IT WAS A hot August day in Kansas City, Missouri, but Harry Truman shivered as he stood naked before a bored army doctor. The usual indignities that come along with such an exam followed, but to Truman the discomfort was worth it.
The year was 1917, and the United States had officially entered the Great War in April. Truman wanted to serve and, for the second time in his life, joined the Missouri National Guard. But his unit was being called up for active service as part of the regular army, and regulations required that he pass a physical.
From the neck down, it wasn’t a problem. The doctor noted that at five feet eight inches tall and weighing 151 pounds, his “figure and general appearance” were “average,” and that his bones and joints, skin, and nervous and respiratory systems were “normal.”
But his vision was anything but. When he was a boy, Truman was often taunted as a “sissy” in part because of his thick spectacles, without which the world was a shapeless blur. Though he may have tried to memorize the eye chart ahead of time, when he took off his glasses the letters dissolved into a series of indecipherable blobs. Whatever feat of memorization he may have attempted, the doctor was not fooled. His right eye was moderately weak, but his left eye had 20/400 vision. Next to this entry, the examiner scribbled, “Blind.”
Somehow, and to his immense relief, he passed the examination. Perhaps the doctor had faith that Truman’s spectacles would remain firmly in place in the trenches of France. Or maybe he saw the determination in those half-blind eyes.
Harry Truman was already thirty-three, much older than the average recruit. But though he was a man with a farm to run, a mother and sister for whom he felt responsible, and a sweetheart with whom he’d been in love since childhood, resisting the call of duty was not in him. Perhaps the call of adventure was powerful for this small-town farmer, but Truman remembered his heart being stirred by President Wilson’s vow to make the world “safe for democracy.”
Not even the most imaginative dramatist would cast Harry Truman in the role of world statesman. No president since Lincoln had arrived in the White House with so little formal education, and like that predecessor, he came from simple origins. Truman was not born in a log cabin, but his rural childhood in Missouri was not very different from Lincoln’s in Kentucky. There was no running water or electric light, and silence at night was nearly unbroken. The reverberations of the Civil War over which Lincoln presided were still heard in the Missouri of Truman’s birth, and both of his parents had inherited Confederate sympathies.
Harry S. Truman was born in 1884, within a decade of such twentieth-century giants as Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Douglas MacArthur. But unlike them, he showed little early promise and lacked the propulsive quality and sense of destiny that drove those other political and military giants. In time he would take his place in the pantheon of architects of the American Century, but for him the path to greatness was long and dimly lit.
The nearsighted young Harry had a passion for books, and those thick spectacles that brought him such grief in the school yard also allowed him to indulge that love of reading. An early move to the nearby town of Independence helped expand his horizons and improve his education, but his thick glasses, poor health, and a lack of physical grace kept him on the outside of social circles in and out of school. He steeped himself in history, and in the stories of the past he learned about a world that stretched far away from rural Missouri. Later he would observe, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”
His other youthful passion was classmate Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace, a striking girl whose comparatively well-to-do mother scorned Truman as a young man of no promise. He courted “Bess” with a dogged determination that eventually won her heart, but her mother would never improve her opinion. She remained convinced that Harry would never be a success, and even living in the White House left her unmoved in her opinion of Truman.
BY THE TIME he graduated from high school, his father had gone broke, so college was out of the question. Truman had hoped to attend West Point, but his poor vision made him ineligible. Instead he worked a series of odd jobs and helped his father manage the family farm. Harry was dutiful but bored, and the future before him held little promise. But he remained enchanted with the past and Andrew Jackson was a personal hero. Still, he disavowed any interest in a political career, writing that “Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man . . . to succeed politically [a man] must be an egotist or a fool or a ward boss tool.”
Truman would instead respond to his country’s call to arms. In the summer of 1914 Europe was ablaze. The assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on the twenty-eighth of June had sparked a continental catastrophe. The outraged Austrians, with the backing of their German allies, presented an ultimatum to Serbia that was more a pretext for attack than a realistic set of demands. On July 29 Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, and the Russians mobilized for war to protect their fellow Slavs. Germany unleashed its long-planned invasion of Russia-allied France, marching first through neutral Belgium. Alarmed by the prospect of a German-dominated Europe, and obligated by treaty to preserve Belgian neutrality, a reluctant United Kingdom declared war on Germany on August 4. The Old World seemed set to devour itself, and from across the broad Atlantic, Americans watched with horrified fascination.
Under President Woodrow Wilson, the United States declared its neutrality and kept out of the fray. Statesmen in London might have dreamed that America would intervene on their side, but the United States’ vast immigrant populations from Ireland and Germany had no interest in fighting alongside the British. If a decadent Europe chose to sacrifice its civilization on the altar of militarism, there seemed little point in the United States interfering. In 1914, the New World was thriving economically and growing exponentially. Becoming distracted by a distant archduke’s death seemed irrational at best.
Germany predictably overreached. In May 1915 a German U-boat sank the Lusitania, a British ocean liner, off the coast of Ireland. Among the nearly 1,200 passengers killed were 128 Americans. Public opinion was inflamed, and anti-German feeling was widespread, but Wilson clung to his high-minded policy of nonintervention. America, he declared, was “too proud to fight.”
Wilson may have been too proud to fight then, but the German outrages that followed ensured that America would soon have little choice but to strike back. In early 1917, the Germans sent a secret communication to the Mexican government known as the Zimmerman Telegram. In it, the Germans asked Mexico to join the fight against the United States, and promised that in return, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico would be restored to them. In one of the great intelligence coups of the twentieth century, the British intercepted and decoded the message, and made it public.
Just before the contents of the telegram were revealed, the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and sank American merchant ships. These reckless provocations proved to be too much for Wilson and Congress to ignore, and the United States ended its splendid isolation with a declaration of war in April. In his war message to Congress, Wilson declared: “The world must be made safe for democracy,” and in his ringing peroration uttered words that would find an echo in President Truman’s three decades later:
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
AMONG THE MILLIONS who would heed the president’s call was the thirty-three-year-old Harry Truman, who with a series of business failures and bad investments behind him would don a soldier’s uniform. The man who would bring the Second World War to an end with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would fight in the First as an obscure artillery officer. After six months of training at a bleak army camp in Oklahoma, Harry Truman embarked for Europe as a captain.
His service in France was honorable and there he displayed a yet-to-be-seen aptitude for leadership. Promoted to command of Battery D, he eventually forged a rowdy and rebellious gaggle of Irish Catholic troops into a potent fighting force. Their assigned section was different from most—rather than a flat and blasted landscape, they fought in the Vosges Mountains. But while the shape of the terrain was unique, the muddiness mirrored the rest of the front. Truman and his men exchanged murderous volleys with the Germans and experienced the terror of battle for the first time. From there they were dispatched to the Argonne Forest, from which they began an epic assault on the enemy lines. Several weeks later, German morale collapsed and the armistice was declared. The war was won and Truman had played a small but honorable part in that victory.
The pace of the newly minted war hero’s life accelerated when he returned home. He and Bess were finally married, and he traded the life of a farmer for that of a businessman. Truman and his wartime sergeant Eddie Jacobson opened a haberdashery in Kansas City with high hopes for the future. But the luck that sustained him in the Argonne Forest deserted him in Kansas City, and a recession forced the partners out of business.
Thus it was that thirty-five-year-old Harry Truman found himself a vet who was both married and financially broken. But rather than proving to be the ruination he once predicted, politics would soon prove his salvation. An army friendship forged a connection with a local political boss who offered him the chance to run for Jackson County judge (commissioner). To the surprise of all—not least himself—Truman accepted, and one of the unlikeliest political ascents in American history began.
Harry won the judgeship and proved himself an adept administrator and retail politician. In an era marked by widespread graft and corruption, Truman won a reputation for honesty and good government that he would later display in the United States Senate. After a brief setback, he ascended to the post of presiding judge on the strength of that reputation (and with the help of the party bosses). By expanding and improving the county’s road system, he helped lay the groundwork for future prosperity. Later, the Depression would predictably add great burdens to his efforts, but he handled the county’s straitened circumstances efficiently and effectively. Truman was proving to be a strong leader and competent administrator.
In Missouri, political machines governed all, and the bosses decided which politicians would rise and which would fall. When a seat in the United States Senate became available in 1934, the Kansas City machine, headed by boss Tom Pendergast, decided that Harry Truman should be its candidate. Truman was taken aback by the offer, but could not resist the challenge. He hurled himself into the race, facing two opponents in the Democratic primary with years of national political experience between them. His efforts—and those of the Kansas City machine—paid off with a surprising victory. At the age of fifty, Harry Truman was on his way to the United States Senate.
Adjusting to life in Washington proved difficult for the man from Missouri. He never fully escaped the taint of the Pendergast machine, and some of his more fastidious new colleagues wanted little to do with him. But Truman, always a hard worker, devoted himself to Roosevelt’s New Deal and gradually earned the respect of his fellow senators. The 1939 conviction and imprisonment of Boss Pendergast damaged his reputation and clouded his prospects, but Truman’s essential decency (and good luck) allowed him to survive that scandal. Six years later, he would be president of the United States.