[T]hings will be in such shape in foreign affairs that we can go to work in earnest on that bunch of ‘hypocrites’ known as Republicans.

-the President in a letter to the First Lady, 23 July 1948

...And let's remember: this is a man who knew with absolutely confidence that his letters would be saved and become very, very public. In fact, he was upset when he discovered she was burning her own copies: "Think of history!" he reportedly said.

I can't speak to the intervening presidents of the "since" part of James' quotes. But yes, Truman had a temper and was not always keen to hold it back. At least once, First Lady Bess Truman physically yanked Harry back into their shared hotel room to keep him from exploding at the wrong people at the wrong time.

Even better, according to then-White House seamstress Lillian Parks, people started to joke about how often Bess had to tell her husband, "You didn't have to say that."

It's not all fun and games. In 1945, Bess accepted an invitation to an event hosted by the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) at a Washington venue that barred Black people. Including, at one point, prohibiting a performance by jazz pianist Hazel Scott, who happened to be the wife of a congressman (NY rep Adam Clayton Powell). Powell complained to Harry about Bess's acceptance of an invitation from this organization--to which Harry promptly vowed never to let Powell set foot in his White House again.

You do not mess with that man's family!

...And this, perhaps, is the most important lesson of all. Because:

In his article, though, James was almost certainly referring to Harry Truman's letter to a certain Paul Hume of the Washington Post.

There's some context here. Hume was not the first music critic to give Harry's daughter Margaret less than Grammy-level credit for her singing. St. Louis papers judged her first public performances "well-produced but not always impeccable in tone" and "not a great voice, perhaps not even a truly good one, but it is used expertly and with considerable artistry."

But Hume went a little too far for the president's taste, and he, shall we say, responded.

I've just read your lousy review of [Harry's daughter] Margaret's concert. I've come to the conclusion that you are an "eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay."

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you're off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below! Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you'll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

Truman was apparently no stranger to writing such, shall we say, eloquent letters. But the Hume letter was widely published, becoming by far the most in/famous example. One can only imagine how Bess phrased that particular moment's version of "You didn't have to say that."

And so we say of Missouri: Act first, apologize second, ask permission third.

Or sometimes just act.

Bill James is a tremendous historian and innovator when it comes to baseball even when he makes genuinely provocative statements, but on politics he's often spoken far outside his area of expertise, and this is one example.

/u/sunagainstgold beat me to it on the infamous Paul Hume letter which I'd agree is almost certainly what James is referring to, but it's important to understand the context.

Truman was blunt to the point of offending; I've written before about how he dealt with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov at their first meeting. But he generally wasn't crude or vulgar in the process; George Elsey writes that during his poker games he'd happily laugh at the really blue stories told by his fellow players, but he never told one of his own, and it wasn't his style to belittle his staff. (Of all recent Presidents, the one who absolutely wouldn't let a curse word pass his mouth was Gerald Ford; one staff member recalls being shocked when he referred to Congress as "those sons of bitches!" when they refused to pass an emergency appropriation bill for South Vietnam and sealed the fate of that war, since it was the most virulent he'd ever heard the man.)

What Truman did have was a tremendous temper that given his position in life prior to the Presidency that he usually wasn't allowed to express. His mother in law, Madge Wallace (always Mrs. Wallace to Truman even after he took office), was outright abusive to him during the many lean years that he lived under her roof with Bess, and in general he'd have to bite his tongue with her and pretty much everyone else he was subordinate to, which was most of the world even when he found himself the Senator from Pendergast.

So since Truman wasn't allowed to fully speak his mind, he turned to another format to express his fury: letters. Indeed, there is an entire book composed of the ones during his White House tenure - Strictly Personal And Confidential - that never got sent; I'm on vacation so sadly don't have access it for some of the juicier ones it contains, but there are some doozies. One I remember off the top of my head, though, was one written to Bess when she'd abandoned him (she spent much of her time as First Lady back in Missouri; it wasn't Harry she disliked but both Washington and the job he forced her into) with a line in there about after he went to visit her in Independence that she "looked at (him) like something the cat dragged in." Probably wise that he never quite expressed himself directly like that to her!

Edit: I finally randomly stumbled across the actual story in Hamby's Man of the People and it's a good enough one that my recollection needs correction.

For Christmas 1945, Bess, Mrs. Wallace, and Margaret had all flown home on December 20th, but Truman was so wrapped up in dealing with the news coming out of Moscow (Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes essentially tried to singlehandedly dictate foreign policy for the US, UK, and USSR, which went about as well as you'd expect) that he didn't leave until Christmas Day. Another more public reason was that he needed to stick around for the first lighting of the national Christmas tree since 1940 on Christmas Eve, which also gave him the opportunity behind the scenes to quietly pay out of his own pocket for Christmas dinner for a couple of extremely needy families, one white, one black.

In turn, to make it to Independence on the 25th, Truman had to both fly out of a blizzard in DC (it took 4 hours to prep the plane) and land in conditions nearly as bad in Kansas City - for which he was mildly reproached by the NY Times and Washington Post for reckless self-endangerment - got into a fight with Bess for immediately turning around and leaving her on the 27th, and Hamby details the rest:

"Probably while still on the plane (back to Washington), he scribbled an angry letter to (Bess) and sent it special delivery. Shortly afterward, he had cooled down enough to call Margaret, tell her to contact Independence postmaster Edgar Hinde, have him intercept the letter, and burn it. At the end of the day, he sat down and wrote, but did not send, a [second] contrite missive expressing his unhappiness and feelings of inadequacy [that was not discovered until after his death]: "You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least 100 things I didn't want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I'm something the cat dragged in and tell me I've come in at last because I couldn't find any reason to stay away...You, Margie, and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assistance, because no one ever needed help and assistance as I do now...Kiss my baby and I love you in season and out."

Putting anger to writing actually wasn't all that uncommon; Lincoln did the same thing (his furious letter to George Meade following Gettysburg is a classic), and so did Twain and Churchill on occasion. Truman, though, did this over and over to the point where staff was well aware of how he actually expressed his fury and routinely intervened to make sure that they didn't get sent.

Of the staff that did this, the most important was his childhood friend and capable press secretary, Charlie Ross, who knew that Truman would almost always calm down in a day or two and greatly regret it if he went off on someone by letter or in person. So one of Ross' most important jobs was to insist on seeing everything that Truman would propose to send out, and on the occasions that it was required, he also had the personal standing with Truman to tell him that he was an idiotic Missouri mule if he refused to listen to reason and decided to drop it in the mailbox.

Except a day prior to one young Margaret Truman's performance, Ross had dropped dead of a heart attack - literally at his desk after giving a press conference - and not only was Truman deeply grieving but the mechanism for vetting his outgoing mail had disappeared. That was how the Hume letter got through, and Truman was rightly embarrassed about it afterwards. If you can find it, PBS' American Experience: Truman actually includes an interview of Hume in its discussion of it.

As far as crude and vulgar though? As Robert Caro has pointed out over and over, nobody tops LBJ.

Something similar was asked yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i3utnc/president_harry_truman_left_office_with_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf