When he left office in 1953, the American public saw Truman as one of the most unpopular chief executives in history. His job approval rating of 22% in the Gallup Poll of February 1952 was lower than Richard Nixon's 24% in August 1974, the month that Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In 1952, journalist Samuel Lubell stated that 'after seven years of Truman's hectic, even furious, activity the nation seemed to be about on the same general spot as when he first came to office ... Nowhere in the whole Truman record can one point to a single, decisive break-through ... All his skills and energies—and he was among our hardest-working Presidents—were directed to standing still'. During the years of campus unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, revisionist historians on the left attacked his foreign policy as too hostile to Communism, and his domestic policy as too favorable toward business. However, Truman's image in university textbooks was quite favorable in the 1950s, and more established scholars never accepted the critiques of revisionist historians.
22%
22%