It was such a leap in my career when 'Truman Show' came along. It's always been a long process for me insofar as recognition goes, but that's OK because you appreciate it when it comes.
My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.
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.
Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends as next-door neighbors in the late 1920s, when they were about kindergarten age. From the start, they recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it; and both loved reading. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories together.
I would say that President Roosevelt probably was more intimately in touch with the press corps at the White House than President Truman was.
In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history.
It was immediately apparent that it was full of tricky ingredients to balance. In fact, I found it very intriguing. What held me back from saying yes to the producer was that I wasn't sure who could play Truman.
I went to a little liberal-arts college in Missouri called Truman State University.
Every President I think I've ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn't quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.
Harry Truman, who was a Bible-believing Christian Zionist, defied the secretary of state he so admired, George C. Marshall, and won a place in Israel's history by recognizing the new state 11 minutes after it declared its independence in 1948.