Truman Loyalty Program

The Truman Loyalty Program is presented as one of the major mistakes of Harry S. Truman’s presidency, complicating any neat division between his consequential successes and lesser errors. The account identifies its significance as a large decision judged woefully wrong, but does not describe how the program operated or what consequences it produced.

Place in Truman’s Record

In a retrospective assessment, the program is grouped with Truman’s appointment of Louis Johnson and his high-handed seizure of the steel industry as major decisions that went wrong. Its inclusion makes clear that the loyalty program was not being treated as a minor lapse or an incidental administrative choice.

Retrospective Assessment

The judgment revises a frequently repeated characterization attributed to Samuel Rayburn: that Truman was right on all the big decisions and wrong on all the little ones. The loyalty program is a direct counterexample in the account’s reasoning, since it was both large in importance and seriously mistaken.

Historical Significance

The program’s place in this assessment gives the broader evaluation of Truman a more discriminating shape. The same passage distinguishes these failures from Truman’s restoration of Herbert Hoover to public service and esteem, which it regards as a generous and revealingly humane decision. The contrast resists reducing Truman’s record to a simple rule about the size of a decision: major choices could be wrong, while a comparatively small act could disclose an important quality of character.