62 pages • 2-hour read
The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “April 12, 1945”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
April 12, 1945, a day that would change the world immensely, began like any other. Vice President Harry Truman, a notoriously early riser, awoke at dawn in the modest Washington, DC, apartment that he shared with his wife Bess, daughter Margaret, and mother-in-law. After breakfast, he left to meet his Secret Service detail (he was the first vice president to have one), and went to his office at the Senate Office Building. Truman’s work was typically not very heavy, as his only official role was president of the Senate, and he had never voted to break a tie in the senate until two days previously. He met an old friend and local businessman for lunch, making plans to play poker and drink whiskey later that night.
In Europe, Allied forces were reaching the outskirts of Berlin, and General Dwight Eisenhower (later to be Truman’s successor as president) visited the Ohrdurf death camp, revealing that the horrors of the Nazi regime were not just Allied propaganda. In the Pacific, a fierce battle was underway for control of Okinawa, and the 21st Bomber Command, based on the Mariana Islands, conducted another incendiary raid on Tokyo, annihilating a vast portion of the city around an aircraft factory.
Washington, DC, had grown vastly and rapidly during the war, making it a busy and competitive city that led Truman to quip, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” (8). The newly built Pentagon building embodied the new, bustling capital. But for the last 12 years, the main figure in Washington had been President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Truman was an extremely unlikely choice for vice president for Roosevelt’s unprecedented fourth term, which had begun the previous January. The office of the vice president had little prestige at the time, leaving Truman ample time for leisure and socializing. He had little contact with the president, but knew of the rumors surrounding his ill health, and the prospect of becoming president “scared the devil out of him” (12). Truman visits the Senate, where he has many friends on both sides of the political aisle from his own time as a senator from Missouri. Many admired Truman for his ability to deal with the Senate, but didn’t think that Roosevelt would ever make use of his talent.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
President Roosevelt was vacationing in Warm Springs, Georgia, on the morning of April 12, a place where he had first come in search of a cure for his polio in the 1920s. At 63 years old, having served as president for 12 years through the Great Depression and World War II, Roosevelt was exhausted. While joking with his maid and preparing for an afternoon barbecue, he was grappling with a sour turn in his relationship with a key ally, the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. Roosevelt had been the first president to recognize the Soviet Union in 1934, but the diplomats stationed there were horrified by Stalin’s ruthless purges of his real and imagined political enemies. Once the war began, they accepted working with the Soviets as necessary, but even as they were both fighting the Nazis, many were concerned that “Stalin’s aim is to spread the power of the communists to the end of the earth” (17) and would simply emerge after the war as a threat comparable to Hitler.
Roosevelt was more confident that he could manage the relationship through careful diplomacy, but there was serious concern over Poland, where the Soviets had recently expelled the Germans and set up a puppet government, in violation of promises to hold free and fair elections. The Soviets were also installing a friendly leader in Hungary and, contrary to the promises of Yalta (the conference held in January between the US, UK, and USSR to lay the groundwork for a postwar Europe) refused to allow US forces into the country. Roosevelt expressed his concerns to Stalin, who responded with accusations that Western forces were seeking a separate peace with the Nazis, even as fighting continued in the east. While Roosevelt tried to maintain a conciliatory tone with Stalin, he confessed to advisors that “we can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta” (20). The optimistic feelings that came of Yalta had been dispelled, replaced with grim foreboding.
In the late morning, Roosevelt began working, with part of the agenda being an upcoming meeting in San Francisco to create a new organization called the United Nations. He continued to work as an artist and began to paint him, but then suddenly he complained of a headache and lost consciousness.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
A doctor hurried to the cabin to check the president’s vitals. Believing that he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, the doctor called in a cardiac specialist from Atlanta. By the time he arrived, there was nothing he could do, and at 3:35 pm Central Time, they pronounced the president dead. His secretary promptly informed the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who commented, “I am more sorry for the people of this country and the world than I am for us” (24). Back in Washington, Truman had finished his business in the Senate and was having a drink with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn when a call came through urging him to come to the White House. He hurried over and met with Eleanor Roosevelt, who told him that the president was dead. He asked if he could help, and she responded, “Is there anything we can do for you […]. For you are the one in trouble now” (26).
When the president did not arrive as scheduled at the barbecue, reporters sniffed for information, while in Washington Truman tried to summon the cabinet for an early evening meeting. Roosevelt’s secretary then informed the press, and from then on, “there was no letup” (27). Around six o’clock in the evening, Truman called his family to tell them the news, and Bess was devastated. As news organizations began to make the story public, Truman met with several members of the cabinet, the weight of the news lending a gloomy silence to the meeting. They waited for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Harlan Stone to bring a Bible on which Truman could be sworn in as the new president. Eventually, Stone arrived, and Truman decided to photograph the moment in order to show his 92-year-old mother back in Missouri. As a crowd gathered outside the White House to mourn the deceased president, Truman took the 35-word oath with Bess, looking utterly horrified, beside him. Stone misstated Truman’s name, mistaking the middle initial S (which didn’t stand for anything) for “Shipp,” but they were able to complete the oath, and Truman officially became president. His first act was to decide that the San Francisco Conference would go on as planned, and then he talked to long-serving Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who offered vague details of a “strange military program that was costing the taxpayers millions” (33), but the details of which would remain secret for now even from the president. Truman felt terribly unprepared for the magnitude of his duties as he left the White House to return home.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
News of FDR’s death spread around the world, with many world leaders concerned whether the largely unknown Truman was ready to fill the shoes of such an immense figure. Hiding in his bunker, Adolf Hitler took the news as a miraculous sign that the war could still be won, while Roosevelt’s staunch ally, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, mourned that the president had died “at the supreme climax of the war” (36). Truman’s own family back home in Missouri took the news as a shock, while in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a scientist named J. Robert Oppenheimer wondered if the new president would help bring his long-running and highly secret project to fruition. Going home to the well wishes of his neighbors, Truman called his mother, who told him to “be good” and “be game” (37). He then went to sleep, his wife sobbing beside him, preparing to meet the world as the new president of the United States.
Part 1 Analysis
Baime portrays Harry Truman as the ultimate representative of political leadership in a time of rapid technological and cultural change, especially since he comes into office at a moment when many of the historical trends that had been at work for decades were reaching their culmination. The child who once did most of his traveling on horseback would ultimately make the decision to drop an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, unleashing a destructive power that would have been inconceivable to anyone living at the time of his birth, a mere 60 years earlier. For Baime, Truman’s ability to make enormously consequential decisions in this context makes him an exemplar of Finding Clarity in a Changing World.
The specific date of April 12, 1945—the day of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death—offers many examples of those looming changes and the need for a fresh perspective to deal with them. Some of the changes are technological, most notably the development of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Many historians argue that no one single weapon has done more to change the nature of warfare than atomic/nuclear weapons, which is ironic in that they have done so mostly through their non-use. When the atomic bomb was first developed, no one could have predicted its exact consequences, though it was clear to most observers that they would be far-reaching. Truman, who had known practically nothing about the atomic weapons program as vice president and would not learn much more about it even upon assuming office, had to decide whether and how to use it while still learning what it was. The Moral Dilemma of the Atomic Bomb placed Truman in a position utterly unlike that of any of his predecessors or counterparts around the world.
The dangers of technological development were made evident in other ways on April 12. When General Eisenhower on that day visited a Nazi death camp, “witnessing for the first time the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution” (6), he and his fellow soldiers confronted atrocities that were only possible in the modern age. The Third Reich had applied all the new features of industry, bureaucracy, and intercontinental transportation to the mass slaughter of millions of human beings, all based on a pseudoscientific creed of racial superiority. The revelation of these horrors, combined with the possibility of a similarly motivated government pursuing a genocide with atomic weapons, made it absolutely imperative that war, at least between the major industrial powers, become a thing of the past. There was little in the historical record to suggest that such a thing was possible, and the previous effort to abolish war had ended in utter failure, but everywhere there were signs of the impossible becoming possible, and while many of those things could make the world much worse, perhaps they could also be utilized to make it better.
As suggested in the book’s title, Baime depicts Truman as a reluctant leader, one who assumes responsibility for these crucial questions despite an absolute lack of desire for such power. When he receives the news of FDR’s death with the thought, “the lightning has struck” (26), it is with utter shock and dread, leading Eleanor Roosevelt to comment that Truman was “the one in trouble now” (26). Such moments frame Truman as a man chosen by fate for the needs of the moment, rather than as an ambitious politician. Flanked by his wife and daughter, who took the news even worse than he did, and a bevy of cabinet officials who had been staunchly loyal to Roosevelt and barely knew the man charged with succeeding him, Truman’s own life had now changed with the same speed and unpredictability as the world around him. In describing the beginnings of Truman’s presidency, Baime borrows a trope from fantasy and adventure stories: that of the reluctant hero who rises to the moment even though he would have preferred to stay at home with his family (e.g., Frodo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy). In this framing, Truman’s humble beginnings and relative lack of personal ambition equip him to cut through needless political complexity and make sound decisions, evidence of The Value of an Outsider’s Perspective.
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