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Dear Harry: The Truman Administration Through Correspondence with Everyday Americans. By D.M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore. Stackpole Books, 1999. 512 Pages. $34.95. Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Albert N. Garland, U.S. Army, Retired.
On 12 April 1945, following the death of then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, former U.S. Senator and Roosevelt's Vice-President, became the 33d President of the United States. Truman was virtually unknown to most of the U.S. populace, despite his sterling work as chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, popularly known as the Truman Committee.
In putting together this book, the authors selected "letters, telegrams, and postcards... almost exclusively from the files of the Harry S Truman Library in Independence, Missouri" to show how the people of the country reacted to the many major events that occurred during President Truman's nearly eight years in office. As such, this is not a scholarly history of that administration; it does offer, rather, a peek into the nation's soul, a peek offered freely by the people themselves. (The authors could have added that they used a number of interWhite House staff memoranda and the results of several special studies.)
The book is divided into 10 chapters, each dealing with one or several subjects. Only three of the chapters are...