Hard Going

The Truman Administration, edited by Louis W. Koenig. 394 pp. New York: N. Y. University Press. $5.50

With loving care Mr. Koenig has extracted from the papers and addresses of Harry S. Truman the passages he regards as outstanding, and he has linked them together with a commentary. It is clear, despite his disclaimers of partisanship, that Mr. Koenig admires his subject. But one can only say that this grandiose effort to present an Administration inspired by the mediocre and conceived in the image of the common man as an epoch of profound statesmanship is defeated by the very material it deploys. No commentary and no “arrangement” can do anything to conceal the lack of wisdom, of insight, of principle, which presided over these eight years of sheer aggrandizement of Presidential power and demagogic welfare-state corruption of the republic. F.S.M.

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The Truman Administration, edited by Louis W. Koenig. 394 pp. New York: N. Y. University Press. $5.50

With loving care Mr. Koenig has extracted from the papers and addresses of Harry S. Truman the passages he regards as outstanding, and he has linked them together with a commentary. It is clear, despite his disclaimers of partisanship, that Mr. Koenig admires his subject. But one can only say that this grandiose effort to present an Administration inspired by the mediocre and conceived in the image of the common man as an epoch of profound statesmanship is defeated by the very material it deploys. No commentary and no “arrangement” can do anything to conceal the lack of wisdom, of insight, of principle, which presided over these eight years of sheer aggrandizement of Presidential power and demagogic welfare-state corruption of the republic. F.S.M.