The Last Honest Man : TRUMAN, <i> By David McCullough (Simon & Schuster: $30; 1,082 pp., illustrated)</i>

A political malaise has settled over the nation. The longest recession since the 1930s, a growing division between rich and poor, racism and inner-city discontent, ineffective political leadership from Washington, and the popular appeal of Texas billionaire Ross Perot, a man known for his impatience with legislative checks and balances: All raise doubts about the durability of American democracy.

This is hardly the first crisis of confidence in the country’s institutions. The Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, McCarthyism, the urban riots and divisions over Vietnam in the ‘60s and Watergate in the ‘70s also aroused fears that the republic, as we have known it, was in danger of collapse. Yet, in novelist John Dos Passos’ words, in earlier “times of change and danger . . ., a sense of continuity with generations gone before” stretched “like a lifeline across the scary present.”

The same can be true today. The country can look to its past as a guide to the present. In earlier national crises, America’s better side--its capacity for hard work, generosity, and a sensible middle ground between political extremes--has repeatedly given us the wherewithal to meet seemingly insurmountable challenges.

In the current difficulties, no recent historical figure might serve our collective memories better than the improbable Harry S. Truman--the “little man from Missouri” whose nomination for the vice presidency in 1944 provoked derisive comments about a “second Missouri compromise,” whose missteps as President led critics to coin the phrase “To err is Truman,” whose 1948 election campaign split the country into three warring political factions, and whose leadership in the Korean War and dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur for insubordination during the conflict largely destroyed public confidence in his ability to govern.

The story of Truman’s life has been told time and again in biographies and histories about the post-World War II period. But no one has told the story better than David McCullough in his new book, simply and accurately titled “Truman.” The author of earlier best-selling works on the Panama Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge and Theodore Roosevelt, McCullough is a master storyteller whose considerable narrative skills have been put to exquisite use in re-creating the life and times of America’s 33rd President.

The professional historian or scholar looking for fresh interpretations or explanations for the great events of Truman’s presidency--the decision to use atomic bombs against Japan to end World War II, the origins of the Cold War, the rise of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist hysteria, Truman’s victory in the 1948 election, his abortive Fair Deal, the stirrings of civil- rights activism, the onset of the Korean War, the conflict with MacArthur, and the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952--will be disappointed. McCullough’s book is essentially a reaffirmation of much that has been written before by Truman biographer’s and historians of the 1940s and 1950s.

But great history always bears retelling, especially when its colors are as vibrant as Truman’s and its brush strokes are as skillful as McCullough’s. For here is Harry Truman as he really was--a down- home, old-fashioned, plain-spoken cuss of a fellah with ordinary weaknesses and extraordinary strengths. Born in Missouri in 1884, Truman was “a nineteenth-century man . . . His outlook, tastes, his habits of thought had been shaped by a different world from the one that followed after 1918. . . . He never learned to like the telephone, or Daylight Saving Time . . . . He tried using a typewriter for a while, but gave it up. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens remained his favorite authors. Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee were to be his lifelong heroes.”

A farmer, small-businessman and elected county official or “judge” who initially made his way in politics through association with the corrupt Pendergast machine of Kansas City, Truman was as honest as his principal backers were corrupt. In 1939, when Jim Pendergast and several associates were convicted of tax evasion on unreported moneys obtained through bribes and looting the Kansas City treasury, Truman, who could have walked off with millions of dollars, remained above suspicion as someone who never took a dime. According to all the evidence, he was broke when he went to the U.S. Senate in 1934 and had little savings when he left the White House in 1953.

A man with the conventional racial and ethnic attitudes of his place and time toward blacks, Asians, Catholics and Jews, he came to recognize the destructiveness of American racism and bias, becoming an outspoken advocate of civil rights, first in Missouri, where it did him no good in a 1940 reelection race for the U.S. Senate, and then in the White House, where it lost him the “solid South” in 1948. “I believe in the brotherhood of man,” he told a nearly all-white audience during his Senate campaign, “not merely the brotherhood of white men but the brotherhood of all men before the law.” He freely stated that he was not preaching “social equality for blacks,” but he wanted equal treatment under the law and economic opportunities for African-Americans that would help free them from racial exploitation.

Above all, Harry Truman was a man with considerable political wisdom. His administration made its share of errors, partly overreacting to the communist “menace” at home and abroad, falling short in pursuit of domestic reforms, helping to make the “Imperial Presidency” what it became under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But his commitment to a restrained containment policy in the Middle East, Europe and Asia, where he refused to let the Korean conflict escalate into an all-out war with China or the Soviet Union, and his sponsorship of domestic reforms like civil rights and medical care for the aged that would come to full bloom in the 1960s, were products of his astuteness as a political leader and decency as a human being.

What principally made Truman unique among recent American Presidents was his sense of proportion. He despised what he called “the folderol” of the presidency, “the impossible administrative burden,” the “abuse from liars and demagogues,” the “glorified public relations” which compelled the Chief Executive to spend time “flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.” Yet at the same time he enjoyed the deference shown him as President and never lost sight of the opportunities a President had to advance the national well-being.

No one caught the spirit and quality of the man better than General and later Secretary of State George C. Marshall, one of America’s greatest 20th-Century public servants. In a spontaneous birthday toast, at a time when Truman was down in the polls and seemed unlikely to win the 1948 election, Marshall “stood up, pushed his chair out of the way, and leaning forward with his hands on the table began to speak, his expression very serious. Marshall, as everyone present was well aware, never complimented the people with whom he worked. It was not his way. ‘The full stature of this man,’ he said, his eyes on Truman, ‘will only be proven by history, but I want to say here and now that there has never been a decision made under this man’s administration, affecting policies beyond our shores, that has not been in the best interest of this country. It is not the courage of these decisions that will live, but the integrity of the man.’ ”

Not long after, Marshall himself would see how accurately he had measured the man when Harry Truman, against Marshall’s unqualified advice and that of most State Department advisers, decided to recognize the state of Israel. Although Marshall saw political considerations at the center of the President’s decision rather than the national self-interest, Truman, moved by moral conviction as much as anything else, defied the advice of the man he held in highest regard in his administration. When some of Marshall’s friends urged him to resign, he refused, saying that one did not resign because a President who had the Constitutional right to make a decision made one.

In this time of troubles, David McCullough’s “Truman” is a fine reminder that American politics can be more than spin doctors, “sound bites” and big-time operators. In November I may be tempted to cast a protest vote for H.S.T. In the meantime, I hope that something turns up to change my mind.