When the Buck Stops With You: Harry S. Truman on Leadership

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Most experts on the American Presidency rank Truman among the greatest, a fact which would have astonished those old enough to remember when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died and Truman was sworn in as his successor. There was little in the background of "The Man from Missouri" to suggest that he was equal to the task during one of the most dangerous periods of his nation's history. World War Two was still in progress, what became the Cold War was developing, West Berlin would soon be isolated by the U.S.S.R.'s blockade, the Korean War lay ahead, and the quite legitimate threat of thermonuclear weapons created an unprecedented sense of menace throughout the civilized world. Truman did indeed rise to the task and as Axelrod correctly indicates in this volume, there are many important lessons to be learned from his leadership from 1945 until 1952.

Therefore, Truman seems a natural choice for the latest manual on leadership from Alan Axelrod. The author draws extensively from Truman's own public statements and private diaries to extract a series of 156 lessons on leadership, divided into a series of chapters with themes like "Hell: Giving and Getting" and "Do The Right Thing."Although primarily aimed at the business person, these lessons have value for anyone in a leadership role, including, of course, the poltical realm.

Truman's decisiveness, his high moral standards, his unwillingness to accept anything less than the best from himself or his colleagues all shine through in this work. A timeline helps place Truman's life in context, and the bibliography offers a number of potential sources for anyone with an intertest in further exploring the life and philosophy of our thirty-third president.--William C. Hall

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