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I liked Truman very much. He was precise and businesslike. After a while, it was his turn.

Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.

My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

At the time it seriously troubled me, but in drafting me as Marshall Plan Administrator, President Truman did as great a favor for me as one man can do for another. It opened my eyes to many things of which I was totally unaware and it was the beginning of my real education.

Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.

Franklin Roosevelt was a great leader. He saw how to use the levers of power to affect change.

I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now know.

Well, in 1947... in Europe and in Italy especially, we thought of America as all-powerful.

That was the principle of reparations to which President Truman agreed at Potsdam. And the United States will not agree to the taking from Germany of greater reparations than was provided by the Potsdam Agreement.