“It is,” he said, “in order that each one of you may have, through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field, and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life with all its desirable human aspirations—it is for this that the struggle should be maintained, th

Truman wrote. “He had a good head and a great brain and a kind heart….He was the best kind of ordinary man, and when I say that he was an ordinary man, I mean that as high praise, not deprecation. That’s the highest praise you can give a man, that he’s one of the people and becomes distinguished in the service that he gives other people. I don’t kn

Even with their manifold failings, journalists who seek to report and to illuminate rather than to opine and to divide are critical to a democracy.

I think [the press] is invaluable, even though…it is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news. But I would say that it is an invaluable arm of the Presidency….There is a terrific disadvantage [in] not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily….Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn

“The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it,” Truman wrote. “Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they’ll believe it and go along with you.”

Yet I think we would lose something important to our political life if the conservatives were all in one party and the liberals all in the other. This would make us a nation divided either into two opposing and irreconcilable camps or into even smaller and more contentious groups.” RESPECT FACTS AND DEPLOY REASON

But the paying of attention, the expressing of opinion, and the casting of ballots are foundational to living up to the obligations of citizenship in a republic.

ENTER

How, then, in an hour of anxiety about the future of the country, at a time when a president of the United States appears determined to undermine the rule of law, a free press, and the sense of hope essential to American