Truman, Harry S.

Truman, Harry S. (1884–1972), thirty‐third U.S. president.Born in Lamar, Missouri, a poor farmer's son, Harry Truman abandoned hope of a West Point education because of poor eyesight, but joined the National Guard in 1905. In World War I, 1917–18, Captain Harry Truman commanded Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, 35th Division, at the Battle of St. Mihiel, Varennes, the Meuse‐Argonne Offensive, and Metz. Back home as a protégé of the Democratic Pendergast machine of Kansas City, Truman won several local elections before his election as a U.S. senator in 1934. During World War II, in 1941–44, he chaired a special Senate committee investigating defense spending. He became President Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice presidential running mate in 1944, and succeeded to the presidency upon Roosevelt's death, 12 April 1945.

After the successful test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico in July 1945, Truman maintained the unconditional surrender demand toward Japan and took an increasingly hard line toward the Soviet Union. He approved the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the end of the war.

As president, 1945–53, Truman shaped U.S. foreign and defense policy in the early Cold War. His internationalism—more accurately, militant nationalism—depended heavily on military preparedness, a result of his belief in dealing from strength and his own combative personality. He relied upon particularly cosmopolitan, hard‐line advisers, especially Secretaries of State George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson and the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, W. Averell Harriman; but he prided himself on making the final decisions.

Responding to Josef Stalin's imposition of Soviet control in Eastern Europe and American fears of a global expansion of communism, the Truman administration sought to create a postwar order of democracy, self‐government, and expanding world trade. But the Truman Doctrine of “containment” announced originally in 1947 as political and economic soon because militarized, as did the Marshall Plan of 1948 and NATO, created in 1949. The administration began to support a variety of anti‐Communist efforts in Europe and Asia.

U.S.‐Soviet relations had became confrontational in 1946. By 1948, in a dispute over Germany, Stalin blockaded Berlin; Truman responded with the Berlin airlift. In 1949, after the Soviet A‐bomb test, Truman ordered U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb.

The Truman administration in the late 1940s had sought an expanded military within a restricted budget. It failed to achieve universal military training for the army and in 1948 accepted a selective draft. In 1949, when it canceled the navy's supercarrier, it faced a “Revolt of the Admirals.” Primary reliance was placed on atomic bomber aircraft of the U.S. Air Force, made independent by the National Security Act of 1947.

The Korean War changed the budget picture and led to the enormous expansion of all the armed services. It also led to desegregation of the armed services, ordered by Truman in 1948. Yet the frustrations of this limited war precipitated a major crisis in civil‐military relations: Gen. Douglas MacArthur's public challenge to the administration's restrictions against attacking China itself. Consequently, President Truman relieved him of command.

Although the Truman administration was highly unpopular when it left office in 1953, admiration for Truman rose in the 1970s over his plain and honest style, decisiveness, and many of his Cold War policies, which some in the 1990s credited with ultimately defeating the Soviet Union. Yet a number of scholars believe that Truman's get‐tough style and hard‐line policies interacting with Stalin's paranoia and ruthlessly blunt policies served to escalate rather than diminish the Cold War.
[See also Berlin Crises; Civil Military Relations: Civilian Control of the Military; Manhattan Project; World War I: Military and Diplomatic Course; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

Richard F. Haynes , The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief, 1973.
Melvyn Leffler , Preponderence of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, 1992.
David McCullough , Truman, 1992.
Alonzo L. Hamby , Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman, 1995.

Richard F. Haynes