Harry S. Truman

A Missouri farmer and failed shopkeeper who entered politics through a Kansas City party machine, Harry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States when Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945. In under eight years he ordered the atomic bombing of Japan, committed his country to containing Soviet power in Europe and fought the Korean War. Deeply unpopular when he left office in 1953, he is now generally ranked among the more successful American presidents.

Truman was born on 8 May 1884 in Lamar, Missouri, and grew up in Independence. Poor eyesight kept him out of West Point, and after high school he worked as a bank clerk and then for years on the family farm. In the First World War he commanded an artillery battery in France as a captain. Back home he married Bess Wallace in 1919 and opened a men's clothing shop in Kansas City, which failed in the slump of 1921.

With the backing of the Democratic organisation run by Tom Pendergast, Truman won a seat on the Jackson County court in 1922 and later served as its presiding judge. In 1934 he was elected to the United States Senate. He made his name during the Second World War chairing a committee that exposed waste and fraud in military contracts.

Party leaders who wanted to drop the left-leaning Henry Wallace chose Truman as Roosevelt's running mate in 1944. He had been vice president for 82 days, and had rarely met Roosevelt, when the president died on 12 April 1945. Only then was he fully briefed on the atomic bomb project. After Germany's surrender he met Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Potsdam, and in August he authorised the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. He always maintained that the bombs saved many more lives than an invasion would have cost; critics have argued that they were unnecessary and indefensible.

As relations with Moscow broke down, Truman adopted the policy of containing Soviet expansion. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, prompted by Britain's inability to keep backing Greece against a communist uprising, made containment national policy, and the Marshall Plan supplied about 13 billion dollars to rebuild Western Europe. When the Soviets cut off West Berlin in June 1948, he rejected sending an armed convoy and backed instead an airlift that supplied the city until the blockade was lifted in May 1949. He recognised Israel within minutes of its declaration in May 1948 against the advice of George Marshall, and supported the founding of NATO in 1949.

At home, strikes and inflation drove his popularity down, and the Republicans won Congress in 1946. In 1948 he sent Congress a civil rights programme and ordered the desegregation of the armed forces. Southern segregationists and left-wing Democrats both ran rival candidates, yet Truman, campaigning by train across the country, beat the Republican Thomas Dewey with 303 electoral votes to 189. Most of his "Fair Deal" proposals, such as national health insurance, failed in Congress.

When North Korea invaded the South in June 1950, Truman sent American forces under a United Nations mandate without asking Congress to declare war. After Chinese troops entered the Korean War and it settled into stalemate, he dismissed General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951, a hugely unpopular step. Scandals among officials, a Supreme Court defeat over his seizure of the steel mills and the frustrating war pushed his approval rating to 22 per cent in 1952, and he chose not to seek re-election.

Truman returned to Independence, wrote his memoirs and founded his presidential library. He died in Kansas City on 26 December 1972, aged 88. Historians have since rated him far more kindly than voters did in 1952, though his record remains debated.

Our 1945 map shows the world at the end of the war he brought to a close, and the 1960 map shows the Cold War division of Europe and Asia that his policies helped shape.