Roy Blunt: “I was pleased to join the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) to introduce the bill to name the Headquarters Building…”

“I was pleased to join the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) to introduce the bill to name the Headquarters Building of the U.S. State Department for our Nation's 33rd President and Missouri's favorite son, Harry S Truman. The "Man From Independence" was a man from middle America, a man like millions of others at the beginning of the 20th century. He reflected America's farms and small towns. He understood poverty and hard work. He valued education and read book after book from the Independence Public Library. He later would observe that there was not much left in human nature that one could not find in Plutarch's Lives in a community where not lots of people had read Plutarch's Lives. He valued his parents. His love for his wife Bess and their daughter Margaret was unquestioned. His family was most important to him. He was a man who understood courage, not as a philosophical abstraction, but by facing, along with those he commanded, artillery fire at night, in the mud, in the rain in France during World War I. Truman was a farmer and a small businessman who struggled to make a living on the farm and from a retail store. Then this farmer, small businessman, volunteer soldier helped create a vision for America's place in the world that was far different from that imagined by those who had gone before him and shaped American foreign policy for decades.”