Merle Miller

George O'Brien and Douglas Cooper talk with Merle Miller, author of Plain Speaking, an oral biography of President Harry S. Truman, based on the taped interview Miller had conducted with the man.

The interview focuses on the positive aspects of Truman's character and his career. “He was always of a piece,” says Miller, “You never heard about a new Harry.” Friends and teachers, too, he insists, never refute the character he developed.

Miller talks about his first meeting with Truman. Miller wasn’t expecting to meet him, so he was unshaven and poorly dressed, but Truman, he says, reacted casually. Unlike most public figures, Miller says, who become less like their public faces the more one gets to know them, Harry was “a real man. There’s only one of him.”

Transitioning to a conversation about Truman's campaign, O’Brien says that the media portrayed Truman’s campaign in the East as a bit of a Midwestern clown show, which gave him the wrong impression of the campaign. Miller agrees, saying that Truman was never popular with the “northeastern elitist group of people,” because they saw him as a bumpkin, a failed haberdasher, a bad farmer, and above all, not FDR. He insists, though, that Truman had the best education of any president of the 20th century, and had a real understanding of the history of the united states government.

Cooper asks if a man like Truman could be elected again, except by accident. Miller protests that it wasn’t exactly an accident, though he agrees that FDR thought he would survive his fourth term and only chose Truman over Wallace because Truman was so popular in the Senate. Truman’s reelection, though, was no accident, he says.

They discuss Truman’s career in the Senate, his style of leadership, his family, his assurance in the decision the drop the atomic bomb, and his relationship with General MacArthur.

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The Douglas P. Cooper Distinguished Contemporaries Collection (1967-1974) contains rare interviews with influential writers, statesmen, artists, songwriters, journalists and others who have left their mark on our culture.

The Origins of The Cooper Collection

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