The Rise of Truman
MAY 8, 1884: Harry S. Truman is born in rural Lamar, Missouri.
1901: Truman graduates high school. Due to lack of funds, he does not go to college. He works through a series of jobs, on a railroad and then as a clerk at Kansas City banks.
1906–1917: Truman returns to the family farm in Grandview, Missouri, where he will toil obscurely for eleven years. Get-rich-quick schemes—from oil wells to mining operations—all end in failure.
1918: APRIL 13: Truman lands in France as a thirty-three-year-old captain in the U.S. Army during World War I.
JULY 11: He takes command of Battery D.
NOVEMBER 11: World War I ends. While more than 5 million Allied soldiers have been killed, including roughly 117,000 Americans, Truman’s Battery D does not lose a single man.
JUNE 28, 1919: Truman marries Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace and moves into her family home in Independence, Missouri.
1922: Truman and Jacobson, a Kansas City haberdashery, fails, leaving Truman financially devastated.
— With virtually no qualifications, Truman wins an election for a judgeship in rural Jackson County, due to the backing of Tom Pendergast—the corrupt “boss” of Kansas City’s Democratic machine.
1924: Truman fails in his bid for reelection. It is the only election he will ever lose.
1926: Truman wins election for presiding judge of Jackson County, again due to the patronage of Boss Tom Pendergast.
OCTOBER 24, 1929: Black Thursday. The Great Depression begins.
1933: JANUARY 30: Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.
MARCH 4: Franklin Roosevelt is inaugurated the thirty-second president of the United States.
NOVEMBER 6, 1934: Truman is elected a U.S. senator under dubious circumstances, due to the patronage of the corrupt Kansas City machine. Critics label him “the Senator from Pendergast.”
1939: APRIL: Boss Tom Pendergast is indicted on tax evasion charges and is later imprisoned at Leavenworth. Dozens of Pendergast machine operatives are jailed on charges of rigging elections.
SEPTEMBER 1: Nazi Germany invades Poland.
1940: OCTOBER: Truman’s mother and sister are evicted from their farm in Grandview, due to bank foreclosure.
NOVEMBER 5: Stained by his Pendergast alliance, Truman is given almost no chance of reelection. But against all odds, he wins a second term in the U.S. Senate.
1941: MARCH 1: Truman founds the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program—the Truman Committee.
DECEMBER 7: Japan attacks the United States at Pearl Harbor, forcing America into World War II.
1941–1944: The Truman Committee’s investigations of waste and corruption in the national defense effort gain the senator from Missouri his first national recognition.
1944: JULY: Truman stuns the Democratic National Convention in Chicago when he is nominated as the vice presidential candidate on the 1944 ticket with FDR.
NOVEMBER 7: Roosevelt becomes the first four-term president, with Truman as his VP.
1945: APRIL 1: U.S. forces land on Okinawa on Easter Sunday.
APRIL 12: Roosevelt dies. Truman becomes the thirty-third president of the United States. The night he takes the oath, he is told of a secret weapon the U.S. military is working on, an “atomic bomb.”
The Accidental Presidency and World War II
1945: Truman’s First Four Months
APRIL 13: Truman’s first full day in office. He meets with his cabinet for the first time.
— Major General Curtis LeMay’s Twenty-First Bomber Command firebombs Japan. Thousands of civilians are killed.
APRIL 14: Roosevelt’s funeral procession winds through Washington, DC. A service is held in the White House East Room.
APRIL 15: Truman attends Roosevelt’s burial in Hyde Park, New York.
— Allied troops liberate the Nazi death camp at Bergen-Belsen.
APRIL 16: Truman addresses Congress for the first time as president, vowing to force Japan to surrender unconditionally.
APRIL 23: Truman meets with Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin’s number two, to discuss deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
APRIL 25: The United Nations Conference begins in San Francisco. Delegates from nearly fifty nations begin to map out the new peace organization.
— Truman meets with General Leslie Groves and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The president learns in-depth details of the atomic bomb for the first time.
— “Elbe Day.” American and Soviet forces meet at the Elbe River, joining the eastern and western fronts and severing Nazi Germany in half.
APRIL 28: Partisans execute Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, along with his mistress, by gunfire. Mussolini’s last words are reportedly, “No! No!”
APRIL 29: American forces liberate more than thirty thousand prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp.
— Nazi forces in Italy surrender.
APRIL 30: As Russia’s Red Army closes in on Hitler’s Berlin bunker, Hitler and his newlywed bride, Eva Braun, commit suicide.
MAY 2: The Soviet Union announces the fall of Berlin to the Red Army.
MAY 4: German forces in the Netherlands and Denmark agree to surrender.
MAY 5: American troops liberate the Mauthausen death camp.
MAY 7: The Trumans move into the White House.
MAY 8: VE-day. Following the surrender of Nazi forces to General Eisenhower in Reims, France, World War II in Europe ends. Harry Truman celebrates his sixty-first birthday.
MAY 11: As the battle for Okinawa rages, a Japanese suicide plane crashes into the USS Bunker Hill, killing nearly four hundred American sailors.
MAY 24–26: Under orders from Major General Curtis LeMay, the Twenty-First Bomber Command firebombs Tokyo again, this time striking the emperor’s palace. Scores of civilians are killed.
MAY 28: Truman hosts his first White House state dinner, for the regent of Iraq, Prince Abd al-Ilah.
JUNE 1: The top advisory committee on the Manhattan Project advises Truman to employ the bomb against Japan “as soon as possible . . . without prior warning.”
JUNE 5: Military leaders from the United States, the USSR, Britain, and France meet in Berlin to begin the process of occupying Germany, which is to be sliced into occupation zones, one for each of those four nations.
JUNE 18: Truman meets with his top military advisors to strategize the end of the war with Japan. The leaders agree on plans to invade Japan with nearly 800,000 ground troops. General George C. Marshall sets D-day at November 1.
— General Eisenhower makes his triumphant return to Washington. Truman fetes him at a White House “stag party.”
JUNE 22: Allied victory is declared in Okinawa. Before the final bullets are fired, Japanese soldiers hand out grenades to civilians on the island, ordering them to kill themselves. Many do.
JUNE 26: Fifty delegations sign the UN Charter in San Francisco. President Truman addresses the delegations at the city’s War Memorial Veterans Building.
JUNE 27: Truman returns to his hometown of Independence, Missouri, as president for the first time. The biggest crowds in the history of Jackson County turn out to welcome him.
JULY 3: James F. Byrnes is sworn in as the new secretary of state, becoming Truman’s most important advisor.
JULY 6: Truman leaves the White House by car at night, bound for ship passage to the Potsdam Conference in Soviet-occupied Germany. His approval rating in the United States is 87 percent—higher than Roosevelt’s ever was.
JULY 16: The Trinity shot is successfully fired in the New Mexico desert—the first test of an atomic bomb.
— In Babelsberg, Germany, Truman meets Winston Churchill face-to-face for the first time.
JULY 17: Truman meets Joseph Stalin for the first time. They discuss the startling deterioration of American-Soviet relations.
— The Potsdam Conference officially begins. Truman is named the historic conference’s chairman.
JULY 24: At Potsdam, Truman tells Stalin that the Americans have an atomic bomb.
JULY 26: The United States, Britain, and China issue the Potsdam Declaration, demanding unconditional surrender of Japan. “The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
JULY 28: The U.S. Senate ratifies the United Nations Charter.
AUGUST 2: The Potsdam Conference ends.
— Truman meets with Britain’s King George VI. Much of their conversation is devoted to the secret atomic weapon.
AUGUST 6: While Truman is aboard the USS Augusta bound for Newport News, Virginia, the Enola Gay delivers the “Little Boy” bomb over Hiroshima—mankind’s first atomic attack.
AUGUST 8: Back in the White House, Truman signs the United Nations Charter.
— The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.
AUGUST 9: The “Fat Man” atomic bomb explodes over Nagasaki.
AUGUST 14: Truman announces the surrender of Japan. World War II ends.