FEW AMERICAN PRESIDENTS have left such a polarizing legacy as Harry Truman. Perhaps none have. Historians have ranked him among the greatest and among the worst chief executives. His administration was deeply frowned upon when he left office in January 1953. Less than ten years later, a poll conducted by the prominent historian Arthur Schlesinger ranked Truman ninth among American presidents. As recently as 2014, a Washington Post poll ranked him sixth. At the same time, others have labeled him a war criminal, for it was Truman who gave the go-ahead to drop the atomic bombs on Japan—Little Boy and Fat Man, August 6 and 9, 1945.
This book poses a new thesis. Regardless of Truman’s legacy, the first four months of his administration should rank as the most challenging and action-packed of any four-month period in any American presidency. Through declassified war documents, personal diaries, international communications of the highest diplomacy, and other primary sources, the figures who appear in this book will tell you that themselves. Arguably, no other four-month period has had so much import in shaping the world we live in today.
Truman’s presidential odyssey began on April 12, 1945, the day Franklin Roosevelt died. It is impossible to overstate the shock to the world FDR’s death caused. “The Romans must have felt this way when word came that Caesar Augustus was dead,” the columnist I. F. Stone wrote at the time. “Perhaps not since the dawn of history,” State Department veteran Joseph Davies wrote in his diary, “has the passing of a great man been mourned contemporaneously by so many different nations, so many different religions and races, spread over the earth.”
