Presidency of Harry S. Truman

• 1. Introduction

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  The Presidency of Harry S. Truman began not with an election, but with a phone call. On the 12th of April 1945, Truman was urgently summoned to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt met him and told him the President was dead. Truman, who had been vice president for only a matter of days, asked her if there was anything he could do for her. She replied: "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."

  The next morning, Truman told reporters: "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."

  He had not been told about the Manhattan Project. He had no major role in the Roosevelt administration. He was a Democrat from Missouri who had been chosen as a running mate because all factions of the party could live with him. And yet the decisions that awaited him would shape the second half of the twentieth century. How would an untested man, filled with what his own biographers called latent anger about career setbacks, handle the atomic bomb, the collapse of Europe, the birth of the Cold War, and a shooting war in Korea? That is what this documentary explores.

• 2. The Atomic Decision

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  Secretary of War Henry Stimson told Truman the full details of the atomic bomb on the 25th of April 1945, just thirteen days after he took office. Germany surrendered on May 8, and Truman's attention turned entirely to the Pacific.

  At the Potsdam Conference that July, Truman learned that the Trinity test on July 16 had been successful. He hinted to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the U.S. was about to use a new kind of weapon. Stalin, it turned out, already knew, having been briefed by spies long before Truman himself was.

  When the Japanese government ignored the surrender demands in the Potsdam Declaration, Truman approved the military's schedule. Hiroshima was bombed on the 6th of August 1945, and Nagasaki three days later, leaving approximately 135,000 dead immediately. Another 130,000 would die from radiation sickness and related illnesses over the following five years.

  Japan agreed to surrender on August 10, on the sole condition that Emperor Hirohito would not be forced to abdicate. After internal debate, the Truman administration accepted those terms.

  After leaving office, Truman told a journalist that the bombing "was done to save 125,000 youngsters on the American side and 125,000 on the Japanese side from getting killed and that is what it did. It probably also saved a half million youngsters on both sides from being maimed for life." Critics, including Truman's own successor Dwight D. Eisenhower, argued that conventional tactics like firebombing and blockade might have brought the same result. The debate has never fully resolved.

  The atomic bomb also informed every subsequent decision Truman made about nuclear weapons. The U.S. had only 9 atomic bombs in 1946, but the stockpile grew to 650 by 1951. And in early 1950, after the Soviet Union tested its own nuclear device in August 1949, Truman made the decision to proceed with the far more powerful hydrogen bomb.

• 3. Building the Postwar Order

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  As a Wilsonian internationalist, Truman signed the United Nations Charter at the San Francisco Conference, having watched Woodrow Wilson destroy his own League of Nations through partisan stubbornness in 1919. Truman made a deliberate choice not to repeat that mistake. He cooperated closely with Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, a leading figure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose support proved crucial after Republicans won control of Congress in the 1946 elections.

  Construction of the United Nations headquarters in New York City was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and completed in 1952. But the Soviet veto made the UN ineffective in most major disputes, and Truman moved quickly to build a parallel architecture of alliances and aid programs.

  The Marshall Plan was the most consequential of these. Truman asked Congress to approve an unprecedented, multi-year, $25 billion appropriation to rejuvenate devastated Western European economies. Congress eventually allocated $12.4 billion over four years. By 1952, industrial productivity in recipient countries had increased by 35 percent compared to 1938 levels. The plan also set rules: governments were required to exclude Communists, and American aid to France and Britain was conditioned on their acceptance of Germany's reindustrialization.

  On the 24th of June 1948, Stalin ordered a blockade of the Western-held sectors of Berlin, hoping to prevent the creation of a western German state. General Lucius D. Clay proposed sending an armored column through Soviet territory. Truman rejected that option as too dangerous and instead approved an airlift. On June 25, the Allies began supplying the blockaded city by air, with food, coal, and other essentials. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Soviet forces lifted the blockade on the 11th of May 1949.

  That same year, Truman recognized the State of Israel on the 14th of May 1948, eleven minutes after it declared itself a nation, overcoming objections from Secretary of State George Marshall. The recognition came partly because Clark Clifford convinced Truman that non-recognition would push Israel toward the Soviet Union.

• 4. The Cold War Takes Shape

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  On taking office, Truman privately viewed the Soviet Union as a "police government pure and simple," but he was initially reluctant to confront it directly. Soviet consolidation of Eastern Europe throughout 1945, combined with the February 1946 announcement of the Soviet five-year plan calling for continued military buildup, hardened his position.

  Winston Churchill's March 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, called for an anti-Soviet alliance led by the United States. Truman privately approved but did not publicly endorse it. By September 1946, he was convinced that the Soviet Union sought world domination.

  The instrument of the new policy was containment, a doctrine drawn from a 1946 cable by diplomat George F. Kennan. Kennan argued that the Soviet regime was fundamentally uncompromising and that the correct response was not rollback, but steady resistance to further Soviet expansion.

  The first major test came in Greece and Turkey in early 1947. Britain informed Washington it could no longer afford to maintain its support for the Greek government against a left-wing insurgency. Dean Acheson warned Truman that the fall of Greece could trigger Soviet expansion across Europe. In a March 1947 speech before a joint session of Congress, Truman announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine, requesting an unprecedented $400 million aid package for Greece and Turkey. Congress approved it with bipartisan support. The Greek insurgency was defeated in 1949.

  In 1949, the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty with Canada and several European countries, creating NATO and committing the U.S. to its first permanent military alliance since the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France. Truman appointed General Dwight D. Eisenhower as the first Supreme Commander of NATO. He permanently stationed 180,000 troops in Europe. European defense spending grew from 5 percent to 12 percent of gross national product under the alliance's pressure.

  NSC 68, a National Security Council document calling for a major expansion of the U.S. defense budget, landed on Truman's desk but he dismissed it, unwilling to commit to higher spending. The Korean War changed his mind: military spending soared from 1949 to 1953.

• 5. Korea and MacArthur

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  On the 25th of June 1950, Kim Il Sung's Korean People's Army invaded South Korea. Kim had won Stalin's approval before launching the attack, though the Soviet Union was not directly involved. Truman, despite not viewing Korea itself as strategically vital, believed that allowing a Western-aligned country to fall would embolden Communists globally.

  With the Soviet Union boycotting the United Nations Security Council over its refusal to recognize the People's Republic of China, Truman secured Resolution 84, empowering other nations to defend South Korea. He framed U.S. involvement as a "police action" under UN authority, without seeking a formal declaration of war from Congress.

  North Korean forces captured Seoul on June 28, just three days after the invasion began. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in Asia, won Truman's approval to land troops on the peninsula. Truman's July 1950 request for $10 billion in war funding was approved almost unanimously.

  By August, U.S. troops and air strikes had stabilized the front around the Pusan Perimeter. MacArthur then scored a stunning surprise victory at the Battle of Inchon, trapping most of the North Korean invaders. UN forces marched north toward the Yalu River boundary with China, aiming to reunite the peninsula.

  In November 1950, Chinese People's Volunteer Army forces crossed the Yalu River and forced UN soldiers into a retreat that carried them below the 38th parallel. Truman refused MacArthur's request to bomb Chinese supply bases north of the river, fearing a wider war with the Soviet Union. General Matthew Ridgway launched a counterattack that pushed Chinese forces back to the 38th parallel, but MacArthur began making public demands for escalation.

  On the 5th of April 1951, House Minority Leader Joseph Martin read aloud a letter from MacArthur that criticized Truman's conduct of the war. Truman concluded that MacArthur had crossed the line from military advisor to independent policy maker, threatening the principle of civilian control of the military. He fired him.

  The public reaction was fierce. Truman's approval rating in February 1952 stood at 22 percent in Gallup polls, which was, until George W. Bush in 2008, the lowest ever recorded for a sitting American president. MacArthur returned to a hero's welcome and addressed a joint session of Congress. But congressional hearings and newspaper editorials eventually turned public opinion against MacArthur's call for escalation.

  The war ended with an armistice in 1953, after Truman had left office, dividing the peninsula near the 38th parallel. Over 30,000 Americans and approximately 3 million Koreans died in the conflict.

• 6. The Fair Deal at Home

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  Truman proposed an ambitious domestic liberal agenda he called the Fair Deal. Nearly all of it was blocked by the conservative coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats that controlled Congress for most of his presidency.

  The strike wave of 1945-46 set the tone for his domestic battles. By February 1946, nearly 2 million workers were engaged in strikes or other labor disputes. When a national rail strike threatened to shut down the country, Truman seized the railroads, but two key railway unions struck anyway. Twenty-four thousand freight trains and 175,000 passenger trains a day stopped moving. After top aide Clark Clifford toned down a draft presidential message that had called on veterans to form a mob against union leaders, Truman demanded Congress draft railroad strikers into the army. As he finished that speech, he was handed a note saying the strike had settled on presidential terms. He read it, and finished the speech anyway.

  Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1946 elections. The 80th Congress then passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, reversing key pro-labor union provisions that had been central to the New Deal. The one significant domestic victory Truman celebrated came when conservative Republican Senator Robert A. Taft unexpectedly supported the Housing Act of 1949.

  Truman had a notable success on civil rights. He ordered equal treatment in the military, enraging white politicians in the Deep South, who backed Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat third-party campaign in 1948. Truman later pushed for full military integration in the 1950s.

  The G.I. Bill, passed in 1944 before Truman took office, transformed the country during his presidency. Under it, 2.2 million veterans crowded into hastily built classrooms. College degrees awarded rose from just over 200,000 in 1940 to nearly 500,000 in 1950. In 1947 alone, 540,000 veterans bought homes at an average price of $7,300. Between 1945 and 1955, some 15 million housing units were built, and the home-ownership rate grew from 50 percent to 60 percent by 1960.

  Truman also established a Commission on Higher Education for American Democracy in 1946, whose report called for a national network of public community colleges that would be free of charge. The report helped popularize the phrase "community college" and shaped two-year degree institutions across the country for decades.

• 7. Legacy and Reputation

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  Truman left office in January 1953 as one of the most unpopular presidents of the twentieth century. Eisenhower's successful 1952 campaign was built around three words: "Korea, Communism and Corruption."

  The institutional architecture Truman left behind was extensive. The National Security Act of 1947 created the U.S. Air Force, the CIA, and the National Security Council, and merged the Departments of War and Navy into what became the Department of Defense. In 1952, Truman secretly created the National Security Agency. He made four appointments to the Supreme Court: Harold Hitz Burton in 1945, Fred M. Vinson as Chief Justice in 1946, and Tom C. Clark and Sherman Minton in 1949 following the deaths of Frank Murphy and Wiley Blount Rutledge. Clark served until 1967, emerging as an important swing vote on both the Vinson Court and the Warren Court.

  His foreign policy choices were foundational to American power for the rest of the century. The Marshall Plan produced measurable results: by 1952, Western European industrial productivity was 35 percent above 1938 levels. NATO drew in Greece and Turkey, eventually incorporated West Germany in 1955, and established the architecture of Western collective defense. The doctrine of containment, which Truman operationalized through the Truman Doctrine and NSC 68, remained the organizing principle of American foreign policy until the Soviet Union dissolved.

  Public reputation recovered slowly. By the 1960s, Truman was viewed more favorably, and in polls of historians and political scientists conducted since then, he is generally ranked among the ten greatest American presidents. The man who felt the moon, the stars, and all the planets fall on him in April 1945 is now considered one of the most consequential presidents to have held the office.