Harry S. Truman
Harry Truman became president having been vice-president for eighty-two days, and was not told about the atomic bomb until he took office. Born in Missouri in 1884, he was the last president without a university degree. He farmed for a decade, commanded an artillery battery in France in 1918 — where he was popular with men who had run off two previous commanders — and went into a haberdashery business that failed and left him paying debts for fifteen years. He entered politics through the Pendergast machine in Kansas City and reached the Senate in 1935 with the reputation of being its creature, and remade it by chairing a committee on waste in defence contracting that is estimated to have saved billions. Roosevelt picked him for the 1944 ticket as a compromise and then barely spoke to him. Roosevelt died in April 1945. Truman took the decisions of the following four months — Potsdam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Japanese surrender — with about three months' preparation. The Cold War was made under him: the Truman Doctrine in 1947, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, NATO, the recognition of Israel against his own State Department, and the commitment to Korea in 1950. He desegregated the armed forces by executive order in 1948, after the Senate would not act. He also dismissed MacArthur for public insubordination, at enormous political cost, and established that the general answers to the president. He won in 1948 against every prediction, left office at 32 per cent approval, and is now generally ranked among the better presidents.
- Lived: 1884 CE – 1972 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: president, commander_in_chief
