Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945-1948

When the Vice President of the United States arrived one April afternoon for a sip of bourbon in the office of the speaker of the house, Mister Sam Rayburn, he received a message: Please call Steve Early at the White House. The Vice President put in a call for Franklin Roosevelt’s principal assistant, listened for a moment, and then, turning pale, hung up. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!” Harry Truman exclaimed. “. . . Boys, this is in the room. Something must have happened.”

What had happened was the death of

FDR. Harry S Truman, a prosaic, machine-made politician from Missouri, a gray man, was catapulted into the presidency of the United States. Truman had as much difficulty absorbing that startling fact as the public at large, but once he did he placed a sign saying “The Buck Stops Here” on his desk and proceeded to run the country as if he were the person the Constitution said he was, the Commander-in-Chief. In this engaging book Robert Donovan tells how Truman served as the unelected President of the United States from April 12, 1945 until January of 1948. That period encompassed the defeat of Germany, the coming of the atomic bomb and the subsequent surrender of Japan in World War II, the emergence of the monumental welfare program known as the Marshall Plan, the ensuing Cold War with the USSR, the birth of the Jewish state of Israel (one of the most arresting of the inside stories Donovan relates), and, alas, the beginnings of the McCarthyism and Red-baiting that were to run rampant in Truman’s later years as President.

Academic historians will, as they seem reflexively to do, find fault with the book, but it has two virtues above and beyond Donovan’s easygoing prose. First, the combination of arbitrariness and courage in Truman made him a man of decision willing to trust in the American political process. Second, Donovan knows and understands most of the human beings he is writing about. If it is possible to be admiringly dispassionate, that is what the author is. Like so many who remember the moment, he cannot help but share in the feeling of exhilaration of his book’s final episode, Truman’s defeat of Dewey in the 1948 election. What happened in the four years after that is an additional story, and presumably Donovan will write it.