy was two fold: 1) self protection as you state, and couldn’t blame it on the dead FDR 2) He was listening to his advisers. His advisers were infiltrated communists that had served under FDR, been recommended by people who had ascended under FDR, or advanced under FDR. He was surrounded and contaminated from the get go.
We can agree to disagree how big a scumbag he was, but he took the Presidency in the worst of times and totally unprepared, surrounded by wolves who were supposed to help, and he trusted the wrong people. The media and Truman have smeared Joe McCarthy, but the real problem is that he was actually correct.