During his presidency, Truman and the Republicans were locked in a series of furious assaults on each other that outraged him and made Truman an enduring foe of a party and its representatives, which he saw as on the wrong side of almost every domestic and foreign policy issue he considered important.
Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.
Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.
Almost everything Truman did in foreign affairs I approve of.
Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.
Foreign policy is inseparable from domestic policy now. Is terrorism foreign policy or domestic policy? It's both. It's the same with crime, with the economy, climate change.
I was in Independence, Missouri when Johnson signed the Medicare bill, with Truman standing there. Truman had first proposed Medicare, but couldn't get it through.
Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.
Americans were outraged and horrified by this president's reckless spending and his endless assaults on the Constitution, but no issue drove them to rise up and fight back like Obamacare - both the abominable legislative monstrosity itself and the tyrannical, corrupt manner by which Obama crammed it through the legislative process.
Truman left in the middle of an unpopular war, a war of choice. Truman didn't have to go into South Korea. And he was reviled and ridiculed for the stalemate that resulted. Now, he's seen as one of the great presidents of the 20th century.
There's a pattern in Bush 43's presidency of being attracted to the big and the bold, and my whole reading of him is that he was instinctively uncomfortable with what you might call a modulated foreign policy - a foreign policy of adjustment, of degree.
Domestic policy, foreign policy, I tend to come down more on the liberal side.
He [Harry S. Truman] loved politicians - even Republicans.
Bipartisanship on behalf of an imprudent policy can be folly, just as partisanship on behalf of a just cause can be wise. What is clear is that politics will not stop at the water's edge simply because presidents plead for it. American foreign policy will return to the tradition of Truman and Vandenberg only when the American public demands it.
Every president learns on the job because nobody`s really prepared for the kind of decisions that cross your desk every day. No one`s prepared for that. No vice president who has scended to the presidency has ever truly been ready for that. Certainly, no vice president who`s assumed the presidency in extremis, like Harry Truman, has been ready for that. But this Trump guy doesn`t seem to be ready for a career in government.
[President Truman] was free of the greatest vice in a leader, his ego never came between him and his job.
I think anybody currently running for the presidency on the Republican side by default would be a huge improvement over Obama in every area, including foreign policy and the use of the military.