HARRY S. TRUMAN Excerpted from an essay by David McCullough: He had arrived first in Washington in the 1930s as a senator notable mainly for his background in the notorious Pendergast machine of Kansas City. He was of Scotch-Irish descent, and like many of Scotch-Irish descent--and I know something of this from my own background--he could be narrow, clannish, short-tempered, stubborn to a fault.

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