Wit & Attitude Quote by Harry S. Truman

Truman doesn’t just call Nixon a liar; he turns dishonesty into Nixon’s defining physical talent, a grotesque party trick performed “out of both sides of his mouth at the same time.” The line lands because it’s less an argument than a character assassination delivered with the plainspoken brutality Truman cultivated as a political brand. He’s not diagnosing policy failures. He’s warning the public that Nixon’s entire relationship to reality is transactional.

The best knife twist is the conditional: “if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.” That’s frontier idiom weaponized, suggesting lying isn’t merely convenient for Nixon, it’s habitual maintenance, like a gambler practicing sleight-of-hand. Truman frames truth as an accident Nixon must immediately correct. The subtext is fatalistic: you can’t negotiate with this kind of politician because there’s no stable baseline of honesty to appeal to.

Context sharpens the intent. Truman was a Democrat who saw Nixon rise as the hard-edged, anti-Communist prosecutor-politician of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a figure whose career was turbocharged by insinuation, theatrical outrage, and media-savvy smears (from Alger Hiss to the broader Red Scare atmosphere). Truman’s outburst reads like an early indictment of the style of politics Nixon came to embody: suspicion as strategy, moral language as camouflage, victory as permission.

It works because it refuses the comforting idea that lies are exceptions. Truman paints them as Nixon’s muscle memory, implying the real threat isn’t one falsehood, but a system of power built to make falsity feel normal.