When Eisenhower took the oath and when Truman walked down off the platform, he was right back down on ground level again as citizen Truman. McCULLOUGH: 1953, when Eisenhower took the oath of office as the 34th President of the United States. He lived to be almost 90 and spent 20 years in Washington as a Senator and Vice President and eventually President.

He lived nearly 70 years of his life in Jackson County, Missouri. But in order to understand Truman, you have to understand, it seems to me, life in Jackson County. He missed the stimulation and the pressure and the excitement of Washington. While we all remember, I think, with affection the Harry Truman of Independence, Missouri, walking the same streets of the town he'd grown up in and just being citizen Truman, neighbor Truman once again, it wasn't all that easy for him. But when he got home, he found that living up to the idea wasn't as easy as he expected. Truman liked to say, 'I tried never to forget who I was, where I came from and where I would go back to.' Now, that is the Cincinnatus theme, obviously, but it also shows that he knew who he was and he was proud of who he was, and the return to Independence after he left the office of the Presidency in 1953 was his way of letting his actions speak louder than his words. And the power belonged to the people therefore, the power would be returned by those who held it for a time.

Citizenship meant that any citizen could be called upon any time to serve his country or her country in any capacity including the greatest power. If you go up to the rotunda in the Capitol and you look at the great painting by Trumbull of George Washington turning over his powers as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army to the Congress, the Cincinnatus symbols are all through that painting because the Founding Fathers really believed that this was democracy entailed. That's the theme that this country was founded on. DAVID MCCULLOUGH, AUTHOR, 'CITIZEN TRUMAN': Well, Cincinnatus was the mythical hero who left the plow, left the farm to go to the aid of his country in time of war and became a great general and was victorious, and then he renounced all of his power and returned to the farm.

Harry truman david mccullough