The Watchdog, Steve Drummond
The Watchdog, Steve Drummond
List: $28.99 | Sale: $20.29
Club: $14.49

The Watchdog
How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two

Author: Steve Drummond

Narrator: Steve Drummond

Unabridged: 11 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/09/2023


Synopsis

The story of how a little-known junior senator fought wartime corruption and, in the process, set himself up to become vice president and ultimately President Harry Truman.

Months before Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the United States was on the verge of entering another world war for which it was dangerously ill-prepared. The urgent times demanded a transformation of the economy, with the government bankrolling the unfathomably expensive task of enlisting millions of citizens while also producing the equipment necessary to successfully fight—all of which opened up opportunities for graft, fraud and corruption.

In The Watchdog, Steve Drummond draws the reader into the fast-paced story of how Harry Truman, still a newcomer to Washington politics, cobbled together a bipartisan team of men and women that took on powerful corporate entities and the Pentagon, placing Truman in the national spotlight and paving his path to the White House.

Drawing on the largely unexamined records of the Truman Committee as well as oral histories, personal letters, newspaper archives and interviews, Steve Drummond—an award-winning senior editor and executive producer at NPR—brings the colorful characters and intrigue of the committee’s work to life. The Watchdog provides readers with a window to a time that was far from perfect but where it was possible to root out corruption and hold those responsible to account. It shows us what can be possible if politicians are governed by the principles of their office rather than self-interest.

About Steve Drummond

Steve Drummond is a journalist at NPR in Washington, where he has been a senior editor for more than two decades. He has been a reporter with newspapers in Florida and the Associated Press in Michigan and has written for many publications, including the St. Petersburg Times, the Detroit News, the New York Times, Education Week and Teacher Magazine. He lives in Maryland, where he also teaches journalism at the University of Maryland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Porter

What a fun book! Let's get that out of the way right from the beginning. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Watchdog by Steve Drummond. The book does an excellent job in explaining how Harry Truman went from an obscure junior senator tainted by the Pendergast Machine from Missouri in 1941 to becoming t......more

4 BIG FAT STARS! This book is so good-the rarely told tale of the 'Truman Committee'. Exhaustively researched and well written. The details and extra little bits of not just the facts, but of the people and how they worked (and sometimes fell in love!) together. We all know how Harry Truman became V......more

Goodreads review by Isaac

When we write about government power, it’s usually about the power to tax, regulate, prohibit or destroy. We rarely are told about the work that a government investigation can do to publicize information, and bring change by making that information public. The Truman administration did just that— sa......more

Goodreads review by David

Steve Drummond’s, The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two, is an outstanding 5 Star history on the Truman Committee. At only 385 pages it is relatively short. While the book goes from his childhood to his selection as Vice President and ultimately his a......more