“Four words raced through Truman’s mind: the lightning has struck! ‘I was fighting off tears,’ he later recalled. ‘It was the only time in my life I think that I ever felt like I’d had a real shock. I had hurried to the White House to see the president and when I arrived, I found I was the president. No one in the history of our country ever had it happen to him just that way.’”

Truman was certainly not the first person to assume the presidency upon the unexpected death of his predecessor, but Truman’s journey to the highest office in the land did seem particularly unlikely. An unlikely senator and an even unlikelier vice president, Truman barely had time to settle into his new job when the office was thrust upon him at a critical moment in World War II and US history.

“‘Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president of the United States…’ As Truman uttered these words, the others looked on. ‘In that moment of actual succession, he seemed almost sacrilegiously small,’ press secretary Daniels said of Truman. A photographer captured the scene, but when it was over the chief justice told Truman that he had failed to raise his right hand while he held the Bible. And so the oath was repeated. Truman uttered the final words ‘firmly and clearly,’ as one in the room remembered.”

Baime often describes Truman as seemingly out of step with the magnitude of the moment, awkward and fumbling as history happens around him. Observers often tended to see this as Truman’s lack of ability, but Baime sees Truman as someone with deep reserves of character and little regard for pageantry. Incidents like this one foreshadow Truman’s eventual triumph as he rises to meet the moment.

“There was a matter of terrific importance discuss, [War Secretary] Stimson told Truman, a matter of grave secrecy. ‘He wanted me to know about an immense project that was under way,’ Truman later recalled, ‘a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.’ Truman had heard whispers of some strange military program that was costing taxpayers millions. But he had no knowledge of the details.”

The atomic bomb looms large over the text, serving as the ultimate example of the incredible transformations happening as the relatively inexperienced Truman assumed the presidency. Among the many challenges facing Truman, none was more serious than a world-altering development whose details were still being kept from him. Truman’s presidency will be defined by the challenge of Finding Clarity in a Time of Change.

“Senators and statesmen sat with strong drinks distilling the world’s anxiety into the ink in their diaries. ‘The gravest question-mark in every American heart is about Truman,’ Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote that night. ‘Can he swing the job?’”

Truman overcame his obscure background and controversial connection with Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast to win the respect of his senate colleagues as an amiable and hard-working legislator. Even so, he had become vice president practically by default, as all the leading contenders had some sort of political baggage, and FDR famously kept Truman out of the loop of crucial wartime decisions. There was therefore understandable scrutiny as to whether Truman was ready for the extraordinary moment he now faced.

“Since childhood at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living as its own reward. I find a very small minority who agree with me on that premise.”

Baime consistently portrays Truman as a fundamentally decent, salt-of-the-earth person with a profound sense of history and morality. He believes that his education and character in some respects made him even more ready for the remarkable moment in which he found himself than those with more conventional backgrounds and experiences.

“Ignored by many, he got one good piece of advice from J. Hamilton Lewis, Democrat of Illinois. ‘Don’t’ start out with an inferiority complex,’ Lewis said. ‘For the first six months you’ll wonder how you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the rest of us got here.’”

Truman was overwhelmed upon his first contact with Washington. It was a long way from the small-time politicking he was used to, and it was immediately apparent that he was the least wealthy of the then-98-member body. Lewis uses a term borrowed from the psychotherapy jargon of the era—“inferiority complex,” a term coined by the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler—to describe what in today’s psychotherapy jargon might be termed “imposter syndrome.” His advice speaks to the need to look beyond appearances, to realize that the majesty of the office will always be ill-suited to flawed human beings, and that the best thing to do is learn how to do the job well.

“Truman could recall as a young man of nineteen reading about the Wright Brothers’ first controlled flights. Now the U.S. Army Air Forces were flying thousands of 56,000 pound B-24 bombers, equipped with radar and gyrocompasses that enabled the dropping of bombs on precision targets.”

Another frequent point of emphasis in the text is the degree of change that Truman witnessed in his life. Growing up in rural Missouri, where most travel was still done on horseback, he assumed the presidency at the climax of a war that had revolutionized industry and unleashed heretofore unthinkable destructive capabilities. The juxtaposition between the Wright Brothers’ rudimentary aircraft and the technologically sophisticated B-24 bombers emphasizes the theme of Finding Clarity in a Time of Change.

“With the help of a police escort on each arm, he moved through the crowd. He stood before a phalanx of microphones and made the shortest acceptance speech any politician in the hall had ever heard. It lasted roughly one minute. Through history’s looking glass, however, his words were uncannily prescient. He would dedicate his work to ‘help shorten the war and win the peace,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what else I can say,’ Truman finished, ‘except that I accept this great honor with all humility. Thank you.’”

Once again, a foundational moment in Truman’s political career finds him utterly unprepared for the political if not the substantive requirements of the moment. Ordering a hot dog and soda when officially nominated for the vice presidency, he seemed utterly overwhelmed and barely produced what could be called an acceptance speech. Baime includes this anecdote to signal Truman’s humility and straightforwardness.

“The candidate’s appeal was his everyman persona. He was your neighbor, or the guy standing on line at the pharmacy, who just happened to be running for VP. Truman was ‘one of the most amazing stories in American democracy,’ wrote one Boston Globe reporter. ‘It is the story of an average man, swept to dizzy heights against his will, a little bewildered by it all and doubting whether it is really true.’”

While Truman was an unconventional figure for the heights of American politics, some of those qualities ironically played to his favor. While the Washington elite kept him at arm’s length, ordinary citizens tended to see him as one of their own, whose success proved that American politics was accessible to someone without money or a college education.

“According to Truman’s account of this conversation, Molotov then said: ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life.’ ‘Carry out your agreements,’ Truman fired back, ‘and you won’t get talked to like that.’”

Truman assumed office at a critical moment for US foreign policy, as the alliance with the Soviet Union, so crucial to winning World War II, was beginning to crumble. Baime uses this incident to portray Truman as an unusually plainspoken politician, one whose straightforwardness makes him effective.

“Invoking the ‘great humanitarian’ Roosevelt, Truman told the gathering in the Opera House: ‘You members of this Conference are to be the architects of the better world. In your hands rests our future…The world has experienced a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice,’ Truman said. ‘At no time in history has there been a more important Conference, nor a more necessary meeting, than this one in San Francisco, which you are opening today.’”

The conference to ratify the UN Charter came at a precarious time, not only due to the inexperience of the host nation’s leader, but because the increasingly hostile tone of US-Soviet politics belied the ostensibly cooperative purpose of the meeting. Truman could certainly hope that agreeing over the UN would help to institutionalize a more productive relationship between the two postwar superpowers, but unlike his predecessor, he did not trust in those institutions to challenge the fundamentals of either state’s behavior.

“At one dinner in the White House, Truman told a group of cabinet officers that he should never have been president but rather a piano player in a whorehouse. ‘That would have been too bad,’ responded [his secretary of labor], ‘because then we never would have known you.’ ‘Why be so high and mighty,’ Truman came back, ‘as though you had never been in a whorehouse!’”

Truman was very sociable, and Baime suggests that this social ease reflects a lack of pretension—he always regarded himself as an ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary situation. His sense of humor, for which he became famous, was much more ribald than what the stuffy Washington scene was used to, and while this may have ruffled feathers at times, it also proved advantageous in throwing people off balance.

“The idea of Germany running jointly with the Russians is a chimera. The idea of both the Russians and ourselves withdrawing politely at a given date and a healthy, peaceful, stable, and friendly Germany rising out of the resulting vacuum is also a chimera.”

This is an excerpt from a note by George Kennan, who would go on to become one of the most respected experts on the Soviet Union in the state department. Here, he lays out the dilemma whereby there is little hope of a successful joint occupation of Germany, but to attempt to leave it and make it a neutral country would be a disaster of a different sort. The only logical conclusion is what would eventually happen—a division of the country between the Soviets and the western allies.

“The mood of the United States is one of extraordinary friendliness. Americans appear to be more at ease with each other. They are more inclined to talk about national affairs, less inclined to argue. In short there is a cordiality in the air that this country hasn’t known in years.”

Citing a news report, Baime suggests a correlation between the happy mood of the country and Truman’s presidency. While the looming victory in the war and the immense surge of the economy after more than a decade of the Great Depression surely play a role, Baime suggests that Truman’s understated leadership is responsible for this shift in mood.

“[J. Robert Oppenheimer] argued that the United States should approach the Soviets now, in hopes of a postwar cooperation in this field. If the Americans sprang the bomb on the world as a surprise, the Soviets were certain to react with exponentially greater distrust and aggression.”

This is one of the few examples of protest, or even hesitation, regarding the use of the atomic bomb, a doubt conveyed by the person most responsible for bringing the project into being. Truman of course rejects this advice, and Baime ultimately praises him for doing so, but it does signify the presence of a dissenting opinion about the long-term consequences of a nuclear world. That Oppenheimer’s partial dissent was enough to effectively end his career is indicative of the repressive climate in which discussions about the bomb took place.

“The secretary of war asked Oppenheimer to create his own committee at Los Alamos, so that the scientists themselves could make recommendations on what should be done with their work. […] However, it appeared to the scientists that the decision to use the bomb had already been made. As Compton noted, it seemed from these committee discussions like a ‘foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used.’”

In light of Oppenheimer’s later skepticism, this passage suggests that the scientists at Los Alamos did not think their consultation really carried much weight: Their role was a purely technical one, and the political aspects were out of their hands.

“‘The Charter of the United Nations,’ he said, ‘which you have just signed, is a solid structure upon which we can build a better world. History will honor you for it. Between the victory in Europe and the final victory in Japan, in this most destructive of all wars, you have won a victory against war itself.’”

Commemorating the ratification of the UN Charter after a hard-fought negotiation, Truman is attempting to revive the Wilsonian ideal of an international system governed by law, therefore assuring the same degree of security one could expect within a well-governed society. On the cusp of the atomic bomb’s first test, Truman sincerely hoped that the sheer destructiveness of the weapon would help to make war an impossibility.

“But either way, Stimson argued, by issuing a public and official warning, the United States could convince Japan to capitulate. And if Japan did not (more likely the case), history would record the moral position of an attacking nation that had done its best to warn its victims of what was to come—annihilation of a city; perhaps more than one.”

Though the eventual use of the atomic bomb was treated as a virtual certainty from the beginning, the US did understand the moral implications of such a revolutionary act. The United States did end up offering such a warning, but in vague language that did not reveal just how much destruction the Japanese would face should they persist. Given the country’s status as the initial aggressor in its conflict with the US, Japan was widely seen as being justly punished for its intransigence.

“An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade. I was never in doubt, when visiting him, that I was in the presence of one of the world’s most remarkable men—a man great, if you will, primarily in his iniquity.”

This is another quote from George Kennan, who later in Truman’s administration would receive primary credit for authoring a policy of “containing” the Soviet Union—resisting their expansionist tendencies without going on the offensive. In this chilling description of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Kennan swerves between admiration and horror, recognizing that there is in fact something great about someone who can steer an entire nation to the first rank of global powers, while aghast at the extraordinary amounts of blood he spilled in doing so.

“There can be no exact date when the Cold War started. However, as historian Charles L. Mee Jr. has pointed out, the nuclear arms race is a different story. ‘The twentieth century’s nuclear arms race began at the Cecilienhof Palace at 7:30 p.m. on July 24, 1945.’”

By the time Truman announced the existence of the atomic bomb to Stalin, the US and USSR were already locking horns, and Truman hoped that the news would rattle the usually unflappable dictator. Instead, when Stalin received the news without apparent reaction, only to later tell Molotov to accelerate the already ongoing Soviet program, the specifically nuclear dimension of the Cold War had formally begun.

“The president knew at this point that the Russians and the Americans had probably come together as far as they could. And the absence of Winston Churchill had deflated the mood in the negotiating chamber. All that was left was to fight out the final issues and sail for home.”

Baime does not conceal the fact that Potsdam was a disappointing conference, even if he finds the cause to be Soviet intransigence rather than any fault on Truman or Byrnes’s part. Churchill may not have been able to do much better had he remained throughout, but in his absence, the two rookie leaders (Atlee and Truman) were not going to steer the wily Stalin from his predetermined course, although they did reinforce the alliance that would help to resist Soviet expansion in the years to come.

“I am certain the entire crew felt this experience was more than any one human had ever thought possible…Just how many [people] did we kill?...If I live a hundred years I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.”

These are the words from the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Withstanding the blast of the explosion was a physically daunting experience, followed by a flash of light so far beyond what was previously thought possible, that the participants could not help but realize their direct role in a major historical turning point. The co-pilot uses a racial slur to refer to Japanese people, suggesting that even as he reckons with the moral weight of his actions, he participates in the dehumanization of Japanese people that has made these actions conceivable.

“In the eyes of the world, this was America’s finest hour. Never before had the United States achieved such prestige. What Truman did not know at this moment was this: never would the United States achieve such prestige again.”

Given the generally positive assessment of the period in question, the last line of the text prior to the Epilogue ends on a surprisingly dour note. The author does not elaborate on why or in what way the US would go into decline, or whether lessons from this period might help to arrest or reverse it, but it does suggest a view of 1945 as a lost golden age.