Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 - December 26, 1972) was the thirty-fourth Vice President (1945) and the thirty-third President of the United States (1945-1953), succeeding to the office upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In domestic affairs Truman faced a tumultuous reconversion of the economy, marked by severe shortages, numerous strikes and the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act over his veto. He won re-election in 1948 but did not control Congress and was unable to pass any of his Fair Deal program. He used executive orders to begin desegregation of the U.S. armed forces and to launch the second red scare to remove thousands of Communist sympathizers from government office.

Truman's presidency was eventful in foreign affairs, starting with victory over Germany, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II, founding the United Nations, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Truman Doctrine to contain Communism, the beginning of the Cold War, the creation of NATO, and the Korean War.

Truman was a folksy, unassuming president, and popularized phrases such as "The buck stops here" and "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." He overcame the low expectations of many, particularly in the shadow of his politically-dominant predecessor, and although he was forced out of his re-election campaign in 1952 because of low approval ratings. Presently, scholars rank him among the best Presidents.

Truman was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, the eldest child of John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Young Truman. A brother, John Vivian (1886-1965), soon followed, along with sister Mary Jane Truman (1889-1978).

His father, John Truman, was a farmer and livestock dealer. Truman lived in Lamar until he was 11 months old. The family then moved to his grandparents 600-acre (240 ha) farm at Grandview, Missouri.

When Truman was six years old, his parents moved the family to Independence, Missouri, so he could attend school. After graduating from high school in 1901, Truman worked at a series of clerical jobs.

He returned to the Grandview farm from 1906-1916. Truman always considered himself a farmer. During this period he courted Bess Wallace and even proposed to her in 1911; however she turned him down. Truman said he wanted to make more money than a farmer before he proposed again-which he did again in 1918 after coming back as a Lieutenant Colonel from World War I.

He was the last President not to earn a college degree, although he studied for two years toward a law degree at the Kansas City Law School (now the University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law) in the early 1920s and was a fellow classmate of future United States Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Whittaker.

World War I

With the onset of American participation in World War I, Truman enlisted in the Missouri National Guard, was chosen to be an officer, and then commanded a regimental battery in France. His unit was Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, 60th Brigade, 35th Division. At his physical, his eyesight was 20/50 in the right eye and 20/40 in the left eye. He passed his physical, though, because he secretly memorized the eye chart. Before heading to France, he was sent for training at Fort Sill, near Lawton, Oklahoma. While at Ft. Sill he was given the additional duty of running the camp canteen (to provide candy, cigarettes, shoelaces, sodas, tobacco, and writing paper to the soldiers). This position meant that nearly every soldier there would come to know Truman. To help run the canteen, he enlisted the help of his Jewish friend Sergeant Edward Jacobson, who had experience in a Kansas City clothing store as a clerk. Another man he met at Ft. Sill, who would help him after the war, was Lieutenant James M. Pendergast, the nephew of Thomas Joseph (T.J.) Pendergast, a Kansas City politician.

In France, Captain Truman's battery performed very well under fire in the Vosges Mountains. Truman later rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the National Guard and always remained proud of his military background. Under his command the artillery battery, Battery D, did not lose a single man.

Kansas City haberdasher

At the war's conclusion, Truman returned to Independence and married his longtime love interest, Bess Wallace, on June 28, 1919. The couple had one child, Margaret (born February 24, 1924).

A month before the wedding, banking on the success they had at Ft. Sill and overseas, the men's clothing store of Truman & Jacobson opened at 104 West 12th Street in downtown Kansas City. The store went bankrupt in 1922 after being very successful the first couple of years, but the grain market dropped, and lower prices for wheat and corn meant fewer sales of silk shirts. What shirts and ties that they did manage to sell went mainly to former members of the 129th Field Artillery unit. It was simple economics: in 1919 wheat went for $2.15 a bushel, in 1922 it was 88 cents a bushel. Truman blamed the fall in farm prices on the policies of the Republicans and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon in Washington, D.C., a factor that would influence his decision to become a Democrat. Truman worked for years to pay off the debts. He and Jacobson were friends for the rest of their lives, and he turned to Jacobson advice on the Zionist issue. He and Jacobson were accepted at Washington College together in 1923.

Jackson County judge

In 1922, with the help of the Kansas City Democratic machine led by boss Tom Pendergast, Truman was elected judge of the County Court of Jackson County, Missouri - an administrative, not judicial, position similar to county commissioners elsewhere. Although he was defeated for reelection in 1924, he won back the office in 1926 and was reelected in 1930. Truman performed his duties in this office diligently and won personal acclaim for several popular public works projects, including an extensive series of roads for the growing use of the automobiles, building of a new County Court building, and a series of 12 Madonna of the Trail monuments to pioneer women dedicated across the country in 1928 and 1929.

In 1922, Truman gave a friend $10 for an initiation fee for the Ku Klux Klan but asked to get his money back; he was never initiated, never attended a meeting, and never claimed membership. Though Truman at times expressed anger towards Jews in his diaries, his friend and business partner Edward Jacobson was Jewish, and Truman later became one of the moving forces behind the creation of the state of Israel.

U.S. Senator

In the 1934 election Pendergast's machine selected him to run for Missouri's open United States Senate seat, and he ran as a New Dealer in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Democratic primary he was opposed by Tuck Milligan, brother of federal prosecutor Maurice M. Milligan who was to eventually topple the Pendergast machine and would run against Truman in the 1940 primary election.

Truman assumed office under a cloud as "the senator from Pendergast" after three people were killed at the polls in Kansas City. Truman directed New Deal political patronage through Pendergast but said he was independent on his votes.

Milligan began a massive investigation into the 1936 Missouri governor election which elected Lloyd C. Stark, and it resulted in 258 convictions. More importantly, Milligan discovered Pendergast had not paid federal taxes between 1927 and 1937 and had conducted a fraudulent insurance scam. In 1939, Pendergast pled guilty and received a $10,000 fine and a 15 month sentence. The trial was interrupted by numerous health problems including a heart attack for Pendergast.

Stark, who had received Pendergast's blessing in the election, turned against him in the investigation and took control of federal New Deal funds from Truman and Pendergast.

In 1940, both Stark and Milligan challenged Truman in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. They split the anti-Pendergast vote. More importantly, Robert E. Hannegan who controlled St. Louis Democratic politics threw his support in the election to Truman. Hannegan would go on to broker the 1944 deal that put Truman on the Vice Presidential ticket for Franklin Roosevelt.

Truman shocked many when, as Vice President, he attended Pendergast's funeral a few days after being sworn in and a few months before he succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt as President. Purportedly, Truman was the only elected official of any level who attended the funeral.

Truman always defended his decisions of offering patronage to Pendergast by saying that by offering a little, he saved a lot. Truman said Pendergast gave him this advice when we went to the Senate:

Vice President

Truman was selected to be on the Vice President ticket because of a deal worked out by Robert E. Hannegan who had saved Truman's political career in 1940 when he threw support of the St. Louis Democratic Party behind Truman.

In 1944, Hannegan was Democratic National Chairman. Roosevelt wanted to replace Henry Wallace as Vice President because he was considered too liberal. James F. Byrnes of South Carolina was initially favored, but as a segregationist he was considered too conservative. Hannegan offered Truman in what was dubbed the "Missouri Compromise" at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Roosevelt-Truman team had a landslide victory in the United States presidential election, 1944.

On April 12, 1945, Truman was at the capitol with House Speaker Sam Rayburn when he got word to go to the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt informed him that the President was dead. Truman asked if there was anything he could do for her, to which the former First Lady replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."

First Term (1945-1949): End of World War II

Truman had been Vice President for only 82 days and did not communicate much with President Roosevelt, who was in ailing health when he was selected; the President had not shared major strategies with him including Manhattan Project atomic bomb plans.

Truman told reporters:

"I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets fell on me."

Momentous events were to occur in Truman's first five months:

• April 25 - Nations meet in San Francisco, California to create United Nations
• April 28 - Benito Mussolini of Italy killed
• May 1 - Announcement of the suicide of Adolf Hitler
• May 2 - Berlin falls
• May 7 - Germany surrenders
• May 8 - Victory in Europe Day
• July 17-August 2 - Potsdam Conference to determine shape of the post-war world
• August 6 - Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima
• August 8 - USSR declares war on Japan
• August 9 - Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki
• August 14 - Japan agrees to surrender (Victory over Japan Day)
• September 2 - Japan formally surrenders aboard the USS Missouri

United Nations and Marshall Plan

Realizing that the interests of the Soviet Union were quickly becoming incompatible with the interests of the United States government, Truman's administration articulated an increasingly hard line against the Soviets. As a Wilsonian internationalist, Truman initially strongly supported the creation of the United Nations, and included former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on the delegation to the U.N.'s first General Assembly in order to meet the public desire for peace after the carnage of the Second World War. Although he claimed no expertise on foreign matters, and the Republicans controlled Congress, Truman was able to win bipartisan support for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. To get Congress to spend on the Marshall Plan, Truman used an ideological argument about averting Communism to get the funding, saying that Communism flourishes in deprived areas. He later admitted that he had exaggerated the threat of Communism in the speech, stating that he had to "Scare the hell out of Congress." To strengthen the U.S during the cold war against Communism, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 and reorganized military forces by creating the Department of Defense, the CIA, U.S. Air Force (separate from the U.S. Army Air Forces), and the National Security Council.

Fair Deal

Following many years of Democratic majorities in Congress and Democratic Presidents, voter fatigue led to a new Republican majority in the 1946 midterm elections, with the Republicans picking up 55 seats in the House of Representatives and several seats in the Senate. Although Truman cooperated closely with the Republican leaders on foreign policy he fought them on domestic issues. He failed to prevent tax cuts and removal of price controls. The power of the labor unions was significantly curtailed by the Taft-Hartley Act which was enacted by over-riding Truman's veto. The onset of the Korean conflict in 1950 once again required an increase in taxes.

As he readied for the approaching 1948 election, Truman made clear his identity as a Democrat in the New Deal tradition, advocating universal health insurance, the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act and an aggressive civil rights program in a broad legislative program that he called the "Fair Deal."

Truman's Fair Deal program was not well received and only one of its major bills was enacted.

Recognition of Israel

Truman, who had been a supporter of the Zionist movement as early as 1939, was a key figure in the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1946, an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the gradual establishment of two states in Palestine, with neither Jews nor Arabs dominating. However, there was little public support for the two-state proposal, and Britain was under pressure to withdraw from Palestine quickly because of attacks on British forces by armed Zionist groups. At the urging of the British, a special U.N. committee recommended the immediate partitioning of Palestine into two states, and with Truman's support, it was approved by the General Assembly in 1947. The British announced that they would leave Palestine by May 15, 1948, and the Arab League Council nations began moving troops to Palestine's borders. There was significant disagreement between Truman and the State Department about how to handle the situation, and meanwhile, tensions were rising between the U.S. and Soviet Union. In the end, Truman, amid controversy both at home and abroad, recognized the State of Israel 11 minutes after it declared itself a nation.

Berlin Airlift

On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union blocked access to the three Western-held sectors of Berlin. The Allies had never negotiated a deal to guarantee supply of the sectors deep within Soviet occupied East Germany. The commander of the American occupation zone in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, proposed sending a large armoured column driving peacefully, as a moral right, down the Autobahn from West Germany to West Berlin, but prepared to defend itself if it were stopped or attacked. Truman, however, following the consensus in Washington, believed this entailed an unacceptable risk of war. On June 25, the Allies decided to begin the Berlin Airlift to support the city by air. The airlift continued until May 11, 1949 when access was again granted.

Integration of the military

After a hiatus that had lasted since Reconstruction, the Truman administration marked the federal government's first steps in many years in the area of civil rights. A series of particularly savage 1946 lynchings, including the murder of two young black men and two young black women near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, and the subsequent brutalization of an African American WWII veteran, drew attention to civil rights and factored in the issuing of a 1947 report by the Truman administration entitled To Secure These Rights. The report presented a detailed ten-point agenda of civil rights reforms, including making lynching a federal crime. In February 1948, the President submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress that proposed creating several federal offices devoted to issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices. This provoked a firestorm of criticism from Southern Democrats in the time leading up to the national nominating convention, but Truman refused to compromise, saying "My forbears were Confederates... But my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten."

Second Term (1949-1953): 1948 Election

The United States presidential election, 1948 is best remembered for Truman's stunning come-from-behind victory.

At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Truman attempted to place a tepid civil rights plank in the party platform so as to assuage the internal conflicts between North and South. A sharp address, however, given by Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr. of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and candidate for the United States Senate-as well as the local political interests of a number of urban bosses-convinced the party to adopt a strong civil rights plank, which was wholeheartedly adopted by Truman. Within two weeks he issued Executive Order 9981, racially integrating the U.S. Armed Services following World War II. Truman took considerable political risk in backing civil rights, and was very concerned that the loss of Dixiecrat support might destroy the Democratic Party.

With Thomas E. Dewey having a substantial lead, the Gallup Poll quit taking polls two weeks before the election even though 14 percent of the electorate was still undecided. George Gallup would never repeat that mistake again, and he emerged with the maxim, "Undecided voters side with the incumbent."

Truman's whistlestop tactic of brief speeches from the back of a train caboose has been a major part of every Presidential campaign since.

The defining moment of the campaign was when Truman held up the erroneous front page of the Chicago Tribune proclaiming "Dewey Defeats Truman" .

Truman did not have a vice president in his first term. His vice president 1949 to 1953 was Alben W. Barkley.

Nuclear standoff

The Soviet Union developed an atomic bomb much faster than was expected and exploded its first bomb on August 29, 1949, prompting an arms race. On January 7, 1953, Truman announced the detonation of the much bigger hydrogen bomb.

Communist China

On December 21, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces left the mainland for Taiwan in the face of successful attacks by Mao Zedong's Communists. In June 1950, Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy into the Strait of Formosa to prevent further conflict between the Republic of China and the PRC on Taiwan. Truman also called for Taiwan to cease any further attacks on the mainland.

Korean Conflict

In June 25, 1950, armies of North Korea invaded South Korea, nearly occupying the whole of the peninsula.

Truman promptly urged the United Nations to intervene, and Douglas MacArthur led the struggle in pushing the conflict nearly to the Chinese border in October 1950.

In October 1950, China intervened on North Korea's behalf. MacArthur advised Truman to attack Chinese bases across the Yalu River and use atomic bombs if necessary. The Chinese pushed forces far back into South Korea, but the forces found themselves back at the original starting point in the Spring of 1951. MacArthur publicly aired his views despite the President's disagreement and against his direct orders, as Truman was concerned escalation would draw Russia and its atomic bombs into the conflict. On April 11, 1951, Truman relieved MacArthur of his command.

The Korean War remained a stalemate until a ceasefire took effect on July 27, 1953, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The war and dismissal of MacArthur made Truman so unpopular that he did not seek a third term in the 1952 election. In February 1952, Truman's approval mark was at 22% according to Gallup polls. This is the all-time lowest approval mark for an active American President.

Vietnam

United States' involvement in Vietnam began during the Truman administration. On V-J Day 1945, Ho Chi Minh wrote a Declaration of Independence, modeling it after that of the US; at the time, Vietnam perceived its primary enemy to be the Chinese nationalist troops under Chiang Kai-shek. On September 23, the US voiced its support of French dominion over Vietnam in order to prevent Chinese aggression in the region, in line with its policy opposing the expansion of Communism worldwide.

On September 26, 1945, OSS officer Lieutenant Colonel A. Peter Dewey, working with the Viet Minh, was mistaken for a Frenchman and was shot, becoming the first U.S. casualty of the war. Dewey is not mentioned on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. because the Department of Defense has ruled that U.S. involvement in the war officially began on November 1, 1955, following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

Spurned by the United States, Ho Chi Minh sought Communist aid. In 1950, he again declared Vietnamese independence and was recognized by Communist China and the Soviet Union. He controlled some remote territory along the Chinese border, while France controlled the remainder. The United States' "containment policy", its fierce opposition to Communist expansion, led the U.S. to continue to recognize French rule and the French client government. In 1950, Truman authorized $10 million in aid to the French, sending 123 non-combat troops to help with supplies. In 1951, the amount escalated to $150 million. By 1953, the amount had risen to $1 billion (one third of U.S. foreign aid and 80 percent of the French cost).

White House renovations

Unlike other Presidents, Truman lived in the White House very little during his term in office. Structural analysis of the building early in his term had shown the White House to be in danger of imminent collapse, partly because of problems with the walls and foundation that dated back to the burning of the building by the British during the War of 1812. While the White House was systematically dismantled to the foundations and rebuilt - a project that also added what is now known as the "Truman Balcony" to the curved portico of the White House - Truman moved to Blair House nearby, which became his "White House."

Major legislation signed

• National Security Act - July 26, 1947
• Truman Doctrine - March 12, 1947
• Marshall Plan/European Recovery Plan - April 3, 1948

1952 Election

In 1951, the U.S. ratified the 22nd Amendment, disqualifying presidents from running for a third term (or a second term, if they had served more than two years of another's term). The text of the amendment specifically excluded Truman from its provisions. However, Truman withdrew his candidacy for the election of 1952 after losing the New Hampshire primary to Estes Kefauver.

In the summer of 1951 following the MacArthur dismissal flap, he offered the top spot of the Democrat ticket to Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had yet to declare a party affiliation) and Truman offered to tag along as Vice President.

At the time of the New Hampshire primary, no candidate had elicited Truman's backing. Without a front-runner, and with no announcement that he would not run for reelection having been made, Truman's name was placed on the ballot. (In New Hampshire, interested individuals can nominate a person to be entered in the primary ballot without his or her consent.) By March 1952, Truman had announced his decision not to run, and pressure on Gov. Adlai Stevenson (D-Ill.) to run for the Democratic nomination increased in the United States presidential election, 1952.