Unfit For Command
October 8, 1952 — The Times Record
October 8, 1952 — The Times Record
| The Mossadegh Project | March 22, 2017 |
Yet another anti-Truman editorial in The Times Record of Troy, New York. The newspaper supported Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was elected as President less than a month later.
• Harry Truman media archive
CLICHES
Truman is an adept at cliches. Now he repeats a statement made in 1948 by General Eisenhower that military life doesn’t qualify a man for the Presidency. If one’s outlook is confined to any narrow scope of interests the Presidency hardly is a proper place for him. If Eisenhower never had looked beyond the Army he wouldn’t do. But of course we know that he has—and so does Truman. Indeed. Truman tried hard to persuade him to run for President on the Democratic ticket. Let us not forget that.We might turn the Truman cliche into another form. Crooked political training under a Pendergast doesn’t qualify a man for President, either. [Kansas City political boss, Truman friend and supporter Thomas J. Pendergast, imprisoned for corruption] And here we have the evidence, for out of our thirty-three Presidents we have never had one less qualified for the Presidency than Truman. For the present chief magistrate is the product of as slimy a political ring as the nation has ever known; and his public morals are the public morals of that ring. He has never been able to lift himself above that level. Apparently his close relationship to Pendergast and his criminal assistants deadened his conscience so that the things that seem corrupt to most of us seemed decorous, almost praiseworthy, to him. The President ought to be careful of his facts. He is assuming that the public is wholly dense—that he can hurl charges at anybody and, with the platform power that he feels he possesses, can get away with it. But can he?
Related links:
Many Things Contribute to Mistrust of Truman — The Chester Times, July 17, 1951
Retarded Nations Trying To Catch Up — The Times Record, October 8, 1952
“Rude, Uncouth, Ignorant” — The Times Record, October 18, 1952
MOSSADEGH t-shirts — “If I sit silently, I have sinned”
