The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

After Truman graduated from high school, his father suffered financial ruin, prompting the 17-year-old to work several odd jobs to keep his younger siblings afloat. He ultimately returned home to the family farm and worked tirelessly as the family barely scraped by. In 1910, Truman was visiting his cousins, who needed a cake plate returned to the Wallace home. Bess Wallace’s family had suffered grievously, as her father had taken his own life several years earlier, probably due to financial problems and an alcohol addiction. Truman arrived at her door, and thus “began a relationship that was not to end until Harry passed away sixty-two years later” (48). The initial courtship, however, was not promising, with Bess largely refusing the advances of the struggling farmer.

Truman was not especially close with his father, but they did bond over politics. Witnessing the tumult of the 1912 presidential election, and his own father’s foray into local politics, Truman concluded that “to succeed financially […] a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egotist or a fool or a ward boss tool” (50). By 1914, Truman’s 30th year, the US was moving quickly into the industrial era, as the European powers plunged into a fratricidal war. That same year, Truman’s father died, leaving him squarely in charge of the family farm and desperate to make money so he could propose to Bess. He sought a career in oil exploration, but failed to turn a profit even after German naval attacks on US shipping promised to raise prices. When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Truman abandoned the oil business and volunteered for an artillery regiment, viewing the war as “an escape from a life that seemed doomed to failure” (53).

Truman’s army training took place in Oklahoma, which had been ravaged by recent droughts. After successfully running the company’s supply shop, Truman earned the rank of captain and was shipped to Paris for additional training. Truman was overwhelmed by the big city, especially as it was full of rowdy American soldiers, but officers quickly noticed his potential for leadership, and he was given command of an entire battery. His unit had a reputation for troublemaking and insubordination, but Truman took to his role with confidence, and in their first brush with combat, not a single man was killed (although a few ran away). Battery D gradually moved across the front, as “night marches left the horses near death from exhaustion and malnutrition, while the soldiers grew so tired, they slept as they walked, forced to eat rotten meat for sustenance” (59). Eventually, they arrived at the Argonne Forest as part of the largest American offensive in the nation’s entire history. Shockingly, he still had not lost a single man when the armistice came into effect on November 11, 1917, and the war was over.

The following June, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Treaty of Versailles formally ending the war. On that same exact day, Truman married his long-time sweetheart and moved into the Wallace home. Getting along awkwardly with his new wife’s family, he tried to earn their respect through business, but the road ahead would be filled with setbacks.

In November 1919, Truman & Jacobson, a Kansas City haberdasher, opened its doors to the public. They chose their location well, but the opening coincided with a recession, and Truman was crushed under the weight of his debts. Desperate, he was approached by Mike Pendergast, an influential politician and father of an old army buddy. Pendergast offered Truman the position of county judge, which in Missouri at the time was more a political than a legal office. By 1922, he decided to run, promising to clean up the corruption often associated with the office. He proved an awkward campaigner, but Pendergast’s brother Tom was the so-called “Boss” of the Kansas City political machine, once stating that “it’s a very simple thing when you come down to it. There’s people that need things, lots of ‘em, and I see to it that they get ‘em” (64) in the expectation that such favors would be repaid with votes. Truman scratched out a win, most likely due to the support of the Pendergasts, even though Truman himself did not engage in any shady dealing.

Truman lost reelection in 1924, but he would never again lose an election, coming back as presiding judge in 1926. Also in 1924, Truman and Bess welcomed a daughter, Mary Margaret, who would be their only child. As presiding judge, Truman fulfilled his promise to build roads, but at times found himself accepting some measure of corruption as the cost of getting things done for his constituents. He also campaigned for a new courthouse in Kansas City, which was both successful and honest. Truman’s good political fortunes came to a halt with the stock market crash of October 1929, when the city and the Truman family became victims of what would become known as the Great Depression. As the Depression persisted, Kansas City also suffered bouts of violent crime, and the political dealings of the Pendergast machine turned bloody in an attempt to suppress a reformist rival. Anxious to keep his honesty as part of a corrupt system, Truman began to write a diary, wondering, “Maybe I can put the County where none of the crooks can profit […] I wonder if I can. All this gives me headaches and my private business has gone to pat so that I’ll be worse than a pauper when I’m done” (69). As he wrote those words, Franklin Roosevelt had recently been inaugurated as president of the United States, and Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany. Closer to home, Tom Pendergast worried that the St. Louis political machine was on the brink of securing both of Missouri’s Senate seats, which would deal a major blow to the Kansas City machine. One of Pendergast’s associates suggested nominating Harry Truman, to which the boss replied, “Do you mean seriously to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be nominated and elected to the United States Senate?” (71).

When called into the Pendergast office, Truman shared the boss’s skepticism about his eligibility for high office. The Pendergasts convinced him that he could win with their support, and so he made his announcement. Faced with a stiff primary challenge, Truman barnstormed across the state making speeches and meeting voters. Truman’s opponents made hay of his relative obscurity and inexperience, and the corruption of the Pendergast machine produced still more bloodshed. When Truman won the primary, setting him up for a near-sure victory in the general election, newspapers reported candidly (and probably accurately) that “County Judge Truman is the nominee of the Democratic Party because Tom Pendergast willed it so” (74). At 51 years old, he moved his family to Washington, DC, sure that he would be the poorest senator in the city. Due to his association with Pendergast, he was also a bit of an outcast, with some colleagues refusing to speak to him. On his first visit to the White House, the secretary wrote the wrong name in the address book. Aware of his minor status, Truman committed himself to studying the ins and outs of Senate procedure and making himself a valuable ally to the president and his New Deal agenda. Truman proved adept at the more social aspects of the job, and “earned a reputation as a hard worker and a deeply ethical thinker” (78). However, in 1939, Tom Pendergast went to federal prison for tax evasion and other fraudulent practices, making prospects look bleak for Truman’s upcoming reelection campaign. One day, when the governor of Missouri came to Truman’s office and promised not to challenge him, Truman instantly recognized that he had a bitter fight on his hands if he wanted to stay in the Senate.

As the 1940 election season approached, Europe was in the throes of World War II, leading to widespread fear of the United States getting dragged in. As the country pondered its future, Truman was more focused on a tough reelection campaign, where he wanted to focus on the issues and his personal record rather than deal with insinuations of his relationship to Pendergast, or try mudslinging against his opponent, Governor Lloyd Stark. Truman campaigned on “the New Deal, the importance of the farmer in America, the emergency in Europe, and military preparedness” (82). He sought FDR’s endorsement, but the president refused to weigh in on Democratic primaries. As the campaign wound down, he did receive endorsements from some of his Senate colleagues, and the Senate applauded Truman when he returned to the chamber after winning the primary by a tight margin. When his new term began, Truman focused on creating oversight for the massively expanding defense industry that was preparing the US for possible entry into the war. His committee found “shocking inefficiencies” (86) in how money was being allocated, and the committee gained favorable publicity by questioning leading defense figures about misappropriated funds in front of reporters.

Truman was in Missouri on December 7, 1941, when he learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He rushed back to Washington in time to vote for the declaration of war. The outbreak of war gave enormous public attention to Truman’s committee, but since much of it was critical of the administration, it also angered Roosevelt. Truman’s committee work placed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1943, which celebrated the “watchdog, conscience and spark plug to the economic war-behind-the-lines” (89). The committee’s work grew only more intense as the US prepared for war and finally deployed its forces in the Pacific and North Africa, and Truman worked himself to the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Lying in a hospital bed, Truman began to think about how different the present world was from the one of his childhood, or even his young adulthood: “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” (91). Back to work after recovering from his exhaustion, he received a call from Secretary of War Stimson, where the latter talked obliquely about a plant in Pasco, Washington, which Truman later learned was the world’s first plutonium reactor. In the summer of 1944, Truman received multiple calls from Senate colleagues asking him to endorse them for vice president, a position that was widely rumored to be vacant after the end of Roosevelt’s third term, requiring a vote at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The convention was divided among a host of candidates, many of whom had various political or personal reasons for having offended their colleagues or fallen out of favor with the president. Truman’s name was floated, and while Roosevelt barely knew who he was, and he was seen as too old for the job at 59, “Truman had no enemies. He would not alienate any section of the electorate. Even with his Pendergast past, he seemed the least problematic choice” (96). Roosevelt, ever the consummate political operator, was more interested in not offending anyone than in enhancing his ticket.

When Truman received a call right before the convention telling him that FDR wanted him for a running mate, his first reaction was “tell him to go to hell” (96). As it turned out, there were power players within the party looking to advance Truman’s candidacy, but Truman did not want his family subject to the scrutiny of the office, did not want to pay for a campaign, and most importantly, did not want to be president. Right before the convention, FDR signed a note endorsing either Harry Truman or Supreme Court Justice William Douglas (allegedly, he asked to have Truman’s name placed first, but this part of the story is contested). There was also a letter circulating from FDR apparently endorsing his current vice president, Henry Wallace, while still others thought James Byrnes was the sure pick. Finally, a party leader called Roosevelt and insisted that he pick Truman to resolve the confusion.

As the Democratic National Convention opened, Truman received a call from the president asking him to accept the nomination for vice president. Initially, Truman tried to insist that he wanted to stay in the Senate, but he quickly acquiesced and said, “I’ll do it” (101). Even then, however, confusion remained, and Henry Wallace in particular was determined to hold onto his seat. After Roosevelt was overwhelmingly nominated for an unprecedented fourth term, suddenly members of the crowd shouted out, “We want Wallace!” (102). Some alleged that these were Wallace supporters who had entered the convention with fraudulent tickets. Wallace then won the vote from his native Iowa, and party leaders rushed to halt the proceedings. The convention met again the next day, and after the senior senator from Missouri barely overcame his intoxication to give a speech on Truman’s behalf, several rounds of voting failed to produce a majority until the governor of Maryland pledged his own delegates to Truman, leading other longshot candidates to follow suit. Even Wallace’s delegates pledged to Truman, making the vote unanimous. When the official announcement was made, “Truman was at a concession stand ordering a hot dog and a Coca-Cola” and did not at first hear the calls for him to come forward, until he awkwardly moved to the front of the hall and made “the shortest acceptance speech any politician in the hall had ever heard” (105). Leaving an exuberant convention and dogged press, Truman looked to his wife and saw how utterly unhappy she was with this extraordinary turn of events.

Truman convened the National Defense Committee to announce that he was resigning to focus on the campaign. Public reaction to Truman’s nomination was ambivalent, with his own mother opining that “I would rather have had him stay in the Senate” (107). He undertook a national speaking tour, where he charmed audiences with his “everyman persona” (108). He endured criticism for his ties to Pendergast, as well as for having put his wife on a Senate payroll. There were false reports that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which blew over. On election night, Truman treated guests of a Kansas City hotel to an impromptu piano concert, but once the news landed that FDR had won, “he felt the impact of what was about to happen” (110), suspecting that the president would not survive the term. After the inauguration, Truman returned to the same office he had occupied as a senator, where he called his mother, who told him, “Now you behave yourself” (112). Two days later, FDR left for the Yalta conference, and Truman received news that Tom Pendergast had died. Truman made the controversial decision to attend the funeral, although it was generally regarded as a “gutsy move” (113). At Yalta, Churchill, FDR, and Stalin made plans for the joint occupation of Germany and the formation of a United Nations, but Roosevelt was becoming increasingly concerned with the paranoid and belligerent behavior of his Soviet counterpart. Truman knew little of this when he learned on April 12 that he would be the president of the United States.