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Publication Date 3-13-08 I lead a good life. Seriously. I mean, I know I'm bald and that I've fallen badly behind in the getting-rich-sweepstakes, and we could all name another half-dozen or so reasons why an outside, impartial observer might assume my life isn't that hot, but I don't think you could convince me. This week we headed 500 miles straight south. A college in southeast Nebraska asked me to speak at an annual event. Now, I like kids, and I like kids from farms and small towns best of all, so this opportunity seemed like a good time in the making. And then a week before we left, my wife, after looking at maps of the area, asked, “Do you realize how close we'll be to Independence, Missouri?” Well, no I didn't - until I looked at a map myself. And to make a long story short, we headed out two days early so we could check out Harry Truman's home town. It was an easy drive. As I said, 500 miles straight south and we were there. We stopped in Kansas City and ate barbecued prime rib for supper. It was good. I mean, it was so good it almost had to be bad. I didn't even know such a thing existed, but baby, I'm a convert now. Just as a side note, the restaurant did have a couple of defibrillators by the cash register, a bypass surgeon on staff, and all the servers wore “Team Heimlich” t-shirts, but still, what a way to go. The next day we spent with Harry Truman. I'm a big Harry Truman fan and I thought I knew almost everything about him there was to know, but a park service guy said something that took me a little by surprise. He was showing us around the Truman home. Bess grew up in the house and she and Harry bought it from her mother's estate so they'd have a place to move back to when their White House days were over. It was a really nice old house, yet nothing spectacular. We looked around Independence quite a bit and decided it was probably about the fifth nicest place in town. So, nice - but certainly nothing most people would think of as “presidential.” What the ranger said made perfect sense. “The years when Harry was president, after WWII, America had the biggest and best armed forces in the world and, of course, America was the only country to have the atom bomb and President Truman was the person who could say when, where, and if the bomb would be dropped. That made Harry Truman the most powerful man in the history of the world, and he gave that all up and moved back to the same small town where he grew up and he lived there happily until he died.” We live in a world where singers and movie stars seem to lose their brains, not to mention a sense of perspective, as soon as they hit it big, a world where presidents retire and immediately start to cash in on the lecture circuit, where elected officials get voted out of office and move right into jobs as lobbyists making ten times the money. Truman did none of those things. In 1953, he was offered a salary of half a million dollars a year just to let a company put his name on their letterhead (and that was before ex-presidents received a pension of any kind). He turned it down flat. He had the same friends and neighbors throughout his life. Yet, at the same time, he knew who he was, and what he'd done. He saw himself as just one in a long line of presidents, he'd been given a chance to sit in the same position as Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, and he knew many presidents would take the office after him. He took great pride in turning it over undiminished and untarnished. The world hasn't seen many Harry Trumans - and it will never see enough. Copyright 2008 Brent Olson
Brent Olson |
