News & Articles

After starting a war that is tanking the economy of Southeast Asia, leaving millions of north Africans a few months from mass starvation and giving Iran more power than ever with its cheapo drones while blowing up $25 billion worth of very expensive weapons and handing the Ayatollahs control of the world’s oil while we pay $4 a gallon for gasoline, Donald Trump has gotten bored with the Persian Gulf.

He’s driven along the Reflecting Pool to examine his new blue paint job. He can’t wait to see it reflect the Earth’s tallest triumphal arch, which will tower over the Lincoln Memorial as Republicans raise $1 billion in taxes to finance his ballroom, which he promised would be paid for by billionaires.

There is nothing Trump won’t deface to remind us that he has been as “consequential” as emperors who snuffed out great civilizations.

His latest brainstorm is to paint the somber, four-foot-thick Virginia granite walls of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The internet offers few justifications for painting granite, especially on exterior walls. Maintenance will be constant and expensive. Dwight David Eisenhower’s descendants are appalled.

Donald Trump is like a homeless man who breaks into a house and refuses to leave when the owners return. This dates back to January 6, 2020.

I’ll give Trump some credit. His 2016 election kicked my American history reading into overdrive. 2026’s semi-quincentennial has doubled it. As of May Day, I’ve slathered yellow marker on six books while listening to two Audibles.

The last three cover the two presidencies in the middle of America’s greatest century. By chance, those men straddled the two states smack dab in the center of the nation – my dad’s Missouri and my Kansas.
Neither Harry S. Truman nor Dwight D. Eisenhower inherited Trump’s wealth or his insecurities. They were raised with integrity and humility, like the president whose memorial will soon be dwarfed by Donald Trump’s proposed Arch. And yes, Ike’s Executive Office Building is also under assault. It will be painted as white as Barbie’s teeth for Trump’s Make-America-White-Again project.

The respective 1,000 and 375 and 550 pages of the books pictured above cover a lot of ground. Truman was thrown from obscurity into the shoes of a giant (FDR) who won four elections in a row to guide the nation through its worst depression and then the earth-shaking Second World War.

At Roosevelt’s death America held its breath, certain of disaster. But Harry Truman rode the bomb like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, checked Stalin, checked the Chinese Communists in Korea, called in Herbert Hoover and Eisenhower to deal with millions of war refugees, brought millions of soldiers home and got the peacetime economy humming. He amazed everyone.

It was sort of the opposite of the last two years.

Eisenhower rose from the dusty plains of Kansas like a meteor to lead the invasions of Africa, Italy and France with cool grace. He handled towering political and military egos and found the best leaders to fight an epochal enemy that threatened America and the world.

Truman could and did count on him in war and peace. And with peace Truman handed Ike millions of refugees and the newly formed NATO to keep Joseph Stalin’s massive Hitler crushing armies from sweeping to the Atlantic.

No law prevented Truman from running for a third term but Americans tire of their presidents, even those who once captured their imaginations as Harry did when he gave Republicans hell. 

Harry asked Ike if he would be the Democratic Party’s candidate to replace him. Republicans who had not elected a president for two decades had the same thought. Both Kansas and Ike were Republican.
The book Age of Eisenhower lays out how Ike’s methodical skills turned post-war America into a formidable barrier to Cold War aggression. His disarming smile, easy manner and time spent on golf links hid the massive works he engineered.

Americans liked Ike perhaps in part because he rarely showed his hand. But historians have 20x20 vision looking backwards. In 2017, the year before Hitchcock’s book was published, America’s historians voted Ike the fifth best of our 45 presidents. Truman came in sixth.

No wonder many of us look back to the ‘50s and ‘60s as a golden age.

In 2017 the historians didn’t rate Trump because he was new on the job but recently, he has had a bitter fight with James Buchanan for worst president ever.

I wasn’t sure what my next book would be, but learning that Senator Jack Kennedy privately called Ike an “A…hole” pointed the way. Kennedy also claimed over and over that Ike had allowed a “missile gap” to develop with the Soviets. I’m now 100 pages into David Nasaw’s book The Patriarch, about Jack’s dad Joseph P. Kennedy. PBS Newshour host Gwen Ifell raved about it.

Joseph P. Kennedy raised three sons to become President of the United States. PT Boat hero Jack made it. It reaches back to the stock market crash and the childhoods of my parents. Joseph P. famously survived the crash and made movies that my parents watched. PT 109 would have burnished Jonn Kennedy’s reputation for reelection had Lee Harvey Oswald not had other plans.

Joe Kennedy helped elect Franklin Roosevelt then bedeviled the President by championing the appeaser Neville Chamberlain rather than Churchill while he was Ambassador to England.

His son Jack had better instincts. Jack wrote a popular book about how the British under Chamberlain were caught napping by Hitler.

I’m not letting the semi-quincentennial catch me napping. I have more books to read. As Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Don’t whitewash the Executive Office Bldg.

Visit five years of Welty columns by clicking Harry’s name at duluthreader.com.