Truman

by David McCullough

I hardly know Truman. —FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, JULY 1944

The reporter remarked that as Vice President he might “succeed to the throne.” Truman shook his head. “Hell, I don’t want to be president.”

To another reporter that same evening Truman repeated much the same thing.

So ended an era and so began another. —ALLEN DRURY I The news broke at 5:47 P.M., Eastern War Time, April 12, 1945. International News Service was first on the wire, followed seconds later by the Associated Press, United Press, the four radio networks, and the Armed Forces Radio Service.

In New York CBS interrupted a children’s serial about Daniel Boone called “Wilderness Road.” NBC broke into “Front-Page Farrell,” ABC interrupted “Captain Midnight,” and Mutual, “Tom Mix.” In minutes the bulletin had reached every part of the country and much of the world. The time in London was near midnight. In Berlin, where it was already another day, Friday the 13th, an ecstatic Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, telephoned Hitler personally to proclaim it a turning point written in the stars. In Moscow, the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, was hosting an embassy party when a duty officer called to report what he had heard on a late broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service.

At the Armed Forces Radio Station in Panama, Sergeant James Weathers, assigned to answer incoming calls, began picking up the phone and answering, “Yes, it’s t...

Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia, at 4:45 in the afternoon (3:45, Warm Springs time). Two hours earlier, sitting at a card table signing papers, he had complained of a terrific headache, then suddenly collapsed, not to regain consciousness. As many accounts stated, his death at age sixty-three came in an hour of high triumph. “The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander-in-Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands . . . and the cause he represented and led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.” From the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt sent cables to her four sons in the service, saying their father had done his job to the end, as he would want them to do, a point Steve Early included in the initial White House announcement. To Early and Harry Truman she had also expressed a wish to fly to Warm Springs, but questioned wh...

“Good God, Truman will be President,” it was being said everywhere. “If Harry Truman can be President, so could my next-door neighbor.” People were fearful about the future of the country, fearful the war would drag on longer now. “What a great, great tragedy. God help us all,” wrote David Lilienthal, head of TVA.

The fact that Roosevelt had died like Lincoln in the last stages of a great war, and like Lincoln in April, almost to the day, were cited as measures both of Roosevelt’s greatness and the magnitude of the tragedy. But implicit also was the thought that Lincoln, too, had been succeeded by a lackluster, so-called “common man,” the ill-fated Andrew Johnson.

“From a distance Truman did not appear at all qualified to fill Roosevelt’s large shoes,” Bradley wrote. Patton was bitter and more emphatic. “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.”

“There have been few men in all history the equal of the man into whose shoes I am stepping,” Truman had said as they headed downtown. “I pray God I can measure up to the task."

Signing his first official document late the afternoon of his first day, a proclamation announcing Roosevelt’s death, he felt strange writing his name, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. Had he come into the office in normal fashion,

As the morning papers reported, the war thus far had cost 196,999 American lives, which, as Truman knew, was more than three times American losses in his own earlier war. The new total for American casualties in all categories—killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners—was 899,390, an increase in just one week of 6,481, or an average of more than 900 casualties a day. In the Pacific the cost of victory was rising steadily.

Since 1945 numbers of others had judged him as anything but ordinary. At Potsdam, Churchill immediately perceived the new President to be “a man of immense determination,” and in the fateful spring of 1947, from Chartwell, his home south of London, where he was busy with his memoirs, Churchill would write to tell “My dear Harry” how much he admired “what you have done for the peace and freedom of the world. . . .” For Churchill, the presidency of Harry Truman had become the one cause for hope in the world. Dean

If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen. —a favorite Truman saying

“Give ’em hell, Harry!” someone would shout from the crowd—news accounts of his promise to Barkley to “give ’em hell” having swept the country by now. The cry went up at one stop after another, often more than once—“Give ’em hell, Harry!”—which always brought more whoops, laughter, and yells of approval, but especially when he tore into the 80th Congress.

(“I never gave anybody hell,” he would later say. “I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”)

A final Gallup Poll showed that while he had cut Dewey’s lead, Dewey nonetheless remained a substantial five points ahead, 49.5 to 44.5. The betting odds still ranged widely, though generally speaking Dewey was favored 4 to 1. The New York Times predicted a Dewey victory with 345 electoral votes. “Government will remain big, active, and expensive under President Thomas E. Dewey,” said The Wall Street Journal. Time and Newsweek saw a Dewey sweep. The new issue of Life carried a full-page photograph of Dewey “the next President” crossing San Francisco Bay by ferry boat.

It was also to be the first inauguration broadcast on television. As great as were the crowds on hand, another audience ten times greater would be watching—an estimated 10 million in fourteen cities connected by coaxial cable.

This would make it the largest number of people ever to watch a single event until then.

Indeed, more people would see Harry Truman sworn in as President on television on January 20, 1949, than had witnessed all previous presidents taking the oath since...