Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, the eldest child of John Anderson Truman, a farmer and livestock trader, and Martha Ellen Young Truman ^[1]. The middle initial S stood on its own, a compromise between the names of his two grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young. The family moved several times during his childhood before settling in Independence, Missouri, in 1890, the town he would call home for the rest of his life ^[2].

Poor eyesight kept the boy out of rough games, and thick glasses pushed him toward books and the piano. He read widely in history and biography at the Independence public library and later said the reading shaped his sense of how leaders behave under pressure ^[1]. After graduating from Independence High School in 1901, he could not afford college, and his eyesight barred him from West Point. He worked instead as a timekeeper for a railroad contractor and as a bank clerk in Kansas City ^[2].

In 1906 he returned to the family farm near Grandview, Missouri, where he spent more than a decade plowing, planting, and keeping accounts. Anyone asking who was Harry S. Truman before politics would find the answer in those years: a working farmer with no college degree, a fact that made him unusual among twentieth century presidents ^[3].

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Truman, then thirty-three, rejoined the Missouri National Guard, reportedly memorizing the eye chart to pass the physical. He shipped to France as a captain commanding Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, a rowdy unit of Kansas City Irish Catholics ^[2]. He led the battery through the Meuse-Argonne offensive in the autumn of 1918, and the men who once mocked the bespectacled farmer came to respect him. The war gave Truman his first taste of command and a network of loyal veterans ^[1].

Back home he married Bess Wallace in June 1919 and opened a haberdashery in Kansas City with an army friend, Eddie Jacobson. The shop failed in the postwar downturn of 1922, leaving Truman with debts he insisted on repaying rather than declaring bankruptcy ^[3]. That same year, with backing from Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast, he won election as a judge of the Jackson County Court, an administrative rather than judicial post responsible for roads and county buildings ^[2].

As presiding judge from 1927 to 1934, Truman earned a reputation for honest management of public works, building a well-regarded county road system while operating inside a machine notorious for graft ^[1]. In 1934 Pendergast backed him for the United States Senate. Truman won, though Washington insiders initially dismissed him as the senator from Pendergast. He answered the label with diligent committee work, and during the Second World War he chaired the Senate special committee investigating waste and fraud in defense contracting. The Truman Committee saved taxpayers billions of dollars and put his name on front pages nationwide ^[4].

Democratic leaders chose Truman as Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate in 1944, judging the sitting vice president, Henry Wallace, too far left for a ticket likely to matter beyond the election. Truman had served just eighty-two days as vice president when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and had been told almost nothing about war strategy or the atomic bomb project ^[4]. He told reporters the next day that he felt as if the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on him.

The new president faced decisions of staggering consequence within months. Germany surrendered in May 1945. In July he met Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam, and in August he authorized atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, judging that the weapons would end the war without an invasion of Japan. Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945 ^[5]. The bombings remain the most debated of all Harry S. Truman facts, defended by some historians as a war-ending necessity and condemned by others on moral and strategic grounds.

Any list of Harry S. Truman achievements centers on the architecture of postwar foreign policy. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 committed the United States to supporting free peoples resisting subjugation, beginning with aid to Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan channeled roughly thirteen billion dollars into rebuilding Western Europe. His administration organized the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and 1949, helped found NATO in 1949, and recognized the new state of Israel minutes after its declaration in May 1948 ^[5]. At home, his Executive Order 9981 of July 1948 desegregated the armed forces, a landmark in civil rights history taken over the objections of Southern Democrats ^[6].

Written off in the 1948 election, Truman barnstormed the country by train, attacking the do-nothing Congress, and defeated Thomas Dewey in one of the great upsets in American political history. The Chicago Daily Tribune's premature headline, Dewey Defeats Truman, became the era's most famous newspaper error ^[4]. His second term was dominated by the Korean War, which began in June 1950. Truman committed American forces under United Nations authority, and in April 1951 he relieved General Douglas MacArthur of command for public insubordination, a deeply unpopular act that reaffirmed civilian control of the military ^[5].

Truman's marriage to Bess Wallace, whom he had first met in Sunday school in Independence when he was six and she was five, lasted fifty-three years. He courted her for nearly a decade, and after their wedding in 1919 they lived in the Wallace family home at 219 North Delaware Street, which served as the summer White House during his presidency ^[3]. Their only child, Margaret, born in 1924, became a singer and later a writer of mysteries and biographies, including a life of her father.

He was a devoted letter writer, sending Bess more than 1,300 letters over a half century, a correspondence that historians have mined for its candor ^[3]. When a Washington Post critic panned Margaret's 1950 singing recital, the president fired off a furious letter threatening the reviewer, an episode that scandalized some readers and charmed others as evidence of a father's loyalty.

Plain habits defined him. He rose early, walked briskly, played poker with friends, and enjoyed a morning shot of bourbon. A sign on his White House desk reading The Buck Stops Here summed up the accountability he preached, and his blunt style earned the nickname Give 'Em Hell Harry, though he insisted he only told the truth and people thought it was hell ^[6].

Truman declined to seek another term in 1952, though the new Twenty-second Amendment did not apply to him, and returned to Independence in January 1953 with no pension, no staff, and modest savings. He and Bess drove themselves home from Washington. His straitened circumstances helped prompt Congress to pass the Former Presidents Act of 1958, which established pensions and office allowances for ex-presidents ^[6].

He spent his retirement writing two volumes of memoirs, published in 1955 and 1956, and overseeing the creation of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, which opened in 1957. He walked there most mornings, answered mail, and lectured visiting schoolchildren on the Constitution ^[2]. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill at the Truman Library and enrolled Truman as the program's first beneficiary, honoring his early advocacy of national health insurance ^[6].

His health declined in the late 1960s. Harry S. Truman died of complications from pneumonia on December 26, 1972, at Research Hospital in Kansas City, at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in the courtyard of his library, and Bess, who lived until 1982, was later buried beside him ^[1].

Truman left office in 1953 with approval ratings among the lowest ever recorded, dragged down by the Korean stalemate, corruption scandals among associates, and McCarthy era accusations. The verdict shifted within a generation. Historians came to credit him with constructing the containment framework that guided American policy through the Cold War, and surveys of scholars now regularly place him in or near the top ten presidents ^[4].

Any serious Harry S. Truman biography must weigh the contradictions: a product of a corrupt machine who was personally honest, a border state politician raised amid casual racism who ordered the military desegregated, a leader with no college education who made decisions of unmatched consequence. Biographers such as David McCullough and Alonzo Hamby have argued that his ordinariness was the point, proof that judgment and character matter more than pedigree ^[1].

His name endures on institutions and ideas: the Truman Doctrine, the Truman Scholarship for students entering public service, and the presidential library system, which his own library helped inaugurate. The farmhouse in Grandview, his home in Independence, and his birthplace in Lamar are all preserved as historic sites, markers of a life that ran from rural Missouri to the center of world events ^[2].