Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), the 33rd U.S. president, assumed office following the death of President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945). In the White House from 1945 to 1953, Truman made the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, helped rebuild postwar Europe, worked to contain communism and led the United States into the Korean War (1950-1953). 
A Missouri native, Truman assisted in running his family farm after high school and served in World War I (1914-1918). He began his political career in 1922 as a county judge in Missouri and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934. Three months after becoming vice president in 1945, the plain-spoken Truman ascended to the presidency. In 1948, he was reelected in an upset over Republican Thomas Dewey (1902-1971). After leaving office, Truman spent his remaining two decades in Independence, Missouri, where he established his presidential library.
== Early life and career ==
Truman was the eldest of three children of John A. and Martha E. Truman; his father was a mule trader and farmer. After graduating from high school in 1901 in Independence, Missouri, he went to work as a bank clerk in Kansas City. In 1906 he moved to the family farm near Grandview, and he took over the farm management after his father’s death in 1914. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Truman—nearly 33 years old and with two tours in the National Guard (1905–11) behind him—immediately volunteered. He was sent overseas a year later and served in France as the captain of Battery D, a field artillery unit that saw action at Saint Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. The men under his command came to be devoted to him, admiring him for his bravery and evenhanded leadership.
Returning to the United States in 1919, Truman married Elizabeth Wallace (Bess Truman), whom he had known since childhood; they had one child, Margaret, in 1924. With army friend Edward Jacobson he opened a haberdashery, but the business failed in the severe recession of the early 1920s. Another army friend introduced him to Thomas Pendergast, Democratic boss of Kansas City. With the backing of the Pendergast machine, Truman launched his political career in 1922, running successfully for county judge. He lost his bid for reelection in 1924, but he was elected presiding judge of the county court in 1926, again with Pendergast’s support. He served two four-year terms, during which he acquired a reputation for honesty (unusual among Pendergast politicians) and for skillful management.
In 1934 Truman’s political career seemed at an end because of the two-term tradition attached to his job and the reluctance of the Pendergast machine to advance him to higher office. When several people rejected the machine’s offer to run in the Democratic primary for a seat in the U.S. Senate, however, Pendergast extended the offer to Truman, who quickly accepted. He won the primary with a 40,000-vote plurality, assuring his election in solidly Democratic Missouri. In January 1935 Truman was sworn in as Missouri’s junior senator by Vice Pres. John Nance Garner.
He began his Senate career under the cloud of being a puppet of the corrupt Pendergast, but Truman’s friendliness, personal integrity, and attention to the duties of his office soon won over his colleagues. He was responsible for two major pieces of legislation: the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, establishing government regulation of the aviation industry, and the Wheeler-Truman Transportation Act of 1940, providing government oversight of railroad reorganization. Following a tough Democratic primary victory in 1940, he won a second term in the Senate, and it was during this term that he gained national recognition for leading an investigation into fraud and waste in the U.S. military. While taking care not to jeopardize the massive effort being launched to prepare the nation for war, the Truman Committee (officially the Special Committee Investigating National Defense) exposed graft and deficiencies in production. The committee made it a practice to issue draft reports of its findings to corporations, unions, and government agencies under investigation, allowing for the correction of abuses before formal action was initiated.
Respected by his Senate colleagues and admired by the public at large, Truman was selected to run as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president on the 1944 Democratic ticket, replacing Henry A. Wallace. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket garnered 53 percent of the vote to 46 percent for their Republican rivals, and Truman took the oath of office as vice president on January 20, 1945. His term lasted just 82 days, however, during which time he met with the president only twice. Roosevelt, who apparently did not realize how ill he was, made little effort to inform Truman about the administration’s programs and plans, nor did he prepare Truman for dealing with the heavy responsibilities that were about to devolve upon him.
== Succession to the presidency ==
Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, leaving Truman and the public in shock. Truman told reporters the day after taking the oath of office that he felt as if “the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen” on him and asked them to pray for him. He was hardly, however, as scholars have noted, a political naïf. Although he had no foreign policy experience, he was a capable administrator of large bureaucracies and a skilled politician who knew how to use the press to his purposes. Truman was sworn in as president on the same day as Roosevelt’s death, which was just weeks away from Truman’s 61st birthday. He began his presidency with great energy, making final arrangements for the San Francisco meeting to draft a charter for the United Nations, helping to arrange Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, and traveling to Potsdam in July for a meeting with Allied leaders to discuss the fate of postwar Germany. While in Potsdam Truman received word of the successful test of an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and it was from Potsdam that Truman sent an ultimatum to Japan to surrender unconditionally or face “utter devastation.” When Japan did not surrender and his advisers estimated that up to 500,000 Americans might be killed in an invasion of Japan, Truman authorized the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), killing more than 100,000 men, women, and children. This remains perhaps the most controversial decision ever taken by a U.S. president, one that scholars continue to debate today. (See Sidebar: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.) In his address to the American people on August 7, Truman said in part:It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth….The fact that we can release atomic energy ushers in a new era in man’s understanding of nature’s forces.
Japan surrendered on August 14, and the Pacific war ended officially on September 2, 1945. Scarcely had the guns of World War II been silenced than Truman faced the threat of Soviet expansionism in eastern Europe. Early in 1946 Truman brought British statesman Winston Churchill, who had just completed his first term (1940–45) as prime minister, to Missouri to sound the alarm with his “iron curtain” address. The following year Truman put the world on notice through his Truman Doctrine that the United States would oppose communist aggression everywhere; specifically, he called for economic aid to Greece and Turkey to help those countries resist communist takeover. In the process, Truman shifted U.S. foreign policy from cooperation with the Soviet Union to “containment” of Soviet power. On March 12, 1947, he addressed a joint session of Congress, saying in part:One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion….We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States….I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.Later in 1947 the president backed Secretary of State George Marshall’s strategy for undercutting communism’s appeal in western Europe by sending enormous amounts of financial aid (ultimately about $13 billion) to rebuild devastated European economies. Both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program) achieved their objectives, but they also contributed to the global polarization that characterized five decades of Cold War hostility between East and West.
== Winning a second term ==
As the presidential election of 1948 approached, the odds against Truman’s winning the presidency seemed enormous. The Republicans had triumphed in the congressional elections of 1946, running against Truman as the symbol of the New Deal. That electoral triumph seemed to indicate that the American people were weary of reform and of the Democratic Party. Worsening Truman’s chances for reelection was the defection of liberal Democrats, breaking with the president over his hard-line opposition to the Soviet Union; many of these liberals supported the candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, who was running as the Progressive Party candidate for president. At the Democratic National Convention, Southern delegates bolted as well, angry at the president for his strong civil rights initiatives; these Southern Democrats supported Strom Thurmond, the States’ Rights (“Dixiecrat”) presidential candidate.
But Truman surprised everyone. He launched a cross-country whistle-stop campaign, blasting the “do-nothing, good-for-nothing Republican Congress.” As he hammered away at Republican support for the antilabour Taft-Hartley Act (passed over Truman’s veto) and other conservative policies, crowds responded with “Give ’em hell, Harry!” The excitement generated by Truman’s vigorous campaigning contrasted sharply with the lacklustre speeches of Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey, and Truman won by a comfortable margin, 49 percent to 45 percent; Wallace and Thurmond had little impact on the outcome. Energized by his surprising victory, Truman presented his program for domestic reform in 1949. The Fair Deal included proposals for expanded public housing, increased aid to education, a higher minimum wage, federal protection for civil rights, and national health insurance. Despite Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, most Fair Deal proposals either failed to gain legislative majorities or passed in much weakened form. Truman succeeded, however, in laying the groundwork for the domestic agenda for decades to come.
In part, the Fair Deal fell victim to rising Cold War tensions that absorbed attention and resources. In 1949 Chinese communists finally won their long civil war, seizing control of the mainland. Almost simultaneously, the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear bomb, ending the nuclear monopoly enjoyed by the United States since 1945. Truman, who had faced down the Soviet threat to Berlin in 1948 with a massive airlift of food and supplies to sustain the noncommunist sectors of the city, led the United States into a collective security agreement with noncommunist European nations—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—to resist Soviet expansionism. In 1950 he authorized development of the hydrogen bomb in order to maintain an arms lead over the Soviets. By the end of the decade, the wartime alliance linking the United States and Soviet Union had been completely severed, and the two nations had embarked on an arms race of potentially world-destroying dimensions.
== Outbreak of the Korean War ==
In June 1950 military forces of communist North Korea suddenly plunged southward across the 38th parallel boundary in an attempt to seize noncommunist South Korea. Outraged, Truman reportedly responded, “By God, I’m going to let them [North Korea] have it!” Truman did not ask Congress for a declaration of war, and he was later criticized for this decision. Instead, he sent to South Korea, with UN sanction, U.S. forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur to repel the invasion. Ill-prepared for combat, the Americans were pushed back to the southern tip of the Korean peninsula before MacArthur’s brilliant Inchon offensive drove the communists north of the 38th parallel. South Korea was liberated, but MacArthur wanted a victory over the communists, not merely restoration of the status quo. U.S. forces drove northward, nearly to the Yalu River boundary with Manchuria. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops then poured into North Korea, pushing the fighting once again down to the 38th parallel. When MacArthur insisted on extending the war to China and using nuclear weapons to defeat the communists, Truman removed him from command—a courageous assertion of civilian control over the military. The administration was devoted to its policy of containment. The war, however, dragged on inconclusively past the end of Truman’s presidency, eventually claiming the lives of more than 33,000 Americans and leaving a residual bitterness at home.
The inability of the United States to achieve a clear-cut victory in Korea following Soviet conquests in eastern Europe and the triumph of communism in China led many Americans to conclude that the United States was losing the Cold War. Accusations began to fly that the president and some of his top advisers were “soft on communism,” thereby explaining why the United States—without question the world’s greatest power in 1945—had been unable to halt the communist advance. As the nation’s second “Red Scare” (the fear that communists had infiltrated key positions in government and society) took hold in the late 1940s and early ’50s, Truman’s popularity began to plummet. In March 1952 he announced he was not going to run for reelection. By the time he left the White House in January 1953, his approval rating was just 31 percent; it had peaked at 87 percent in July 1945.
Over the next two decades, however, Truman’s standing among American presidents rose. He began to be appreciated as a president who had, in Truman’s own words, “done his damnedest.” The ultimate common man thrust into leadership at a critical time in the nation’s history, Truman had risen to the challenge and acquitted himself far better than nearly everyone had expected. Later presidents, regardless of political party, looked back on him fondly, admiring his willingness to take responsibility for the country (as a sign on his desk read, “The Buck Stops Here!”) and trying to emulate his appeal to the average voter. His Fair Deal social programs, such as those delineating civil rights for African Americans, had been defeated during his presidency but were enacted in the 1960s and retained by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Truman did, however, issue an executive order (9981) that desegregated the military, and he was noted for appointing African Americans to high-level positions. His reputation suffered slightly in the 1980s, when scholars highlighted the fact that in private conversation and personal correspondence, Truman told off-colour jokes and referred to minorities and ethnic groups in terms considered highly offensive today. His life in retirement was modest but active, perhaps epitomized by his habit of taking a brisk morning walk, or “constitutional,” along the sidewalks of Independence, Mo. He enjoyed joking with reporters, and he seems to have initiated a controversy over the period after his middle initial. (See Researcher’s Note.) He remained in good health, spending his days reading voraciously, until the mid-1960s, when he declined rapidly. On Christmas Day 1972, Truman lapsed into unconsciousness, and he died the next morning.
== Tributes and legacy ==
When he left office in 1953, Truman was 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. American public feeling towards Truman grew steadily warmer with the passing years; as early as 1962, a poll of 75 historians conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. ranked Truman among the "near great" presidents. The period following his death consolidated a partial rehabilitation of his legacy among both historians and members of the public. Truman died when the nation was consumed with crises in Vietnam and Watergate, and his death brought a new wave of attention to his political career. In the early and mid-1970s, Truman captured the popular imagination much as he had in 1948, this time emerging as a kind of political folk hero, a president who was thought to exemplify an integrity and accountability many observers felt was lacking in the Nixon White House. This public reassessment of Truman was aided by the popularity of a book of reminiscences which Truman had told to journalist Merle Miller beginning in 1961, with the agreement that they would not be published until after Truman's death.
Truman had his latter-day critics as well. After a review of information available to Truman about the presence of espionage activities in the U.S. government, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded that Truman was "almost willfully obtuse" concerning the danger of American communism. In 2010, historian Alonzo Hamby concluded that "Harry Truman remains a controversial president." However, Truman has fared well in polls ranking the presidents, consistently being listed in the top ten; this includes a 2022 poll by the Siena College Research Institute, which placed him in seventh.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused Truman advocates to claim vindication for Truman's decisions in the postwar period. According to Truman biographer Robert Dallek, "His contribution to victory in the cold war without a devastating nuclear conflict elevated him to the stature of a great or near-great president." The 1992 publication of David McCollough's favorable biography of Truman further cemented the view of Truman as a highly regarded chief executive. According to historian Daniel R. McCoy in his book on the Truman presidency:Harry Truman himself gave a strong and far-from-incorrect impression of being a tough, concerned and direct leader. He was occasionally vulgar, often partisan, and usually nationalistic ... On his own terms, Truman can be seen as having prevented the coming of a third world war and having preserved from Communist oppression much of what he called the free world. Yet clearly he largely failed to achieve his Wilsonian aim of securing perpetual peace, making the world safe for democracy, and advancing opportunities for individual development internationally.
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