David Bicknell Truman

David B. Truman, a notable student of politics and past president of the American Political Science Association (1964–1965), died on August 28, 2003, some three months after his 90th birthday, at his retirement home in Sarasota, Florida. He is survived by his wife, Elinor, and by his son, Edwin M., an economist whose career up to now has been mainly at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.

David Truman, an Amherst alumnus with a Chicago doctorate, first taught at Bennington College and briefly at Cornell shortly before World War II, taking leave for war service in Washington, initially as a civilian, then as a Naval officer assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After the war, he taught successively at Harvard and at Williams before settling down at Columbia University in New York. At almost the same time, he published his most important book, The Governmental Process (1951), which alone would have sufficed to make him significant in political science. During the following 19 years in New York, he accomplished three other achievements to bolster his importance in and to the field. First, he taught both undergraduates and graduate students with signal success. Secondly, he helped immensely in building the Department of Public Law and Government (now Political Science). In those years, the department became a leader in the discipline, and also a most congenial place to work, almost uniquely so, due in good part to David's own judiciousness and steadiness. And third, through assiduous, wholly unpublicized work on key committees of the Social Science Research Council, Truman contributed a great deal toward the progress of the discipline in public opinion and congressional studies. From that he took great satisfaction. His last book, The Congressional Party (1959) was an offshoot of those efforts.

David also contributed to the University around him. Along with his professorship, he served successively as chair of the department, dean of Columbia College and vice president and provost of the University at large. During those years, David thought long and hard about the future of Columbia, and he was within a year of succeeding to its presidency, putting his plans to work, when the events of 1968 overtook the place. Student radicals seized buildings and refused to leave without a total amnesty for everything, not least substantial damage. Twice the police had to be called to evict them. Angers erupted. The faculty split. Truman, as provost, had to make most of the hard decisions and to execute them all. In the aftermath, the University's trustees concluded that they could not make him president. So he shortly left Columbia and the next year assumed the presidency of Mt. Holyoke College. There for almost a decade he showed his talent as an academic administrator and fundraiser.

During Truman's years at Mt. Holyoke, the college accomplished affirmative action, greatly increasing its proportion of minority students, and also made the crucial choice to remain a women's college, a decision which has stood it in good stead. At the close of his term, it returned to having a woman president, after three men, and Truman, to his satisfaction, was the last male head of the college until now.

At Columbia, where I taught for a decade, David and I became the best of friends. He and his wife, Ellie, helped us find the ideal place to live, on Riverside Drive, one floor above them. David even found a publisher for Presidential Power when I'd failed after four tries. He read and commented in depth on every page of that and every manuscript I subsequently wrote, until just recently. His criticism was exemplary for clarity, consistency, and for concern with evidence: in short like his own work!

When I first read The Governmental Process I was enormously impressed by the degree to which the world of American politics it painted was like the world I had experienced in seven years of governmental service, much of it in direct touch with legislation. That book is often said to have embodied the group theory of politics. But it transcended group theorizing as previously done by making room for individuals, for individual variations, and for shifting relationships. These things Truman accomplished with three critically important concepts. He distinguished attitudes from activated interests. He distinguished “rules of the game” from lesser attitudes. And he distinguished “multiple membership” in overlapping and competing interests, moderated by the activation of those rules, as the “balance wheel” of democratic government. The sophistication of those concepts is what makes the book still relevant, after more than 50 years.

David's steadiness, even in the face of screaming students and intriguing faculty, was part of his character. He was also reasonable, realistic but not cynical, dispassionate in his judgements, but not indifferent. Caring was built into him. He had more feel for party politics, and more enjoyment of it, than most contemporary political scientists—one of the things I loved him for—but so far as I know he never yearned to practice it. He was too analytic for that and too objective, too much master of himself and, even so, too modest.

About everything except himself he was indeed a realist. About himself, though, he was modest to a fault. He set his standards very high—both personal and intellectual—and sometimes lacerated himself for failing to live up to them. That was the fate of his final book. It was a creative contribution, but one that for him never quite stood up. In his own eyes, he had fallen short of an ideal in his own mind. It wasn't in anyone else's mind, so far as I could tell, but David was never a follower.

For his own sake, I wish that he had been—as he certainly deserved to be—a shade less self-critical. For the rest of us, of course, that made him the more attractive. Ego control is a wonderful thing to behold, and not often seen on campuses. I think Dave Truman slightly overdid it.

Perhaps it was that very quality that made him so constructive a critic of the work of others. He was a hard although not unjust taskmaster when he thought somebody could profit from being severely challenged to be careful of evidence and to extract its precise meaning. I spoke, not long ago, to one of his doctoral students from whom David sought and ultimately got exceptionally good work. “He forced it out of me,” this person said, “he wouldn't take less for an answer.”

So there you have David Truman as I knew him—steady and reliable, sensitive yet never sappy, shrewd yet always principled, serious yet humorous, possessed of the gift of irony, and intellectually first-class, yet never proud. I am grateful to have had him as my friend. We, all of us, are lucky to have had him in our profession.