Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Ambrose

It is the “almost” that does the real work here, a historian’s raised eyebrow smuggled into what sounds like sweeping praise. Stephen Ambrose isn’t just offering a thumbs-up to Harry Truman’s State Department; he’s signaling a broad endorsement of the postwar architecture Truman helped lock into place - containment, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Berlin airlift, the willingness to draw lines against Stalin while rebuilding Western Europe. To say he approves of “almost everything” is to position Truman as the rare president whose improvisations became doctrine, whose seat-of-the-pants decisions hardened into what we now call the American century.

The subtext is methodological as much as political. Ambrose, writing from within the mainstream mid-to-late 20th century consensus on U.S. leadership, frames Truman’s foreign policy as a baseline of competence: hard choices made under pressure, generally vindicated by outcomes. It’s also a quiet corrective to the old caricature of Truman as the accidental president - the haberdasher elevated beyond his depth. Ambrose’s line insists the opposite: Truman may have looked untheoretical, but the results were strategic.

Context matters, because approving of Truman’s foreign affairs carries built-in controversy. The atomic bomb, the dawn of the national security state, coups-by-proxy and Cold War moral trade-offs lurk behind the compliment. That’s why the sentence stays personal (“I approve”) rather than universal (“history proves”). Ambrose is staking an interpretive claim, not pretending there’s no argument - and leaving himself room, with that single qualifier, to concede the parts that still won’t sit neatly inside triumphalist narratives.