Cirque du Truman
December 15, 1951 — Spokane Daily Chronicle

The Mossadegh Project | May 18, 2017    


U.S. President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972)

This was the lead editorial in the Spokane, Washington newspaper, one of a series of their negative editorials on the President.

Harry Truman editorial archive




MR. TRUMAN EXPOSES HIS OWN FLAWS

President Truman put his finger on two of his own weaknesses at Thursday’s press conference.

He said he will take any necessary action in the scandals which have broken about the heads of his subordinates. He said he will do so on his own initiative and at a time of his own choosing. He said he can’t be pushed into doing anything by anybody. That attitude is one of the faults Mr. Truman has, and it is a bad one.

The President seems to have lost sight of the fact that he is under obligation to do the people’s bidding. He is working for them, not herding them around like a ringmaster.

His other error was to assume that because newspapers report the doings of his appointees they do not like them, or that when they attack them editorially they do not like him.

Mr. Truman has too important a job to approach it in a spirit of childish ill temper, or to do it to suit himself, regardless of the wishes of the people whom he should be serving.

And if he thinks he is being abused by the newspapers he should read history and learn of the treatment accorded Abraham Lincoln by the personal journalism of that day. Yet there is no record of that great patriot’s complaining about the fact that some of the papers did not even print his Gettysburg address.




Related links:

Plenty Is Wrong, Mr. Truman | The Spokane Daily Chronicle, Dec. 10, 1951

No Time For ComedyThe Times Record, September 10, 1952

Must Stay In Character | December 7, 1951 editorial on Pres. Harry Truman



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