WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) spoke yesterday at the dedication ceremony for the new President Harry S. Truman statue, which has now been installed as the 10th presidential statue in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
Additional information on the Truman Library Institute’s efforts to fund, create, and install the statue is available here: https://www.trumanlibraryinstitute.org/trumanstatue/ |
Following Are Blunt’s Remarks:
“Well, on April 12th, 1945, Harry Truman had come over to this building. As Clifton mentioned, he loved the Capitol. He loved working in the Senate.
“He’d come to this building, and not too far from here in a room that the speaker still probably calls the Board of Education, he and Sam Rayburn were going over the events of the day and whatever else they might want to talk about that day.
“And a note was passed in to the Vice President, ‘you need to come to the White House. Something has happened.’ Well, there were lots of things happening in April of 1945. It’s hard to know what Harry Truman might have been thinking about when he went to the White House.
“Later that day, for history since his mother would have already found this out, he wrote his mother a letter before he went to bed that night. And in the letter he said, ‘today, I went to the White House thinking I was going to see the president. I got there and found out I was the president.’
“No president, in such a short period of time, made more consequential decisions than Harry Truman: ending the war in Europe, how to deal with the Soviets, how to look at transitioning back to a peacetime economy, what to do about ending the war in Japan, the United Nations, and that’s just the first six months.
“All the things that Clifton Truman Daniel mentioned that would be on that list of great accomplishments by Harry Truman were important. But, if you’ve ever been in a job where you’ve made decisions, just imagine the decisions he had to make and how quickly he had to make them and how well he made them.
“When Secretary of State Stettinius had his first meeting with new President Truman, he left the meeting and said to somebody right away, ‘he seems like a man usually willing to make decisions.’ And he understood the importance of making decisions. He did that based on incredible common sense and a great sense of history.
“You know, because of his eyesight, Mrs. Truman was the athlete and the baseball player. He was the reader. Clifton’s mother told me one time she never saw her dad sit down at home when he didn’t have a book. And he understood the history of the country. He respected the history of the country.
“For the last 12 years, I’ve had the great opportunity to use the offices he used in the 10 years he was in the Senate and the 82 days he was vice president. And I feel like I’ve benefited from thinking about those decisions he made and how he made them and what he did for the country.
“It’s great for us today to see him now in the building he loved, in a democracy that he cherished, in a world that he did so much to design and create and make what it is today.”