Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman: The Understudy Who Ran the World

On the evening of 12 April 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt told the vice president that her husband was dead. Truman asked whether there was anything he could do for her. "Is there anything we can do for you?" she answered. "For you are the one in trouble now." He was sworn in at 7:09 p.m. He had held the vice presidency for eighty-two days, had barely spoken to Roosevelt, and had not been told that the United States was building an atomic bomb.

A Missouri Failure

He was born on 8 May 1884 in Lamar, Missouri, to John Anderson Truman, a farmer and livestock dealer, and Martha Ellen Young. The middle initial stood for nothing and for two people at once — his grandfathers Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young — and the family declined to choose. Raised in Independence, he learned the piano from the age of seven and got good at it. He finished Independence High School in 1901, studied briefly at a business college, and then worked as a railroad timekeeper, a bank clerk and a farmer. He never took a university degree, and for most of his first forty years he looked like a man who would not amount to anything in particular.

Battery D

He served in the Missouri National Guard from 1905 to 1911, reaching corporal, and rejoined when America entered the First World War in April 1917. Commissioned first lieutenant and then captain, he took command of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, 35th Division, and led it in France. At the Meuse-Argonne in September 1918 he fired on German batteries beyond his own sector, probably saving neighbouring units from destruction. Battery D suffered no casualties under his command. He was discharged a captain on 6 May 1919, and the men of that battery stayed loyal to him for the rest of his life.

Machine Man

He married Bess Wallace on 28 June 1919 and opened a haberdashery in Kansas City with his army friend Eddie Jacobson. The 1921 recession destroyed it, and he was still paying off the debt in 1935. Politics came through Tom Pendergast's Kansas City machine, which put him on the Jackson County Court as a judge from 1923, lost him in a Republican year, and returned him as presiding judge from 1927, where he coordinated the Ten Year Plan of public works. The machine sent him to the Senate in 1934, and the association shadowed him. He answered it with work: the Truman Committee, which he chaired from 1940 to 1944, hunted waste and profiteering in war contracts and was credited with saving as much as fifteen billion dollars. It made him respectable enough for the 1944 ticket.

The Bomb

He learned that the Manhattan Project existed only after he became president. At Potsdam that summer he issued, with the Allies, a demand for Japanese surrender; when it was refused he authorised the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He never publicly wavered, framing the choice ever after as one made "to end the war quickly and save countless lives — Japanese as well as American." It remains the only use of nuclear weapons in war, and it was ordered by a man who four months earlier had not known they were being built.

Containment

What followed was the most consequential burst of institution-building in American foreign policy. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion; the Marshall Plan rebuilt Western Europe; the National Security Act of 1947 reorganised the military and created the Central Intelligence Agency; NATO followed in 1949. When the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, Truman supplied the city by air from June 1948 to May 1949 rather than either abandoning it or shooting his way in. On 14 May 1948 he recognised the State of Israel eleven minutes after its declaration of independence, over the objection of his own Secretary of State, George Marshall.

Nine Eighty-One and the Whistle-Stop

He created a President's Committee on Civil Rights in 1946, became the first president to address the NAACP — at the Lincoln Memorial, on 29 June 1947 — and sent Congress a ten-point civil rights programme in February 1948. Congress would not move. So on 26 July 1948 he signed Executive Order 9981, requiring equality of treatment in the armed forces, alongside Executive Order 9980 barring discrimination in federal hiring. The services resisted: Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall countered in December 1948 with a proposal for merely "experimental" integration, and the Fahy Committee spent until 1950 grinding out compliance before issuing its report, *Freedom to Serve*.

He did this in an election year, knowing it would split his party. Then he ran anyway. Polling at 36 per cent that spring, he attacked the "Do Nothing Congress," covered 21,928 miles by rail aboard the *Ferdinand Magellan*, and beat Thomas Dewey 303 electoral votes to 189 while the *Chicago Tribune* was printing DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

Korea and the Collapse

The second term went badly. The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in August 1949; on 31 January 1950 he authorised the hydrogen bomb. When North Korea invaded the South on 25 June 1950 he committed American forces through the United Nations without asking Congress for a declaration of war. In 1951 he dismissed Douglas MacArthur, the most popular soldier in America, for insubordination. His Fair Deal — national health insurance, repeal of Taft-Hartley — was gutted by Congress, which passed the Housing Act of 1949 and little else. He left office in 1953 with his popularity in ruins.

Why Harry Is Called a Genius

Nobody serious calls Truman brilliant, and he did not claim it himself. He had no degree, failed in business, owed his career to a corrupt city machine, and arrived in the presidency uninformed about the most important secret his government held. If genius means intellectual originality, the word does not apply and the sources give no one who has seriously applied it.

What he had instead was a specific and rarer competence: the capacity to decide, quickly and irreversibly, on questions where the information was incomplete and the cost of being wrong was catastrophic — and then to absorb the consequences without flinching or reopening the question. Recognising Israel over Marshall's objection, airlifting Berlin instead of retreating or fighting, desegregating the armed forces by executive order in an election year because Congress never would, sacking MacArthur to establish that generals do not set foreign policy: these are all the same act, performed under different conditions. Each was contested inside his own administration and none was politically safe.

The counter-case is real and heavy. He ordered the only nuclear attacks in history and never permitted himself doubt about them. His own Army leadership slow-walked the desegregation order for years. His domestic programme mostly failed, and he left office repudiated. The honest verdict is that his was a genius of judgement and nerve rather than of intellect — a distinction worth keeping, because it is the one his own record insists on.

Legacy

He chose not to run again in 1952, went home to Independence, built a library and wrote his memoirs, and lived until 26 December 1972, long enough to see the reassessment begin. Historians now place him consistently in the first quartile of American presidents, and the architecture he assembled between 1947 and 1949 — containment, the Marshall Plan, the CIA, NATO — organised Western policy for four decades after he left. The understudy turned out to have written most of the second act.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1945–1953)
• Vice President of the United States (1945–1945)
• Governor-General of the Philippines
• United States senator (1935–1937)
• Congressional Gold Medal
• Armed Forces Reserve Medal
• World War II Victory Medal
• Educated at University of Missouri–Kansas City and William Chrisman High School