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Missouri Mule
How Harry Truman's Stubbornness and Determination Helped Win World War II and Led Him to the Presidency
On February 3, 1940, Harry S Truman, a freshman Senator from Missouri, held a press conference to announce that he would run for reelection.
Truman also said in that same press conference that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt should not run for a third term as president because, in Trumans words, There is no indispensable man in a democracy.
Roosevelt ignored Trumans admonition, secured the Democratic nomination, and ran successfully for a third term.
Roosevelt refused to endorse Trumans reelection campaign and even tried to bribe himoffering him a place on the Interstate Commerce Commissionin an effort to get him to drop out of the race.
Four years later, Roosevelt chose Truman as his running mate, a decision that led directly to Trumans becoming president when Roosevelt unexpectedly died only eighty-two days into his fourth term.
Why, then, did FDR choose Truman over all others?
The answer to that question is the primary subject of Missouri Mule, prize-winning author James Curries new book, which traces Trumans rise from Senate backbencher in 1940 to Roosevelts running mate in 1944.
As secondaryand intriguingthemes, this book draws upon extensive original research in the National Archives to expose massive Army and Navy wartime bungling and wastefulness and reveals how some U.S. corporations were more interested in increasing shareholder dividends and corporate profits than in providing the quality materiel needed to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese.
As chair of the primary Senate oversight committee that investigated our countrys World War II defense build-up and expenditures, Harry Truman displayed all the best characteristics of the Missouri mules he had worked with as a young man on his farm: the stubbornness and determination that helped us win the war and made him one of our best Presidents.
