The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

by A.J. Baime

“In reading the lives of great men,” he later wrote in a diary, “I found that the first victory they won was over themselves . . . Self-discipline with all of them came first.”

“To succeed financially,” Harry concluded, “a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egotist or a fool or a ward boss tool.”

The senator’s motto was “There is no substitute for a fact. When the facts are known, reasonable men do not disagree with respect to them.”

As Thomas Jefferson—America’s second VP and its third president—once said: “The second office of this government is honorable and easy. The first is but a splendid misery.”

Mark Twain: ALWAYS DO RIGHT. THIS WILL GRATIFY SOME PEOPLE AND ASTONISH THE REST.

As Clark Clifford, a young lawyer working in the Truman administration at the time, wrote of government: “At the savage intersection of policy, ambition, and history, it is impossible to be right all the time.”

Oppenheimer himself later recalled the moment. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita . . . ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

Test- Detonation of the atomic bomb

There can be no exact date when the Cold War started. However, as historian Charles L. Mee Jr. has pointed out, the nuclear arms race is a different story: “The Twentieth Century’s nuclear arms race began at the Cecilienhof Palace at 7:30 p.m., on July 24, 1945.”

While he was president, he kept a quotation of Abraham Lincoln in a leather portfolio on his desk. It read, “I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so to the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won’t make any difference.”