"Maybe I Wouldn't Be Pres."

"Stalin," said Harry Truman at the Potsdam Conference, "is as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know." Reminiscing later, he added: "I got the impression that Stalin would stand by his agreements, and also that he had a Politburo on his hands like the 80th Congress."

By that time it was apparent that Uncle Joe was not so much like Uncle Tom as Harry Truman once thought, and the Politburo was a lot more subservient than the balky 80th Congress. While Harry Truman cast his mind back over the years, onetime White House Aide Jonathan Daniels listened carefully and jotted down everything he heard. One day last July, Author Daniels walked into the President's oval study and offered him a look at the completed manuscript. Harry Truman refused the offer; he would wait for the printed copy, he said. Last week an advance copy of The Man of Independence (Lippincott; $3.75) lay on the President's desk and Harry Truman was busily thumbing through it in his spare time.

Old Frame, New Portrait. Biographer Daniels, once press secretary for Franklin Roosevelt, sometime adviser to Harry Truman and editor of the famed Raleigh, N.C. News and Observer, had stretched his 384-page portrait of the 32nd U.S. President on a familiar frame--the early years on a Missouri farm, Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, the early political adventures under the auspices of Kansas City Boss Tom Pendergast. But after his long talks with Harry Truman and some energetic digging in the old, hard-packed subsoil of the President's Missouri past, he had filled out the canvas with more facts about the Man of Independence, his background and his recollections than have ever gotten onto paper before.

Even in the flattering light in which Daniels saw his subject, Harry Truman's early ventures made a bleak picture of bad luck and costly failure. There was, of course, the Kansas City haberdashery. Daniels also sets down for the first time the full and painful record of Harry Truman's other hit & miss schemes.

Deep Hole, No Oil. There was the $7,500 he sank into a worn-out zinc mine in 1916. He helped organize and sell stock in an oil company which dissolved in two years. Too late, he and his partners discovered that they had stopped drilling only 900 feet short of the strike which turned into the rich Teter oilfield, in Greenwood County, Kans. Said the President years later, in a letter to a partner in that venture: "Maybe I wouldn't be Pres. if we'd hit."

Time after time, the Grandview, Mo. farmland owned by Harry Truman's mother was plastered with mortgages, and in 1940, when her son was a U.S. Senator, she was foreclosed out of the place. Harry and his brother Vivian bought it back from the county later, and the doughty old woman was able to live out her last few years on the land she loved.

"I Fired Him." In his later, more successful years, Harry Truman's troubles were of a different sort. Author Daniels got the President's own recollection of the firing of Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace for his be-nicer-to-Russia speech in 1946: "I called Wallace in ... We made an agreement as to what he would say to straighten the thing out ... He went out and gave out an interview diametrically opposed to what he had agreed to do. The next day I fired him."

On the resignation of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, in 1947, the President had an equally succinct report: "He failed miserably as Secretary of State and ran out on me ... when I needed him worst. His 'bad heart' has now left him when he has found that he made a bad guess [on the 1948 election]. So he and old Baruch have joined the McCormicks, Hearsts and Scripps-Howards to discredit me. They will not succeed." The President thought Byrnes had been too soft to Russia at the Moscow foreign ministers' meeting in December 1945. "Byrnes got the real riot act after Moscow," Mr. Truman recalled. "I told him our policy was not appeasement and not a one-way street."

Bosses & Dictators. To sympathetic Author Daniels, Harry Truman also unburdened himself on a number of other subjects:

On replacing Roosevelt's Cabinet with his own men--"I don't know how I ever got out of that mudhole."

On dictatorships--"A dictatorship is the hardest thing in God's world to hold together because it is made up entirely of conspiracies from the inside."

On Tom Pendergast--"If he had died that summer [during a serious operation for cancer in 1936] ... he would have been remembered as the greatest boss this country ever had."

On public office--"County judge, chairman, of a committee, President of the U.S., they are all the same kind of jobs. It is the business of dealing with people."

On hindsight--"Churchill had tried to get me not to withdraw our troops from Prague. I told him we were bound to do that by our agreements with the Russians. But if I had known then what I know now, I would have ordered the troops to go to the western boundaries of Russia."

One other comment might cause a certain wry amusement in professional political circles. Said Harry Truman to Biographer Daniels: "I never in my life ran for a political office that I wanted."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.