Truman Dies: Architect of the Cold War Order

Harry Truman died on December 26, 1972, at 88, at Research Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. He had left the presidency in January 1953 with an approval rating around 32 percent, one of the lowest for any departing president. Historians have spent the intervening decades reconsidering. Born in Lamar, Missouri on May 8, 1884, Truman grew up in Independence and worked as a farmer, a zinc miner, a bank clerk, and a haberdasher before entering politics. His haberdashery business failed. He was 38 when he won his first political office, a county judgeship, through the patronage of the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City. He was honest within a corrupt system, a distinction that mattered to him. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934 and served two terms. Franklin Roosevelt chose him as vice president in 1944 largely because he was inoffensive. Roosevelt never briefed him on the atomic bomb or the state of the war. When FDR died on April 12, 1945, Truman told reporters: "I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." He authorized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, a decision he said he never lost sleep over. He desegregated the U.S. military by executive order in July 1948, bypassing a Congress that would not have passed the legislation. He launched the Marshall Plan, which spent $13 billion rebuilding Western Europe and is widely credited with preventing the spread of communism westward. He created NATO. He fought the Korean War to a stalemate. He won the 1948 election against Thomas Dewey in the most famous upset in American political history. The Chicago Daily Tribune printed "Dewey Defeats Truman" on its front page. Truman held up the newspaper the next morning, grinning. He refused to enrich himself from the presidency. He left office and returned to Independence without a government pension (Congress later passed the Former Presidents Act partly because of his financial situation). He walked to the local bank, bought his own stamps, and answered his own mail.