Harry Truman, travestied in the film, built the world we live in, and stand to lose
The lesson of this decade so far is that liberalism isn’t tenable without hard power. And there hasn’t been enough of a reckoning with the dereliction of those who governed before. I am not calling for show trials, quite, though it is striking what gets scrutinised and what doesn’t. In the UK, there is an inquiry into the Covid pandemic, but not the decline of the defence budget since the 1980s.
The trouble with inquiry-itis, a virus not confined to Britain, is its focus on acts of commission, not omission. In retrospect, Barack Obama took his serene detachment too far, at least in foreign policy. Few administrations anywhere in the West have dated worse than Angela Merkel’s complacent one. Yet, in polite society, each of those names still carries far less stigma than George W Bush or Tony Blair do for theTruman’s reputation languished for decades.
If he is neglected it is for two reasons. First, he reminds us what liberalism has done to survive this far. The film treats the nuclear bombing of Japan as a unique moral compromise, and it might be. But “conventional” weapons turned much of Tokyo to a cinder over the course of one night. The allies bombed German civilians. As for America’s own past, the Union didn’t beat the Confederacy with chivalric jousting.
Liberalism’s blend of high conscience and its opposite existed nowhere so much as in the person of Truman. He decolonised the Philippines. He stood up for civilian control of government against the would-be warrior-king General Douglas MacArthur. At the same time, this product of seriously rum municipal politics called the bomb a “blessing” long after he used it and was complicit in the Red Scare at home.
And so to the other reason Truman is obscured. Snobbery. It is hard for some liberals to accept that we owe our world to a failed haberdasher from Missouri: a mule-trader’s son, a figure of suave derision until, in his 60s, he became perhaps the most powerful human being who will ever live. He leaves behind no treatise and few epigrams, much less in translated Sanskrit. But he knew a liberal must learn to walk with, if not the devil, then the brute.
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