The FReeper Foxhole Revisits Outpost Harry - Korea (June 10-18, 1953)

"Truman hewed to the UN mandate and eschewed victory. Which certainly worked as well then as it did in 1990-1."

MacArthur was fired over this. Democrats usually think Truman was a brave, tough, honest man. Those people are either insane or pure evil.

A little piece on Missouri politics in the years before Truman was elected President. The last paragraph talks about Truman, very circumspectly:

On July 13, 1934 Charles Binaggio, tears flowing from his cheeks, helped carry the coffin of his political and underworld mentor Johnny Lazia, to his final resting place in Kansas City’s Mount St. Mary’s Cemetery. Lazia had been assassinated by persons unknown at the age of 37. Sixteen years later, Binaggio, at the age of 41, would die under the same circumstances and be laid to rest less than one hundred yards away.

Charles Binaggio was born in Beaumont, Texas and moved to Kansas City with his family while he was still a youth. Not much is known about his early years. Living on Kansas City’s North Side Binaggio became acquainted with Johnny Lazia who found work for him in one of his downtown gambling operations.

Binaggio was determined to follow in Lazia’s footsteps. He worked at the business of politics seven days a week. He built a following by performing favors for his constituents, finding jobs for them, and most importantly, helping them when they got in trouble with the law. He became an important political organizer and rose quickly through the ranks. Except for Governor Forrest Smith, he was the most recognized leader of the Democratic Party. His detractors claimed that his rise came through his connections to the Kansas City Mafia, who backed him for leadership because of his organizing ability and his minor criminal record.

On his way to the top, Binaggio merged seven Democratic clubs and seized control of the North Side from Jim Pendergast, the nephew of Thomas J. Pendergast, who ran Kansas City’s machine politics for almost three decades before his demise in the late 1930s. Some believe Binaggio’s most brilliant political move was supporting Forrest Smith for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1948. Binaggio and Jim Pendergast had actually worked together until the mid-1940s before splitting on who the Democrats would support for governor.

In 1946, Binaggio and his political organization were involved in a well-publicized voting fraud scandal. In question were the votes that came from the Binaggio controlled North End. On May 28, 1947 while the incident was under investigation, thieves blew open the election-board safe, in which the ballots were kept, and removed the evidence. The irony was that the safe was in the courthouse, which also housed the county sheriff’s office. As a result of the ballot theft, many of Binaggio’s political aides escaped prosecution after the vote fraud cases collapsed.

By the late 1940s, Binaggio oversaw a bloc of 30,000 votes and no other political boss in the state controlled more. Although some politicians were concerned about Binaggio’s underworld connections, they still came to him for the votes he could muster. At least two senators and six representatives were reputed to be under his control in the Missouri State Legislature.

Binaggio’s base of operations on the North Side was the First District Democratic Club. Newspapers gave the following description of the location and the activity that took place there:

“The political headquarters of Binaggio was in a large meeting hall on Truman Road in a neighborhood of cheap hotels and restaurants, second-hand furniture stores and used car lots. On election days squadrons of ghost voters were assembled in that room and dispatched to various polling places to vote in the names of absent or long dead citizens.”

Missouri native son, Harry S. Truman was a close friend of Jim Pendergast and served with him during World War I. Truman’s early success in politics was accomplished under the auspices of Thomas J. Pendergast, a fact that his political opponents would continually use against him. When Truman became president, Jim Pendergast was a frequent guest in Washington D.C. Despite Binaggio’s prominence in the Democratic Party, he was not a welcome visitor at the White House. Binaggio’s enemies claimed it was his arrest record, not his split with Pendergast, which kept him from an invitation to the oval office.

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