Truman, Harry S.

Truman, Harry S. (1884–1972)33rd president of the United States (1949–1953), born in Lamar, Missouri, and raised in Independence, Missouri. Truman finished out the remainder of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term as president of the United States (1945–1948), then ran for president himself. Truman spent ten years (1906–1916) trying his hand at farming and investing, disliking the former and failing at the latter, he rejoined the National Guard in 1917. After the United States entered World War I, he served as captain of 129th Field Artillery Regiment during World War I at St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne offensive, and Metz. He returned home to marry Bess Wallace (1919) and open a haberdashery shop in downtown Kansas City with an Army buddy. That, too, failed, and Truman, heavily in debt, decided to use his Democratic machine connections and good reputation to enter the political arena in 1922. His early political career was unsteady at best, but he had the support of the Kansas City Democratic machine run by Boss Tom Pendergast, and was eventually elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934. He served there for ten years, immersing himself in transportation issues, helping to create the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, and foreign policy, becoming a strong advocate for global involvement and the United Nations. His popularity among liberal conservative Democrats made him the compromise choice as Roosevelt's vice presidential candidate in the 1944 presidential campaign. When Roosevelt suddenly died after less than four months in office, Truman became president. As president, Truman would face the difficulties of war and the uneasy peace that followed. After Germany's surrender in May 1945, he ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August. After his attempts to appease Josef Stalin failed, he announced the Truman Doctrine of containment against Soviet expansion in 1947, and quickly followed that in 1948 with the Marshall Plan, a comprehensive plan for rebuilding Europe. Invited to participate in the Plan, Stalin refused, and the next step in containment, the North Atlantic Treaty was overwhelmingly ratified by the U.S. Senate, and NATO was established in 1949. The intensification of the Cold War with the Soviets, and their alliance with the victorious Chinese Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong, had focused the attention of the U.S. on Communist gains around the world. Amid the rising tide of anticommunist sentiment, U.S. intelligence analysts announced that the USSR had detonated its first atomic bomb. In 1950, Truman reluctantly approved the development of of a thermonuclear “superbomb” (Edward Teller's hydrogen bomb), as well as obtaining the support of the United Nations to defend South Korea against the invading North Korean Communists. In spite of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's surprise victory over the North Koreans at Inchon, the war continued to drag on, and MacArthur pushed to extend the war into China, using atomic bombs, if necessary. When he learned that MacArthur had told Republican leaders how he thought the war in Korea should be carried out, using a method that neither the United Nations nor our European allies would countenance, Truman relieved him of duty in 1951. At the same time that Truman was ordering U.S. occupation troops from Japan into Korea, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested; earlier in 1950, Alger Hiss, a former assistant secretary of state, had been convicted of perjury for denying under oath that he had given classified information to the USSR. In March 1952, Truman announced that he would not seek reelection, and, although he campaigned strenuously on behalf of the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate, won in a landslide. Truman retired to Independence, Missouri in 1953 to write his memoirs.