polls or public opinion of the moment

For a while the mood overall seemed one of a death watch over his own presidency. Dwight Eisenhower had defeated Adlai Stevenson by a landslide. New poll results showed that only thirty two percent of the people approved of the way Truman was handling his job, and forty three percent thought it had been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Korea. But polls meant no more to him now than ever before. “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt,” he wrote privately in an undated memo to himself. “What would Jesus Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in Israel? It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts, it’s right and wrong.”

David McCullough
Truman Simon and Schuster. 2003. p.1086, 1087.

suffer by comparison

To no one was Marshall’s presence more reassuring, or inspiriting, than to Truman. “The more I see and talk to him the more certain I am he’s the great one of the age,” Truman wrote not long after Marshall’s swearing in. Marshall is a tower of strength and common sense,” he noted privately another time. It was admiration such as Truman felt for no other public figure, no one he had ever known, not Roosevelt, not Churchill, not anyone. Nor was he at all hesitant or concerned over having such a strong-minded man as his Secretary of State – Marshall, Harriman, Patterson, Forrestal, Lilienthal, Eisenhower, they were all strong-minded. Conceivably, Truman could have worried that someone of such immense reputation as Marshall in so prominent a role would diminish his own standing with the country, that he might suffer by comparison, and Marshall be perceived as more the sort of man who ought to be President. But Truman was neither jealous nor intimidated. He was not so constructed. “I am surely lucky to have his friendship and support,” he wrote, and that was that.

David McCullough
Truman - Simon and Schuster. 2003. p.637,638