[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 129 (Wednesday, September 18, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H10573-H10574]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE EXAMPLE OF HARRY TRUMAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, this is going to be hot stuff.
  I said last week I would quote from battling Harry Truman. Everybody 
wants to be Harry Truman if they are coming from behind in an election, 
and I said that Harry Truman was tough on adultery, loyal to his Bess.
  My dad was Harry Dornan, D Artillery Battalion, World War I, 30th 
Division. Harry was 34th Division, Battery D, Artillery. Harry. Harry.
  Listen to this on adultery, Mr. Speaker, and I bring this up during a 
Presidential race period for obvious reasons. ``Harry Truman said, `Any 
man who was dissolute with women,' Truman believed, `was not a man to 
be trusted entirely. He discovered that''--two names from the past--
``both loved the ladies and kept telephone girls on the payroll. `I'll 
say this for the big boss,' '' referring to the Tom Pendergast of 
Pendergast machine fame, `` `he has no feminine connections.' ''
  This is the book called ``Truman'' that won a Pulitzer Prize for an 
author and biographer of some note, David McCullough. David McCullough.
  Listen to this paragraph. It seems that Harry Truman was plagued with 
headaches, as was my mother, as I was at one point studying for exams, 
but lucky in my later years. ``Harry Truman says he worried always 
about possible entrapment with women,'' would have saved a lot of 
careers in the Senate and this body if people had taken this advice, 
``an old device for destroying politicians. Once, responding to a call 
for a meeting in a room at the Baltimore Hotel,'' this is in Missouri, 
``He asked Edgar Hine to go along, just in case. When they knocked at 
the room, Hine remembered a blond woman was there in a negligee. She 
opened the door. Harry Truman spun on his heels and ran back down the 
hall, disappearing around the corner. Hine thought it was a fear 
verging on the abnormal.'' Or maybe the decent.
  `` `Three things rule a man,' Harry would tell a reporter long 
afterward, `power, money and women.' '' The great archbishop and 
evangelist in the Catholic church, Fulton Sheen told me the same thing. 
Only he put women in the first category, the downfall in the twenties 
and thirties; then came power, the obsession of men in their thirties, 
forties, and fifties; and then money, for men in their older years, the 
accretion of power, money you are never going to get to spend at the 
end of your life.
  Hine wrote this: ``I have been around Legion conventions with Harry 
Truman. He would have his room there. Naturally, everybody would kind 
of gravitate to the Senator's room. If some fellow brought a woman in 
there, or even his wife, I have seen Truman pick up his hat and coat, 
take off out of there, and that would be the last you would see of him 
until those women left. He just didn't want women around his hotel 
room. He had a phobia about it.''
  This is not the story of Little Rock, AK, folks. This is the story of 
Harry Truman and Missouri.
  I would like to put in the Record, Mr. Speaker, the editorial from 
the Wall Street Journal on Monday, the 16th, titled ``Will Anyone 
Believe?'' It is all about the Clintons stonewalling on both their 
medical records, but particularly the commander-in-chief. 
Shalikashvili's medical records are out there.
  Every combat commander down to a private, the whole chain of command, 
their whole medical records are out there. It was asked for of Perry 
before he became Secretary of Defense. But only these doctor summaries.
  So the Wall Street Journal says nobody is going to believe because it 
is a stonewalling pattern, as it was with the tax return commodity 
trade stonewall, as it was with the health care task force stonewall, 
as it was with the White House passes stonewall, as it was with the 
billing records stonewall, as it stonewalled House committees here on 
Waco, on every other scandal, on Haiti, on Bosnia now, on Somalia, 
stonewalling on people in drug programs at the White House.

[[Page H10574]]

  No, if America is going to pass a morality and an IQ test on November 
5 in the Presidential race, they had better know something about the 
full physical records, the actual documents. Not summaries by doctors 
taking down, as when I get a physical, they say, ``How is your 
health?''
  ``Pretty darn good, doc. Generally excellent.'' And they write all 
that down.
  No, no, not testimony from Clinton himself, the medical records.
  There are all sorts of ricochets flying around, like the center of 
the new book by Roger Morris called ``Partners In Power.'' In the 
middle it has a brother who went to prison for cocaine under a cocaine 
pusher named Lassiter who got pardoned, saying my brother has a nose 
like a shovel. Guess of whom he was speaking, Mr. Speaker?
  Rule XVIII prohibits me from telling the million or so people in our 
audience. Use your imagination. Who has a shovel for a nose in Federal 
Government today?

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