Harry S. Truman

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Harry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States not by winning an election, but by walking into a room where Eleanor Roosevelt told him her husband was dead. He had been vice president for only 82 days. He had never been briefed on the atomic bomb. He did not even know the Manhattan Project existed. Within months of that April evening in 1945, he would make what he later called "the hardest decision I ever had to make" - authorizing the first and only use of nuclear weapons in war. The questions his presidency raises are still alive: How does a man who ran a failed hat shop in Kansas City end up reshaping the postwar world? What drove him to push civil rights when it cost him so dearly politically? And why do historians, who savaged him when he left office, now rank him among the greatest presidents the country has ever had?

• 2. Missouri Roots

  ›

  Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, on the 8th of May, 1884, the oldest child of John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Young Truman. His middle initial, "S", is not an abbreviation for any single name. It honors both his grandfathers - Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young - a practice common enough in the American South at the time.

  The family moved several times during his childhood, settling eventually in Independence, Missouri, so young Harry could attend the Presbyterian Church Sunday School. He did not attend a conventional school until he was eight. During those years in Independence, he served as a Shabbos goy for Jewish neighbors, performing tasks on Shabbat that their religion prevented them from doing.

  He learned to play the piano at age seven under Mrs. E.C. White, a well-respected teacher in Kansas City. He practiced every morning at five o'clock and studied more than twice a week until he was fifteen. During the 1900 Democratic National Convention in Kansas City, the teenage Truman served as a page - and there he watched William Jennings Bryan speak, the man who would become his political hero.

  After graduating from Independence High School in 1901, Truman attended Spalding's Commercial College in Kansas City for about a year, studying bookkeeping, shorthand, and typing. The education he received there was modest. He is the only president since William McKinley - elected in 1896 - who did not earn a college degree. He tried night law school between 1923 and 1925 but dropped out after losing a reelection bid as county judge. He never returned. When he applied for a law license in 1947 while serving as president, he changed his mind before submitting the paperwork. The Missouri Supreme Court issued him a posthumous honorary law license after his application was discovered in 1996.

• 3. The Soldier and the Hat Shop

  ›

  When the United States entered World War I on the 6th of April, 1917, Truman rejoined Battery B of the Missouri National Guard, where he helped recruit new soldiers. He had previously passed the enlistment eye exam only by secretly memorizing the chart - his unaided vision was 20/50 in the right eye and 20/400 in the left.

  Before shipping to France, Truman ran the camp canteen at Fort Sill alongside Edward Jacobson, a clothing store clerk from Kansas City. Unlike most canteens funded by the soldiers themselves, which typically lost money, the Truman-Jacobson canteen turned a profit. It returned each soldier's initial two-dollar investment and generated ten thousand dollars in dividends in six months.

  In France, Truman was promoted to captain and took command of Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, 35th Division - a unit known for its discipline problems. He restored order by making his corporals and sergeants personally accountable. One moment passed into battery lore as "The Battle of Who Run": during a surprise German night attack in the Vosges Mountains, his soldiers began to flee. Truman stopped them with a stream of profanity borrowed from his railroad days. The men were so startled to hear him swear that they obeyed immediately.

  On the 27th of September, 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Truman spotted an enemy artillery battery deploying across a river in a position to fire on the neighboring 28th Division. His orders confined him to targets facing the 35th Division. He ignored them. He waited patiently until the Germans had walked their horses well clear of the guns, then ordered his battery to open fire and destroy the position. His regimental commander, Colonel Karl D. Klemm, threatened a court-martial but never followed through. Battery D did not lose a single man under Truman's command in France.

  Back home in Independence, Truman married Bess Wallace on the 28th of June, 1919. Shortly before the wedding, he and Jacobson opened a haberdashery at 104 West 12th Street in downtown Kansas City. The store found brief success, then went bankrupt during the recession of 1921. Truman did not finish paying off its debts until 1935 - with help from banker William T. Kemper, who arranged for Truman's brother Vivian to purchase the promissory note for a thousand dollars, even though by that point it was worth nearly nine thousand.

• 4. Rise Through the Machine

  ›

  Truman's entry into elected politics came through Tom Pendergast, the Kansas City Democratic boss whose machine dominated Missouri. With Pendergast's backing, Truman was elected judge of Jackson County's eastern district in 1922 - an administrative court, not a judicial one, similar to a county commission. He lost his 1924 reelection campaign in a Republican wave behind Calvin Coolidge's landslide, then spent two years selling automobile club memberships before concluding that public service was safer employment for a family man.

  He won the presiding judgeship in 1926, again with Pendergast's support, and was reelected in 1930. During those years, Truman helped coordinate the Ten Year Plan, a public works program that transformed Jackson County's roads and produced a new courthouse designed by Wight and Wight. He also became president of the National Old Trails Road Association in 1926 and oversaw the dedication of twelve Madonna of the Trail monuments honoring pioneer women.

  Pendergast was reluctant to back Truman for the U.S. Senate in 1934 - four other candidates had already declined to run before the boss turned to him. Truman won the Democratic primary over two sitting congressmen, then defeated incumbent Republican Roscoe C. Patterson by nearly twenty percentage points in the general election. In Washington, he was dismissed as "the Senator from Pendergast." He later put it plainly: "by offering a little to the machine, I saved a lot."

  His reputation changed dramatically between 1940 and 1944, when he chaired a special Senate committee investigating waste and corruption in wartime contracts. Truman managed the committee, in the words of the Senate's own historical record, "with extraordinary skill" - and erased his image as a machine errand-runner. The committee reportedly saved as much as fifteen billion dollars and put Truman on the cover of Time magazine. At Fort Sill during World War I, Truman had met Lieutenant James M. Pendergast, nephew of Tom Pendergast - and that connection, traced back to a camp canteen, had set the whole chain in motion.

• 5. The Atomic Decision

  ›

  On the afternoon of the 12th of April, 1945, the day Roosevelt died, Truman was told only that the United States had a new, highly destructive weapon. It was not until the 25th of April that Secretary of War Henry Stimson briefed him in full, calling it "the most terrible bomb in the history of the world."

  At the Potsdam Conference in Berlin with Stalin and Churchill, Truman learned on the 16th of July that the Trinity test - the first atomic bomb detonation - had succeeded. He hinted to Stalin that a new weapon was coming. Stalin already knew, having received intelligence about the Manhattan Project through espionage long before Truman himself was informed.

  Japan refused the surrender demands of the Potsdam Declaration. Military planners had given Truman stark projections: a study done for Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that invading Japan could cost between 1.7 and 4 million American casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 deaths, and between five and ten million Japanese fatalities if civilians participated in the defense. Truman approved the schedule for dropping the two available bombs.

  In 1948, he described the decision publicly: "It was the hardest decision I ever had to make. But the President cannot duck hard problems - he cannot pass the buck." In 1963, he told a journalist the bombs saved 125,000 American lives and 125,000 Japanese lives, and probably spared a half million people on both sides from being maimed for life. Critics have argued that a demonstrative bombing of an uninhabited area might have forced Japan's surrender without the civilian toll, and that the attacks constituted a war crime. The debate has continued ever since.

• 6. The 1948 Miracle

  ›

  By spring of 1948, Truman's public approval rating stood at 36 percent. His party was splitting three ways: South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond was running on a Dixiecrat ticket, and Henry Wallace was leading a breakaway Progressive campaign on the left. Nearly every political observer considered a Truman victory impossible.

  Truman had made himself a target of Southern Democrats by issuing Executive Order 9981, which ended racial discrimination in the Armed Forces, and Executive Order 9980, which barred discrimination in federal agencies - both signed within two weeks of the Democratic convention. He had also proposed a ten-point civil rights program to Congress in February 1948, including anti-lynching legislation and voter rights protections. Biographer Taylor Branch later argued that no political act since the Compromise of 1877 had so profoundly influenced race relations.

  For his campaign, Truman boarded a train and crisscrossed the country by rail, delivering "whistle stop" speeches from the rear platform of the presidential car, Ferdinand Magellan. Six stops in Michigan drew a combined half a million people. A full million turned out for a New York City ticker-tape parade. The three major polling organizations - Roper, Crossley, and Gallup - all stopped polling before the November 2nd election, missing the surge entirely.

  On election day, Truman secured 303 electoral votes. Dewey received 189, and Thurmond only 39. The defining image came the morning after: Truman holding aloft the front page of the Chicago Tribune with its enormous, wrong headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman." His second inauguration on the 20th of January, 1949, was the first presidential inauguration ever televised nationally.

• 7. Cold War Architect

  ›

  To contain Soviet expansion, Truman built an architecture of alliances and institutions that outlasted his presidency by decades. The Truman Doctrine, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress with the help of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, formalized the policy of Soviet containment. The Marshall Plan aimed to restart the European economy on the logic, which Truman argued publicly, that communism flourishes in economically deprived areas.

  On the 24th of June, 1948, the Soviet Union blocked ground access to the western sectors of Berlin. Rather than send an armored column through Soviet-occupied territory, as General Lucius D. Clay had proposed, Truman approved a plan to supply the city entirely by air. The Berlin Airlift began on the 25th of June, delivering food, coal, and supplies by military aircraft on a scale nothing in history had attempted. Ground access was restored on the 11th of May, 1949.

  NATO was established with the United States, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Iceland, and Canada as original signatories. Truman appointed General Dwight D. Eisenhower as its first commander. He also signed the National Security Act of 1947, which merged the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into what became the Department of Defense, created the CIA, and established the National Security Council. On the 4th of November, 1952, Truman authorized the confidential creation of the National Security Agency.

  When North Korea invaded the South on the 25th of June, 1950, Truman committed U.S. forces without a congressional declaration of war. The conflict eventually cost more than 30,000 American lives. His decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur on the 11th of April, 1951, after MacArthur publicly lobbied for attacking Chinese supply bases north of the Yalu River, drove Truman's approval rating to 22 percent in February 1952 - the lowest ever recorded for a sitting president, a mark later matched only by Richard Nixon in 1974.

• 8. The Long Reckoning

  ›

  When Truman left office in January 1953, his administration was widely scorned. Corruption investigations had implicated people around him, though not Truman himself. The Korean War had stalled. McCarthyism had poisoned the political atmosphere, and Truman had called Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has" - an accusation that satisfied almost no one.

  For years it was believed that Truman's retirement was financially precarious, and Congress established a pension for former presidents partly in response. Evidence later emerged that he had actually accumulated considerable wealth, some of it during his presidency. He spent his retirement founding his presidential library and writing his memoirs, published in 1955-1956.

  His former business partner Eddie Jacobson, who had sold hats with him at 104 West 12th Street and shared the canteen profits at Fort Sill, played an unexpected role in one of Truman's most consequential decisions. Jacobson, described as a non-religious Jew whom Truman absolutely trusted, advised him on Zionism. Truman cited that advice as decisive in his choice to recognize the State of Israel on the 14th of May, 1948 - eleven minutes after Israel declared itself a nation, over the objection of Secretary of State George Marshall.

  Historians have revised their assessments sharply upward since Truman left office. They now consistently place him in the top quartile of American presidents. The man who passed the eye chart from memory, who led Battery D without losing a soldier, who held the wreckage of Roosevelt's coalition together long enough to win an election no one thought he could win, died on the 26th of December, 1972 - and the arguments about what he did and why have not stopped since.