United States Military Academy

The United States Military Academy, known in the book as West Point, is linked to Harry S. Truman’s unrealized military ambitions and, much later, to a cheating scandal that distressed him. The Academy’s appearances are brief but sharply contrasted: first it represents a future Truman hoped to enter; later, its cadets’ conduct left him dismayed.

Truman’s Early Ambition

As a high-school student preparing to graduate in 1901, Truman hoped to attend the United States Military Academy. He and Fielding Houchens, who aspired to attend the Naval Academy, took extra history lessons with Miss Margaret Phelps while preparing for the entrance examinations. Truman imagined a military career and thought he might become a general, although the book also describes him as bookish, inexperienced in fighting, and afraid of guns.

The Academy rejected Truman because of his eyesight. His father’s financial troubles then made college unaffordable. Truman briefly enrolled in an accounting course at a commercial college in Kansas City, but its cost forced him to leave that too. He went to work, first in a newspaper mailroom and then as a construction timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad. The rejected application therefore marks the close of an intended path at a moment when family circumstances were also narrowing his options.

A Later Disappointment

In the summer of 1951, the book returns to the Academy through news that ninety cadets, including a large part of the Army football team, had been expelled for cheating on examinations. Truman was sickened by the scandal and said it discouraged him more than anything had in a long time. Learning that other colleges were offering places to the dismissed football players made him feel worse.

Place in the Narrative

The two episodes frame the Academy through Truman’s changing position in relation to it. As a teenager, he was an outsider prevented by his eyesight from pursuing admission; as President, he encountered the institution through a public breach of its examination rules. The account supplies little about the Academy’s organization or daily life, but these moments show its personal importance to Truman and the force of the cadet scandal on his judgment.