Episode 17: Harry S. Truman - a podcast by SMU Center for Presidential History

Today’s episode is all about Harry S Truman, the 37th president of the United States, a man with the unenviable task of following Franklin Roosevelt, AND of overseeing the end of the largest war in human history. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked when consoling the newly-widowed Eleanor Roosevelt. Harry, she said, “is there anything WE can do for YOU, for YOU are the one in trouble now.”   

That date was April 12, 1945. The war still raged in Europe and the Pacific, and amazingly, it would be another two weeks before Truman was first formally briefed on a new and terrible type of bomb, an atomic bomb, with hope it might bring the fighting to a speedy end.   

Unlike so many other presidents we’ve studied thus far this season, Truman never planned or even really dreamed he’d one day sit in the Oval Office. He was not, like a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, or a Bush, to the manor born. He was instead our last President without a college degree, raised in America’s heartland, which is where he returned when finally done with Washington.

We spoke this week with two scholars of the Truman era.  First, we learned from the writer A.J. Baime, a New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World, and Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America’s Soul. Then, we spoke to Retired U.S. Army Colonel, Dr. Krewasky Salter, executive director of the First Division Museum at Cantigny Park and guest curator of The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s exhibit, “Double Victory: The African American Military Experience. 

Together our scholars pointed out three key themes.   

• First, that the person in charge really does matter.  Truman broke with his party to speak out on Civil Rights.  Another president, and it might have been a very different story indeed.  
• Second, the symbolic importance of Truman’s 1948 Executive Order desegregating the military, though African-Americans in particular had already been serving, and fighting, in America’s wars since before the Constitution became law in 1789.  
• Third, that the verdict of history can change.  It certainly did for Truman.

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