Harry S Truman's early years gave little indication that he would ever rise above a struggling station in life. He met little success as a construction crew timekeeper, road overseer, bank clerk or mailroom attendant at the Kansas City Star. His one attempt at running a business—a menswear shop—ended in failure.
Not until he commanded an artillery battery in World War I did he begin to recognize his native talent for leadership. But he never lost confidence in himself, living by one of Mark Twain's maxims: "Always do what's right. It will please some people and astonish the rest."
When Truman succeeded FDR as President in 1945, many in Washington did not know what to expect of the former Senator who had been nominated for Vice President in a convention gambit dubbed the Missouri Compromise. They knew his background—Scottish-Irish descent, from hardworking Baptist farmers; an honest member of the grubby Kansas City political machine.
What the capital, and the country, got in the 33rd President—as this magnificent and meticulous biography reveals—is a man of action who stood behind his decisions and lived up to the famous sign on his White House desk: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. When he had accepted the vice-presidential nomination in 1944, his first shy words were, "Now, give me a chance." When fate made him President, he made the most of the chance. After much deliberation, he ordered the atomic bomb dropped on Japan and never blinked. He established the Atomic Energy Commission and placed it under the control of civilians and not the military commanders who considered it their domain. He set up the CIA, the Defense Department and NATO and created the office of Secretary of Defense. He desegregated the armed forces and pushed civil rights legislation through a reluctant Congress. And, in 1948, he beat Thomas Dewey for the presidency after every poll and opinion maker had written him off.
McCullough paints the private Truman as a loyal friend and family man, affable and humble but with a sharp sense of humor. He married his only sweetheart, Elizabeth "Bess" Wallace, and stayed true till death. He never forgot the help of a friend and seldom missed a chance to skewer an enemy. When a Washington Post critic panned a vocal recital by Truman's daughter, Margaret, the President wrote him a personal note, saying, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!"
Truman is biography as good as it gets, as absorbing and readable as it is voluminous (992 pages of text). McCullough (The Great Bridge, Mornings on Horseback) writes like a novelist, digs like a zealous reporter and puts things in perspective like the superb historian he is. It would be a must-read at any time, even more so in an election year when Truman's qualities will give many a voter a sharp pang of nostalgia and yearning. (Simon & Schuster, $30)
by Richard Price
As clear as graffiti on a ghetto wall, this long-awaited novel by the author of The Wanderers and Blood-brothers has "best-seller" written all over it. Chronicling the intersecting lives of teenage cocaine dealers in a fictional New Jersey town and the cops who hunt, beat, bribe and occasionally befriend them, the book displays Price's near perfect ear for street language and his peculiar empathy—both for good-guy cops torn between private ambition and public service and the desperate strivings of the "clockers," hustling their wares as fast as they can before the law can swoop down on them.
Six months shy of retirement, Rocco Klein is a burned-out cop, drinking too much and entertaining his much younger wife's friends with rambling stories about dead relatives. Strike Dunham, a clocker who never does drugs himself, oversees a crew of junior clockers and considers the trade "his best shot at having a life, like going into the army, or working for UPS." He, like Rocco, starts thinking about retirement. Then Darryl Adams, another dealer, is shot dead in a fast-food restaurant. Strike's straight-arrow brother, Victor, immediately confesses to the crime, but Klein, who takes the confession, thinks Victor is covering for his brother. Strike, meanwhile, has his own ideas about who killed Darryl.
Price spent many months hanging out with cops and dealers. The research shows: He gets so deep under the skin of both the cops and the clockers that it's hard to believe he himself has never been either. "Strike hated posters," Price writes. "If you were poor, posters followed you everywhere—health clinics, probation offices, housing offices, day-care centers, welfare offices—and they were always blasting away at you with warnings to do this, don't do that, be like this, don't be like that, smarten up, control this, stop that."
Thanks to Price's ear and knowledge of his subject, the characters remain believable. That you really aren't sure who killed Darryl until page 550 of a 600-page book testifies to Price's skill at maintaining suspense. That the denouement is both surprising and satisfying shows his psychological insight and cinematic imagination. Coming attraction: Clockers the movie. Price, who scripted The Color of Money and Sea of Love, got $1.9 million from Universal for the book. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95)
by Pamela Kilian
Surprise! There are some juicy tidbits in this biography of the First Lady—in the form of recipes for "Bar's" favorite tea party cheese puffs and pecan tartlets.
There are also plenty of dog stories, a slew of anecdotes about the White House White Hair and many quotes attributed to admiring friends and family members. Author Kilian (What Was Watergate?) writes that while she was not able to interview the First Lady herself, Mrs. Bush's White House Press Office was of great help. Hmmmm. The upshot is, if you thought Barbara Bush was a nice, down-to-earth, spunky woman, this book won't change your mind. By all accounts, Mrs. Bush is also intelligent and generous, a loyal wife, a good mother, a tireless campaigner and genuinely dedicated to her work on literacy.
Kilian covers the tragic loss of the Bushes' 3-year-old daughter, Robin, to leukemia, in 1953, and mentions that it was during this time that Barbara's hair turned white. The book touches ever so lightly on Mrs. Bush's depression in 1976 after her husband became CIA director. It hints that Mrs. Bush may hold some different opinions from Mr. Bush, but what they are you won't learn here.
Pure frosting, Barbara Bush is a determinedly shallow glance at a woman who, the reader suspects, has a lot more to her. (St. Martin's, $19.95)
by Bob Woodward, David S. Broder
If the Veep comes off better in these pages than you'd expect, it's because from his surprise selection by George Bush in 1988 to the tongue-in-cheek thank-you he received from the departing Johnny Carson, Quayle has had nowhere to go but up.
Originally printed as an investigative series in The Washington Post by Woodward, an assistant managing editor of the paper, and political columnist Broder, the book looks beneath the caricature and offers as well-rounded a portrait as possible of someone who doesn't have a lot of facets. One surprise, perhaps, is the incredibly high level of self-confidence and drive in this man of average abilities.
In fact, Dan Quayle is above average in two areas: politics and golf. The dedication and savvy he displayed in his all-out campaign to become George Bush's running mate are matched only by the effort he puts into lowering his golf handicap. It's clear, though, from interviews with both supporters and detractors, that he doesn't devote the same attention to issues such as abortion or civil rights. "You do the policy, I'll do the politics," he tells one assistant. To those who claim he has a short attention span, he argues, "When I'm interested in something, I'll stay in focus on it as long as is necessary." Clearly he's interested in winning elections; he set his sights on the Senate just six months into his term in the House.
The authors portray Marilyn Quayle as her husband's most trusted adviser, the "hard half" of the team, in the words of a Quayle associate. That the book is livelier when it talks about her says something about him. But all describe Quayle as decent, warm and—potentially pertinent—a man who surrounds himself with intelligent people.
"I think, because of my own inner confidence, I think I'd be good at anything I set out to do," Quayle tells the authors, making clear he includes the presidency. Their book, while debunking the dunce stereotype, may not inspire the multitudes to concur in that self-assessment. (Simon & Schuster, $18)
>GOOD GRIEF, CHIEF!
GEORGE BUSH MAY BE ONE OF THE few people whose extemporaneous utterances make those of Ronald Reagan sound cogent. Judge for yourself in this selection from Bushisms (Workman, $4.95), compiled by the editors of The New Republic:
•Please don't ask me to do that which I've just said I'm not going to do, because you're using up time; the meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering. News conference, April 20, 1989
•Fluency in English is something that I'm often not accused of. June 6, 1989
•We're enjoying sluggish times, and not enjoying them very much. Jan. 2, 1992
•I mean a child that doesn't have a parent to read to that child or that doesn't see that when the child is hurting to have a parent and help out or neither parent there enough to pick the kid up and dust him off and send him back into the game or whatever, that kid has a disadvantage. Jan. 3, 1992
•All I was doing was appealing for an endorsement, not suggesting you endorse it. A Governors' meeting, Feb. 3, 1992
>GOT THE ROSS RIGHT HERE
WHAT HAS ROSS PEROT SAID IN THREE decades of interviews, speeches and articles? You can look it up in Ross Perot: In His Own Words, by PEOPLE contributor Tony Chiu (Warner, $4.99). A sampler:
•Every person in this country should have in fact, not just in theory, an equal opportunity. The New York Times, Nov. 28, 1969
•Failures are like skinned knees—painful but superficial. Look, March 24, 1970
•As I study Congress, they work hard; we don't pay them enough.... I'd want to pay them enough, and then I would take all these lobbyist fees and throw them overboard. I'd take all those honorariums and say, I want you guys to belong to somebody—you bet—the American people. PBS's American Interests, Sept. 16, 1989
•If we just sit around and high-five one another over the fact that we blew the bejesus out of the Arab world, nothing but arrogance can come of it. The New York Times, March 4, 1991
•I think [abortion] is the woman's decision. God knows what kind of demonstrations I'll have outside my office now. Speech to the National Press Club, March 18, 1992,
•Nobody will think about the spotted owl if they're starving, except maybe to eat him. The Washington Post, May 3, 1992
- Contributors:
- Lorenzo Carcaterra,
- Sara Nelson,
- Carol Peace,
- Tony Chiu.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
