62 pages • 2-hour read
The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World
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Themes
Finding Clarity in a Changing World
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism and violence, specifically wartime atrocities.
Baime repeatedly points out the contrast between the world Harry Truman grew up in and the one he inherited as president. He points out that the conditions of his childhood “made the year 1945 seem like the wildest imaginings of the most apocalyptic philosophers. There were no machines in 1884—no airplanes, no motorcars. When Harry was a child, the loudest noises he would hear were the occasional thunder crack and the smack of an ax blade” (41). It may seem as though a man so rooted in the old world would be wholly incapable of managing the challenges of the new, and that was certainly the impression of many who witnessed his sudden and entirely unexpected rise to the top. While Truman was as amazed by technological developments as anyone else, the simplicity of his early life helped to root him in a set of fundamental truths that endured in spite of tremendous change, such as the need for self-discipline, the necessity of hard work, and honesty as the best guarantor of ultimate success.
It also helped Truman to cut to the heart of a problem rather than get lost in the minutiae—not that he didn’t have an eye for details, but that the details did not pull him away from the big picture and the simpler truth at its core. Truman did not have a background in foreign policy and was not well-versed in communist ideology, but Baime suggests that these shortcomings became strengths in his dealings with the Soviet Union, given that even the State Department’s experts were unsure of how to deal with a state that was emerging from civil war and brutal purges to become a major power on the world stage. When Truman met Stalin, he commented that the Soviet leader “is as near a man to Tom Pendergast as I know” (302) seeing in Stalin another variation of the power-seeking party boss that is more or less the same in any cultural setting. In the most consequential decision of the period covered in the book, the dropping of the atomic bomb, Truman showed a similar tendency to simplify complex problems. He simply narrowed the decision down to what he considered the most essential point: whether it would help expedite the end of the war. Upon concluding that it would, he pushed toward that goal with utter dedication and without regard to its human cost.
The Value of an Outsider’s Perspective
Baime argues that despite his unconventional path to the presidency, Truman’s character and unique set of experiences left him amply prepared for the job. Truman’s humble, rural background makes him a relative rarity among the company of presidents. As Baime notes, he was only the second president born West of the Mississippi, the first being his family’s hero, Andrew Jackson (his successor, Dwight Eisenhower from Kansas, would be third). Truman did not receive a college education, was rare among presidents at the time and unheard of in the modern era. And although he was able to develop political experience prior to the presidency, including high office, his path through those offices was circuitous and unusual. Upon reaching the US Senate, he was jokingly called “the Senator from Pendergast” (76) due to his close ties with the local Democratic party boss Tom Pendergast of Missouri. His selection to the Vice Presidency had little to do with the preferences of Roosevelt, who barely knew who Truman was and undertook little effort to learn even after the fact. Consequently, when Truman took the oath of office, to his shock as much as anyone else’s, the general reaction was “Good God! […] Truman will be President!” (35). In Baime’s estimation, Truman largely proved the skeptics wrong, and even brought certain abilities missing among the Washington establishment.
The key feature, according to Baime, is Truman’s connection with the ordinary American. While his predecessor was very successful in addressing the people, especially through his legendary “fireside chats,” Truman was instantly recognizable as an ordinary American himself. Upon assuming office, “he had become a symbol for ordinary Americans, who saw in him the hopes and dreams of their own lives and those of their children” (222). His reputation for honest, plain speech and fair dealing became a hallmark of his presidency. Nowhere was this more important than in his dealings with the Soviet Union on the cusp of what would be known as the Cold War. FDR’s aristocratic background and immense personal charm may have led him to overestimate the extent to which he would charm Stalin. For Truman, the former county judge, Soviet violations of Yalta were bad behavior, to be called out as such. When Foreign Minister Molotov exclaimed, “I have never been talked to like that in my life,” Truman responded, “Carry out your agreements, and you won’t get talked to like that” (165). Historians will disagree over whether such an attitude helped the US prepare for an inevitable conflict with the Soviet Union or precipitated it, but Baime argues that Truman’s comparatively humble beginnings made him uniquely suited to meet this the fraught moment in history.
The Moral Dilemma of the Atomic Bomb
In the four-month period that forms the main focus of the book, the most consequential decision of all was whether to drop the atomic bomb over Japan. To many of the participants involved in the decision, it did not seem like a dilemma at all. Truman would famously say that he never lost a night of sleep over the decision (a quote not featured in this book, but well documented elsewhere). In another exchange not featured in this book (but also documented elsewhere, and depicted in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer), J. Robert Oppenheimer professed to having blood on his hands due to the atomic bomb, leading Truman to dismiss him angrily as a “crybaby.”
These well-known episodes cement the impression that once the atom bomb became a technological certainty, the question of its use ceased to be a matter of major controversy, at least within the corridors of power. The author concludes, citing Churchill, that “the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise” (358). This unquestioned agreement may arise in part from the fact that, until shortly before the bomb was used, there was little direct discussion of it in the White House. Baime notes that during a 1945 briefing, an assistant secretary of state shocked the room by bringing up the bomb: “You didn’t mention the bomb out loud; it was like mentioning Skull and Bones in polite society at Yale. It just wasn’t done” (251). This climate of silence allowed the bomb’s inevitability to become a truism among high-level decision makers.
Though there might have been little recrimination after the fact, the use of the bomb was nonetheless a difficult question, morally and politically. As the author concedes, the bombs incinerated square miles of densely inhabited cities, vaporizing nearly all living things within its radius. Persistent radiation effects poisoned tens of thousands more in the months to come, and cancer rates remained abnormally high for decades. The precise death toll from the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is impossible to know with certainty, but contemporary historians place it in the hundreds of thousands, nearly all of whom were non-combatants.
The principle of distinction, a pillar of international humanitarian law holding that noncombatants should not be considered legitimate targets, was impossible to uphold with nuclear weapons, and the same can be said of the firebombing campaign that preceded the use of the atomic bomb by about five months and claimed additional hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Baime is generally loath to ascribe the violence done against Japan to racism, a thesis attributed to John Dower in his War Without Mercy (1986), but he does note that while many in the US reacted in horror to the British firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden (famously described in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five), the same population found no problem in obliterating the cities of a country that had effectively lost the ability to defend itself.
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