I have no problem with Truman using his service in some fashion to boost his career. If I recall, he didn’t exaggerate or inflate his experiences, and he served...he was entitled, IMO, to leverage his service to his advantage.
Interesting, you can see from my Freep Page that Joseph McCarthy was one of my heroes, and he served in the Pacific in WWII. (He didn’t have to, he was a judge in Wisconsin at the time, the youngest ever to become one in that state and was thus exempt) but he joined the USMC at the age of 34 and because of his college education, was given a commission where he worked as an intelligence officer in the South Pacific in a Marine dive bomber squadron. He requested (and was granted) permission to fly as the back-seater in SBD Dauntlesses and went on 12 combat missions.
He was excoriated by Leftists (read the Wikipedia entries to see how with information that mysteriously never came out while McCarthy was alive, and largely from second hand accounts in the decades after. This conglomeration of info is expected from Wikipedia which is a worthwhile source of information if regarding the date of birth or death, but little more)
The same people who denigrated McCarthy’s service were the exact same people who celebrated a Silver Star awarded to LBJ which Ann Coulter humorously and accurately referred to it as the least deserved and most celebrated Silver Star ever awarded.
It is the kind of hypocrisy that we see from people (generally on the Left, but not always) who defend the Clinton’s illegal handling of government records where they sequestered records in the White House, but think that is just fine for Truman to have done so.
OH i didnt have problem with Trumans service in WW1, my grandfather was in WW1, I know about the smearing of McCarthy by the media of the time. McCarthy was right about all the infiltration of the goverment.