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Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd President of the United States (1945–1953). As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice-president and the 34th Vice President of the United States, he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his fourth term. During World War I, Truman served as an artillery officer, making him the only president to have seen combat in World War I (his successor Eisenhower spent the war training tank crews in Pennsylvania). After the war he became part of the political machine of Tom Pendergast and was elected a county commissioner in Missouri and eventually a United States senator. After he gained national prominence as head of the wartime Truman Committee, Truman replaced vice president Henry A. Wallace as Roosevelt's running mate in 1944. Truman faced challenge after challenge in domestic affairs. The disorderly postwar reconversion of the economy of the United States was marked by severe shortages, numerous strikes, and the passage of the Taft–Hartley Act over his veto. He confounded all predictions to win re-election in 1948, helped by his famous Whistle Stop Tour of rural America. After his re-election he was able to pass only one of the proposals in his Fair Deal program. He used executive orders to begin desegregation of the military and to create loyalty checks which dismissed thousands of communist supporters from office, even though he strongly opposed mandatory loyalty oaths for governmental employees, a stance that led to charges that his administration was soft on communism. Truman's presidency was also eventful in foreign affairs, with the end of World War II and his decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, the founding of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Truman Doctrine to contain communism, the beginning of the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Korean War. Corruption in Truman's administration reached the cabinet and senior White House staff. Republicans made corruption a central issue in the 1952 campaign. Truman, whose demeanor was very different from that of the patrician Roosevelt, was a folksy, unassuming president. He popularized such phrases as "The buck stops here" and "If you can't stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen." He overcame the low expectations of many political observers who compared him unfavorably with his highly-regarded predecessor. At different points in his presidency, Truman earned both the lowest public approval ratings that had ever been recorded, and the highest approval ratings to be recorded until 1991. Despite negative public opinion during his term in office, popular and scholarly assessments of his presidency became more positive after his retirement from politics and the publication of his memoirs. Truman's legendary upset victory in 1948 over Thomas E. Dewey is routinely invoked by underdog presidential candidates. Most American historians consider Truman one of the greatest U.S. Presidents.
Truman was born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri,
the oldest child of John Anderson Truman (1851–1914) and Martha Ellen
Young Truman (1852–1947). His parents chose the name Harry after his
mother's brother, Harrison Young (1846–1916), Harry's uncle. His
parents chose "S" as his middle name in an attempt to please both of
Harry's grandfathers, Anderson Shippe Truman and Solomon Young. The
initial did not actually stand for anything, since it was a common
practice with Scots-Irish. A brother, John Vivian (1886–1965), soon followed, along with sister Mary Jane Truman (1889–1978). John
Truman was a farmer and livestock dealer. The family lived in Lamar
until Harry was ten months old. They then moved to a farm near Harrisonville, then to Belton, and in 1887 to his grandparents' 600 acre farm in Grandview. When Truman was six, his parents moved the family to Independence, so he could attend the Presbyterian Church Sunday School. Truman did not attend a traditional school until he was eight. As
a young boy, Truman had three main interests: music, reading, and
history, all encouraged by his mother. He was very close to his mother
for as long as she lived, and as president solicited political as well
as personal advice from her. He got up at five every morning to practice the piano, and went to a local music teacher twice a week until he was fifteen. Truman also read a great deal of popular history. He was a page at the 1900 Democratic National Convention at Convention Hall in Kansas City. After graduating from Independence High School (now William Chrisman High School) in 1901, Truman worked as a timekeeper on the Santa Fe Railroad, sleeping in "hobo camps" near the rail lines; he then worked at a series of clerical jobs. He worked briefly in the mail room of the Kansas City Star. Truman decided not to join the International Typographical Union.
He returned to the Grandview farm in 1906 and stayed there until 1917
when he went into military service. The physically demanding work he
put in on the Grandview farm was a formative experience. During this
period he courted Bess Wallace and
even proposed to her in 1911. She turned him down, and Truman said he
wanted to make more money than a farmer before he proposed again. Truman enlisted in the Missouri Army National Guard in 1905, and served until 1911. At his physical in 1905, his eyesight had been an unacceptable 20/50 in the right eye and 20/40 in the left. Reportedly, he passed by secretly memorizing the eye chart. With the onset of American participation in World War I, Truman rejoined the Guard. Before going to France, he was sent to Camp Doniphan, adjacent to Fort Sill, near Lawton, Oklahoma for training. He ran the camp canteen with Edward Jacobson,
who had experience in a Kansas City clothing store as a clerk. At Ft.
Sill he also met Lieutenant James M. Pendergast, the nephew of Thomas Joseph (T.J.) Pendergast, a Kansas City politician. Both men would have profound influences on later events in Truman's life. Truman was chosen to be an officer, and then battery commander in an artillery regiment in France. His unit was Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, 60th Brigade, 35th Infantry Division, known for its discipline problems. During a sudden attack by the Germans in the Vosges Mountains,
the battery started to disperse; Truman ordered them back into position
using profanities that he had "learned while working on the Santa Fe
railroad." Shocked
by the outburst, his men reassembled and followed him to safety. Under
Captain Truman's command in France, the battery did not lose a single
man. On November 11, 1918 his artillery unit fired some of the last shots of World War I into
German positions. The war was a transformative experience that brought
out Truman's leadership qualities; he later rose to the rank of Colonel
in the Army Reserves, and his war record made possible his later political career in Missouri. At
the war's conclusion, Truman returned to Independence as a captain and
married his longtime love interest, Bess Wallace, on June 28, 1919, the
very day that the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The couple had one child, Mary Margaret (February 17, 1924 – January 29, 2008). Truman was the only president who served after 1897 not to earn a college degree: poor eyesight prevented him from applying to West Point (his childhood dream) and financial constraints prevented him from securing a degree elsewhere. He did, however, study for two years toward a law degree at the Kansas City Law School (now the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law) in the early 1920s. Later in his life, at age 60, Truman was issued invitations to join Alpha Delta Gamma National Fraternity and Missouri-Kansas City's Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity; he accepted the invitations and is recognized as an honorary member of both organizations. A month before Truman was married, banking on their success at Fort Sill and overseas, Truman and Jacobson opened a haberdashery of
the same name at 104 West 12th Street in downtown Kansas City. After a
few successful years, the store went bankrupt during the recession of 1921, which greatly affected the farm economy. Truman
blamed the fall in farm prices on the policies of the Republicans; he
worked to pay off the debts until 1934, just as he was going into the
U.S. Senate, when banker William T. Kemper retrieved
the note during the sale of a bankrupt bank and allowed Truman to pay
it off for $1,000. (At the same time Kemper made a $1,000 contribution
to Truman's campaign.) Former
comrades in arms and former business partners, Jacobson and Truman
remained close friends for life. Decades later, Jacobson's advice to
Truman on Zionism would play a critical role in the US government's decision to recognize Israel. On February 9, 1909, Harry Truman was initiated into Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the Belton Lodge, Missouri. In
1911 he helped establish the Grandview Lodge, and he served as its
first Worshipful Master. In 1940, Harry Truman was elected the 97th
Grand Master of the Masons of Missouri. In 1945, he was made a 33°
Sovereign Grand Inspector General and an Honorary Member of the supreme
council at the Supreme Council A.A.S.R. Southern Jurisdiction
Headquarters in Washington D.C. In 1959, he was awarded the 50 year
award, the only U.S. president to reach that anniversary. Truman was a member of Sons of the Revolution and a card carrying member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Harry S. Truman had at least two relatives who were Confederate
soldiers. First, William Young, son of Solomon and Harriet Louise
(Gregg) Young, served under Upton Hayes. Solomon & Harriet were the
grandparents of Harry S. Truman. Federals ("Redlegs") stole the
family silverware, killed over 100 hogs, and burned his barns and
haystacks. This occurred after Harriet had fed the men. Young rode with
Hayes, Virgil Miller, Cole Younger, Dick Yeager & Boon Muir in
August 1862. The other man was James J. "Jim Crow" Chiles, an in-law, his wife was a daughter of Solomon Young.
The President's grandfather Anderson Shipp Truman was a Kentuckian and
Southern in sympathy, but unwilling to fight in the Civil War. Instead
he loaded his slaves onto a wagon and drove them to Leavenworth, KS,
where he gave them their freedom with blankets and food for several
months. His son, John Truman was too young to fight but he had two uncles in the Confederate Cavalry under General Joe Shelby. President Harry Truman's grandmother Harriet (Gregg) Young was put in a "prison camp" due to Gen. Thomas Ewing's General Order #11.
Harry's mother was Martha Ellen Young. She, from childhood, remembered
her home being burned, following Order #11. In 1861, when Kansas
"Redlegs" made their first raid on the Truman's family's property, the
Youngs were living southeast of Kansas City near Hickman Mills. At this
time, the Redlegs tried to make Harrison Young, Harry's uncle, turn
informant and reveal information about Missourians loyal to the South.
Harrison refused and was repeatedly "mock hanged", and his neck was
stretched to torture him and make him talk. Harrison Young never broke
to this torture. In 1922, with the help of the Kansas City Democratic machine led by boss Tom Pendergast, Truman was elected as a judge of the County Court of the eastern district of Jackson County — an administrative, not judicial, position similar to county commissioners elsewhere. In 1922, Truman gave a friend $10 for an initiation fee for the Ku Klux Klan but later asked to get his money back; he was never initiated, never attended a meeting, and never claimed membership. Though Truman at times expressed anger towards Jews in his diaries, his business partner and close friend Edward Jacobson was Jewish. Truman's attitudes toward blacks were typical of white Missourians of his era, and were expressed in his casual use of terms like "nigger".
Years later, another measure of his racial attitudes would come to the
forefront: tales of the abuse, violence, and persecution suffered by
many African American veterans upon their return from World War II infuriated Truman, and were a major factor in his decision to issue Executive Order 9981, in July 1948, to back civil rights initiatives and desegregate the armed forces. He was not reelected in 1924, but in 1926 was elected the presiding judge for the court, and was reelected in 1930. In
1930 Truman coordinated the "Ten Year Plan", which transformed Jackson
County and the Kansas City skyline with new public works projects,
including an extensive series of roads, construction of a new Wight and Wight-designed County Court building, and the dedication of a series of 12 Madonna of the Trail monuments honoring pioneer women. In 1933 Truman was named Missouri's director for the Federal Re-Employment program (part of the Civil Works Administration) at the request of Postmaster General James Farley as payback to Pendergast for delivering the Kansas City vote to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. The appointment confirmed Pendergast's control over federal patronage jobs in Missouri and marked the zenith of his power. It was also to create a relationship between Truman and Harry Hopkins and assure avid Truman support for the New Deal. After
serving as judge, Truman wanted to run for Governor or Congress, but
Pendergast rejected these ideas. In 1934, Pendergast's aides suggested
Harry Truman as a candidate for Senator; after three other men turned
him down, Pendergast reluctantly backed Truman as the candidate for the 1934 U.S. Senate election for Missouri. During the Democratic primary, Truman defeated John J. Cochran and Tuck Milligan, the brother of federal prosecutor Maurice M. Milligan. Truman then defeated the incumbent Republican, Roscoe C. Patterson, by nearly 20 percent. Truman
assumed office under a cloud as "the senator from Pendergast." He gave
patronage decisions to Pendergast but always maintained he voted his
conscience. Truman always defended the patronage by saying that by
offering a little, he saved a lot. In his first term as a U.S. Senator, Truman spoke out bluntly against corporate greed, and warned about the dangers of Wall Street speculators and other moneyed special interests attaining too much influence in national affairs. He
was, however, largely ignored by President Roosevelt, who appeared not
to have taken him seriously at this stage. Truman reportedly had
difficulty getting White House secretaries to return his calls. The 1936 election of Pendergast-backed Governor Lloyd C. Stark revealed
even bigger voter irregularities in Missouri than had been uncovered in
1934. Milligan prosecuted 278 defendants in vote fraud cases; he
convicted 259. Stark turned on Pendergast, urged prosecution, and was
able to wrest federal patronage from the Pendergast machine. Ultimately
Milligan discovered that Pendergast had not paid federal taxes between
1927 and 1937 and had conducted a fraudulent insurance scam. In 1939,
Pendergast pled guilty and received a $10,000 fine and a 15-month
sentence at Leavenworth Federal Prison. No charges were filed against Truman. Truman's prospects for re-election to the Senate looked bleak. In 1940, both Stark and Maurice Milligan challenged him in the Democratic primary for the Senate. Robert E. Hannegan, who controlled St. Louis Democratic
politics, threw his support in the election behind Truman. (Hannegan
would go on to broker the 1944 deal that put Truman on the vice
presidential ticket for Roosevelt.) Truman campaigned tirelessly and
combatively. In the end, Stark and Milligan split the anti-Pendergast
vote in the Democratic primary, with Stark and Milligan having more
combined votes than Truman. In September 1940, during the general election campaign, Truman was elected Grand Master of the Missouri Grand Lodge of Freemasonry. In November of that year, he defeated Kansas City State Senator Manvel H. Davis by over 40,000 votes and retained his Senate seat. Truman said later that the Masonic election assured his victory in the general election over State Senator Davis.
On June 23, 1941, the day after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Senator Truman declared: "If
we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is
winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as
possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any
circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word." Although
the sentiment was in line with what many Americans felt at the time, it
was regarded by later biographers as both inappropriate and cynical. The
remark was the first in a long series of prominently inopportune
off-the-cuff statements by Truman to members of the national press
corps.
Truman gained fame and respect when his preparedness committee (popularly known as the "Truman Committee")
investigated the scandal of military wastefulness by exposing fraud and
mismanagement. The Roosevelt administration had initially feared the
Committee would hurt war morale, and Undersecretary of War Robert P. Patterson wrote
to the president declaring it was "in the public interest" to suspend
the committee. Truman wrote a letter to the president saying that the
committee was "100 percent behind the administration" and that it had
no intention of criticizing the military conduct of the war. The
committee was considered a success and is reported to have saved at
least $15 billion. Truman's advocacy of common-sense cost-saving
measures for the military attracted much attention. In 1943, his work
as chairman earned Truman his first appearance on the cover of Time. He would eventually appear on nine Time covers and be named the magazine's Man of the Year for 1945 and 1948. After
years as a marginal figure in the Senate, Truman was cast into the
national spotlight after the success of the Truman Committee. Following
months of uncertainty over the president's preference for a running
mate, Truman was selected as Franklin Roosevelt's vice presidential
candidate in 1944 as the result of a deal worked out by Hannegan, who was Democratic National Chairman that year. Although
his public image remained that of a robust, engaged world leader,
Roosevelt's physical condition was in fact rapidly deteriorating in
mid-1944. A handful of key FDR advisers, including outgoing Democratic
National Committee Chairman Frank C. Walker, incoming Chairman Robert Hannegan, party treasurer Edwin W. Pauley, strategist Ed Flynn, and lobbyist George E. Allen closed ranks in the summer of 1944 to "keep Henry Wallace off the ticket." They considered Wallace, the incumbent vice president, too liberal,
and had grave concerns about the possibility of his ascension to the
presidency. Allen would later recall that each of these men "realized
that the man nominated to run with Roosevelt would in all probability
be the next President. . ." After
meeting personally with the party leaders, FDR agreed to replace
Wallace as vice president; however, Roosevelt chose to leave the final
selection of a running mate unresolved until the later stages of the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago. James F. Byrnes of South Carolina was
initially favored, but labor leaders opposed him. Roosevelt also
opposed Byrnes, but was reluctant to disappoint any candidate and did
not want to tell Byrnes of his opposition directly; thus the president
told Hannegan to "clear it with Sidney", meaning
labor leader and Byrnes opponent Sidney Hillman, a few days before the convention. In addition, Byrnes' status as a segregationist gave him problems with Northern liberals, and he was also considered vulnerable because of his conversion from Catholicism. Reportedly, Roosevelt offered the position to Governor Henry F. Schricker of Indiana, but he declined. Before the convention began, Roosevelt wrote a note saying he would accept either Truman or Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas;
state and city party leaders preferred Truman. Truman himself did not
campaign directly or indirectly that summer for the number two spot on
the ticket, and always maintained that he had not wanted the job of
vice president. As a result, Roosevelt had to put a great deal of
pressure on Truman to accept the vice presidency. On July 19, the party
bosses summoned Truman to a suite in the Blackstone Hotel to
listen in on a phone call that, unknown to the Senator, they had
rehearsed in advance with the President. During the conversation, FDR
asked the party bosses whether Truman would accept the position. When
they said no, FDR angrily accused Truman of disrupting the unity of the
Democratic party then hung up. Feeling as if he had no choice, Truman
reluctantly agreed to become Roosevelt's running mate. Truman's candidacy was humorously dubbed the second "Missouri Compromise" at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in
Chicago, as his appeal to the party center contrasted with the liberal
Wallace and the conservative Byrnes. The nomination was well received,
and the Roosevelt–Truman team went on to score a 432–99 electoral-vote victory in the 1944 presidential election, defeating Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Governor John Bricker of Ohio. Truman was sworn in as vice president on January 20, 1945, and served less than three months. Truman's
brief vice-presidency was relatively uneventful, and Roosevelt rarely
contacted him, even to inform him of major decisions. Truman shocked
many when he attended his disgraced patron Pendergast's funeral a few
days after being sworn in. Truman was reportedly the only elected
official who attended the funeral. Truman brushed aside the criticism,
saying simply, "He was always my friend and I have always been his." On April 12, 1945, Truman was urgently called to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt informed him that the president had died after suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
Truman's first concern was for Mrs. Roosevelt. He asked if there was
anything he could do for her, to which she replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now!" Truman
had been vice president for only 82 days when President Roosevelt died,
April 12, 1945. He had had very little meaningful communication with
Roosevelt about world affairs or domestic politics after being sworn in
as vice president, and was completely uninformed about major
initiatives relating to the successful prosecution of the war—notably
the top secret Manhattan Project, which was about to test the world's first atomic bomb. Upon
assuming the presidency, Truman asked all the members of FDR's cabinet
to remain in place, told them that he was open to their advice, and
laid down a central principle of his administration: he would be the
one making decisions, and they were to support him. Just a few weeks after he assumed office, on his 61st birthday, the Allies achieved victory in Europe. Truman was quickly briefed on the Manhattan Project and at the Potsdam Conference, he indicated cryptically to Joseph Stalin the
U.S. was about to use a new kind of weapon against the Japanese. Though
this was the first time the Soviets had been officially given
information about the atomic bomb, Stalin (through his spies in the
U.S.) was already well aware of the bomb project, in fact learning
about it long before Truman himself did. In August 1945, after Japan did not accept the Potsdam Declaration Truman authorized use of atomic weapons against the Japanese. The atomic bombings that followed were the first, and so far the only, instance of nuclear warfare. On the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8:15, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima. Two
days later, having heard nothing from the Japanese government, the U.S.
military proceeded with its plans to drop a second atomic bomb. On
August 9, Nagasaki was also devastated with a bomb, Fat Man, dropped by the B-29 bomber Bockscar. The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, with
roughly half of those deaths occurring on the days of the bombings.
Truman received news of the bombing while aboard the heavy cruiser USS Augusta on his way back to the U.S. after the Potsdam Conference. The Japanese agreed to surrender on August 14. The
end of World War II was followed in the United States by uneasy and
contentious conversion back to a peacetime economy. The president was
faced with a sudden renewal of labor-management conflicts that had lain
dormant during the war years, severe shortages in housing and consumer
products, and widespread dissatisfaction with inflation, which at one point hit six percent in a single month. In
this polarized environment, there was a wave of destabilizing strikes
in major industries, and Truman's response to them was generally seen
as ineffective. In the spring of 1946, a national railway strike,
unprecedented in the nation's history, brought virtually all passenger
and freight lines to a standstill for over a month. When the railway
workers turned down a proposed settlement, Truman seized control of the
railways and threatened to draft striking workers into the armed forces. While delivering a speech before Congress requesting authority for this plan, Truman received word that the strike had been settled on his terms. He
announced this development to Congress on the spot and received a
tumultuous ovation that was replayed for weeks on newsreels. Although
the resolution of the crippling railway strike made for stirring
political theater, it actually cost Truman politically: his proposed
solution was seen by many as high-handed; and labor voters, already
wary of Truman's handling of workers' issues, were deeply alienated.
As a Wilsonian internationalist, Truman strongly supported the creation of the United Nations, and included former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on the delegation to the U.N.'s first General Assembly in order to meet the public desire for peace after the carnage of World War II. Faced with Communist abandonment of commitments to democracy made at the Potsdam Conference, and with Communist advances in Greece (leading to the Greek Civil War) and in Turkey that suggested a hunger for global domination, Truman and his foreign policy advisors concluded that the interests of the Soviet Union were quickly becoming incompatible with those of the United States. The Truman administration articulated an increasingly hard line against the Soviets. Although he claimed no personal expertise on foreign matters, and although the opposition Republicans controlled the United States Congress, Truman was able to win bipartisan support for both the Truman Doctrine, which formalised a policy of containment, and the Marshall Plan,
which aimed to help rebuild postwar Europe. To get Congress to spend
the vast sums necessary to restart the moribund European economy,
Truman used an ideological argument, arguing forcefully that Communism
flourishes in economically deprived areas. His goal was to "scare the
hell out of Congress." As part of the U.S. Cold War strategy, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 and reorganized military forces by merging the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the National Military Establishment (later the Department of Defense) and creating the U.S. Air Force. The act also created the CIA and the National Security Council. After many years of Democratic majorities in Congress and two Democratic presidents, voter fatigue with the Democrats delivered a new Republican majority in the 1946 midterm elections, with the Republicans picking up 55 seats in the House of Representatives and several seats in
the Senate. Although Truman cooperated closely with the Republican
leaders on foreign policy, he fought them bitterly on domestic issues.
He failed to prevent tax cuts or the removal of price controls. The
power of the labor unions was significantly curtailed by the Taft–Hartley Act, which was enacted by overriding Truman's veto. As he readied for the approaching 1948 election, Truman made clear his identity as a Democrat in the New Deal tradition, advocating national health insurance, the
repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, and an aggressive civil
rights program. Taken together, it all constituted a broad legislative
agenda that came to be called the "Fair Deal". Truman's proposals made for potent campaign rhetoric, but were not well received by Congress, even after Democratic gains in the 1948 election. Only one of the major Fair Deal bills, the Housing Act of 1949, was ever enacted. Truman was a key figure in the establishment of the Jewish state in the Palestine Mandate.
In shaping his policy toward Palestine, Truman experienced continuous
pressures, especially from the Jewish community, virtually from the
moment he took office as president. Truman
writes, "Top Jewish leaders in the United States were putting all sorts
of pressure on me to commit American power and forces on behalf of the
Jewish aspirations in Palestine." In 1946, an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the gradual establishment of two states in Palestine, with neither Jews nor Arabs dominating. However, there was little Zionist support for the two-state proposal. Britain's empire was
in rapid decline, and under pressure to withdraw from Palestine quickly
because of attacks on British forces by armed Zionist groups. At the urging of the British, a special U.N. committee, UNSCOP,
recommended the immediate partitioning of Palestine into two states,
and with Truman's support, this initiative was approved by the General
Assembly on November 29, 1947. According to Truman, "The facts were
that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations
unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White
House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever
had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had
in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist
leaders — actuated by a political motive and engaging in political
threats — disturbed and annoyed me." The president noted in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, "I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their [Zionist] side." The British announced on November 30, 1947 that they would leave Palestine by May 15, 1948. A civil war broke out in Palestine and the Arab League Council
nations began moving troops to Palestine's borders. The Zionist idea of
a Jewish state in the Middle East was popular in the U.S., and Truman eventually came to support it. The State Department, however, disagreed with the idea. Secretary of State George Marshall and most of the foreign service experts strongly opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Thus, when Truman agreed to meet with Chaim Weizmann at the request of Edward Jacobson,
he found himself overruling his own Secretary of State. In the end,
Marshall did not publicly dispute the president's decision, as Truman
feared he might. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was
vocal on the issue of Palestine and spoke repeatedly about the perils
of arousing Arab hostility, which might result in denial of access to
petroleum resources in the area and about "the impact of this question on the security of the United States." Truman recognized the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, eleven minutes after it declared itself a nation. Coupled
with strong humanitarian concerns was Truman's pragmatic need for
cash during the 1948 campaign. One particularly critical donor, Abraham
Feinberg, arranged for a gift to the campaign of $100,000 in support of
a cross-country campaign train trip that Truman wanted to make, but
that the Democratic National Committee could not afford. The trip
became known as the "whistle-stop tour," and emerged as the centerpiece
of the Truman campaign. Feinberg, who helped secure many donations to
the cash-starved campaign from supporters of the Zionist cause, was
president of Americans for Haganah Incorporated, whose mission was to
support unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine.
On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union blocked access to the three Western-held sectors of Berlin.
The Allies had never negotiated a deal to guarantee supply of the
sectors deep within the Soviet-occupied zone. The commander of the
American occupation zone in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, proposed sending a large armored column driving peacefully, as a moral right, down the autobahn across the Soviet zone to West Berlin,
with instructions to defend itself if it were stopped or attacked.
Truman, however, following the consensus in Washington, believed this
would entail an unacceptable risk of war. He approved a plan to supply
the blockaded city by air. On June 25, the Allies initiated the Berlin Airlift,
a campaign that delivered food and other supplies, such as coal, using
military airplanes on a massive scale. Nothing remotely like it had
ever been attempted before, and no single nation had the capability,
either logistically or materially, to have accomplished it. The airlift
worked; ground access was again granted on May 11, 1949. The airlift
continued for several months after that. The Berlin Airlift was one of
Truman's great foreign policy successes as president; it significantly
aided his election campaign in 1948. Truman, Congress, and the Pentagon followed
a strategy of rapid demobilization after World War II, mothballing
ships and sending the veterans home. The reasons for this strategy,
which persisted through Truman's first term and well into his second,
were largely financial. In order to fund domestic spending
requirements, Truman had advocated a policy of defense program cuts for
the U.S. armed forces at the end of the war. The Republican majority in
Congress, anxious to enact numerous tax cuts, approved of Truman's plan
to "hold the line" on defense spending. In
addition, Truman's experience in the Senate left him with lingering
suspicions that large sums were being wasted in the Pentagon. In 1949, Truman appointed Louis A. Johnson as
Secretary of Defense. Impressed by U.S. advances in atomic bomb
development, Truman and Johnson initially believed that the atomic bomb
rendered conventional forces largely irrelevant to the modern
battlefield. This assumption eventually had to be revisited, however,
as the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in the same year. Nevertheless, reductions continued, adversely affecting U.S. conventional defense readiness. Both Truman and Johnson had a particular antipathy to Navy and Marine Corps budget requests. Truman
had a well-known dislike of the Marines dating back to his service in
World War I, and famously said, "The Marine Corps is the Navy's police
force, and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They
have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's." Indeed,
Truman had proposed disbanding the Marine Corps entirely as part of the
1948 defense reorganization plan, a plan that was abandoned only after
a letter-writing campaign and the intervention of influential
congressmen who were Marine veterans. Under
Truman defense budgets through Fiscal Year 1950, many Navy ships were
mothballed, sold to other countries, or scrapped. The U.S. Army,
faced with high turnover of experienced personnel, cut back on training
exercises, and eased recruitment standards. Usable equipment was
scrapped or sold off instead of stored, and even ammunition stockpiles
were cut. The Marine Corps, its budgets slashed, was reduced to hoarding surplus inventories of World War II-era weapons and equipment. It was only after the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans in
1950 that Truman sent significantly larger defense requests to
Congress—and initiated what might be considered the modern period of
defense spending in the United States. The 1948 presidential election is best remembered for Truman's stunning come-from-behind victory. In the spring of 1948, Truman's public approval rating stood at 36 percent, and
the president was nearly universally regarded as incapable of winning
the general election. The "New Deal" operatives within the
party—including FDR's son James—tried to swing the Democratic nomination to General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
a wildly popular figure whose political views—and party
affiliation—were totally unknown. Eisenhower emphatically refused to
accept, and Truman outflanked opponents to his nomination. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention,
Truman attempted to calm turbulent domestic political waters by placing
a tepid civil rights plank in the party platform; the aim was to
assuage the internal conflicts between the northern and southern wings
of his party. Events overtook the president's efforts at compromise,
however. A sharp address given by Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis—as
well as the local political interests of a number of urban
bosses—convinced the Convention to adopt a stronger civil rights plank,
which Truman approved wholeheartedly. All of Alabama's delegates, and a portion of Mississippi's, walked out of the convention in protest. Unfazed,
Truman delivered an aggressive acceptance speech attacking the 80th
Congress and promising to win the election and "make these Republicans
like it." Within two weeks, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, racially integrating the U.S. Armed Services. Truman took considerable political risk in backing civil rights, and many seasoned Democrats were concerned that the loss of Dixiecrat support might destroy the Democratic Party. The fear seemed well justified—Strom Thurmond declared his candidacy for the presidency and led a full-scale revolt of Southern "states' rights" proponents. This revolt on the right was matched by a revolt on the left, led by former Vice President Henry A. Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket.
Immediately after its first post-FDR convention, the Democratic Party
found itself disintegrating. Victory in November seemed a remote
possibility indeed, with the party not simply split but divided three
ways. There followed a remarkable 21,928-mile (35,290 km) presidential odyssey, an
unprecedented personal appeal to the nation. Truman and his staff
crisscrossed the United States in the presidential train; his "whistlestop" tactic of giving brief speeches from the rear platform of the observation car Ferdinand Magellan came to represent the entire campaign. His combative appearances, such as those at the town square of Harrisburg, Illinois, captured the popular imagination and drew huge crowds. Six stops in Michigan drew a combined total of half a million people; a full million turned out for a New York City ticker-tape parade. The
large, mostly spontaneous gatherings at Truman's depot events were an
important sign of a critical change in momentum in the campaign — but
this shift went virtually unnoticed by the national press corps, which
continued reporting Republican Thomas Dewey's apparent impending victory as a certainty. One reason for the press'
inaccurate projection was polls conducted primarily by telephone in a
time when many people, including much of Truman's populist base, did
not own a telephone. This
skewed the data to indicate a stronger support base for Dewey than
existed, resulting in an unintended and undetected projection error
that may well have contributed to the perception of Truman's bleak
chances. The three major polling organizations also stopped polling
well before the November 2 election date—Roper in September, and
Crossley and Gallup in October—thus failing to measure the very period
when Truman appears to have surged past Dewey. In
the end, Truman held his midwestern base of progressives, won most of
the Southern states despite his civil rights plank, and squeaked
through with narrow victories in a few critical "battleground" states,
notably Ohio, California, and Illinois.
The final tally showed that the president had secured 303 electoral
votes, Dewey 189, and Thurmond only 39. Henry Wallace got none. The
defining image of the campaign came after Election Day, when Truman
held aloft the erroneous front page of the Chicago Tribune with a huge headline proclaiming "Dewey Defeats Truman." Truman did not have a vice president in his first term. His running mate, and eventual vice president for the term that began January 20, 1949, was Alben W. Barkley. Truman's inauguration was the first ever televised nationally." His
second term was grueling, in large measure because of foreign policy
challenges connected directly or indirectly to his policy of
containment. For instance, he quickly had to come to terms with the end
of the American nuclear monopoly. With information provided by its
espionage networks in the United States, the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project progressed
much faster than had been expected and they exploded their first bomb
on August 29, 1949. On January 7, 1953, Truman announced the detonation
of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb. Truman was a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which established a formal peacetime military alliance with Canada and
many of the democratic European nations that had not fallen under
Soviet control following World War II. Truman successfully guided the
treaty through the Senate in 1949. NATO's stated goals were to check
Soviet expansion in Europe and to send a clear message to communist
leaders that the world's democracies were willing and able to build new
security structures in support of democratic ideals. The United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Iceland, and Canada were the original treaty signatories; Greece and Turkey joined in 1952.
On December 21, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) and his National Revolutionary Army left mainland China, fleeing to Taiwan in the face of successful attacks by Mao Zedong's communist army during the Chinese Civil War. In June 1950, Truman ordered the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent further conflict between the communist government at the China mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan. Truman also called for the ROC not to make any further attacks on the mainland. Throughout
his presidency, Truman had to deal with accusations that the federal
government was harboring Soviet spies at the highest level. Testimony
in Congress on this issue garnered national attention, and thousands of
people were fired as security risks. An optimistic, patriotic man,
Truman was dubious about reports of potential Communist or Soviet
penetration of the U.S. government, and his oft-quoted response was to
dismiss the allegations as a "red herring." In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former spy for the Soviets and a senior editor at Time magazine, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
and presented a list of what he said were members of an underground
communist network working within the United States government in the
1930s. One was Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official. Hiss denied the accusations. Chambers'
revelations led to a crisis in American political culture, as Hiss was
convicted of perjury, in a controversial trial. On February 9, 1950, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the State Department of having communists on the payroll, and specifically claimed that Secretary of State Dean Acheson knew of, and was protecting, 205 communists within the State Department. At
issue was whether Truman had discovered all the subversive agents that
had entered the government during the Roosevelt years. Many on the
right, such as McCarthy and Congressman Richard Nixon, insisted that he had not. By
spotlighting this issue and attacking Truman's administration, McCarthy
quickly established himself as a national figure, and his explosive
allegations dominated the headlines. His claims were short on
confirmable details, but they nevertheless transfixed a nation
struggling to come to grips with frightening new realities: the Soviet
Union's nuclear explosion, the loss of U.S. atom bomb secrets, the fall
of China to communism, and new revelations of Soviet intelligence
penetration of other U.S. agencies, including the Treasury Department. Truman,
a pragmatic man who had made allowances for the likes of Tom Pendergast
and Stalin, quickly developed an unshakable loathing of Joseph McCarthy. He
counterattacked, saying that "Americanism" itself was under attack by
elements "who are loudly proclaiming that they are its chief defenders.
... They are trying to create fear and suspicion among us by the use of
slander, unproved accusations and just plain lies. ... They are trying
to get us to believe that our Government is riddled with communism and
corruption. ... These slandermongers are trying to get us so hysterical
that no one will stand up to them for fear of being called a communist.
Now this is an old communist trick in reverse. ... That is not fair
play. That is not Americanism." Nevertheless
Truman was never able to shake his image among the public of being
unable to purge his government of subversive influences.
President
Truman recognized the newly created state of Pakistan in 1947 and the
United States was one of the first countries in the world to do so.
President Truman personally invited Pakistan's first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and
his wife Begum Ra'ana to the United States for talks. Liaquat Ali Khan
accepted the invitation and arrived in Washington in May 1950. Liaquat
toured the United States and gave various speeches to the US Senate. At
the time of the visit Pakistan was non-aligned between the US-led
Western Bloc and the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc and it had recognized the
Communist-led People's Republic of China, ignoring Washington's
opposition to Peking. Despite the success of his US tour, Liaquat Ali's
Government did not make any drastic change in its foreign policy of
semi-non-alignment in the Cold War rivalry. In the UN Security Council,
it did oppose North Korea's aggression against pro-American South Korea
but refused to send Pakistani combat troops to join the UN force in the
Korean Peninsula. This was mainly because Pakistan was recently
recovering from its war with India over the disputed Kashmir in 1948. On June 25, 1950, the North Korean People's Army under the command of Kim Il-sung invaded South Korea, precipitating the outbreak of the Korean War.
Poorly trained and equipped, without tanks or air support, the South
Korean Army was rapidly pushed backwards, quickly losing the capital, Seoul. Truman
called for a naval blockade of Korea, only to learn that due to budget
cutbacks, the U.S. Navy no longer possessed a sufficient number of
warships to enforce such a measure. Truman
promptly urged the United Nations to intervene; it did, authorizing
armed defense for the first time in its history. The Soviet Union,
which was boycotting the United Nations at the time, was not present at
the vote that approved the measure. However, Truman decided not to
consult with Congress, an error that greatly weakened his position
later in the conflict. In
the first four weeks of the conflict, the American infantry forces
hastily deployed to Korea proved too few and were under-equipped. The
Eighth Army in Japan was forced to recondition World War II Sherman tanks from depots and monuments for use in Korea. Responding to criticism over readiness, Truman fired his much-criticized Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, replacing him with retired General George Marshall. Truman (with UN approval) decided on a roll-back policy—that is, conquest of North Korea. UN forces led by General Douglas MacArthur led the counterattack, scoring a stunning surprise victory with an amphibious landing at the Battle of Inchon that nearly trapped the invaders. UN forces then marched north, toward the Yalu River
boundary with China, with the goal of reuniting Korea under UN
auspices. China surprised the UN forces with a large-scale invasion in
November. The UN forces were forced back to below the 38th parallel,
then recovered; by early 1951 the war became a fierce stalemate at
about the 38th parallel where it had begun. UN and U.S. casualties were
heavy. Truman rejected MacArthur's request to attack Chinese supply
bases north of the Yalu, but MacArthur nevertheless promoted his plan
to Republican House leader Joseph Martin,
who leaked it to the press. Truman was gravely concerned that further
escalation of the war might draw the Soviet Union further into the
conflict: it was already supplying weapons and providing warplanes
(with Korean markings and Soviet fliers). On April 11, 1951, Truman
fired MacArthur from all his commands in Korea and Japan. Relieving
MacArthur of his command was among the least politically popular
decisions in presidential history. Truman's approval ratings plummeted,
and he faced calls for his impeachment from, among others, Senator Robert Taft. Fierce
criticism from virtually all quarters accused Truman of refusing to
shoulder the blame for a war gone sour and blaming his generals
instead. Many prominent citizens and officials, including Eleanor Roosevelt however
supported and applauded Truman's decision. MacArthur meanwhile,
returned to the United States to a hero's welcome, and, after his
famous address before Congress—which Truman was reported to have said
was a bunch of "damn bullshit". MacArthur was even rumored as a
candidate for the presidency. The
war remained a frustrating stalemate for two years, with over 30,000
Americans killed, until a peace agreement restored borders and ended
the conflict. In
the interim, the difficulties in Korea and the popular outcry against
Truman's sacking of MacArthur helped to make the president so unpopular
that Democrats started turning to other candidates. In the New Hampshire primary on March 11, 1952, Truman lost to Estes Kefauver, who won the preference poll 19,800 to 15,927 and all eight delegates. Truman was forced to cancel his reelection campaign. In February 1952, Truman's approval mark stood at 22 percent according to Gallup polls,
which was, until 2008, the all-time lowest approval mark for an active
American president. However it didn't last beyond March.
United States' involvement in Indochina widened during the Truman administration. On V-J Day 1945, Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence from France, but the U.S. announced its support of restoring French power.
In 1950, Ho again declared Vietnamese independence, which was
recognized by Communist China and the Soviet Union. Ho controlled a
remote territory along the Chinese border, while France controlled the
remainder. Truman's "containment policy" called for opposition to
Communist expansion, and led the U.S. to continue to recognize French
rule, support the French client government, and increase aid to
Vietnam. However, a basic dispute emerged: the Americans wanted a
strong and independent Vietnam, while the French cared little about
containing China but instead wanted to suppress local nationalism and
integrate Indochina into the French Union. In 1948 Truman ordered a controversial addition to the exterior of the White House: a second-floor balcony in the south portico that came to be known as the "Truman Balcony." The addition was unpopular. Not
long afterwards, engineering experts concluded that the building, much
of it over 130 years old, was in a dangerously dilapidated condition.
That August, a section of floor collapsed and Truman's own bedroom and
bathroom were closed as unsafe. No public announcement about the
serious structural problems of the White House was made until after the
1948 election had been won, by which time Truman had been informed that
his new balcony was the only part of the building that was sound. The
Truman family moved into nearby Blair House; as the newer West Wing, including the Oval Office,
remained open, Truman found himself walking to work across the street
each morning and afternoon. In due course the decision was made to
demolish and rebuild the whole interior of the main White House, as
well as excavating new basement levels and underpinning the
foundations. The famous exterior of the structure, however, was
buttressed and retained while the renovations proceeded inside. The
work lasted from December 1949 until March 1952. On November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate Truman at Blair House. On the street outside the residence, Torresola mortally wounded a White House policeman, Leslie Coffelt,
who shot Torresola dead before expiring himself. Collazo, as a
co-conspirator in a felony that turned into a homicide, was found
guilty of murder and was sentenced to death in 1952. Truman later
commuted his sentence to life in prison. Acknowledging
the importance of the question of Puerto Rican independence, Truman
allowed for a plebiscite in Puerto Rico to determine the status of its
relationship to the United States. The
attack, which could easily have taken the president's life, drew new
attention to security concerns surrounding his residence at Blair
House. He had jumped up from his nap, and was watching the gunfight
from his open bedroom window until a passerby shouted at him to take
cover. In response to a labor/management impasse arising from bitter disagreements over wage and price controls, Truman instructed his Secretary of Commerce, Charles W. Sawyer,
to take control of a number of the nation's steel mills in April 1952.
Truman cited his authority as Commander in Chief and the need to
maintain an uninterrupted supply of steel for munitions to be used in
the war in Korea. The Supreme Court found Truman's actions unconstitutional, however, and reversed the order in a major separation-of-powers decision, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.
The 6–3 decision, which held that Truman's assertion of authority was
too vague and was not rooted in any legislative action by Congress, was
delivered by a Court composed entirely of Justices appointed by either
Truman or Roosevelt. The high court's reversal of Truman's order was
one of the notable defeats of his presidency. After
coal miners went on strike in the spring of 1946, Truman threatened to
draft the miners into the Army if they didn't return to work, or use
members of the Army to replace the workers. In 1950, the Senate, led by Estes Kefauver, investigated numerous charges of corruption among senior Administration officials, some of whom received fur coats and deep freezers for favors. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was involved. In 1950, 166 IRS employees either resigned or were fired, and many were facing indictments from the Department of Justice on
a variety of tax-fixing and bribery charges, including the assistant
attorney general in charge of the Tax Division. When Attorney General Howard McGrath fired the special prosecutor for being too zealous, Truman fired McGrath. Historians
agree that Truman himself was innocent and unaware—with one exception.
In 1945, Mrs. Truman received a new, expensive, hard-to-get deep
freezer. The businessman who provided the gift was the president of a
perfume company and, thanks to Truman's aide and confidante General
Harry Vaughan, received priority to fly to Europe days after the war
ended, where he bought new perfumes. On the way back he "bumped" a
wounded veteran from a flight that would have taken him back to the US.
Disclosure of the episode in 1949 humiliated Truman. The President
responded by vigorously defending Vaughan, an old friend with an office
in the White House itself. Vaughan was eventually connected to multiple
influence-peddling scandals. Charges
that Soviet agents had infiltrated the government bedeviled the Truman
Administration and became a major campaign issue for Eisenhower in 1952. In 1947, Truman issued Executive Order 9835 to set up loyalty boards to investigate espionage among federal employees. Between
1947 and 1952, "about 20,000 government employees were investigated,
some 2500 resigned 'voluntarily,' and 400 were fired." He
did, however, strongly oppose mandatory loyalty oaths for governmental
employees, a stance that led to charges that his Administration was
soft on Communism. In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. claimed that Truman had known Harry Dexter White was a Soviet spy when Truman appointed him to the International Monetary Fund. A 1947 report by the Truman administration titled To Secure These Rights presented
a detailed ten-point agenda of civil rights reforms. In February 1948,
the president submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress that proposed
creating several federal offices devoted to issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices.
This provoked a storm of criticism from Southern Democrats in the run
up to the national nominating convention, but Truman refused to
compromise, saying: "My forebears were Confederates. . . .
But my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers,
just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten." In retirement however, Truman was less progressive on the issue. He described the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches as silly, stating that the marches would not "accomplish a darned thing". Instead
of addressing civil rights on a case by case need, Truman wanted to
address civil rights on a national level. Truman made three executive orders that eventually became a structure for future civil rights legislation. The first executive order, in 1948, desegregated the Armed Forces. African Americans and White Americans had to serve side by side during the Korean War.
However, only a few African Americans were promoted in the military and
it took two years for this policy to be fully implemented. The second,
also in 1948, made it illegal to discriminate against persons applying for Civil Service positions
based on race. The third executive order, in 1951, established
Committee on Government Contract Compliance (CGCC). This committee
ensured that defense contractors to the armed forces could not
discriminate against a person on account of race. In 1951, the U.S. ratified the 22nd Amendment,
making a president ineligible to be elected for a third time, or to be
elected for a second time after having served more than two years of a
previous president's term. The latter clause would have applied to
Truman in 1952, except that a grandfather clause in
the amendment explicitly excluded the current president from this
provision. However, Truman decided not to run for reelection. At the
time of the 1952 New Hampshire primary, no candidate had won Truman's
backing. His first choice, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, had declined to run; Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson had also turned Truman down; Vice President Barkley was considered too old; and Truman distrusted and disliked Senator Estes Kefauver, whom he privately called "Cowfever." Truman's
name was on the New Hampshire primary ballot but Kefauver won. On March
29 Truman announced his decision not to run for re-election. Stevenson, having reconsidered his presidential ambitions, received Truman's backing and won the Democratic nomination. Dwight D. Eisenhower,
now a Republican and the nominee of his party, campaigned against what
he denounced as Truman's failures regarding "Korea, Communism and
Corruption" and the "mess in Washington," and promised to "go to Korea." Eisenhower defeated Stevenson decisively in the general election,
ending 20 years of Democratic rule. While Truman and Eisenhower had
previously been good friends, Truman felt betrayed that Eisenhower did
not denounce Joseph McCarthy during the campaign. Truman returned to Independence, Missouri to live at the Wallace home he and Bess had shared for years with her mother. Four months after leaving office, Truman was invited to address the Reserve Officers Association in Philadelphia. Refusing official transportation, Truman instead drove his brand-new Chrysler New Yorker,
with Bess accompanying him in the passenger seat. The trip, which
included stops in Washington, D.C., New York City, and smaller towns,
caused a media sensation, especially when the former President was
pulled over by a policeman for driving too slowly in a passing lane. Truman's predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had organized his own presidential library,
but legislation to enable future presidents to do something similar
still remained to be enacted. Truman worked to garner private donations
to build a presidential library, which he then donated to the federal
government to maintain and operate—a practice adopted by all of his
successors. Once
out of office, Truman quickly decided that he did not wish to be on any
corporate payroll, believing that taking advantage of such financial
opportunities would diminish the integrity of the nation's highest
office. He also turned down numerous offers for commercial
endorsements. Since his earlier business ventures had proved
unremunerative, he had no personal savings. As a result, he faced
financial challenges. Once Truman left the White House, his only income
was his old army pension: $112.56 per month. Former members of Congress
and the federal courts received a federal retirement package; President
Truman himself had ensured that former servants of the executive branch
of government would receive similar support. In 1953, however, there
was no such benefit package for former presidents. He
took out a personal loan from a Missouri bank shortly after leaving
office, and then set about establishing another precedent for future
former chief executives: a book deal for his memoirs of his time in
office. Ulysses S. Grant had
overcome similar financial issues with his own memoirs, but the book
had been published posthumously, and he had declined to write about
life in the White House in any detail. For the memoirs Truman received
only a flat payment of $670,000, and had to pay two-thirds of that in
tax; he calculated he got $37,000 after he paid his assistants. Truman's memoirs were a commercial and critical success; they were published in two volumes in 1955 and 1956 by Doubleday (Garden City, N.Y) and Hodder & Stoughton (London): Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Year of Decisions and Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Years of Trial and Hope. Truman was quoted in 1957 as saying to then-House Majority Leader John McCormack,
"Had it not been for the fact that I was able to sell some property
that my brother, sister, and I inherited from our mother, I would
practically be on relief, but with the sale of that property I am not
financially embarrassed." In
1958, Congress passed the Former Presidents Act, offering a $25,000
yearly pension to each former president, and it is likely that Truman's
financial status played a role in the law's enactment. The one other
living former president at the time, Herbert Hoover, also took the pension, even though he did not need the money; reportedly, he did so to avoid embarrassing Truman. Hoover may have been remembering an old favor: Shortly after becoming
President, Truman had invited Hoover to the White House for an informal
chat about conditions in Europe. This was Hoover's first visit to the
White House since leaving office, as the Roosevelt administration had
shunned Hoover. The two remained good friends for the remainder of
their lives. In
1956, Truman took a trip to Europe with his wife, and was a sensation.
In Britain he received an honorary degree in Civic Law from Oxford University, an event that moved him to tears. He met with his friend Winston Churchill for
the last time, and on returning to the U.S., he gave his full support
to Adlai Stevenson's second bid for the White House, although he had
initially favored Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York for the nomination. Upon
turning 80, Truman was feted in Washington and asked to address the
United States Senate, as part of a new rule that allowed former
presidents to be granted privilege of the floor. Truman was so emotionally overcome by the honor and by his reception that he was barely able to deliver his speech. He
also campaigned for senatorial candidates. A bad fall in the bathroom
of his home in late 1964 severely limited his physical capabilities,
and he was unable to maintain his daily presence at his presidential
library. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill at the Truman Library and gave the first two Medicare cards to Truman and his wife Bess to honor his fight for government health care as president. On December 5, 1972, he was admitted to Kansas City's Research Hospital and Medical Center with lung congestion from pneumonia. He subsequently developed multiple organ failure and died at 7:50 a.m.
on December 26 at the age of 88. Bess Truman died nearly ten years
later, on October 18, 1982. He and Bess are buried at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri.
Bess Truman opted for a simple private service at the library for her
husband because of her advanced age and frail health, though a state
funeral in Washington had been planned. Foreign dignitaries, instead,
attended a memorial service at Washington National Cathedral a week later.
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