Contrast Donald Trump with Harry Truman

The pain involved in watching a Donald Trump performance, such as the vulgar charade of a press conference held in New York this week, is made more acute whenever one considers that he is about to occupy an office held by a man as civilised, decent, modest and successful as Harry Truman.

Truman was the modest haberdasher, and artillery officer on the battlefields of Europe in the First World War, who became a senator and then president in 1945. As the leader who had the insight to grasp what was really at stake in relation to the communists in the years immediately after the Second World War, he created the Truman Doctrine which was the basis of Western security and the defence of freedom in the decades that followed. Derided on his assumption of office on the death of FDR, and at various points mocked during his tenure, Truman’s legacy is in the foreign policy field almost as good as it gets.

Feeling depressed by boastful Trump’s buffoonery, and the embarrassment he inflicts on a great country, I retreated to spend time with a good book and reached for David McCullough’s magnificent single volume life of Truman.

What is most striking is the modesty and quiet intelligence of the man, and in particular the approach he took in retirement to personal wealth and status. What a contrast with Trump – who acts like a cheap hood and a comic extra from Goodfellas when explaining how he will account (he won’t) for the conflicts of interest involved in being President and owner of a business.

Truman’s ideal was the legend of the Roman hero Cincinnatus, who as McCullough describes it was the “patriot farmer who assumes command in his country’s hour of peril, then returns to his plow.”

Can you ever imagine Trump concluding his presidency in the modest and undemonstrative manner of a Truman? No.

“He had travelled home from Washington,” writes McCullough, “unprotected by Secret Service agents and there were none to be found watching over him. He had come home without salary or pension. He had no income or support of any kind from the federal government other than his Army pension of $112.65 a month.”

He and his wife Bess had saved some of his President’s salary but it seems not to have amounted to all that much, to the extent that he later given a presidential pension. Truman turned down all offers of corporate employment, offers of commercial endorsements and employment, and even the offer of a free Toyota car offered to stress the improved state of US-Japanese relations. He restricted himself to writing a memoir and lived modestly although he missed politics and being at the centre of the action.

“He liked to say,” said McCullough,”that he was just a plain American citizen again.”

One upbeat observation in relation to Trump. Truman hated the ghastly bully and demagogue Joe McCarthy, a media show-off and blowhard who turned a justified assault on communism and foreign influence into a witch-hunt and ego-trip. At one point it looked as though McCarthy was destined to be the dominant figure of his age, his rise seemingly presaging a nasty populism and cultural panic. And then he blew it and was gone. History moves on. Trump won’t be here for ever.