Column: From ‘Give ’em Hell’ to just plain Hell

Be brave. Take heart. Deliverance looms. Or to put it another way: Our long and raucous national nightmare — otherwise known as the 2016 presidential campaign — will soon be over. 

I suspect I’m not the only one who believes this has been the most dispiriting and destructive election year any of us can remember. But just 26 days from now, the protracted assault on decency and reason will finally come to a merciful end, and we can shift our attention to the dawn of a new era. 

For regardless of who emerges victorious on November 8, she — or perhaps he — will go on to be sworn in as our 45th President. Not only that, but he — or more likely she — will be the 14th to occupy the White House in my lifetime.

When I casually worked through the math on all that the other day, it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve been here on God’s green earth during the reigns of nearly one/third of all our Chief Executives. Now that’s a scary thought.

Yet I am hardly alone in that regard. All of you other geezers out there who were born before April 12, 1945 — the day Franklin Roosevelt died — share with me that dubious distinction. 

I was a mere youngster when FDR died, and thus my personal impressions of him are vague and hazy, formed as they were through the unreliable lens of childhood memory. I later came to know him by reputation, of course, but that is an entirely different experience.

Harry Truman, however, was President during my adolescent years, and since I grew up in a family of Democrats, I was encouraged to admire him — which I did. In particular, I was impressed by his blunt, plain-speaking style of leadership.

He was at his feisty best during his uphill struggle to hold on to the presidency in 1948. At one of his campaign stops that year, Truman assailed his Republican foes with such bristling vigor that one of his more ardent supporters in the crowd was inspired to shout, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!”

To which Truman replied with a steely grin, “I don’t give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them and they think it’s Hell.” 

“Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” instantly became the battle cry of that ’48 campaign and would later be enshrined as a lifetime slogan for Truman partisans.

He was no less direct when it came to the decision-making process in the White House. Throughout his years there, he famously displayed on his desk in the Oval Office a plaque that read, “The Buck Stops Here.” And in a similar vein, he often proclaimed, “If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen.”

Truman relished the political in-fighting that defined so many of his dealings with the Republican leaders in Congress. When an interviewer asked him about the difference between a politician and a statesmen, Truman said, “It takes a politician to run the government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.” 

And on the subject of Divine Providence, he came up with this zinger: “Conceit is God’s gift to little men.”

Of all the put-downs Truman unleashed during his years in the White House, my favorite was a caustic letter he fired off to a Washington music critic.

As a family, the Trumans doted on classical music, and when their only child,  Margaret, expressed a desire to pursue a career as a concert singer, the President encouraged that ambition.

Margaret launched her career as a coloratura soprano in 1947 at the age of 23, and after several concert performances in other cities, she gave a recital in 1950 at Constitution Hall before a large audience of glitterati that included her parents and the music critic for the Post, Washington’s most influential newspaper.

The concertgoers in general responded with waves of applause, but their enthusiasm was not shared by the Post critic, Paul Hume. In a scathing review, Hume described Margaret’s singing as “flat a good deal of the time” and went on to write that she “cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish.”

When he read the review the next morning, Truman went ballistic and dashed off his bellicose letter to Hume. After describing Hume’s criticisms as “poppycock” and “off the beam,” he concluded his tirade with a pugnacious warning: “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.” 

I was in high school when Truman’s presidency came to an end and I barely took notice when he settled into a life of quiet retirement in his native Missouri. Hence, I would have been astonished if anyone had told me then that in a decade or so, the former president and I would cross paths, so to speak. Yet that is what happened.

In the early 1960s, Harry and Bess made frequent trips to New York to visit their daughter and grandchildren. (Margaret was married to Clifton Daniel, a New York Times correspondent who would soon become the paper’s managing editor.)

On those visits, they usually stayed at the Carlyle, and every morning Truman would emerge from that elegant hotel’s presidential suite and take his daily walk. These “constitutionals,” (as he called them) had been a ritual in his life for many years, and now, in his late 70s, he was still stepping out at the brisk, military-march clip of 120 paces a minute.

As had been the case during his years in Washington, reporters were permitted to tag along on these hikes, and since I had recently been transferred from Detroit to UPI’s National Desk in New York, I was assigned to cover a couple of Truman constitutionals.

Those gigs were a lot of fun. Truman had always enjoyed mixing it up with the “press boys,” and as we promenaded through the streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he kept up a lively banter.

For our part, we “press boys” tried to goad the former President into making some kind of intemperate or controversial remark that would give us a good story. But Truman, wise to these games, adroitly deflected our efforts – at least on the two occasions I covered his walks.

But a UPI colleague of mine had better luck when he took on the assignment one day in 1964. The big headline news that morning was the release of a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that officially linked smoking to lung cancer, a report that launched the anti-smoking crusade that extended over the next several decades.

When Truman was asked about that report, he came to an abrupt stop, planted his walking stick firmly on the sidewalk and proclaimed with his famous grin, “Well, boys, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When we came to this country, we gave the Indians syphilis and they gave us cancer.”

Yet another plain-speaking triumph for “Give ‘em Hell, Harry.” It was great to hear that even in winter, the old lion still had his roar.