Remembering President Truman

President Truman

It's hard for me to remember the first U.S. president of my lifetime, Harry S. Truman, who occupied the Oval Office from April 12, 1945, to January 20, 1953. In January 1953, I was only six years old.

Truman came to be president because he was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president. FDR died suddenly not long after, in January 1945, being inaugurated for his fourth (!) term in office. After having been elected for a first term in 1932, Roosevelt had shepherded America through the Great Depression and then ushered us into World War II after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which he called "a date that will live in infamy" in his December 8 speech to Congress and the nation.

Our main allies during the long, devastating war against Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, and Imperial Japan, under Emperor Hirohito, were two: Great Britain and Soviet Russia. Britain's leader was its redoubtable prime minister, Winston Churchill. The U.S.S.R. was under the thumb of a communist dictator, Marshal Josef Stalin. Also on the side of the Germans and Japanese, in what was termed the Axis Powers, was Italy under the dictatorship of "Il Duce," Benito Mussolini. Early in the war, Paris had fallen to German guns, after which General George de Gaulle became the leader of the "Free French" in exile. In China, meanwhile, General Chiang Kai-shek had long been his country's dictator when his capital city, Nanking, fell to Japanese massacre in December 1937.

Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, de Gaulle, Hirohito, Chiang Kai-shek: all were names to be conjured with by journalists and historians of the times. Truman: not so much.

Yet President Truman turned out to be as staunch and significant as any of those men during his crucial first four months in office, from April through July 1945. So says A.J. Baime, author of The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World. Until becoming the surprise selection of FDR as his new vice president in 1944, Truman had been the junior senator from Missouri. His name and face were virtually unknown to the American public. In fact, before the 1944 campaign, Truman had met Roosevelt only casually, once or twice in the Oval Office. Roosevelt told his advisers while they were conferring over the choice of a running mate, that he, Roosevelt, scarcely remembered Truman.

Roosevelt was already so deathly ill by January 1945 that he was forced to take his last oath of office in the Rose Garden of the White House, instead of at the U.S. Capitol. Truman, who had taken his vice presidential oath there and then as well, knew he was but a heartbeat away from the presidency, and it scared the dickens out of him. He seriously doubted he was made of the right stuff to be president.

But he could do what needed to be done, as Baime attests. The blurb about the book at Amazon.com says:

The first four months of Truman’s administration saw the founding of the United Nations, the fall of Berlin, victory at Okinawa, firebombings of Tokyo, the first atomic explosion, the Nazi surrender, the liberation of concentration camps, the mass starvation of Europe, the Potsdam Conference, the controversial decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Imperial Japan, and finally, the end of World War II and the rise of the Cold War. No other president had ever faced so much in such a short period of time.

Truman, a Democrat, would narrowly win re-election in 1948 in a race whose early results incorrectly had him losing to Republican Thomas Dewey:

After serving four more years in the White House, Truman chose not to run for another term. He was content to retire with his wife Bess to their old home in Missouri, as the World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower took the reins as the new Republican president. At the time he retired, Truman was considered one of the most unpopular chief executives in history, with a job approval rating of only 22% in the Gallup Poll of February 1952. Yet, according to Wikipedia,

U.S. 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 [in 1972] consolidated a partial rehabilitation of his legacy among both historians and members of the public.

The Accidental President helps us understand both why Truman was so under-appreciated during his lifetime and why he he has become, in retrospect, one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.