How would you rank them?
February 17, 2009 (Tuesday)
CSpan Television asked a team of historians headed by a Rice University professor to rank the presidents, based on ten criteria. The group said that Abraham Lincoln was the best, followed in order by George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
When I saw Harry Truman listed as the fifth greatest president in our history, my mind took me back to my college days, when a young history professor told the class that Harry Truman would go down in history as a great president. He said that when Truman was still in office, in 1952. The class laughed and laughed, because they thought the prof was joking. When the laughter subsided, he calmly said, “I’m serious.” Then he gave reasons for his opinion. Well, according to the report of the CSpan historians committee, he was right.
In my young mind, Truman was not qualified because his name was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt won election to office when I was 13 months old, so he was the only president I had ever known when he died. I was a teenager at the time and to me the word, “President,” and the word, “Roosevelt,” went together like “Houston, Texas.”
Truman was summoned to the White House when FDR died, and had to go through the back door. He had been kept in the dark as Vice President concerning just about everything that required secrecy during the Second World War. All of a sudden, he found himself the Commander in Chief during a world war.
I remember talking with the Assistant Principal at high school one day during the 1948 election campaign, and he freely told me how much he disliked Truman, considering him unqualified to be president, his performance ending the war notwithstanding. He expressed the feelings of many, but not all, Americans, because Truman won the election against all odds. A famous photo shows Truman with a big smile, holding up a newspaper with the headline saying his opponent, Thomas Dewey, won. Dewey lost. Truman won. Now he is considered by CSpan’s group of historians to be the fifth greatest president in history.
I guess the lesson in this is to hold your head high, do what you think is right, and don’t worry about what people think about you. That’s the way Harry did it.