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Join us for an insightful evening with author Jeffrey Frank and Senior International correspondent for Denmark’s Radio, Steffen Gram. The two will be in conversation about Frank’s book, The Trials of Harry S Truman. The decision to use the first atomic weapon, the recognition of Israel, and, perhaps above all, the first American war in Southeast Asia (Korea, from 1950-1953, but still unresolved) are some essential themes that still reverberate today.
About the Book
The Trials of Harry S. Truman - the first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly thirty years—is a work of discovery, revealing a man far more complex than the customary "give 'em hell" provincial who, at age sixty, suddenly inherited the White House.
More than six years of archival research and travels to Missouri, Washington, Berlin, and Korea, meant revisiting, and reassessing some of Truman's most critical decisions—from giving the order to use the world's first atomic bomb to seizing the nation's steel mills to the hasty call to support a tragic, "limited" war in Korea. It's also an intimate portrait of a man torn between his upbringing (and Confederate ancestry) and what he saw as a duty to support equal rights for African Americans.
Book Reviews
A "beguiling new biography….Frank gives us this ebullient, often cantankerous man in full."
—James Traub, The New York Times
"With a new kind of Cold War heating up and the foibles of our chief executives an ever more intense matter of scrutiny and concern, [the] book is timely in ways he couldn't have imagined when he started it. … rigorously researched, thought-provoking and, not least, a pleasure to read.
–Frank Gannon, The Wall Street Journal
"Thoughtfully explores the unlikely triumph of one of the nation's most consequential presidencies.,,, an intimate portrait of his internal struggles as he clashed with foreign and domestic rivals and led a group of heavyweights that came to establish a winning blueprint for the Cold War."
—Michael Bobelian, The Washington Post
About Jeffrey Frank
Jeffrey Frank was a senior editor at The New Yorker, the deputy editor of The Washington Post’s Outlook section, and is the author of Ike and Dick. He has published four novels, among them the Washington Trilogy—The Columnist, Bad Publicity, and Trudy Hopedale—and is the coauthor, with Diana Crone Frank, of a new translation of Hans Christian Andersen stories, which won the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Prize. He is a contributor to The New Yorker, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bookforum, and Vogue, among other publications.
About Steffen Gram
Steffen Gram is Senior Correspondent for DR and has covered the US since the 1980s. He has his own radio program, ‘The world according to Gram’, where he covers politics, events, and developments around the world.