Harry Truman
The unprepared vice president who inherited the presidency in 1945 and, in under eight years, built the institutions that fought the Cold War for forty.
On April 12, 1945, Harry Truman was told that Franklin Roosevelt was dead and that he was president of the United States. He had been vice president for eighty-two days, had met Roosevelt alone only a couple of times, and had not been told that the United States was building an atomic bomb. Within four months he had used one. Within four years he had committed the country to defending Europe in perpetuity, a reversal of American practice going back to Washington.
His background was as unpromising as any modern president's. A Missouri farm boy with poor eyesight and no college degree, he commanded an artillery battery in France in 1918, went bankrupt running a men's clothing store, and entered politics through the Kansas City machine of Tom Pendergast, which never entirely stopped being held against him. He reached the Senate in 1935 as a nobody and made his name during the war chairing a committee that hunted waste in defense contracting, saving the government billions and irritating a great many people. He was put on the 1944 ticket mainly because he offended fewer factions than the alternatives.
The decisions of 1945
He arrived in office with the war in Europe days from ending and the Pacific war expected to cost enormous casualties. At Potsdam that July he met Stalin and Churchill, learned of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and authorized its use against Japan. Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed in August. Truman never publicly expressed doubt about the decision, and the argument over it has run ever since.
The more consequential shift was slower. Truman came to believe, faster than most of Washington, that the Soviet Union could not be accommodated. When Britain announced in February 1947 that it could no longer prop up Greece, he went to Congress and delivered the Truman Doctrine, the pledge to support free peoples resisting subjugation. Then came the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift that kept a blockaded city fed through the winter of 1948, and in 1949 NATO, a peacetime military alliance of a kind the United States had spent 160 years avoiding.
He also rebuilt the machinery. The National Security Act of 1947 created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA, the permanent apparatus of a country that intended to stay mobilized.
The unpopular presidency
At home he was frequently in trouble and occasionally brave. He desegregated the armed forces by executive order in 1948 over the objections of his own party's southern wing, and recognized the state of Israel minutes after it declared independence, against the advice of his Secretary of State. He then won the 1948 election that every newspaper had given to Thomas Dewey, and posed with the paper that got it wrong.
His second term went badly. He sent American forces to Korea in 1950 without a declaration of war, calling it a police action, a precedent that has shaped every American military commitment since. The war stalemated, and when General Douglas MacArthur publicly challenged his authority Truman fired him, correct constitutionally and disastrous politically. Amid corruption scandals and the Korean deadlock his approval rating fell to around twenty-two percent, among the lowest ever recorded, and he did not run again.
Reputation, reversed
Truman left office in 1953 widely regarded as a small man who had been handed a job too big for him. Historians now rank him consistently among the best presidents, because the structure he improvised, containment, alliances, permanent intelligence and defense institutions, an American security guarantee for Europe, turned out to be the architecture of the next four decades and, in much of it, of the present.
He kept a sign on his desk reading the buck stops here, and a plainer motto in his letters: he decided, and he did not spend his retirement agonizing in public. It is a useful reminder that the people who set the shape of an era are not always the ones anyone expected to.