U.S. President Truman’s Historical Achievements and Ranking

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

1. He created America’s military-industrial complex (MIC). Eisenhower (a master-deceiver who condemned the MIC that he himself had greatly expanded after Truman started it) and Truman’s other successors, only continued and constantly expanded its grip upon the U.S. Government, but Truman himself was actually the one who created the CIA, the ‘Defense’ Department, and all the rest of it. In stark contrast to Truman, his immediate predecessor FDR had been determined that after WW2 the War Department would go on as it had always been, in accord with the Constitution and its Founders who wrote it — no standing army — and was determined that the OSS of WW2 would end, not become replaced by the pervasive permanent CIA and “Intelligence Community” portion of Truman’s new standing-army permanent-warfare MIC imperialistic Government and its routine breaking of the Constitution and of the intentions and priorities of the 100% anti-imperialists who collectively wrote it at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

2. He created the state of Israel; he was the sole crucial person who made it happen. By contrast, FDR was determined that the Zionists would not have their way — there wouldn’t have been any Israel — because the first principle of FDR’s foreign policies was anti-imperialism, and Zionism was nothing if not imperialistic.

3. Truman also created the Cold War. Specifically, he started it on 25 July 1945, by telling Stalin that the U.S. wouldn’t recognize or accept into the budding U.N. (which FDR had created) the Eastern European countries that the Soviet Union had conquered from Hitler. By contrast, Stalin didn’t even object, at all, to the countries that America and the UK had conquered from Hitler, nor demand that they become communistic. Stalin was quietly shocked at Truman’s horrendous demand (which Stalin knew would never have come from FDR) that the U.S. Government have a say over the domestic policies of the countries that the Soviets had freed from Hitler. Truman had been persuaded by Churchill and Eisenhower that after WW2 either the U.S. would take over the world or else the Soviet Union would; and, so, Truman was going to see to it that the U.S. would do that; he set about and achieved reversing FDR’s anti-imperialistic foreign policies, and he replaced FDR’s entire Cabinet within two years; in private, Truman despised FDR, but decided not to inform anyone about it because he knew that if he did, that might terminate any hope of being elected as President or respected by the historians. He decided not even to send the one letter he wrote disparaging FDR’s foreign-policy team. Fortunately, however, he filed it, instead of trashed it. Perhaps he thought that after the U.S. Government takes over the entire world, future historians should be able know that he had needed to reject FDR’s foreign-policy aims in order to make possible the all-encompassing U.S. global empire, which he, Truman, had started. But, in the short term, he didn’t want anyone to know about it.

4. He stripped from the FDR-envisioned U.N. Charter any enforcement-capabilities of what FDR had been intending to be the democratic federal republic of all sovereign nations and sole source for creating, judging, and enforcing, international laws: his U.N. Whereas FDR was intending for the U.N. to replace all empires by establishing a democratic world government over sovereign nations — to replace all empires so as to prevent any World War Three — Truman instead made the U.N. tolerant of empires, tolerant of what FDR knew had caused both of the World Wars, and so which FDR was determined to end. Truman did this by producing a U.N. Charter which failed to include in the new organization any functional arms and legs.

5. So, in foreign affairs, as great a President as FDR had been, Truman was virtually the exact opposite — the worst decision that FDR ever made was to allow the Party’s megadonors to have their way in selecting whom his 1944 V.P. running-mate would be — and Truman achieved all of the harms that I’ve just listed here, without even ever having been noticed by the ‘historians’ to have done any of those catastrophic things that created the world of today — including now a very real possibility of a world-ending WW3. Only FDR’s domestic-policy triumphs were allowed by Truman to continue on into the future undamaged. But the even-bigger part of FDR’s greatness was his foreign policies, which Truman effectively nullified.

In sum, then, Truman was probably the worst President up till at least the time of Biden (who may yet outperform Truman’s badness by producing a WW3 and so being the worst leader ever in history — Biden is very much a hegemonist in the Truman mold).

There can be reasonable debate about the relative extents to which the catastrophicness of his Presidency was due to his conscious evilness or to his stupidity, or to a combination of those two in his hypocrisy (which is an essential part of liberalism and the lack of which is essential to progressivism — Truman was definitely a liberal, no progressive). However, Truman did know about most of the coups, invasions, protections and hirings of Nazis, etc., that his CIA, etc., were doing under him in order to advance his hegemonic objective; so, it wasn’t merely his stupidity that was the problem.

The consensus of historians and ‘historians’ is that Truman was a nearly great but not great President, generally ranked from 6th-best to 9th-best of the 44 U.S. Presidents up through Obama. (Obama, who created in 2014 the war in Ukraine — which now could turn into WW3 — is ranked from #7 to #15, or very good, but he was certainly one of the worst of the 44, just as both Bushes and Clinton were.) The ‘history-books’ don’t generally even so much as mention any of the facts that have been summarized here to the contrary of that scandalous, absurd, myth about Truman’s Presidency — it’s nothing historical at all. Saying that the creator of U.S. imperialism, of real and rabid global-hegemonic U.S. imperialism, something that was new with President Truman — was instead a nearly great President, is almost like saying that Hitler was a good leader for Germany. But neoconservatives and nazis — all sorts of imperialists — do sometimes become ‘historians’ and rate nations’ leaders. History itself disproves their beliefs, but they nonetheless believe the myths that they cling to and propagate.

FDR in his foreign policies was the greatest President that America has ever had, because in order to make them work, during the immense challenge of WW2, he constantly had to achieve things that were almost impossible to achieve; so, even if his immediate successor were to have been a good and competent person, it would have been almost impossible to fill his shoes. What Truman instead did was simply to trash it. That is unforgivable. It isn’t merely that the man wasn’t up to the task; he reversed what the task was. And the result is the world that we live in today, which, in international relations, is the opposite of what FDR had so carefully and brilliantly designed and planned (for which, see this and this).

Furthermore, what President Andrew Johnson was to his immediate predecessor Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman was to FDR, but whereas Johnson’s atrociousness largely reversed Lincoln’s greatest achievement, which affected almost only the U.S., Truman’s reversing FDR’s foreign policies has been a curse that harms and endangers the entire world. Johnson is ranked by historians as being the worst or nearly the worst U.S. President ever, but his badness is actually dwarfed by Truman’s.

In order to be able to understand the world of today, its source must be honestly known and recognized. Its source was Truman’s historical achievements. He was a very ordinary person, whom some billionaires and fate — and FDR’s biggest blunder — placed at what might turn out to have been the biggest hinge-point of human history (which it will be if the constant movement since then toward WW3 will not somehow become reversed back toward what FDR had been intending).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.