Steve Drummond

Steve Drummond’s, The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two, is an outstanding 5 Star history on the Truman Committee. At only 385 pages it is relatively short. While the book goes from his childhood to his selection as Vice President and ultimately his ascension to the presidency with the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

The core of the book deals with the creation of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, AKA the Truman Committee, created March 1st 1941. This committee is superficially known by many of us as the vehicle which propelled Harry Truman from the junior Senator from Missouri to the rising political powerhouse then nominated to the office of Vice President.

The book goes into some of his primary assistants and briefly gives a short biographical accounting of them both before, during and after their service to the committee. The book highlights sever high profile investigations of the time including the cost and development of the first camps as the U.S. prepared for war, investigation of U.S. Steel, The Curtis Wright Airplane company, a general cases of corruption.

A fabulous book on an often bypassed portion of Truman’s political career and I heartily endorse the reading of this book.… (meer)