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Harry Truman

Harry Truman's wife Bess was not amused when she saw the photo of her husband playing the piano while Lauren Bacall's legs dangled in front.

Editor's Note: Veteran reporter and journalism professor Gil Klein is author of Tales from the National Press Clu

There was widespread misconduct in Harry Truman’s administration, but historians discount the president's responsibility. 

Harry S. Truman became president of a country much changed from the pre-war America of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Relative prosperity born of war had replaced depression, and government had turned its attention from combatting hardship to underwriting an immense military enterprise.

A determined president fires his constitution-defying celebrity general in Korea.

On April 10, 1951 in Washington (April 11 in Asia), President Harry S. Truman removed Douglas MacArthur as the Army’s supreme Asian commander, replacing him with Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway.

In the classic “oral biography” of Harry Truman, many of the president’s most trenchant assertions may simply have been invented.

The story as Harry S. Truman told it was pretty good, even for that eminent storyteller.

The half-remembered Korean conflict was full of surprises, and nearly all of them were unpleasant

Korea is in the news again, and it’s ugly news. North Korea may or may not have the capability to make nuclear weapons, and North Korea’s aging dictator, Kim Il Sung, is unwilling to let international inspectors find out. The United Nations is talking of sanctions.

The unquiet history of the modern state of Israel has been tied up with the United States from the beginning.

Peace was not in evidence in the Holy Land last Christmas Eve. Outbreaks of violence still rocked the West Bank and Gaza Strip three months after the signing of the accord between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat at the White House, with a beaming President Clinton standing by.

The elder statesman sets the record straight on JFK, LBJ, Stalin, the bomb, Charles de Gaulle, Douglas MacArthur, and, most of all, the American presidency.

I can still see Harry and Bess Truman coming toward us across the crowded terminal of the Kansas City airport on that night in 1970, their 86-year-old faces pinched and almost grim with concern.

Roosevelt, like Lincoln and Wilson, died fighting for his ideals.

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