The Year of Indecision, 1946: A Tour Through the Crucible of Harry Truman’s America

Though WWII has come to be known as the “good war” fought by the “Greatest Generation,” such shorthand would have baffled most Americans in 1946, as Weisbrode (Churchill and the King), a diplomatic and cultural historian, shows in this free-flowing meditation on postwar attitudes. Never quite measuring up (in his own mind or others) to aristocratic Franklin Roosevelt, Truman is shown to be able, industrious, conniving, and thin-skinned. The man from Missouri vacillates all too often, but is saved by good advisors. Observing the politics, society, and culture of the time, Weisbrode pronounces Truman as emblematic of the period’s “unsure mood.” Yet, the author perhaps drinks too deeply at the well of revisionism, judging Truman to be “overrated” without making a clean case for such a pronouncement while veering tangentially into such topics as the cultural milieu of New York and writers of the period. Weisbrode is an astute critic of the political headwinds whipped up by McCarthyite witch hunts for domestic communists, and his excellent analysis of the psychology of the fear of communism delves into other social dislocations that are remarkably similar to more current attitudes. This is a provocative, if meandering, study of a turbulent period in American history. Agent: Alexander Hoyt, Alexander Hoyt Associates. (Mar.)