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

by A.J. Baime

“Harry,” she said, “the president is dead.” Four words raced through Truman’s mind: The lightning has struck! “I was fighting off tears,” he later recalled. “It was the only time in my life I think that I ever felt like I’d had a real shock. I had hurried to the White House to see the president and when I arrived I found I was the president. No one in the history of our country ever had it happen to him just that way.” He gathered himself. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked the First Lady. “Is there anything we can do for you,” Eleanor Roosevelt answered. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

“Roosevelt was a great architect,” Oppenheimer figured. “Perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.”

(After the war, regarding these firebombing missions, Curtis LeMay wrote, “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal . . . But all war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”)