Harrying Truman

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.