Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

A historical revision of Harry Truman has been underway for some time. Historians are now smiling at the 33rd President. His was an accidental presidency, and his contemporaries, the political swamp of his day, did not like accidents. The more things change, as the French say, the more they remain the same. Victor David Hanson -- a classicist historian and the author of “ The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won ,” in addition to “ A War Like No Other ,” the best and most riveting account of the Peloponnesian War  (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta -- has written the best short account of the Truman presidency for The Washington Times . Anti-Trumpists will be spooked by the title and subtitle: “Truman as a model for Donald Trump: The outsider president succeeds because of what he does, and in spite of what he says.”

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” The saying was attributed to President Harry Truman by a playwright, but just because Truman may not have coined the phrase does not make it any the less true. Washington DC can be a cutthroat corner of the world. This is not to say that all well-mannered pols have cashed in their chips and left the casino in the hands of brutes. Some U.S. Senators still feel that politics should not be a murderous affair. If you do catch your enemy in a compromising position, it would be prudent to leave open a back door through which he might escape with his honor intact. Your enemy will appreciate the graceful gesture and, perhaps in some future encounter, pause and consider before he draws the knife across your throat”  

Political friendships, as we all know, are not long-lived. They usually end when the political clock runs out and the favored politician, putting active politics behind him, enters into history. Hillary Clinton's time as an active politician – one who may run for public office again – is over; so at least she says. Her political friends, attentive while she was an active politician – a First Lady, a Senator from New York, a Secretary of State in the Obama administration -- will now recede into the background. Political friendships are temporary at best. Those politicians who prefer public adulation to the adulation of their wives and children, are trading permanent friendships for part-time working relationships; for that is what a successful marriage is – a permanent friendship, more reliable and steadfast than the affections of lobbyists or partisan political comrades.

   One of the founders of the American Republic, James Madison, wrote in Federalist No. 57 that the U.S. Congress would not likely frame laws that would be injurious to the general public because the members of Congress also would be affected by the same laws. The Congress, he wrote, “can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.” But the U.S. Congress, the Marie Antoinette of legislatures, has long since learned how to escape laws that members of Congress inflict upon others.