History UsefulNotes / HarrySTruman

His experience in command served as the basis of a political career that would eventually lead him to the Senate in 1935. Between then, he owned a haberdashery (a men’s clothing store) with a friend named Eddie Jacobson and did various odd jobs after that didn't work out. Finally, through his military connections, he managed to attract the eye of the UsefulNotes/KansasCity/Jackson County Democratic machine, led by a somewhat unpleasant fellow named Tom Pendergast. Pendergast used his leverage to get Truman elected a county judge (which in Missouri actually means "county commissioner"--the position is legislative rather than judicial), which Truman himself leveraged into appointment as director of one of the state’s New Deal programs during TheGreatDepression.

He was elected senator from Missouri in 1934, against Pendergast's judgment (he backed Truman reluctantly).[[note]]Although Truman benefited from the Pendergast machine, historians are sure Truman was never himself corrupt.[[/note]] In 1941, he was appointed head of what was known as the Truman Committee, was a massively successful program that investigated and exposed government waste and private war-profiteering in the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII war effort]] and brought him to the national spotlight (although he was specifically ordered by Secretary of State Henry Stimson to ignore one particular wasteful moneypit known as the Manhattan Project that would come into play later in the war). The program was credited with saving the US billions of dollars and the lives of thousands of soldiers who would have otherwise been killed from defective equipment. As part of a coup inside the Democratic Party, he was chosen by party leaders as [=FDR=]'s running mate in the 1944 election to replace the highly popular New Dealer Henry A. Wallace due to Wallace's left-leaning views; the press nicknamed it the "second [[UsefulNotes/JamesMonroe Missouri Compromise]]."

Less than three months after assuming this new office, Truman suddenly found himself the sitting president after Roosevelt died. UsefulNotes/NaziGermany, already on the verge of defeat, surrendered weeks after he succeeded (on his 61st birthday, actually), but UsefulNotes/ImperialJapan proved more problematic. The atomic bombs, which were supposed to be used against the Germans, were fully developed just after Germany surrendered. Truman was never told about the Manhattan Project until he was President (hell, [[UsefulNotes/JosefStalin Stalin]] and his spies knew more about it than he did!), which is very controversial among historians. Truman vowed to continue Roosevelt's "unconditional surrender" policy, and turned down Japan's attempts at a conditional surrender. Despite General Marshall’s prediction that only thirty old thousand would die, civilian and American soldier alike, if a land invasion was attempted. Despite this, [[UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower one military advisor]] who '''did''' know about the secret superbomb, when asked by Truman about it, said, "Brilliant new invention; '''don't use it'''".[[note]]Eisenhower's reasoning was sound: As a seasoned general he was (on principle) opposed to using a prototype of '''any'''thing in combat that could kill at least as many of your own forces as it could of the enemy.[[/note]] Of the seven US five star flag officers who got their fifth star in WWII (Leahy, Marshall, King, Macarthur, Nimitz, Eisenhower and Arnold) six were opposed to the atomic bombing believing it to be militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible or both (George Marshall being the one who supported it), this opinion was so well known that Groves issued an order for all commanders to check with the War Department before making public statements, despite this General Curtis [=LeMay=][[note]](Who, ironically, would advocate using nuclear weapons on the [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar Vietcong]] when he was George Wallace's running-mate at the 1968 presidential election, single-handedly derailing Wallace's campaign, which previously was seen as having a good shot of beating Democratic candidate UsefulNotes/HubertHumphrey into second place behind the ultimately-victorious UsefulNotes/RichardNixon)[[/note]] later stated that “Even without the atomic bomb and the Russian entry into the war, Japan would have surrendered in two weeks.” “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war.” At the Potsdam Conference, when discussing the terms of surrender, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo suggested Japan was to wait for the UsefulNotes/{{Soviet|RussiaUkraineAndSoOn}}s' response before giving an official reply. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki stated that their policy would be one of ''mokusatsu'', which was translated as "rejection by ignoring"[[note]]the word has no direct equivalent in English -- a less provocative, and equally valid, translation would have been "withholding comment"[[/note]]. Against this backdrop, Truman decided to risk it and approved the atomic bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to unconditional surrender. While the merits (if any) of dropping the bombs have been debated for decades, what ''isn’t'' debated is that it led to the Soviet Union escalating their own nuclear research, which escalated the UsefulNotes/ColdWar.

* Creator/GaryOldman portrays him for his [[SmallRoleBigImpact very short but very impactful appearance]] in ''Film/{{Oppenheimer}}''. He's characteristically blunt and unkind to the guilt-wracked scientist, [[KickTheDog sarcastically offering Oppenheimer his handkerchief when he stutters about feeling as if he has blood on his hands]], but he accepts full responsibility for the bomb's use and the film strongly suggests that he has a point about Oppenheimer's fundamental hypocrisy, wanting all the fame and glory of being "the father of the atomic bomb" but also to portray himself as an aggrieved would-be peacemaker.

His wife Bess lived to be 97 years old, making her the longest-lived First Lady. While he was in office, the White House was found to be in such dire shape that it needed immediate emergency renovations (the flooring was so weak that a piano leg fell through an upper floor and into a room Truman was in at the time). The ''entire interior'' of the building was [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Reconstruction#/media/File:The_Shell_of_the_White_House_during_the_Renovation-05-17-1950.jpg gutted]] and rebuilt, with the rotting original wooden frame taken out and replaced with steel (what little good wood remained was sawn into paneling for the new ground floor) and Truman spent most of his second term in Blair House, official state guest house for foreign heads of state, right across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Old Executive Office Building and catercorner from the White House itself.[[note]]In one of the stranger incidents of American presidential history, Truman actually endured an assassination attempt while at Blair House, as at one point in 1950 UsefulNotes/{{Puerto Ric|o}}an independence activists armed with pistols tried to storm Blair House while Truman was there, but were stopped by the Secret Service and a White House Police officer; the latter was mortally wounded keeping the assassins away from the President. The kicker to all of this is that Truman was taking a nap when it started and slept through most of it, only awoken by the gunfire shortly before the second attacker was killed.[[/note]] The exterior of the White House was kept intact, though, because it was too iconic to lose. He also built a new second-floor balcony on the House's south side, which is still known as the Truman Balcony.

Less than three months after assuming this new office, Truman suddenly found himself the sitting president after Roosevelt died. UsefulNotes/NaziGermany, already on the verge of defeat, surrendered weeks after he succeeded (on his 61st birthday, actually), but UsefulNotes/ImperialJapan proved more problematic. The atomic bombs, which were supposed to be used against the Germans, were fully developed just after Germany surrendered. Truman was never told about the Manhattan Project until he was President (hell, [[UsefulNotes/JosefStalin Stalin]] and his spies knew more about it than he did!), which is very controversial among historians. Truman vowed to continue Roosevelt's "unconditional surrender" policy, and turned down Japan's attempts at a conditional surrender. Despite General Marshall’s prediction that only thirty old thousand would die, civilian and American soldier alike, if a land invasion was attempted. Despite this, [[UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower one military advisor]] who '''did''' know about the secret superbomb, when asked by Truman about it, said, "Brilliant new invention; '''don't use it'''".[[note]]Eisenhower's reasoning was sound: As a seasoned general he was (on principle) opposed to using a prototype of '''any'''thing in combat that could kill at least as many of your own forces as it could of the enemy.[[/note]] Of the seven US five star flag officers who got their fifth star in WWII (Leahy, Marshall, King, Macarthur, Nimitz, Eisenhower and Arnold) six were opposed to the atomic bombing believing it to be militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible or both, this opinion was so well known that Groves issued an order for all commanders to check with the War Department before making public statements, despite this General Curtis [=LeMay=][[note]](Who, ironically, would advocate using nuclear weapons on the [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar Vietcong]] when he was George Wallace's running-mate at the 1968 presidential election, single-handedly derailing Wallace's campaign, which previously was seen as having a good shot of beating Democratic candidate UsefulNotes/HubertHumphrey into second place behind the ultimately-victorious UsefulNotes/RichardNixon)[[/note]] later stated that “Even without the atomic bomb and the Russian entry into the war, Japan would have surrendered in two weeks.” “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war.” At the Potsdam Conference, when discussing the terms of surrender, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo suggested Japan was to wait for the UsefulNotes/{{Soviet|RussiaUkraineAndSoOn}}s' response before giving an official reply. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki stated that their policy would be one of ''mokusatsu'', which was translated as "rejection by ignoring"[[note]]the word has no direct equivalent in English -- a less provocative, and equally valid, translation would have been "withholding comment"[[/note]]. Against this backdrop, Truman decided to risk it and approved the atomic bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to unconditional surrender. While the merits (if any) of dropping the bombs have been debated for decades, what ''isn’t'' debated is that it led to the Soviet Union escalating their own nuclear research, which escalated the UsefulNotes/ColdWar.