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

In his recently published book about FDR’s final days, David Woolner explains how — with mixed results — FDR struggled to respond to all manner of challenges after he was elected to a fourth term. He focused on the deliberations of the Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin, the near completion of the atomic bomb, how best to end the war with Japan, establishing a homeland for the Jews (in Palestine), the increasing importance of Middle East oil, the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy, concerns about Soviet ambition and aggression in Central and Eastern Europe, and most important of all to him, the establishment of a new system of international security, which became the United Nations.”

All the while, he also had to “attend to the domestic needs of a public weary of the demands of war and to a battlefront reeling from a surprise counteroffensive that threatened to drive the western alliance into the North Sea.” It is important to keep in mind that FDR was in rapidly failing health at his fourth inauguration in January of 1945 and would be dead 102 days later.

It is noteworthy that FDR met with his vice president, Harry S. Truman, only twice during those final 102 days. Until Truman was sworn in as president after FDR’s death, he knew almost nothing about the Manhattan Project, had not attended FDR’s two summit meetings with Churchill and Stalin in Tehran and Malta (nor had he been briefed on what had been discussed), and observed “when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Be that as it may, he is now considered to be among the greatest U.S. presidents. As A.J. Baime explains, his leadership played a major role in dozens of major achievements that include the use of atomic weapons to end the war with Japan 2-3 years sooner than would have otherwise been possible, thereby saving millions of lives; the Berlin Airlift; founding the UN and NATO as well as the NSC, CIA, and NSA; a 10-point plan to abolish racial segregation in the U.S. military services; the Housing Act (“Fair Deal”); providing for 200,000 adults and 17,000 children who had been displaced during World War Two (Displaced Persons Act);  transfer of control of atomic energy from the military to civilian authority (AEC); and funding of the Marshall Pan, in honor of George C. Marshall who had served as a five star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State and then, after a brief retirement, Secretary of Defense.

Baime quotes Truman’s daughter, Margaret, after her father defeated Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential election: “Harry S. Truman was no ‘accidental President,’ for now he had been elected by the American people.” I agree with Baime that despite all of Truman’s numerous and significant achievements, he remains remembered “first and foremost for his decision to employ atomic weapons — Little Boy and Fat Man, the only two nuclear bombs ever used against human beings. More than seventy years later, this decision remains almost certainly the most controversial that any president has ever made.”

Truman: “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are…Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.”

Near the end of his book, A.J. Baime makes a very revealing comment: “Ironically, Truman’s greatest strength came from what was perceived on April 12, 1945 [when he was sworn in as president], as his greatest weakness: his ordinariness.”  That may have been true of Truman the man but certainly not true of Truman the President of the United States and the same can be said of Abraham Lincoln. Truman kept a copy of a Lincoln quotation near at hand in a leather portfolio on the desk in the Oval Office:

“I do the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so to the end. If the end brings me out all right right, what is said again me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won’t make any difference.”