Harry S. Truman: Failed Haberdasher, Battery D Captain, Atomic Decision

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Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1884 and grew up in Independence, where he practiced piano at five in the morning and worked as a Shabbos goy for Jewish neighbors. He was a bank clerk, a farmer, and a railroad timekeeper living in work camps, and his ventures in zinc and lead mining, oil, real estate, and a Kansas City haberdashery all failed. Bess Wallace turned down his 1911 proposal. With 20/400 vision in his left eye, he memorized the eye chart to enlist in World War I and became captain of Battery D in the 35th Division, an unruly unit he held together with blistering profanity during a night attack in the Vosges Mountains.

Back home he joined Tom Pendergast's Kansas City machine and reached the U.S. Senate, where the Truman Committee investigated waste and fraud in wartime defense contracts. He served 82 days as Franklin Roosevelt's vice president before FDR died on April 12, 1945, and only then learned of the Manhattan Project. He authorized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, launched the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, oversaw the Berlin airlift, recognized Israel, and entered the Korean War. Executive Order 9981 desegregated the armed forces, the Dixiecrats walked out in 1948, and he still beat Thomas Dewey. He left office in 1953 with a 22 percent approval rating.

• He was the only 20th century president without a college degree.
• In the Meuse-Argonne offensive he fired outside his assigned sector to destroy a German battery aimed at the 28th Division, and a threatened court martial never came.
• As a senator he dropped his probe of a hidden budget after the Secretary of War asked him to, not knowing it funded the atomic bomb.
• Reports of Black veterans beaten after returning home in uniform pushed him toward desegregating the military.
• His whistle stop campaign drew crowds shouting give 'em hell, Harry, and he held up the Chicago Daily Tribune headline Dewey Defeats Truman.