Harrying Truman

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

America was not buying the President's health-insurance plan, the one that guaranteed every citizen "ready access to all necessary medical, hospital and related services." The populace held him partly responsible for the economy, which looked good on paper but not at the grocery store. But mostly, it appeared, his fellow citizens simply disdained him. So much that the 87% approval rating he enjoyed after taking over was down to 32%. So much that when the midterm election approached, his party leaders implored him not to campaign. So much that his party got trounced anyway, reversing its long- standing majorities in both houses of Congress. Crowed one Senator who suddenly found himself in the majority: "The United States is now a Republican country." The year was 1946. The President was Harry S Truman.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., adviser and historian of Presidents, notes dryly, "I'm sure everyone in the White House is studying the Truman experience." A few months ago, in fact, it seemed that the entire Administration was reading David McCullough's Pulitzer-winning biography Truman. They are no | doubt reviewing pages 525 through 719, which offer the cautionary tale of the last Democratic President to scare away so many midterm voters that he ended up facing a hostile Congress followed by a fairy-tale sequel for the Democrats: the same President riding that very Congress, which he called "the do-nothing" 80th, to his epic come-from-behind victory in 1948.

It was an ebullient age of bebop and charades and Sea Breezes and the new cellophane-wrapped cigarette packages; of returning soldiers and their wives conceiving the first baby boomers; of the goods and services that grew up around those families, from Levittown to Dr. Spock's baby book to frozen orange juice. But 1946 was a troubled time for Truman. His failed health plan was just a small part of an ambitious attempt to continue Franklin D. Roosevelt's activist domestic agenda. Truman found himself blocked by Roosevelt's nemesis: a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. The economy, although sound, was plagued by a black market and strikes. A meat shortage was so bad that House Speaker Sam Rayburn dubbed the 1946 debacle "a damned 'beefsteak election!' " But '46 was also, says Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley, "a referendum on Truman," whom contemporaries regarded as too small-town, too intellectually limited and too amiable to command "the fearsome respect" that should attend his office. They couldn't vote him out, so they voted the 80th Congress in.

Like the Republicans this week, the 80th entered barking furiously: a conference of leaders promised to slash $10 billion from the budget, lower taxes and repeal all social and welfare legislation passed since 1932. The freshmen that year included a crowd of eager red baiters, including Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. But the 80th's bite was surprisingly mild. The aid of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican, assured passage of Truman foreign policy initiatives from the Marshall Plan to containment of the Soviets to the recognition of Israel. Domestically, Truman suffered some stinging rebukes, most famously the override of his veto of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act. Yet the 80th passed his consolidation of the military services and some other major bills, and the threatened welfare "repeal" never materialized. The 80th was contentious but not remarkable.

It took Truman to immortalize it with his "give 'em hell" strategy. William Manchester, in his book The Glory and the Dream, records that "the first tactic was to hit the Hill every Monday with a popular proposal ((the Republicans)) were sure to table." Armed with that record, the no longer amiable Truman initiated the famous railroad tour that was named when Senator Robert Taft complained that the President was "blackguarding Congress at whistle-stops all over the country." The master stroke followed: when the Republicans put out an ambitious party platform in June, Truman immediately convened a special session of Congress and challenged them to pass their own plan. They refused; and he "do-nothinged" them all the way to his famous photograph, holding up the Chicago Daily Tribune's incorrect front page.

If you're a Clintonite, the parallels are tempting. For red baiters, read religious right. For the Republicans' ill-fated platform, read Newt Gingrich's brash "Contract with America." For the amiable, unrespected Missourian, read an affable Arkansan. But scholars counsel caution. The economy had ironed itself out by '48, notes Columbia's Brinkley, whereas today the public is experiencing "the kind of frustrations that are not likely to be alleviated very easily."

More important, says historian Michael Beschloss, "in 1946 the majority of Americans were Democrats. There was mass national support for the New Deal program. So the election of '46 turned out to be more of a deviating election." Bu he continues, "We are in a very conservative period now. If the Republicans pass their program and their program works, it could confirm them as the definite majority party in this country for the next generation." That would leave Clinton's 1992 election as the deviation -- and history refusing to repeat itself.

With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York