Harry Truman

Truman was born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri, the oldest child of John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Young Truman.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, 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 were to have a profound influence on Truman's later 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.His battery also provided support for George S. Patton's tank brigade during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.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. 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. 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—including, notably, the top secret Manhattan Project, which was about to test the world's first atomic bomb. Shortly after taking the oath of office, Truman said to reporters: "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." A few days after his swearing in, he wrote to his wife, Bess: "It won't be long until I can sit back and study the whole picture and. . . there'll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County and not anymore worry."However, the simplicity he had predicted would prove elusive. 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 much more difficult for the Secret Service to protect than the wheel chair–bound Roosevelt had been. The Secret Service had been protecting Roosevelt for over 12 years. Because he was wheel chair–bound most of the time, if he needed to go anywhere, his Secret Service agents would push him at their own speed. Truman had no such restrictions and was an avid walker, regularly taking walks around Washington. 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 (CA-31) on his way back to the U.S. after the Potsdam Conference. The Japanese agreed to surrender on August 14. Supporters of Truman's decision to use the bomb argue that it saved hundreds of thousands of lives that would have been lost in an invasion of mainland Japan. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in support of this view in 1954, saying that Truman had "made the only decision he could," and that the bomb's use was necessary "to avoid tremendous sacrifice of American lives."Others, including historian Gar Alperovitz, have argued that the use of nuclear weapons was unnecessary and inherently immoral.Truman himself wrote later in life that, "I knew what I was doing when I stopped the war... I have no regrets and, under the same circumstances, I would do it again." 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.