In recent years, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been favorably compared to Harry Truman.
In Bush’s case, his supporters hope his legacy gradually improves over time — just as Truman’s popularity increased after he left office. Obama’s supporters, conversely, hope he can mimic Truman’s surprise 1948 victory, in which he campaigned against a “do nothing” Republican Congress.
Interestingly, though, it is not a sitting or former president, but instead, a candidate for president whose background most closely resembles that of the late president.
Perry, like Truman, left the farm as a young man to seek new adventures, only to later return to the farm farm to work for a demanding dad.
As a young man, Truman moved to Kansas City and worked as a bank clerk. But when his father’s investments in grain markets went belly up, Harry was summoned back to the 600-acre family farm near Grandview, Missouri. There, he would work grueling days along side his dad.
Truman’s home in Grandview didn’t have running water. “I grew up in a house that didn’t have running water,” Texas Governor Rick Perry told me in an interview prior to his run for president.
The work on the farm wasn’t easy, and Truman’s father was demanding. As David McCullough recalls in his book, Truman: “John Truman was a perfectionist, intolerant of sloppy work from anyone, especially one of his sons.”
Truman would later leave the farm for good when he departed to serve in World War I with the Missouri National Guard.
In Perry’s case, he returned to the family farm after having served as a pilot in the Air Force. During that time, he lived in South America and Europe.
“After I got back to the farm, I was a little bored,” Perry confessed during our interview. “Going from being an aircraft commander…to cultivating cotton…I went from about 120 down to a pretty pedestrian pace over night.”
Truman must have felt the same way. “… what a comedown it must have been for Harry Truman to go back to the farm after having lived in Kansas City,” speculated McCollough. ” He had been happy in the city …”
“My dad looked at me as still that 17, 18-year old kid who had left home, immature,” Perry said, recalling how things were when he first returned to the farm after his days in the Air Force.
“I’d been in command of a rather substantial piece of equipment that the United States Air Force trusted me to take off and travel all around the world and be in command of this crew and bring them home safely, he said. “And I’m back at the farm as a 27 year old, and my dad is still thinking I’m 17…so for about the first six months we knocked heads…”
Despite the hard farm work foisted upon them by their fathers, Truman and Perry both owe their introduction to politics to their dads. The Truman family entered politics when John Truman was appointed local road overseer in 1912. In this capacity, he was responsible for collecting road taxes and seeing to it that roads were maintained.
Perry’s dad was a long-serving Democratic county commissioner and school board member.
Despite the ups and downs, both men had tremendous respect for their dads. Years after his dad’s death, when asked if his father had been a “failure,” Truman responded, saying: “How could he be a failure if his son became President of the United States?”
Likewise, Perry told me that upon returning to the farm that he “realized that my dad got really smart over those ten years that I’d been gone.”
Both men also knew their wives in elementary school. Perry is married to his childhood sweetheart — a girl he knew since elementary school. Harry and Bess Truman attended grade school together, though they didn’t begin their courtship until almost a decade after graduating high school.
For a variety of reasons, of course, this is not a perfect analogy. Truman, for example, was a senator and vice president while Perry is a governor. Nobody would argue Perry is just like Truman. But when it comes to their formative years, Perry and Truman share similar backgrounds.