According to a national poll published just as the Chicago convention was set to start in July 1944, only 2 percent of Democratic voters hoped to see Truman as the VP nominee on the ticket with Roosevelt, with five other names ahead of him on the list. Not long before Truman was chosen, Roosevelt had said of the senator from Missouri, “I hardly know Truman.” “I knew almost nothing about him,” Admiral William Leahy, FDR’s chief of staff, said of Truman. Even at the height of the 1944 campaign, as the VP nominee toured the nation stumping for Roosevelt, “Truman [was] still unknown to millions
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