Harold I. Gullan

During the presidential campaign of 1992, as he faced a number of polls indicating that he was behind the front-runner Bill Clinton, President George H.W. Bush made a point of noting that he was reading David McCullough's recently-published biography of Harry Truman. Such an association didn't help Bush that year, but it did demonstrate Truman's standing in American politics as the patron saint of come-from-behind political campaigns for his success in defying nearly everyone's expectations in 1948 by defeating the expected victor, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and winning the presidency in his own right.

Yet while this view has been cemented into the American political consciousness, Harold Gullan argues that it is simply untrue. In this concise examination of the president and his campaign Gullan argues that the election was Truman's to lose. Drawing upon a wide range of published works, he makes a case that Truman benefited from a number of underlying advantages, such as a booming economy, international challenges, and a population that was still firmly Democratic in its allegiance. In this respect, Truman's aggressive "whistle-stop" campaign succeeded by mobilizing these voters with reminders of why they had supported his party since the Great Depression, often by juxtaposing Truman's positions with those of the unpopular Republican Congress.

Gullan's book offers a provocative reinterpretation of one of the longstanding shibboleths of American history. Because of his dependency on secondary sources, however, Gullan's analysis of the Democratic campaign effort -- one of the linchpins of his argument -- is lacking. Without the details of the organization and his contributions, his effort falls short of the dramatic revision of our understanding of this famous event. It's a book that anyone interested in this iconic event should read for its arguments, yet one that requires support before we transform Truman's legendary victory into an "upset that wasn't."… (mehr)