Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography Of Harry S Truman

Description for PLAIN SPEAKING: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY OF HARRY S TRUMAN by Merle Miller:

PLAIN SPEAKING, a book "so alive it will seem warm to the touch,: as one critic has put it, is uniquely important as political history. But its appeal as intimate biography is so irresistible, so human, it quite diverts one from the obvious fact that here is a President wholly revealed as we have never before had one revealed. Twenty years since he left the White House, after the year of Watergate of all years, that plainest speaker of all Harry S Truman comes to us alive, magically alive, in his own words and those closest to him, words masterfully elicited by Merle Miller.

A windfall for all of us and for history, PLAIN SPEAKING derives from extraordinary circumstances. Write and indisputably fellow Midwesterner Merle Miller talked in total frankness with Harry S Truman for hundreds of hours spanning many months in the early sixties, recorded on tape and in notes. He also interviewed virtually all those close to Mr. Truman from his earliest childhood in Independence, Missouri, through his years in Washington. What might have been a television series has instead eventuated as a book that re-creates both a splendid man and the historic times he lived through and so often helped to mold.

PLAIN SPEAKING is an evocation of one of America's great Presidents. It also details the critical events and, more to the point, the crucial background facts that mark some of the most momentous decades in modern American life, the years of the Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the advent of Nixon and McCarthy. Merle Miller unerringly produces for us here Mr. Truman's revelations, reflections, and insights on the men and events from the Founding Fathers through to Hoover and up to Nixon. We laugh aloud, we rejoice, we are dismayed, perhaps we may even cry, for we are moved. History comes alive in a manner so personal that few will put this book down without being emotionally charged.