Rivals seek Harry's touch

DAVID McCULLOUGH'S 1,100-page biography of Harry Truman is required reading in this US election year. With both party presidential candidates claiming the mantle of this plain-spoken man from Missouri, the book's timing could not be better, although it certainly was not planned.

The research and writing took 10 years. However, many of the themes have strong resonance today: recession and the search for economic revival; winding down a Cold War instead of entering one; jobs and training; and big international decisions.

This portrait of Truman is nothing like the images we have of President George Bush or of his Democratic challenger, Governor Bill Clinton. Since the independent Ross Perot is a last-minute challenger with little chance of winning, he will not be included among the serious impersonators. Nor should President Bush be included. Although he, too, followed a larger-than-life president in Ronald Reagan, just as Mr Truman had to live up to the heroic proportions of Franklin D Roosevelt, the two men are poles apart. In terms of background and outlook, Mr Bush could not be more different, for all of his claims of fighting back as an underdog (like Mr Truman) and talking straight like the former president, who was noted for dozens of one-liners: 'If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen'; 'The buck stops here'; 'A president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him.'

A child of privilege, Mr Bush was shaped by the Ivy League and by the big business circles in which he moves easily, and which influence his economic policies.

By contrast, Mr Truman knew a small town, turn-of-the-century existence on a farm near Independence, Missouri. At least twice he was forced to interrupt his education and career plans to go back to the dawn-to-dusk work of the farm. His early life was close to the raw, pioneering world of the Missouri frontier and far removed from the prospecting for oil riches in Texas that Mr Bush and other transplanted easterners engaged in.

Mr Truman had a deep mistrust of 'big business' influence, and his first significant speech as a US congressman in the late 1930s was against the deal makers who had heaped debt upon once healthy companies. He never wanted to be president, while Mr Bush spent much of his career preparing for the office. As the book reveals, Mr Truman was remarkably close to the American people, to their wishes and aspirations to 'get ahead', while Mr Bush is strangely aloof.

Mr Clinton is much closer in outlook and in symbolic gesture (note his highly successful back-roads bus tour to connect with ordinary people) if not in personality and character, of which voters know little. His emphasis on investing in people and infrastructure is similar to the principles of the New Deal to which Mr Truman adhered throughout his presidency. Indeed, some of Mr Clinton's advisers are working to put flesh on the bones of his 'invest-in' programmes by borrowing themes from the New Deal.

The scope is scaled down, given the size of the US deficit, but the basic premise is the same: the US economy as a result of big structural changes will not rebound without a dose of government intervention and an overhaul in private manufacturing.

Thus, Mr Clinton's infrastructure programmes have a strong flavour of the New Deal, which spawned the Tennessee Valley Authority, to name one success. TVA reshaped much of the US South, creating dams, lakes, forests, and new industries. It also taught new farming methods and brought electricity to more than 700,000 homes and industries that had been without.

Mr Clinton's proposals are more modest, but he also wants to connect new centres to the US business core with modern rail and short-haul air transport in addition to repairing older bridges, highways and structures that have begun to rot.

One of the more intriguing concepts swirling around the Clinton camp is a proposal to launch a national manufacturing extension service, based on the highly successful US agricultural extension service, that would bring the latest technology and techniques to small firms across America. The emphasis would be on the lean mean production outlined in The Machine that Changed the World, a book by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied post-war Japanese techniques.

To diminish the government's role, there is some talk of adding executives from the private sector to spread the manufacturing gospel, much as industry figures worked with government in the New Deal war production effort.

The impact on the US economy of any of the above, whether it be Mr Clinton's revised 'New Deal' or a more domestic-oriented George Bush, will depend on what Dean Acheson described as 'the priceless gift of vitality'. Mr Acheson, who was Truman's secretary of state, said this was his most inspiring quality as a leader. In describing Truman's impact, he quoted from Shakespeare's Henry V the night before Agincourt:

'. . . every wretch pining and pale before,

Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks,

His liberal eye doth give to everyone,

A little touch of Harry in the night.'

This 'little touch of Harry' is clearly what the US economy needs and the electorate wants.

(Photograph omitted)