Harry S Truman

• Vice President to:       Franklin D. Roosevelt
  
  
• Dates Served: Truman served as Vice President from January - April, 1945, then as President till 1952.
  
• Political Party: Harry was a Democrat, from Missouri.
  
• Born: 1884.
  
• Died: 1972, at the age of 88.
  
• The presidential opponent during the 1944 campaign was:
  
  
  • Thomas Dewey - Republican - New York Governor
    
    
• Campaign issues in 1944:
  
  
  • America was at war and therefore war was the main issue this year. Roosevelt was now running for a 4th term as President and his campaign slogan was the usual war-time slogan, "Don't swap horses in mid-stream". Dewey tried to gain support for his campaign by attacking the New Deal as wasteful and incompetent. He also argued that Roosevelt was too sick to keep leading the nation, which ended up being true. But FDR was unbeatable, having attained near god-like status for many voters. Dewey ended up making FDR's dog a target in the campaign, which just ended up being comical. FDR won, naturally. He would be dead within 5 months.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Harry Truman:
  
  
  • Harry Truman was a great-great-great nephew of President John Tyler.
    
    
  • Harry S Truman's middle initial doesn't stand for anything. He often said that he thought it might refer to one of his grandfathers, Anderson Shippe Truman or Solomon Young, but he was never sure. His parents never told him.
    
    Also, he never, ever wrote a period after the "S". It was always written by itself, a lonely letter between 2 names.
    
    
  • Religious affiliation: Harry was a member of the Baptist church. He claimed to read the Bible daily and once said, "I'm a Baptist, if that means anything. Frankly, all the religion I have is found in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount." After winning his campaign for President in 1952, he declared July 4th, 1952 the first official, annual Day of Prayer.
    
    
  • In 1906, when he was 21 years old, he was room-mates for a while with Arthur Eisenhower, the brother of future-President Dwight Eisenhower.
    
    
  • Truman originally operated a men's clothing store in Kansas City, which he opened in 1918. It prospered for several years, but eventually went bankrupt in 1922.
    
    
  • Truman began his political career by being elected Judge of Jackson County, Missouri in 1922, serving for 2 years till 1924. He ran for re-election but lost, and spent the next 2 years as a salesman, selling memberships in the Kansas City Auto Club. He ran for Presiding Judge of Jackson County in 1926 and won, a post he occupied for 8 years, until 1934.
    
    Truman didn't possess a law degree, nor any University degree, but he managed to get into good favors with the local Party boss Thomas Pendergast, who ran local politics according to well established, corrupt "back-room" practices. With Pendergast's backing Truman won both elections. During his terms Truman gained a reputation as a conscientious administrator who cut waste and enforced responsible policy.
    
    
  • In 1933 Truman worked on President Roosevelt's Federal Emergency Relief Administration as re-employment director for Missouri.
    
    
  • In 1935 Truman was elected to the US Senate, representing Missouri from 1935 - 1945. Upon his election he was hampered by his association with Pendergast, who was well known as a standard-bearer of corrupt politics. Truman was a loyal supporter of President Roosevelt's New Deal programs, even standing by the President's unpopular "Supreme Court Packing" proposal. Truman redeemed his political reputation when Pendergast was eventually tried and convicted of corruption back home, and Truman built on his reputation he had fostered as a judge, that of an efficient administrator with a talent for rooting out waste, particularly in military spending practices.
    
    
  • When Roosevelt decided to run for a 4th term as President in 1944, Democratic leaders leaned hard on him to dump his Vice President, the uncomfortably Leftist Henry Wallace. Roosevelt gave in and, after drawing up a short-list of names to replace Wallace with, he eventually decided on Truman.
    
    
  • Truman initially rejected the idea, not wanting to be demoted to Vice President. But when Roosevelt was told of his reluctance he replied, "Tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of a war, that's his responsibility". Truman had a change of heart and accepted the offer. Truman's daughter claimed that her father's reluctance stemmed from the fact that he didn't look forward to the mud-slinging that came with a political campaign, and he didn't want the opposition digging into his past and discovering that his wife's father had committed suicide back in 1903.
    
    
  • Truman had this to say about the merits of the office of Vice President, "Look at all the Vice Presidents in history. Where are they? They were about as useful as a cow's fifth teat."
    
    
  • When Truman took over after Roosevelt's death he was initially viewed by many as an amateur at a time when the country needed a professional. Winston Churchill once told him, "I must confess, sir, I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt. I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western Civilization".
    
    
  • When Truman campaigned for President in 1948, the Republican campaign slogan was "To err is Truman".
    
    
  • Truman's mother sympathized with the South and, therefore, refused to sleep in Lincoln's bed while visiting the White House.
    
    
  • Truman spent 20 years in retirement at his home in Missouri, occasionally campaigning for Democratic candidates for President, such as Adlai Stevenson and later John F. Kennedy. He died in 1972 of complications from gastro-intestinal ailments.
    
    
  • Truman was the first ex-President to receive a Medicare card. In fact he and his wife received the very first ones, cards #1 and #2.
    
    
  • While Truman supported Civil Rights, he wasn't friendly to the protesters and marchers of the 1960's. In 1963 he once said, "These young rioters were not spanked enough as they grew up. The police should be furnished with nice old-fashioned butter paddles and be authorized to use them in the place intended."
    

Notable Events during his Vice Presidency:

• The Conference at Yalta, in 1945. In February, President Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta to discuss what to do after the war, which was soon to end with Germany's surrender. In exchange for the Soviets promising to enter the war against Japan, who were refusing to surrender, Roosevelt and Churchill allowed the Soviets to move their troops around Eastern Europe into what would eventually become the "Iron Curtain".
  
  
• 2 months later Roosevelt keeled over dead from a cerebral hemmorrhage, just as the war in Europe was entering its final stages. Vice President Truman had basically been totally ignored by Roosevelt and he was totally ignorant of many of the inner-workings of the war summits, including the secret development of the Atomic Bomb that Roosevelt had approved. When Truman suddenly moved to the big chair he had a lot ot catch up on.
  
  
• Ironically, both FDR and Lincoln lived 5 months between their last election victories and their deaths.
  
  

Notable events during his completion of Roosevelt's Presidential term:

• Potsdam Conference, in July 1945. The Nazis had surrendered in May, and one month later President Truman met with Winston Churchill and Stalin to discuss how to deal with Germany in the war's aftermath. They jointly reiterated their insistence on Japan's immediate surrender, which Japan ignored.
  
  
• The Atomic Bomb. It was during the Potsdam Conference that Truman first learned of the development of the Atomic Bomb. He was originally very afraid of it, fearing that it's use would lead to the destruction of most of the planet. But after studying it, he decided to authorize its use, with the justification that it would alleviate the need for a ground-invasion of Japan that he believed would mean massive Allied casualties. The first bomb was dropped over Japan on August 6, killing some 250,000 people and obliterating the entire city of Hiroshima. Japan was ordered to surrender but they refused, so another bomb was dropped 3 days later, on August 9, killing thousands more and obliterating the entire city of Nagasaki. Japan surrendered the next day, officially ending World War II.
  
  
• Split of Germany into 2 countries. In the weeks prior to the Nazi surrender, Allied troops had been racing towards Berlin from the west and east. Soviet troops got there first and when the surrender came the borders between the 2 ally's troops remained in flux, with the Soviet troops erecting barriers to other Allied troops. This border led to the creation of 2 Germanys: Communist East Germany manipulated by the USSR, and West Germany run by a Democratically elected government.
  
  
• The Nuremberg Trials, 1945 - 1946. As the war in Europe came to an end, 22 of Hitler's top officials were arrested and brought to an international war-crimes tribunal in the city of Nuremberg, Germany. Presided over by 8 judges from the US, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, 19 Nazi leaders were found guilty of crimes against humanity, with 12 sentenced to be hung, 3 to life in prison, and 4 others to prison terms up to 20 years. Several other top Nazi leaders fled the country prior to the trial, ending up in various South America countries, only to be hunted down and brought to justice over the next 50 years.
  
  
• Creation of the United Nations, in 1945. Reversing the isolationist policies that the US had practiced between the 2 World Wars, the Allies established the United Nations, meeting first in San Francisco in 1946, then in London, with the present headquarters in New York being donated by John D. Rockefeller on Dec. 11, 1946.
  
  
• The first computer bug occurs on August. 9, 1945, when a moth flies into a mechanical relay switch in the "Mark I" computer at Harvard. Computers and bugs have been inseperable ever since.
  
  
• The Truman Doctrine. Watching as the Soviet armies installed puppet Communist governments in one Eastern European country after another, Truman dictated America's post-war foreign policy in March of 1947 that stated, "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures". As a result, Truman won Congressional approval for sending military aid to Greece and Turkey to avoid losing them to the wrong side of the quickly falling Iron Curtain. From 1948 - 1949 the US and Britain conducted the Berlin airlift, supplying West Berlin with supplies in an effort to hold off the blockade that the Soviet Union had placed around it in it's occupation of East Germany. It succeeded in keeping West Berlin under Allied control, and the Soviets responded by sealing off the entire western part of the city within barbed wire and soldiers, eventually to be built up into an imposing stone wall.
  
  
• The creation of NATO, in 1949. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in the war's aftermath, being a permanent military alliance between member countries of the wartime Allies. It's initial aim was to enforce what Truman called the "policy of containment", in which Western armies were used to contain the spread of Communism but not invade those countries already under its control. Therefore, Eastern Europe had to wait for the 45 years to free themselves.
  
  
• Chinese Communist Revolution. In China there was a civil war being fought between Communist rebels led by Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek for control of the country. In 1949 Mao's forces succeeded in driving the Nationalist armies out of the country and on to the island of Formosa, renamed Taiwan. Since then there have been 2 Chinas: Taiwan which calls itself the Republic of China, and mainland China which calls itself the People's Republic of China. Although, mainland China considers Taiwan to be a district of their country and doesn't recognize its independence.
  
  
• The Marshall Plan. Truman's Secretary of State George Marshall devised a plan where the US would invest around $13 billion dollars in rebuilding Europe's destroyed infrastructure and rebuild its economy. For this successful effort Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
  
  
• Creation of the modern state of Israel, in 1948. After the end of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France had been governing the Middle East, carving out new independent nations such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Palestine was a constant problem with competing claims to the area by indigenous Palestinians and Jewish people who had been settling in the area since the 1800's. In 1948 the British ended their "mandate" and left the area, a Jewish government declared the creation of a new Jewish state, which resulted in Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies immediately attacking the new state. Israel fended them all off, and the US promptly recognized the new nation.