Useful Notes / Harry S. Truman

aka: Harry Truman

"I never give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them, and they think it's Hell."

"The Buck Stops Here."

—Plaque on Truman's desk^note The other side of the same plaque read "I'm from Missouri"

Harry S. Truman^note His middle name is actually just an "S"; it was tradition among Scots-Irish families to name boys after their grandfathers, and his parents wanted to please both of his grandfathers, "Solomon" and "Shippe," that way. As for the period, there is some controversy over whether one should be included or omitted after the "S", or if both forms are equally valid. Truman's own archived correspondence suggests that he regularly used the period when writing his name. (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States (serving from 1945 to 1953), following Franklin D. Roosevelt and preceding Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the eleventh from the Democratic Party. He was the seventh vice president to succeed to the presidency, taking over after FDR died three months into his fourth term. The Twenty-second Amendment, which limits U.S. presidents to a maximum of two complete terms, was ratified while he was in office, but it grandfathered him, making him the last president who could have served more than two terms.^note The actual amendment is a bit more nuanced than that: it prohibits any president from serving more than two full terms and more than half of another president's term, which meant that Lyndon Johnson could technically have run for a second full term in 1968 and would have been above board. He still decided not to run for a third term, both to honor George Washington's tradition and because of his massive unpopularity during his second term.^note As did LBJ, although LBJ's health issues were also a factor.

A native of Missouri (the only president born or living there, in fact), Truman was also the last American president who never went to college; he was a very good student in high school and had had his heart set on attending West Point, but his extremely poor eyesight kept him from getting an appointment. He enrolled in business school and law school later in life (you could do that without a college degree back then) but didn't have the heart for it (because it wasn't West Point) and dropped out fairly quickly. Despite his eyesight, he managed to serve in World War I by memorizing the eye chart, serving in the artillery in the Missouri National Guard. He reached the rank of captain by the time Imperial Germany surrendered; the battery under his command did not lose a single man thanks to the Allies' massive (more than 3:1 and increasing) superiority in artillery and doctrinal emphasis on counter-battery fire (i.e. anti-artillery artillery fire, something easier when you have more artillery to begin with). Nevertheless, this experience makes him the only president to have seen combat during World War I (his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was an active-duty career officer during that war but to his great chagrin was so good at tanks that he was assigned to a tanker-training command stateside and never served in Europe).

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 that failed, and did various odd jobs after that didn't work out, including trying to scratch a living off the family farm yet again. Finally, through his military connections, he managed to attract the eye of the Kansas City/Jackson County Democratic machine, led by a somewhat unpleasant political boss 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 The Great Depression.

He was elected senator from Missouri in 1934, against Pendergast's judgment (he backed Truman reluctantly). Although Truman was initially tarred in Washington as "the Senator from Pendergast" and certainly benefited from the Pendergast machine, historians are sure Truman was never himself corrupt. 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 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 Missouri Compromise."

Less than three months after assuming this new office, Truman suddenly found himself the sitting president after Roosevelt suddenly died of cerebral hemorrhage. Nazi Germany, already on the verge of defeat, surrendered weeks after he succeeded (on his 61st birthday, actually), but Imperial Japan 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, 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, 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 anything in combat that could kill at least as many of your own forces as it could of the enemy. 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.) At the Potsdam Conference, when discussing the terms of surrender, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo suggested Japan was to wait for the Soviets' 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". 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 Cold War.

On the domestic front, the economy entered a recession during his first term as the economy tried to adjust to large numbers of returning veterans. Additionally, labor unions that hushed up during the war years started to increase public activity and, in some cases, organize strikes. By the end of the decade, the economy settled down and prosperity and growth was widespread during most of The '50s and The '60s. He also, in a move that added some much-needed help to the growing Civil Rights Movement, desegregated the U.S. military in 1948 because of his disgust over the way African-American war veterans were treated; the fact that it also saved some tax dollars getting rid of that ridiculous redundancy helped sell it too.^note For example, the Pentagon to this day has a huge number of bathrooms, because being in Virginia it was built as a segregated facility. Truman was the first president to call for full rights for black Americans in earnest — he proposed civil rights legislation to Congress (they were defeated, sadly) and he was also the first to speak in front of the NAACP. During his second term, anti-Communist hysteria, led from the Senate by Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy, started to spread throughout the nation. Truman called his domestic policy, which included national health care and civil rights bills, the “Fair Deal,” though the conservative coalition in Congress (Republicans and right-leaning Democrats from the Deep South) prevented most of them from getting passed (including, ironically, a universal health care plan far more social than that Barack Obama pursued). Years later, Lyndon Johnson would pass many bills similar to what Truman proposed. In fact, Johnson signed the Medicare bill in Truman’s house and gave the first two Medicare cards to the former president and his wife, Bess.^note Truman had long been on the verge of needing Medicare; on account of his meager pre-politics savings (from all his failed business ventures) Truman was all but impoverished upon retiring from the presidency. His only source of income was his army pension, which wasn't very much (just over $100 annually—less than $900 in 2015 dollars). He pulled back up by taking out a loan to write his memoirs, which turned out to be quite successful, but the public was sufficiently appalled by the fact that a past president would have to do that just to live (after bad investments had depleted the savings of Ulysses S. Grant, he had his memoirs detailing his military career published to provide a suitable income for his wife Julia after his death) that it gave the impetus for the first-ever presidential pensions.

Truman is most famous, however, for his foreign policy achievements. He passed the Marshall Plan, General and Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s plan to rebuild the nations of western Europe (and prevent the spread of Communism there) by pouring billions of dollars of aid money into their ruined economies. Truman recognized Israel (eleven minutes after it declared independence, actually) began America’s policy of providing support to that nation. He also did the same for Taiwan after mainland China became communist. The Cold War kicked off almost immediately after the war in Europe ended, and Truman supported a policy of the “containment” of communism throughout the world, known as the "Truman Doctrine." This included the founding of several international alliances (most importantly, NATO), organizing the airlift of food and other supplies to West Berlin during the Soviet blockade, and sending American aid to nations that were fighting communism, such as Greece and Turkey. Most famously, he sent American troops as part of a UN-joint military mission into Korea when the communist North invaded the capitalist South. Led by General Douglas MacArthur (who led American troops on the Pacific front during World War II), the UN forces pushed the North Koreans out of the South and then invaded North Korea in an attempt to free all of the Korean peninsula from communism. MacArthur, however, ignored Red China’s warning not to approach the border, and Chinese forces got involved and pushed the UN forces back to the 38th parallel. MacArthur proposed that America directly attack China with thermonuclear weapons, which Truman rejected. Afterwards, MacArthur tried to obtain permission from the Joint Chief of Staff to use nuclear weapons without the president's permission to continue the assault on China, which (along with MacArthur's rather public criticism of Truman's policies, bordering on outright insubordination) prompted an angered Truman to fire him. The war in Korea remained a stalemate until his successor Dwight D. Eisenhower negotiated an end to the conflict. The CIA was also formed during his presidency.

Despite the conga line of domestic and foreign crises during his first term, Truman still ran for reelection in 1948. Almost all the newspapers expected New York Governor Thomas Dewey would be elected to succeed him, and several of them already had "Truman lost" stories ready. The Chicago Tribune, however, made the mistake of actually printing the story (it didn't help that for the duration of a printers' strike, the Tribune had to make do with a printing method that required it to publish hours in advance), resulting in the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" photo. If you look at the example picture on that page, you can see how happy he is. This unexpected victory was definitely impressive, especially when one considers that he had to contend with two third-party splinter candidacies during his campaign from within the Democratic Party: one from Henry A. Wallace (a leftist who opposed Truman's anti-Communism^note To boot, he had been vice president immediately before Truman too.) and another from Strom Thurmond^note At the time, Thurmond was the Governor of South Carolina who ran for President as a State's Rights Democrat, a Southern regional offshoot of the main Democratic party known as "Dixiecrats", who compared to mainline Democrats were a bit more conservative and a lot more racist. He would later be elected Senator, where his claim to fame would be holding the longest-ever one-man filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which failed. After switching parties to Republican, he would continue to be elected Senator for another 45 years until his death in 2003 at the astonishing age of 100. (a Southern segregationist who opposed Truman's support for civil rights). His second term, however, was a slew of unpopular decisions and a slide in the polls. Truman became seriously unpopular when the Korean War turned into a stalemate and he sacked MacArthur; he ended up going as low as 22% in approval ratings, the lowest of all time in the Gallup poll. (Though George W. Bush’s disapproval rating would surpass Truman's 67% height.) He decided that he couldn't stand the heat any longer and got out of the kitchen (an expression popularized by Truman, though he spread it around by way of quoting a friend), announcing he would not run again in 1952 after he lost the New Hampshire primary. The eventual Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson II, would lose to the popular Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, due largely to how unpopular Truman was at the time.^note For that matter, Stevenson ran against Eisenhower again in 1956 and lost by a slightly larger margin than he had done in 1952.

Since his death, however, Truman has enjoyed a marked rise in popularity, and he is rated highly by many historians and the public. In particular, his decision to fire MacArthur, while deeply unpopular at the time, is now commonly viewed as a smart move that prevented the Korean War from escalating into World War III (though there are plenty who still say that focus on simply holding the North, instead of defeating it, is the real reason the war was ultimately a stalemate). He has a carrier named after him; a bit ironic, since Truman actually tried to limit the expansion of the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier program during his tenure^{history lesson} A bit more than that. Post-WWII, Truman saw no need for a worldwide military and proposed slicing the military budget by nearly 90%, an attempt to return to the antebellum U.S. policy of maintaining a token planning and training cadre in peacetime and surging with draftees in wartime, but with places that needed defending against the Soviet Union in Europe and occupying in Japan and others, there were too many obligations for such a huge drawback. He and some military advisors had the thought that nuclear weapons would fill the gap of traditional military force and so advocated for nearly the entire dismantling of the Navy and Marine Corps. Interservice fights for budget money, equipment, and literal survival were fierce, leading to Marine Corps General Alexander Vandegrift's famous "On Bended Knee" speech to Congress and newspaper articles published by several Navy Admirals imploring leaders not to "scuttle the Navy". Truman got his way and cut the military to the quick, just in time for the Korean War, where nuclear weapons weren't an option and not nearly enough forces from elsewhere could be scrounged up to do the least good. Truman has also become a kind of political trope in and of himself, as he is frequently cited by politicians down in the polls as a reason for supporters to keep the faith. As a general rule, when a politician starts citing Harry Truman, it's a bad sign for his electoral prospects.

Truman was known for his honesty and responsibility. Famously, the plaque on his desk stated "The Buck Stops Here," his promise to take full responsibility for all the actions of the executive branch. However, his loyalty to the political friends he appointed sometimes came back to haunt him; some of them were pretty corrupt and caused a few scandals, though Truman himself was never involved. He was also famous for being very plainspoken and "telling it how it is." While he was still President, Truman wrote a very scathing letter to a critic who wrote a negative review of his daughter's concert. Most famously, when he read MacArthur's speech to Congress after he got sacked, Truman turned to the Army Secretary and said "Nothing but a bunch of damn bullshit." When asked after his presidency about why he fired MacArthur, he made this scathing comment: "I didn't fire him because he was a stupid son-of-a-bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be behind bars. I fired him because he wouldn't accept the authority of the President."

He was also an intense nerd of the bookish variety with an excellent memory; while Senator, he once made a speech with a very obscure reference to Alexander the Great; the source was finally traced to a book in the Library of Congress that had not been borrowed for several years. The last borrower, naturally, was Harry.

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 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, the 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 Puerto Rican 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. 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.

---

Truman in fiction:

• The one-man play and film Give 'Em Hell, Harry! (his campaign slogan in 1948) feature James Whitmore as Truman. A performance of this was filmed in 1976 and Whitmore received an Oscar nomination. This is one of only three times that every credited cast member received a nomination, the others being Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Sleuth.
  • Interestingly, in October of 2017 the role was reprised in Thalian Center for the Performing Arts in North Carolina by Clifton Truman Daniel, Truman's oldest grandson. This marked the first time in history a president was portrayed by a direct descendant.
• Truman, a 1995 HBO feature starring Gary Sinise in the title role.
• Makes a brief and symbolic appearance getting the first Medicare card in HBO's Path to War, where Lyndon Johnson is portrayed as his spiritual successor.
• In Watchmen, Rorschach frequently expresses admiration for 'decent men' like Truman and his father. It's shown in several in-story documents that he wrote an essay in his youth expressing how good it was that he dropped the bomb, because he saved many more lives by ending World War II. This is particularly ironic given that Rorschach claims to be a moral absolutist and attacks Veidt for killing millions in a fake 'alien' attack on New York to prevent World War III from breaking out.
• A Doctor Who Tie-In Novel.
• In M*A*S*H, it is often mentioned that Truman is President.
  • In one episode ("Dear Harry") Hawkeye actually writes a letter to Truman describing conditions in Korea and imploring him to end the war.
    • Interestingly, Truman was portrayed by Harry Morgan in the miniseries Backstairs At The White House, and Morgan played Colonel Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H.
• The Graveyard Book has a ghoul (that tries to abduct the main character) who is named after Truman, or rather, called "The 33rd President of the United States".
  • The book mentions that the ghouls are named after the main course of their first meal.
• Appears in the Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well", treated with all the respect you'd expect Futurama to show a POTUS:
  [Interrogating a captured Zoidberg] If you come in peace, surrender or be destroyed! If you come to make war, we surrender!
  • He is also, for some reason, depicted punching his way out of a crate of "eggs" being delivered to Roswell.
• Makes a minor appearance at the end of the Timeline-191 Alternate History series by Harry Turtledove as the Democratic nominee for vice-president in the post-war election of 1944 (Thomas Dewey is the top half of the ticket). When they pull off a surprise victory against the Socialist Party incumbent (Charles M. LaFollette), Truman is seen holding a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the headline LaFollette Beats Dewey.
  • President Truman also is a POV character in Turtledove's The Hot War trilogy where he starts World War III in 1951 after authorizing General Douglas MacArthur to use atomic bombs to counter a more effective Communist Chinese counterattack during the Korean War.
• In an Earthworm Jim episode, Peter Puppy found a framed letter from President Truman in a museum and read it. "Thank you for your kind offer to end World War II, but we have a bomb we wanna try out."
• In the That '70s Show episode "Prank Day", Red says to Eric that his punishment for putting a bucket of oatmeal over the door (intended for Kelso) will be "the kind of thing that Harry Truman might order to end the war!" Fez asks who Harry Truman is and Kelso responds that he "invented electricity".
• In Peanuts, Snoopy as the World War I Flying Ace claims to have met Truman when he was serving as a US Army captain in that conflict.
• Chicago wrote the song "Harry Truman" after Richard Nixon's resignation, praising Truman's emphasis on responsibility and straightforwardness. It was released as a single in 1975.
• He's given a major Historical Villain Upgrade in Oliver Stone's documentary The Untold History of the United States, with Henry A. Wallace cast as the Tragic Hero who could've prevented the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and made everything awesome. As The New York Times noted, if all you knew about Truman came from Untold History, "you might conclude he was a virulent racist, mentally unfit for office, and suffering from a gender confusion that resulted in mass murder [when he] dropped atomic bombs on Japan not to end the war but to flex his muscles and intimidate Stalin [who] comes off as an honest negotiator who, following F.D.R.'s death, was faced at every turn by Truman's diplomatic perfidy."
• In The Simpsons episode "The Trouble with Trillions", Truman authorized the one-time printing of a trillion-dollar bill to help Europe rebuild after World War II. Unfortunately, the person Truman chose to deliver the bill was Mr. Burns, who stole it for himself.
  British man: Well, this is a kick in the knickers.
  German man: Should we complain to somebody?
  French man: I say we just act snooty to Americans forever!
• In Jonathan Hickman's comic book The Manhattan Projects, Truman is the head of the Illuminati, the secret rulers of the world, prior to becoming Vice President.
• Truman appears in a flashback scene in the DC Comics one-shot Last Days of the Justice Society when Adolf Hitler uses the Spear of Destiny to bring about the end of the world in 1945.
• Ultimate Marvel: In Ultimate Origins Truman is mentioned in a newsreel seen by Steve Rogers in the local cinema, while he was still trying to be recruited.
• Gary Oldman portrays him for his very short but very impactful appearance in Oppenheimer. He's characteristically blunt and ungracious to the guilt-wracked scientist, sarcastically offering Oppenheimer his handkerchief when he confesses about feeling as though he has blood on his hands, but he levelly points out that even the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't "give a shit who built the bomb", only who dropped it; Truman himself, which he maintains sole responsibility for, 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.

---