He had never gone to college and had failed at business upon returning from World War I. But in Washington, he got reassurance: “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Senator Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, the number two Democratic leader, said one day after taking a seat next to him. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”
Truman never did learn how to spell. Occasion was “occation.” Senator Byrnes was “Senator Burns.” “Hawaii” was hopeless. He couldn’t even spell the name of the street he lived on in Independence, Missouri. It was forever “Deleware” Street to him.
But he remembered names. He remembered what the real people he knew cared about, what their kids were doing in life, to whom they were related. He came across as the man he really was—a regular fellow who just as easily could be standing behind the counter when you went to buy a new pair of socks. Yet, from the moment he took the oath of office, this owlish little country gentleman with the thick glasses and high, flat voice had the power of life and death in his hands.
The important thing is how Harry Truman always, as president, had the guts to do what he thought was right. When Moscow closed off Berlin in 1948, he created the “airlift” that saved the city. When North Korea invaded South Korea, he backed a United Nations campaign to resist and throw back the invaders. It was an unpopular war, but he knew he had to fight it.
The result was, when he left office, he had a dismal Gallup Poll job approval of 23 percent. Tough decisions don’t always make friends.
That judgment would change in time. Today Harry Truman stands as one of the great presidents. He is hugely respected both among Democrats and their opposite numbers. In fact, he is hands down every rock-ribbed Republican’s favorite Democrat of the twentieth century.
The biographer David McCullough has captured Truman best: “He was the kind of president the founding fathers had in mind for the country. He came directly from the people. He was America.” Senator Adlai Stevenson III, son of the two-time Democratic presidential candidate, called Truman “an object lesson in the vitality of popular government; an example of the ability of this society to yield up, from the most unremarkable origins, the most remarkable men.”
The Appeal of the “Common Man”
The innate resourcefulness of the little guy is the irresistible notion behind such movies as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Dave. Even though he’s put in the White House as an impostor, Dave does the right thing. He proposes legislation to ensure that every American is guaranteed a chance to work. Dave also wins our heart by having the guts to fire the White House chief of staff who gave him the outrageously illegal gig in the first place—impersonating the real president who’s being kept in a vegetative state somewhere in the bowels of the executive mansion’s basement.
It’s a fantasy of the most delightful sort, especially for us political junkies.
“America has been very busy the last couple of centuries developing a strange and complex notion about its ideal,” the film historian Donald Spoto has written, “someone called the Common Man.” He’s talking about Rick Blaine, Jeff Smith, Dave Kovic, Harry Truman. “You know who this common man is: the ordinary guy next door. He’s patriotic and idealistic, but not heroic, unless he’s pushed too far, and then heroism is usually an accident.”
When an imaginative and—let’s face it—patriotic Hollywood scriptwriter puts his own spin on the glorious ordinariness of the common man risen to the occasion, this is what we get:
DAVE: See, there are certain things you should expect from a president. I ought to care more about you than I do about me . . . I ought to care more about what’s right than I do about what’s popular . . . I ought to be willing to give this whole thing up for something I believe in . . .
This is exactly—exactly—what the American public wants from its presidents, even if we’ve somehow managed to keep our expectations lowered.
The thought that a “common man” might be found to lead the country was very much alive in 2000. But there wasn’t one running. Vice President Al Gore had traveled the world, hung out with leaders from Tabo Mbeki to Hosni Mubarak. During the course of the presidential debates he even invoked the name of the health minister of Ghana.
But a presidential election is not a matter of international name-dropping any more than it’s a spelling bee (lucky for Truman!). For the American people, it’s a matter of which candidate they feel more comfortable with, more connected to. Gore had the issues down pat and George W. Bush often floundered. One knew a lot, the other knew enough.
So who did we want?
It turned out not to be a contest of credentials. Had it been, Al Gore would have cleaned Bush’s clock and be halfway through his first term. But he couldn’t convince anyone anywhere that he was a regular guy. A plurality of people voted for him. Most voters just didn’t want to hang out with him for four years.
CHAPTER 6
Underdogs
David is still getting good PR for beating Goliath.
REPUBLICAN POLITICAL STRATEGIST
LEE ATWATER
Rocky took America by storm in the late autumn of 1976. It’s the story of a thirty-year-old “bum” from Philadelphia who gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot at greatness. At theaters across the country, audiences stood up as it ended—many with tears in their eyes—and applauded, helping this underdog of a movie become one of the most successful films of all time.
The tag line in the ad campaign for Rocky—“His whole life was a million-to-one shot”—echoes the biography of its star, Sylvester Stallone. Before he wrote the screenplay in three days, this underemployed young actor had submitted thirty-two scripts to Hollywood producers without a single green light. This did not keep the unknown Stallone from demanding the right to play the title role.
The plot of Rocky is basic. But that’s all that’s necessary. A has-been Philadelphia boxer, Rocky Balboa, gets an opportunity out of nowhere. The World Heavyweight Champion, Apollo Creed, has come to town for a heavily hyped bout with a serious contender. But a training accident has scratched his rival from the card. With the arena rented and the date scheduled, the promoters decide to cut their losses by giving a local guy a shot at the title.
Even before the opening credits are finished, we have seen that Rocky is anything but heroic. Living in a one-room dump in North Philly, he’s an over-the-hill palooka who makes his living as a soft-hearted enforcer for the local “numbers” rackets.
The movie magic comes when he begins to transform himself into someone who can be a contender.
Flash forward to the fifteenth round. Rocky, barely conscious after the beating he has taken, begs his manager to open up his swollen eye so he can see enough to finish the fight.
“Cut me!” he demands.
In the other corner, the champion is so angry at his humiliating inability to pummel this nobody into submission that he refuses to let the fight be declared a technical knockout owing to the other man’s condition.
“You ain’t stoppin’ nothin’, man,” he sneers at his cornerman.
At the final bell, both boxers are wrecked, able to do nothing but hang on to each other. The judges rule a split decision: two votes for the champion, one for the challenger. Rocky Balboa is no longer a “bum” but a hero who, on one unforgettable night in his hometown, took on the champion of the world and gave him a fight.
As Sylvester Stallone explained “when they’re cheering for Rocky, they’re cheering for themselves.” This is a country that has become used to winning, but remains emotionally invested in the underdog.
Back in the very beginning, the United States itself was a longshot. In 1778, the British forces included fifty thousand regular troops and more than thirty thousand German mercenaries. George Washington never had more than twenty thousand men under his command.
Yet we won. Here we are to prove it.
The secret is that, though t
he Royal army won battle after battle, the Americans never really lost. The rebels kept coming at them, bolstered by their countrymen’s fervor and relying on savvy back-country stratagems learned during the French and Indian War.
Today, remembering its own origins, if only subconsciously, America continues its romance with the underdog, its infatuation with the guy who’s not supposed to win.
Rumble in the Jungle
In 1974, Muhammad Ali was supposed to be killed by George Foreman at four o’clock in the morning, Zaire time. The fighter who once bragged he could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee” was now a decade older and facing a fighter whose punches were stronger and faster.
But let’s go back a little further: when Cassius Clay fought the ex-convict Sonny Liston, then heavyweight champion, nobody thought Liston had anything to worry about from this Louisville kid who’d won in the Olympics. No one so far had even given Liston a fight, certainly not Floyd Patterson, the champ he’d demolished to gain the title.
Before facing Clay, Liston issued the usual blustering prefight threats. In fact, reported fight buff George Plimpton, “public sentiment was for Liston, a Mob-controlled thug, to take care of the lippy upstart. Liston concurred, saying he was going to put his fist so far down his opponent’s throat, he was going to have trouble removing it.”
But the kid won and changed the world of boxing. He also changed his name. Joining the Nation of Islam, he became Muhammad Ali. When people criticized this decision, he retorted, “I don’t have to be what you want me to be; I’m free to be what I want.”
In 1967, he rebelled again, refusing to accept induction into the U.S. Army. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he said, and declared that his Muslim religion taught him that the fighting in Vietnam was immoral. Charged with draft evasion, he lost his boxing title.
For more than three years, at the peak of his boxing fitness, he was prevented by the government from fighting. Yet when a Russian reporter goaded him with questions about the plight of American blacks, Ali refused to allow himself to be exploited. “Man, the USA is the best country in the world, counting yours.”
When the Supreme Court ruled in Ali’s favor, allowing him to fight again, he faced the new champ Joe Frazier, and lost. Meanwhile a ferocious George Foreman knocked out Frazier in two rounds. Ali went up against Frazier for the second time in early 1974. This time he won, gaining the right to face Foreman for the championship later that year. Yet no one who cared about boxing could take any joy in an Ali-Foreman match-up.
Thanks to the documentary When We Were Kings, we have a stirring record of that historic Foreman-Ali fight.
In it, Ali appears to approach the fight with characteristic braggadocio, yet something is odd about the way he’s training. Norman Mailer, whose commentary is heard in When We Were Kings, paid notice: “He would go against the rope and he would let people punch him, very heavy hitters who were sort of clumsy. He’d let them bang away at him. It was as if he wanted to train his body to receive this message of punishment.”
In the first round, Ali went on the attack, trying to knock out the larger, stronger Foreman. Not a smart move. “He was in the ring with a man he could not dominate, who was stronger than him, who was not afraid of him, who was gonna try to knock him out, and who punched harder than Ali could punch,” Mailer recalled. “Ali had a look on his face that I’ll never forget. It was the only time that I ever saw fear in Ali’s eyes.”
But as the rounds wore on, with the contender on the ropes and the champ pounding away, Foreman became more and more tired. In the fifth, Ali began to attack, landing solid punches to Foreman’s head. Foreman’s arms were too tired to block the punches. By round eight, Ali was landing hard rights on Foreman. After three connected, Ali fired a right at his opponent’s jaw that sent Foreman to the floor and kept him there for the 10-count.
The “Rumble in the Jungle” turned Muhammad Ali into a national icon. Even those who hated his name change, questioned his religious conversion, and condemned his refusal to join the army knew they had seen something truly transcendent. A man of lesser power had beaten his terrifying rival using his wits, his guile, and his guts.
Oprah Winfrey
She was born in segregated Mississippi to unmarried parents and raised dirt poor by her grandmother. Today, Oprah Winfrey is one of the most influential women in America.
According to her biographer George Mair, Oprah’s poor Mississippi childhood with her grandmother was “a solitary routine filled with daily farm chores . . . without playmates, television, or toys except for a corncob doll.” Her mother worked as a maid far away in Milwaukee, and had trouble making ends meet. Later, after moving to be with her mother, Oprah lived in tight quarters, sharing a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee with her mother, half-siblings, and other relatives.
As Oprah grew older, her life did not get better. Terrible things happened: She was raped by an older male relative. She struggled in school, and rebelled at home. Her mother tried to force her into a home for wayward teens. Finally, Oprah was sent to Nashville to live with her father.
Her years in Nashville made the difference. A lonely child who’d spent a lot of time reading and educating herself, she now gained enough confidence to enter a few local beauty contests, including one that won her a scholarship to Tennessee State University. She also landed a radio station job reading the news. By the end of her sophomore year at TSU, she had been hired as Nashville’s first black female television news anchor.
Winfrey’s next move was to Baltimore, where she anchored the six o’clock news on television. Next came a job in Chicago, where she hosted a morning program called A.M. Chicago. Before long it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 1986, it went national.
Once The Oprah Winfrey Show entered national syndication, it took off. Its star became a household name around the globe. She has parlayed her success into a half-billion-dollar enterprise. She was named to Time’s list of the hundred most important people of the century. Yet she has remained in her heart the girl whose chances for such glory were hardly assured. Never doubting her own abilities or doing anything other than exulting in her own triumphs, she nonetheless knows exactly how she’s linked to her millions of viewers.
“The reason I communicate with all these people is because I think I’m every woman and I’ve had every malady and I’ve been on every diet and I’ve had men who have done me wrong, honey. So I related to all of that. And I’m not afraid or ashamed to say it,” Winfrey once explained.
“What I’m trying to do with the show,” she told another questioner, “is to get people to see where they are stuck and be able to live up to whatever is their human potential.”
Winfrey understands brilliantly the power she possesses. Her intelligence, along with her compassion, has made her brand of television the gold standard.
Even the men running for president of the United States in 2000 couldn’t avoid her. Both showed up in her studio, and it’s arguable that Bush’s appearance boosted him in the polls.
“Like many, many memorable guests before him, Bush cried on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Talking about when his wife Laura became toxemic while carrying their twins, his eyes became wet and continued to glisten even after the following commercial break. And so, if Al Gore went on Oprah last week to prove he was a real person,” wrote Salon’s David Skinner, “George W. Bush proved he was a real Oprah guest, which is even better.”
This is Winfrey’s great discovery about America. A country that loves to win has, to its great moral credit, never stopped rooting for the underdog. As that canny Republican campaign strategist, the late Lee Atwater, once noted, “David is still getting good PR for beating Goliath.”
CHAPTER 7
The Lone Hero
Injun will chase a thing till he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. Same way when he runs. Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter who’ll just keep comin’.
ET
HAN EDWARDS, THE SEARCHERS
America doesn’t fit in with other countries. In good times, we like to go it our own way. But even when we join the posse—think of World War II and the Persian Gulf campaign—we want to do it on our own terms. We’re willing to take on sidekicks as long as we get to be the trail boss.
This first-among-equals mentality of ours may explain the strange kind of hero we tend to celebrate. He’s almost never what you’d call “one of the boys.” More often he’s a loner who arrives out of nowhere, saves the day, then disappears again over the horizon. While he may have a mysterious or even dark past, he comes equipped with the courage and generosity to do what other men can’t.
Yet he’s the hero or nothing. No other role would suit him.
The Searchers
John Ford’s The Searchers, I think—and I’m hardly alone in this—is the best Western ever made. It’s a story that cuts close to the American bone, revealing to us the kind of dark hero that we are drawn to again and again. These are men who reflect back at us the shocking hardness buried deep in our own souls.
In The Searchers, John Wayne plays the Texan Ethan Edwards, a rough-hewn fellow who’s fought on the losing side of the Civil War. Returning to his brother’s ranch, he soon joins a party of local ranchers lured from the homestead to chase Comanche cattle rustlers.
The next scene, after Ethan and the others ride off, is as close to being both nightmare and reality as you’re likely to encounter in a lifetime of movie going. As night falls, Ethan’s brother realizes too late that the cattle rustling was just a ruse that would leave his family unprotected. In the approaching darkness, he, his wife, and two daughters can hear the Comanches signaling to each other—and know that they are doomed.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 172
