Truman himself was honest, but he also winked and nodded at the corruption of others and some of the cronies he put into office as president embarrassed him no end. The character of Joe Flynn, later Captain Binghamton on McHale's Navy is Harry Truman who was a county judge (commissioner) for Jackson County, Missouri and later United States Senator. In fact Pendergast's private life as far as we know was a model of probity and he and his wife raised several children, unlike here where he's shown to be a man alone even keeping his wife at room's length away. The romantic angle however of Payne being in love with Doe Avedon who married best friend William Bishop and then marrying plain Jane Gloria McGehee in a moment of drunken weakness is a complete fabrication. In fact Pendergast did do the things described in the film to a country club that high hatted him. When talking about some of the facts of the Pendergast machine operation, the screenplay by Dalton Trumbo under the pseudonym Ben L. In the days before social welfare became a responsibility of government, these bosses while they enriched themselves also fed a lot of hungry people, giving them food and fuel for a winter. Mostly, but not all were Democrats who rounded up and registered the foreign ethnic populations and got them to vote for the party slate.

Based on the story of Boss Tom Pendergast of Kansas City who ruled the roost there succeeding brother Jim from World War I until the outbreak of World War II, John Payne delivers a riveting portrayal of a political boss back in the day when these guys were at their heights running our nation's cities.

The boss movie 1956