Missouri Mule

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 that year that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt should not run for a third term as president because, in Truman’s words, “There is no indispensable man in a democracy.” Roosevelt ignored Truman’s admonition, secured the Democratic nomination, and ran successfully for a third term. Roosevelt punished Truman by pitting the White House political apparatus against him in the Missouri Democratic Senate primary. His plot to defeat Truman failed, however, and Truman was reelected. Four years later, Roosevelt chose Truman as his running mate, a decision that led directly to Truman’s 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 Currie’s new book, which traces Truman’s rise from Senate backbencher in 1940 to Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944. As secondary—and intriguing—themes, 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 country’s 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.