RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW
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RIGHT THING,
RIGHT NOW
good values.
good character.
good deeds.
RYAN HOLIDAY
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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
Prole Books Ltd
29 Cloth Fair
London
EC1A 7JQ
www.prolebooks.com
First published in the United States by Portfolio,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
Copyright © Ryan Holiday, 2024
Book design by Daniel Lagin
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
e moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmied, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior wrien
permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78816 631 7
eISBN 978 1 78283 757 2
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Injustice is a kind of blasphemy. Nature designed rational
beings for each other’s sake: to help not harm one
another, as they deserve. To transgress its will, then, is to
blaspheme against the oldest of the gods.
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Contents
The Four Virtues xi
Introduction xvii
Part I: THE ME (PERSONAL)
To Stand Before Kings . . .
Keep Your Word
Tell the Truth
Take Responsibility
Be Your Own Referee
Good, Not Great
Be an Open Book
Be Decent
Do Your Job
Keep Your Hands Clean
Integrity Is Everything
Realize Your Potential
Be Loyal
Choose a North Star
Right Thing, Right Now
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Part II: THE WE (SOCIOPOLITICAL)
To You From Failing Hands We Throw the Torch . . .
You Just Have to Be Kind
See How the Other Half Lives
You Have to Help
Start Small
Create Alliances
Become Powerful
Practice Pragmatism
Develop Competence
Give, Give, Give
Grow a Coaching Tree
Look Out for the Little Guy
Make Good Trouble
Just Keep Going Back
Something Bigger Than Us . . .
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Part III: THE ALL (IS ONE)
To So Love the World . . .
Climb Your Second Mountain
Stop Asking for the Third Thing
Give Them Hope
Be an Angel
Forgive
Make Amends
The Great Oneness
Expand the Circle
Find the Good in Everyone
Give the Full Measure of Devotion
Love Wins
Pay It Forward
Afterword
Acknowledgments
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xi
The Four Virtues
I
t was long ago now that Hercules came to the crossroads.
At a quiet intersection in the hills of Greece, in the shade
of knobby pine trees, the great hero of Greek myth rst met his
destiny.
Where exactly it was or when, no one knows. We hear of this
moment in the stories of Socrates. We can see it captured in the
most beautiful art of the Renaissance. We can feel his budding
energy, his strapping muscles, and his anguish in the classic
Bach cantata. If John Adams had had his way, Hercules at the
crossroads would have been immortalized on the ocial seal of
the newly founded United States.
Because there, before his undying fame, before the twelve
labors, before he changed the world, Hercules faced a crisis, one
as life-changing and real as any of us have ever faced.
Where was he headed? Where was he trying to go? at’s the
point of the story. Alone, unknown, unsure, Hercules, like so
many, did not know.
Where the road diverged lay a beautiful goddess who oered
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RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW ThE FOUR VIRTUEs
him every temptation he could imagine. Adorned in nery, she
promised him a life of ease. She swore he’d never taste want or
unhappiness or fear or pain. Follow her, she said, and every de-
sire would be fullled.
On the other path stood a sterner goddess in a pure white
robe. She made a quieter call. She promised no rewards except
those that came as a result of hard work. It would be a long jour-
ney, she said. ere would be sacrice. ere would be scary
moments. But it was a journey t for a god, the way of his ances-
tors. It would make him the man he was meant to be.
Was this real? Did it really happen?
If it’s only a legend, does it maer?
Yes, because this is a story about us.
About our dilemma. About our own crossroads.
For Hercules the choice was between vice and virtue, the
easy way and the hard way, the well-trod path and the road less
traveled. e same goes for us.
Hesitating only for a second, Hercules chose the one that
made all the dierence.
He chose virtue.
“Virtue” can seem old-fashioned. In fact, virtuearete—
translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence.
Moral. Physical. Mental.
In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key com-
ponents.
Courage.
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ThE FOUR VIRTUEs RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW
Temperance.
Justice.
Wisdom.
e “touchstones of goodness,” the philosopher king Mar-
cus Aurelius called them. To millions, they’re known as the
“cardinal virtues,” four near-universal ideals adopted by Chris-
tianity and most of Western philosophy, but equally valued in
Buddhism, Hinduism, and just about every other philosophy
you can imagine. ey’re called “cardinal,” C. S. Lewis pointed
out, not because they come down from church authorities, but
because they originate from the Latin cardo, or hinge.
It’s pivotal stu. It’s the stu that the door to the good life
hangs on.
ey are also our topic for this book, and for this series.
Four books.* Four virtues.
One aim: to help you choose...
Courage, bravery, endurance, fortitude, honor, sacrice...
Temperance, self-control, moderation, composure, balance...
Justice, fairness, service, fellowship, goodness, kindness...
Wisdom, knowledge, education, truth, self-reection,
peace...
* is is book 3.
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RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW ThE FOUR VIRTUEs
ese are the key to the good life, a life of honor, of glory, of
excellence in every sense. Character traits, which John Steinbeck
perfectly described as “pleasant and desirable to [their] owner
and makes him perform acts of which he can be proud and
which he can be pleased.” But the he must be taken to mean all
of humankind. ere was no feminine version of the word virtus
in Rome. Virtue wasn’t male or female, it just was.
It still is. It doesn’t maer if you’re a man or a woman. It
doesn’t maer if you’re physically strong or painfully shy, a
genius or of average intelligence. Virtue is universal. e imper-
ative remains universal.
e virtues are interrelated and inseparable, yet each is dis-
tinct from the others. Doing the right thing almost always takes
courage, just as moderation is impossible without the wisdom
to know what is worth choosing. What good is courage if not
applied to justice? What good is wisdom if it doesn’t make us
more modest?
North, south, east, west—the four virtues are a kind of com-
pass (there’s a reason that the four points on a compass are called
the “cardinal directions”). ey guide us. ey show us where
we are and what is true.
Aristotle described virtue as a kind of cra, something to
pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill.
“We become builders by building and we become harpists by
playing the harp,” he writes. “Similarly, then, we become just by
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ThE FOUR VIRTUEs RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW
doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave
by doing brave actions.”
Virtue is something we do.
It’s something we choose.
Not once, for Hercules’s crossroads was not a singular event.
It’s a daily challenge, one we face not once but constantly, re-
peatedly. Will we be selsh or seless? Brave or afraid? Strong
or weak? Wise or stupid? Will we cultivate a good habit or a bad
one? Courage or cowardice? e bliss of ignorance or the chal-
lenge of a new idea?
Stay the same... or grow?
e easy way or the right way?
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xvii
Introduction
Justice, that brightest adornment of virtue by which a good
person gains the title of good.
T
he clearest evidence that justice is the most important of
all the virtues comes from what happens when you remove
it. It’s remarkably stark: e presence of injustice instantly
renders any act of virtue courage, discipline, wisdomany
skill, any achievement, worthless... or worse.
Courage in the pursuit of evil? A brilliant person with no
morals? Self- discipline to the point of perfect selshness? ere’s
an argument that if everyone acted with justice all the time, we
wouldn’t have so much need for courage. While discretion mod-
erates bravery and pleasure provides us relief from excessive
self- control, the ancients would point out that there is no virtue
to counterbalance justice.
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It just is.
It just is the whole point.
Of every virtue. Of every action. Of our very lives.
Nothing is right if we’re not doing what is right.
It probably says something about our world today, however,
that when people hear the word “justice,” their rst thought is
not of decency or duty but of the legal system. ey think at-
torneys. ey think politics. We are concerned with what’s law-
ful, we ght for “our rights” a lot more than what is right. It might
be too on the nose to call this an “indictment” of modern values,
but it’s hard to see it as anything else.
“Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on
in law courts,” C. S. Lewis would remind listeners in a famous
lecture series. “It is the old name for everything we should now
call ‘fairness’; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness,
keeping promises, and all that side of life.”
Very simple ideas, yet very rare indeed.
We need to understand that justice isn’t simply something
between a citizen and the state. Forget due process; what are
you doing? Stare decisis? Justice stares us in the face. Do we act
with it? Not only in big moments of responsibility but the lile
ones how we treat a stranger, how we conduct our business,
the seriousness with which we take our obligations, the way we
do our job, the impact we have on the world around us.
Of course, we love to debate justice. What is it? Whom do we
owe it to? Starting at childhood, nothing animates people more
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INTROdUcTION RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW
than an argument about fairness, about whether someone has
been screwed over or not, about whether we should be allowed
to do something. We love vexing hypotheticals, we’ll endlessly
debate the tricky exceptions to the rules, the moral consequences
that prove nobody is perfect.
Modern philosophy twists itself into knots over complicated
dilemmas like the so- called trolley problem or whether free will
exists. Historians debate the right and wrongness of the mili-
tary and political and business decisions that have shaped our
world, in one turn reveling in the ambiguities while in another
making sweeping black- and- white judgments about the end-
lessly gray.
As if these moral choices are clear and easy, or as if they are
one- os instead of ever present. As if we are the ones asking the
question, instead of life asking them of us.
Meanwhile, just in the rst few hours of the day, each and
every person has made dozens of ethical and moral decisions of
no small signicance, many of which we do not bother to give
even one- tenth of the consideration. As we think about what
we might do in some unlikely high- stakes situation, there exist
at any moment an innite number of opportunities to engage
with these ideas in a real way in real life. Naturally, we prefer
justice as an abstraction to distract from having to act however
imperfectly with justice.
Until we stop debating, we can’t start doing. We keep debat-
ing so we don’t have to start doing.
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RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW INTROdUcTION
JUSTICE AS A WAY OF LIFE
Earlier in this Stoic Virtues series, we dened courage as puing
our ass on the line, and self- discipline as geing your ass in line.
To continue this metaphor, we may dene justice as holding the
line— or drawing up our “Flat-Ass Rules,” to borrow a phrase
from the great General James Mais. at is, the line between
good and evil, right and wrong, ethical and unethical, fair and
unfair.
What you will do.
What you won’t.
What you must do.
How you do it.
Whom you do it for.
What you’re willing to give for them.
Is there a certain amount of relativity in all this? Does it
sometimes involve trade- os? Sure, sure, but somehow still in
practice, across the ages and across cultures, we nd a reassur-
ing amount of timelessness and universality a remarkable
amount of agreement about the right thing. You will notice that
the heroes in this book, for all their dierences of gender and
background, of war and peace, the powerful and the powerless,
presidents and the impoverished, activists to abolitionists, dip-
lomats to doctors are remarkably aligned in maers of con-
science and honor. Indeed, the tastes of human beings have
changed constantly over the centuries, yet a consensus remains:
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We admire those who keep their word. We hate liars and cheats.
We celebrate those who sacrice for the common good, abhor
those who grow rich or famous at the expense of others.
No one admires selshness. In the end, we despise evil and
greed and indierence.
Psychologists have reason to believe even infants can feel
and understand these notions, which is more evidence still that
“the hunger and the thirst for righteousness” is there within us
from our earliest days.
e “right thing” is complicated... but it’s also prey straight-
forward.
All the philosophical and religious traditions from Confu-
cius to Christianity, Plato to Hobbes and Kant revolve around
some version of the golden rule. In the rst century BC, Hillel,
the Jewish elder, was asked by a skeptic if he could summarize
the Torah while standing on one foot. In fact, he could do it in
ten words. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Hillel told the man.
“All the rest is commentary.”
Care about others.
Treat them as you would wish to be treated.
Not just when it’s convenient or recognized, but especially
when it isn’t.
Even when it’s not returned. Even when it costs you.
“e words of truth are simple and justice needs no subtle
interpretations, for it hath tness in itself,” the playwright Eurip-
ides said, “but the words of injustice, being roen in themselves,
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require clever treatment.” You know justice when you see it
or, on a more visceral level, you feel it, especially its absence and
its opposite.
A boy named Hyman Rickover came to America in 1906, his
family eeing the Jewish pogroms of Russia. He worked his way
through the US Naval Academy, where he was steeped in the
classical virtues. Over a long career, which stretched across thir-
teen presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan
Rickover quietly became one of the most powerful men in the
world, pioneering the idea of nuclear ships and submarines, ul-
timately heading programs responsible for billions of dollars
of machinery, tens of thousands of soldiers and workers, along
with weapons of enormous destructive potential. Across six de-
cades and global wars in which the threat of apocalyptic nuclear
conict was ever present, when even just an accident at a nuclear
facility or onboard a ship could have devastating consequences,
Rickover came to wield inuence over a generation of the best
and brightest ocers in the world.
Rickover sometimes told these future leaders that a person
should act as if the fate of the world rested on their shoulders
paraphrasing Confucius actuallyand this was something that
was, at times in his career, quite nearly true. But Rickover was
also just a regular human being, someone with a temper, some-
one with colleagues and subordinates, a spouse, a son, parents,
neighbors, bills to pay, trac to navigate. What guided him, what
he spoke about repeatedly in speeches and briengs, was the
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INTROdUcTION RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW
importance of this idea of a sense of right and wrong, a sense of
duty and honor that would guide a person through the innite
dilemmas and decisions they would nd themselves in. “Life is
not meaningless for the man who considers certain actions
wrong simply because they are wrong, whether or not they vio-
late the law,” he once explained. “is kind of moral code gives
a person a focus, a basis on which to conduct himself.”
at kind of code is what this book is about. ere will be no
complicated legalism or clever wiicisms. We will not explore
the biological or metaphysical roots of right and wrong. While
we will consider the profound moral dilemmas of life, the pur-
pose will be to cut through them as the human beings who
lived through them had to do not bog you down with hopeless
abstractions. ere will be no grand theory of the law here, nor
will there be any oers of heaven or threats of hell. e aim in
this book is much simpler, much more practical following in
the tradition of the ancients who saw justice as a habit or a cra,
a way of living.
Because that’s what justice should be not a noun but a
verb.
Something we do, not something we get.
A form of human excellence.
A statement of purpose.
A series of actions.
In a world of so much uncertainty, in a world where so much
is out of our control, where evil does exist and regularly goes
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RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW INTROdUcTION
unpunished, the commitment to live rightly is a redoubt in the
storm, a light in the dark.
is is what we are aer, axing justice as north on our
compass, the North Star to our lives, leing it guide and direct
us, through good times and bad. As it did for Harry S. Truman
and Gandhi alike, Marcus Aurelius and Martin Luther King Jr.,
Emmeline Pankhurst and Sojourner Truth, Buddha and Jesus
Christ.
When Admiral Rickover slammed down the receiver at the
end of a phone call, or brought a meeting to a close, he didn’t
belabor his exacting expectations or give specic instructions
on how he wanted something done. Instead he would leave his
subordinates with something that was at once much higher level
and yet also clarifyingly down to earth:
“Do what is right!”
So we might end this introduction with that same command:
Do what is right.
Do it right now.
For yourself.
For others.
For the world.
And in these pages, we’ll discuss how.
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Part I
THE ME
(PERSONAL)
e virtue of a person is measured not by his outstand-
ing eorts but by his everyday behavior.
T
he pursuit of justice does not begin in far- ung places. It
begins at home. It begins with you. It begins with the
decision about who you are going to be. e old- fashioned val-
ues of personal integrity, of honesty, of dignity and honor.
e basic behaviors in which these ideals manifest them-
selves: Doing what you say. Doing business the right way.
Treating people well. e Stoics said that the chief task in life
is to focus on what you control. Injustice and unfairness and
outright cruelty may well rule the world, but it is within the
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power of each of us to be an exception to that rule. To be a
person of rectitude and dignity. Whatever the law, whatever
the culture, whatever we could get away with, we can choose
to adhere to our own code a rigorous and just code. Some
might feel that all this is restrictive. We nd that the oppo-
site is true: Our code frees us, gives us meaning, and, most of
all, makes a positive dierence. We preach this gospel not
with words but with actions knowing that each action is
like a lantern that hollows out the dark, each decision to do
the right thing a statement that our peers, children, and fu-
ture generation can hear.
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To Stand Before Kings . . .
I
t was perhaps the most precarious moment in the history of
the world. A beloved president lay in state. A war raged on two
fronts. In Europe, the killing continued and the death camps
kept ring their awful furnaces and gas chambers. In the Pacic,
the long campaign to take island aer island ground on, bring-
ing closer each day a dreaded invasion that would dwarf the
landing at Normandy.
A ghastly nuclear age still shrouded in secrecy had just
begun. A racial reckoning, hundreds of years delayed, could not
be avoided. e storm clouds of a cold war between great, victo-
rious powers loomed on the horizon.
ere, as millions of lives hung in the balance, as uncertain,
dicult times beckoned, a man was to meet his moment. Who
had the gods sent? What had destiny produced for this crucible?
A small- town Missouri farmer. A short man with glasses so
thick and concave they made his eyes bulge. A failed clothing
store owner who didn’t graduate from college. A former senator
from one of the most corrupt states in the country, who had en-
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TO sTaNd BEFORE KINGs . . . RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW
tered politics having failed at nearly everything he’d done in his
life. A vice presidential pick that the now- deceased Franklin
Roosevelt had barely bothered to brief for the job.
e moment met the man: Harry S. Truman.
e shock of it soon gave way to dread, not just to the people
of the United States and the armies abroad, but in Truman him-
self. “I don’t know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you,”
Roosevelt’s successor would tell the press, “but when they told
me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and
all the planets had fallen on me.” And when Truman asked if he
could do anything for the former rst lady, Roosevelt’s grieving
widow shook her head somberly and said, “Is there anything we
can do for you? For you’re the one in trouble now.”
Yet not all despaired. “Oh, I felt good,” one of the most pow-
erful and experienced men in Washington would reect, “be-
cause I knew him. I knew what kind of man he was.” Indeed, the
people who actually knew Truman were not concerned at all,
because, as a Missouri railroad foreman who’d met the future
president when the boy was supporting his mother on $35 a
month said, Truman was “all right from his asshole out in every
direction.”
And so began what we might call an incredible experiment,
in which a seemingly ordinary person was thrust not just into
the limelight but into a position of nearly superhuman respon-
sibility. Could an average person succeed at such a monumental
task? Could they not only keep their character intact but prove
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RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW TO sTaNd BEFORE KINGs . . .
that character actually counted for something in this crazy
modern world?
e answer for Harry Truman was yes. Absolutely yes.
But this experiment did not begin in Washington. Nor in 1945.
It began many years earlier with the simple study of virtue, and
the example of a man we have already studied in this series. “His
real name was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,” Truman would
later recount, “and he was one of the great ones.” We don’t know
who introduced Truman to Marcus, but we know what Marcus
introduced to Truman. “What he wrote in his Meditations,”
Truman explained of the worldview he borrowed from the
emperor, was “that the four greatest virtues are moderation,
wisdom, justice, and fortitude, and if a man is able to cultivate
those, that’s all he needs to live a happy and successful life.”
It would be with this philosophy, and the teachings of his
parents, that Truman built a kind of personal code of conduct.
One that he lived by unfailingly, in moments high and low. “If
it’s not right, do not do it,” Truman underlined in his well- worn
copy of Meditations, “if it is not true, do not say it....First do
nothing thoughtlessly or without a purpose. Secondly, see that
your acts are directed to a social end.”
Truman was punctual. He was honest. He worked hard. He
didn’t cheat on his wife. He paid his taxes. He disliked aention
or ostentatiousness. He was polite. He kept his word. He helped
his neighbors. He carried his own weight in the world. “Since
childhood at my mother’s knee,” Truman would recount, “I
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TO sTaNd BEFORE KINGs . . . RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW
have believed in honor, ethics, and right living as its own re-
ward.”
It was good that he thought of it as its own reward, because
for many years, there was not much more in it for him than that.
Aer high school, Truman tried his hand as a mailroom boy
at the Kansas City Star, a drugstore cashier, a timekeeper for the
Santa Fe Railroad, a bank clerk, and a farmer. He was rejected
rst from West Point for his poor eyesight and then second
and in fact repeatedly by the love of his life, Bess Wallace,
whose family did not think he was good enough.
So he struggled on, making ends meet just barely. Waiting
for a chance to prove himself.
e rst one came exactly twenty- seven years before Tru-
man entered the White House, when he took his rst trip out
of the country, landing in the city of Brest, France, as a member
of the American Expeditionary Forces, the captain of Baery D,
an artillery unit. e list of Truman’s plausible exemptions
from service in World War I is long. He was thirty- three years
old, well past the dra age. He’d already done his time in the
National Guard. His eyes were terrible. And as a farmer and
the sole breadwinner for his sister and mother, no one ex-
pected him to enlist. Yet it was unconscionable to him that
someone else would serve in his place. Stirred by Woodrow
Wilson’s call to make the world safe for democracy to work
toward a “social end,” as the Stoics had taught him he signed
up and went.
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RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW TO sTaNd BEFORE KINGs . . .
It was here, suddenly, that his strict code of personal conduct
was rst put up in front of other people.
“You know justice is an awful tyrant,” Truman would write
in a leer home, reecting on the discipline he had to exert
over his men, meting out strict but fair punishment to transgres-
sors. Yet he was also the same kind of leader who risked a court-
martial to give them an extra night of rest as the war raged, and
who was, many years later, still frequenting businesses owned
by men in Baery D to help keep them aoat.
Aer the war, Truman started a clothing store, which was
successful just long enough to give him hope, to feel like his bad
luck was over. It would shortly become another business failure,
leaving him with debts he’d feel so honor bound to repay that he
was still carrying (and servicing) them een years later, well
into his political career.
In fact, it was those very debts that compelled him to enter
politics. “I have to eat,” were his words when he went hat in hand
to an army buddy, Jim Pendergast, the nephew of Kansas City’s
all- powerful political boss. Tom Pendergast, who controlled all
the oces and patronage for the state, was willing to look kindly
on his beloved nephew’s friend and allowed him to run for Jack-
son County court judge in 1922.
If one were writing the backstory for a corrupt politician,
Truman’s real life would be sympathetic to even the most cyni-
cal audience. He had been a good man. He had served his coun-
try. He had witnessed his own father dabble in local politics
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as the overseer of roads in Grandview, Missouri, in 1912, a
position where corruption wasn’t just common, it was accepted
practically part of the political process. And yet Harry’s fa-
ther, despite being broke, resisted the temptation to cheat his
neighbors and line his own pockets. e job ground his father
down, and two years later he would be dead, leaving the family
with nothing but debts a tradition Harry seemed primed to
continue.
ere Harry was, bankrupt and desperate for a job, anointed
into politics by one of the most corrupt and wealthy bosses in
the country, holding in part the position his father had held.
is was his chance to make some money! To show his wife that
he was somebody special. To make his place in the world.
Instead, he would prove himself, in Pendergast’s words, to
be the “contrariest goddamn mule in the world.” Seing out to
build a courthouse for the county, Truman drove thousands of
miles on his own dime to scout buildings and architects. When
construction began, he drove to the building site every day and
supervised, refusing to allow the or gri or shoddy work. “I
was taught that the expenditure of public money is a public
trust,” he explained, “and I have never changed my opinion on
that subject. No one has ever received any public money for
which I was responsible unless he gave honest service for it.”
Contractors from the political machine sent to Truman were
shocked when he actually wanted to see bids and that he
didn’t seem to favor local business over beer, more ecient
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companies from out of state. You’ll get contracts om me, he said,
when you give me the lowest bid. He would later estimate that he
could have stolen as much as $1.5 million from the county in his
time in oce.
Instead, he saved them many times that.
“On April 30th, 1929, aer Harry had assigned something
over $6 million in road contracts,” his biographer David Mc-
Cullough would write, “a judgment of default for $8,944.78 was
brought against him for his old haberdashery debts. His mother,
meantime, had been forced to take another mortgage on the
farm. Yet when one of his new roads cut 11 acres from her prop-
erty, he felt he must deny her the usual reimbursement from the
county, as a maer of principle, given his position.”
“Looks like everybody in Jackson County got rich but me,”
Truman would write to his wife, Bess. “I’m glad I can sleep well
even if it is a hardship on you and Margie for me to be so damn
poor.” To his daughter, he would admit he was a nancial fail-
ure, but say with pride that he had tried to leave her “something
that (as Mr. Shakespeare says) cannot be stolen an honorable
reputation and a good name.”
As it happened, it was this frustrating and dogged fastidious-
ness that eventually propelled Truman’s career past the local
level, “kicking him upstairs,” so to speak, into Missouri’s open
Senate seat. Surely it couldn’t hurt to have a man in Washington,
but mostly Pendergast, who had known never to ask Truman to
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do anything unethical, wanted somebody more typical more
amenable— in the job closer to home.
Of course, that’s not how the people in Washington saw it.
e colleagues who didn’t snub Truman as a hick referred to
him as the “Senator from Pendergast,” assuming he was bought
and purchased. All Truman could do was return to Marcus Au-
relius, particularly a passage he’d marked up with the note
“True! True! True! ”
When men say injurious things about you, approach their
poor souls, penetrate within, and see what kind of men they
are. You will discover that there is no reason to take trouble
that these men have a good opinion of you. However, you
must be well disposed towards them, for by nature they are
friends.
Truman toiled away in obscurity as a senator, failing to
make an impression with the public until 1941 when his Sub-
commiee on War Mobilization began to investigate wartime
contracts. Suddenly, the man’s experiences with temptation and
municipal corruption came in handy he knew how the system
worked, he knew where the bodies would be buried. And having
watched the hypocritical scrutiny to which politicians and the
press had subjected New Deal money that was intended to help
the desperate poor, Truman was in no mood to “tolerate” the
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RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW TO sTaNd BEFORE KINGs . . .
waste those same groups were willing to accept when it came to
defense contractors.
What became known as the “Truman Commiee” would,
according to a Time prole in 1943, give “red faces to cabinet
members, war agency heads, generals, admirals, big business-
men, lile businessmen and labor leaders.” It would end up sav-
ing American taxpayers roughly $15 billion and send corrupt
ocials, including two brigadier generals, to jail.
“I’m hoping to make a reputation as a Senator,” Truman had
wrien to his wife, “though if I live long enough that’ll make the
money successes look like cheese. But you will have to put up
with a lot if I do it because I won’t sell inuence and I’m perfectly
willing to be cussed if I’m right.”*
Today, with our extensive (though insucient) campaign
nance laws and other forms of legal compliance, perhaps this
all seems rather minor. e fact that corruption seems obvi-
ously wrong and shameful makes it easy to miss just how re-
markable and solitary Truman’s honest political life was it is
one thing to try to keep your hands clean, it’s another to manage
to do it in a den of thieves.
Perhaps you don’t see why it maers whether a president
insists on paying the postage for leers he sends to his sister
* Meanwhile, in the middle of his campaign in 1940, Truman’s mother’s
farm was sold at auction on the courthouse steps.
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“Because they were personal. ere was nothing ocial about
them.” But that’s the point. You’re either the kind of person who
draws ethical lines like that or you’re not. You either respect the
code or you don’t.
Was it this honesty and the goodwill it engendered that had
convinced FDR to choose Truman as his running mate? Or did
FDR pick him because the man wasn’t much of a threat? All we
know is that in April 1945, FDR succumbed to a stroke during
a break in Warm Springs, Georgia, and suddenly the ordinary
man was president.
ough neither the lure of money nor the temptations of no-
toriety had dented his character to this point, one could be for-
given for assuming that perhaps total power might nally do it.
But that didn’t aect Truman’s self- discipline either. Before
he took oce, he had been a punctual man. It had been in-
grained early, from his school days, where students were ex-
pected, according to the rulebook, “to be punctual and regular
in aendance; obedient in spirit; orderly in action; diligent in
study; gentle and respectful in manner.” And now that he was
president, even though all would have waited on him without
complaint, it remained unthinkable to him to be late. “When
he went to lunch,” one of his clerks would explain, “if he le
word that he’d return at 2:00 p.m., he was back without fail, not
at 2:05, not at 1:15, but at 2:00 p.m.”
ere were four clocks on the Resolute Desk in the Oval
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Oce, plus two in the room and one on his wrist. Even his walk-
ing, which had been trained into him in the army, was on
time always 120 steps per minute. Hotel clerks and reporters
could set their own watches to Truman’s daily routine. “Oh,
he’ll be stepping o the elevator at 7:29 a.m.,” they’d say when-
ever he visited New York.
And he would! Without fail!
Not long aer assuming oce, Truman had what he thought
was an ordinary conversation with Harry Hopkins, one of Roos-
evelt’s longest- serving aides and condants, aer sending him
on an emergency mission to Russia. “I’m exceedingly obligated
to you for what you did,” Truman told him, “and I want to thank
you for it.” Hopkins was stunned, and, leaving the oce, said to
the press secretary, “You know, I’ve just had something happen
to me that never happened before in my life... e President
just said, ‘ank you,’ to me.”
Truman was the kind of man who, when a cabinet member’s
daughter had an operation while her father was overseas on
state business, called the envoy with updates on her condition
om the hospital; who, aer a terse exchange with a college stu-
dent in California, asked the boy to write to him and asked the
dean to keep him informed of the boy’s grades; who, in the mid-
dle of the Berlin Airli, would send a note of condolence from
the White House when the child of a Baery D veteran died in
a car accident; and who, nally, would bring former president
Hoover to tears by inviting him back to the White House aer
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twelve years of exile.* But the public’s rst glimpse of this per-
sonal aection and empathy came just six days aer his swear-
ing in, when Truman aended the funeral of Tom Pendergast, a
persona non grata aer a prison sentence and fall from grace.
“What kind of man wouldn’t go to his friend’s funeral because
he’d be criticized for it?” Truman asked.
It takes a special kind of person to even have the bandwidth
to care about other people during what was arguably the most
stressful period of their life and quite possibly one of the most
stressful periods for literally everyone alive at that moment. In
the span of thirty days, the Soviets were interfering in Poland
and entering the war against Japan, while the UN was forming
to prevent future world wars and the rst shipment of uranium
was en route for military use.
“He is a man of immense determination,” Winston Churchill
would say of Truman shortly aer meeting him. “He takes no
notice of delicate ground, he just plants his foot down rmly on
it.” Good thing, because the next several months would bring
the economic collapse of Europe, the Berlin Airli, and the im-
plementation of the Truman Doctrine.
e most consequential of his decisions in that period was,
of course, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
* He assigned Hoover a role in delivering food and supplies to Europe,
which had actually been Hoover’s specialty aer World War I and during
the Great Flood of 1927.
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Nagasaki. e debate over this decision rages now and it raged
immediately aer, but one overlooked fact is how lile debate
raged before. Just months prior to the rst explosions of the nu-
clear age, Truman did not even know the bomb existed! It was
a military project and primarily a military decision, with one
general later describing Truman as a “lile boy on a toboggan
who never had an opportunity to say yes. All he could say was
no.” It was more complicated than that, as Truman himself
noted on the very day of the rst tests, lamenting a world where
“machines are ahead of morals by some centuries,” and hoping
for a future where such a thing would not exist.
But there in the present, he baled an implacable and almost
incomprehensibly evil foe. On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianap-
olis, the ship that had just four days prior delivered to Tinian
Island the materials to assemble the rst nuclear bomb, was
sunk by a Japanese submarine. Over a thousand men died, many
eaten by sharks as they oated in the ocean.
We know that Truman decided not to say no believing for
the rest of his life that this was the correct call, that as a president
elected by millions of mothers and fathers, his duty was to pro-
tect American lives over most other considerations. Yet aer
the devastation wrought on August 6 and 9 the implications of
this decision were brought into full, atomic relief. While the in-
cineration of more than two hundred thousand Japanese is a
tragedy that will be etched in human history forever, one critical
outcome was Truman’s sense aerward that such horrible power
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could not under any circumstances be le in the hands of mili-
tary ocials. Treading rmly on delicate ground, he asserted
civilian control over nuclear weapons, where it has remained
thankfully and they have yet to be used again.
It’s almost a cliché of leadership stories now to point out that
on his desk in the White House, Truman had a lile sign that
read “e Buck Stops Here.” is was true and it did embody his
approach which was not just to make tough decisions but to
take responsibility for them too. Lesser known, however, is a
more illustrative sign, one that far more leaders today could
stand to follow. “Always do right!” it read, quoting Mark Twain.
“is will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
Was the use of nuclear weapons right? It remains debated.
No one, on the other hand, questions the Marshall Plan. When
Germany surrendered in May 1945, it was hardly the end of
Europe’s problems. Both the continent and Britain had been
ravaged by six years of war. Some forty million people had
been displaced. A generation of children were orphaned. Across
enormous swaths of an entire continent, people were without
jobs or heat or food. If the war had been a humanitarian calam-
ity, killing millions, the suering set to follow would have been
incomprehensible.
Resolved to do something, Truman and his advisors hard-
ened on an economic rescue of an entire hemisphere. He told
Congress he’d need $15 or $16 billion to give away. When Sam
Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, balked, Truman reminded
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him that that was almost exactly the amount that the Truman
Commission had saved the country some years earlier. “Now
we’re going to need that money,” he told him, “and we could save
the world with it.”
If this plan was all Truman’s doing, why isn’t it named aer
him? Political acumen is one reason. Midwestern modesty is
another. “General, I want the plan to go down in history with
your name on it,” Truman would tell General George Mar-
shall, the wildly popular architect of the Allied war eort at
home, whom he had known since his days as a soldier in World
War I. “And don’t give me any argument. I’ve made up my mind,
and, remember, I’m your commander in chief.” And so what the
historian Arthur Toynbee would call the “signal achievement of
our age” the giving of billions of dollars to ravaged, war- torn
nations, and in some cases to former enemies was topped o
with a simple act of humility, the giving of the credit to some-
one else.
ere have been plenty of leaders of great personal integrity
who had abysmal records on human rights. e tragic irony of
both America’s crusade in Europe and the Pacic ghting
against fascism and genocide and for democracy and the rule of
law is just how imperfect its union was at home. Truman had
grown up in a former slave state, just a generation removed from
slavery, and retained well into adulthood much of the repugnant
racial baggage that comes with that kind of upbringing. His grand-
parents on both sides had owned slaves. His parents remembered
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