President Truman and Peter the Great's Will

The lies are beginning to be solidified into historical ‘facts.’ Let's head them off now while we can. The truth is all I want for history. If I appear in a bad light when we have the truth, that's just too bad….But I don't want a pack of lying, so-called historians to do to Roosevelt and to me what the New Englanders did to Jefferson and Jackson. President Harry S Truman's fascination with history is legendary. “Reading history,” he wrote, “was far more than a romantic adventure. It was solid instruction and wise teaching…. While still a boy I could see that history had some extremely valuable lessons to teach.”2 Truman read history all his life, and his Memoirs are punctuated with numerous references to historical “lessons,” which, he said, influenced presidential decisions.3 He often used history to guide him, remembering how Abraham Lincoln dealt with recalcitrant generals, trying to avoid Woodrow Wilson's errors with Congress, making sure that he would not become another Andrew Johnson. The 1930s proved to Truman that good intentions and a small army could not deter totalitarian aggression. Yet scholars have noted that Truman's historical views were those of an amateur—too dependent on the biographies of “great men” and sometimes simplistic in their analogies.4 Moreover, as Presidential Assistant George Elsey has observed: “I don't think his knowledge of European history was very deep; he had not paid too much attention to European history.”5