# Harry S. Truman Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) was the 33rd President of the United States (1945–1953), elevated from the vice presidency on [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]'s death on April 12, 1945. A Missouri [[Democratic Party]] machine product — he owed his Senate career to Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast — Truman entered the presidency knowing nothing about the Manhattan Project until briefed on it 12 days into his term. In his first four months he ordered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accepted Japanese surrender, and watched Stalin consolidate Eastern Europe, inheriting the early structuring of what became the Cold War. His full term (1945–1953) produced the [[Truman Doctrine]] (1947 — containment of Soviet expansion as official U.S. policy), the [[Marshall Plan]] (1948 — $13 billion in economic aid to rebuild Western Europe), the National Security Act of 1947 (which created the [[CIA]], the National Security Council, and the [[Department of Defense]]), the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949), the founding of NATO (1949), the [[Desegregation]] of the U.S. armed forces by Executive Order 9981 (1948), the [[Korean War]] (1950–1953), and the firing of General Douglas MacArthur (1951) for publicly advocating nuclear strikes on China against presidential orders. Truman pulled off the most famous upset in American presidential history in the [[1948 Presidential Election]] against [[Thomas Dewey]] ("Dewey Defeats Truman"), declined to seek another term in 1952, and was succeeded by [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]. ## Right-wing relevance Truman is the **Cold War origin point** — the president who built the institutional architecture that 20th-century anti-communist conservatism organized itself around. The [[Truman Doctrine]], the [[CIA]], the National Security Council, NATO, and the permanent postwar military establishment all trace to his administration. George Kennan's 1946 "Long Telegram" and 1947 "X Article" provided the intellectual framework, but Truman translated containment from diplomatic theory into the standing infrastructure of global American power projection. Every subsequent Cold War president — [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan — operated inside the institutional frame Truman built. The contemporary right claims the Cold War victory as its own, but the apparatus that fought it was a New Deal Democrat's creation. Truman's 1948 Executive Order 9981 desegregating the armed forces was the first major federal civil-rights action since Reconstruction and the trigger for the Dixiecrat revolt. [[Strom Thurmond]]'s 1948 third-party candidacy against Truman — running explicitly on a segregationist platform — was the opening move in the [[Party Realignment]] that the [[Southern Strategy]] would complete two decades later. The 1948 Democratic convention fight over the civil rights plank (championed by [[Hubert Humphrey]]) and the subsequent Dixiecrat walkout is the structural origin of the white Southern defection from the Democratic coalition. The MacArthur firing (April 1951) remains the canonical case study in civilian control of the military. MacArthur wanted to expand the Korean War into China, potentially using nuclear weapons; Truman relieved him. The right lionized MacArthur — his 1951 congressional address ("old soldiers never die") was a conservative rallying event — and accused Truman of being soft on Communism. The episode established the precedent that a president's authority as commander-in-chief overrides a popular general's policy preferences, a principle invoked in every subsequent military-executive tension. Domestically, Truman's Fair Deal agenda — national health insurance, expanded Social Security, federal housing programs, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission — extended the [[New Deal]] framework and was blocked by the conservative coalition of [[Republican Party]] members and Southern Democrats that had been obstructing liberal legislation since 1938. The Fair Deal's failure helped define the limits of New Deal liberalism and previewed the conservative coalition-building that would culminate in the Goldwater and Reagan movements. The rise of [[McCarthyism]] during Truman's second term — [[Joseph McCarthy]]'s 1950 Wheeling speech launching the Red Scare — was simultaneously enabled by Truman's own loyalty-oath programs and directed against his administration. ## Key policies and episodes - **Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945).** Ordered the only combat use of nuclear weapons in history. The decision remains the most consequential single presidential act of the 20th century and the foundational event of the nuclear age. - **[[Truman Doctrine]] (March 12, 1947).** Requested $400 million in military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey to prevent Soviet-backed communist takeovers. Established containment as official U.S. foreign policy — the doctrine that governed American strategy for the next four decades. - **National Security Act (July 26, 1947).** Signed aboard the presidential aircraft Sacred Cow. Created the [[CIA]] (replacing the Central Intelligence Group), the National Security Council, the [[Department of Defense]] (merging the War and Navy Departments), the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]] as a permanent body, and the independent Department of the [[Air Force]]. This single statute built the institutional skeleton of the national-security state. - **[[Marshall Plan]] (1948–1952).** The European Recovery Program channeled approximately $13 billion ($170 billion in 2023 dollars) to rebuild Western European economies — simultaneously a humanitarian program, an anti-communist bulwark, and a market-creation strategy for American exports. - **Executive Order 9981 — [[Desegregation]] of the armed forces (July 26, 1948).** Declared "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin." Truman forced Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall into retirement for refusing to comply. Full implementation took until 1954. - **[[1948 Presidential Election]].** Defeated [[Thomas Dewey]] in the most famous upset in American electoral history despite facing a four-way race: Thurmond's Dixiecrats on the segregationist right, Henry Wallace's Progressives on the left, and Dewey's Republicans. Won 303–189 in the [[Electoral College]]. - **Berlin Airlift (June 1948 – May 1949).** After the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, Truman ordered a continuous airlift rather than either abandoning the city or forcing the blockade militarily — 278,000 flights delivering 2.3 million tons of supplies. The airlift succeeded without direct military confrontation. - **NATO founding (April 1949).** The North Atlantic Treaty committed the U.S. to the collective defense of Western Europe — the first peacetime military alliance in American history, and the institutional expression of containment. - **Korean War (June 1950 – July 1953).** North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. Truman committed U.S. forces under UN authorization without a congressional declaration of war — establishing the precedent of presidential war-making that would expand through Vietnam and beyond. - **Firing of MacArthur (April 11, 1951).** Relieved General Douglas MacArthur of command for insubordination after MacArthur publicly advocated expanding the war into China. MacArthur's subsequent hero's welcome and congressional address galvanized the anti-Truman right. - **National health program proposal (November 19, 1945).** Truman's *Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Comprehensive Health Program* proposed universal health insurance through an expansion of compulsory social insurance, as the health plank of the [[Economic Bill of Rights]] he had laid out that September. His evidence was the draft: roughly 30% of examined Selective Service registrants were classified unfit for military service. The [[American Medical Association]] destroyed the proposal by branding it socialized medicine — a charge Truman had tried to pre-empt twice within the message itself — and the Republican Congress elected in 1946 buried it. Twenty years later [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] signed the [[Medicare and Medicaid Act]] in the Truman Library and enrolled Harry and Bess Truman as the first two Medicare beneficiaries. - **Truman's loyalty program (1947–1953).** Executive Order 9835 required loyalty investigations of all federal employees — the program that created the infrastructure [[Joseph McCarthy]] and others would exploit during the Red Scare. Truman built the loyalty-oath machinery, then lost control of it. ## Connections - [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] — Predecessor; Truman ascended on FDR's death with no briefing on the atomic bomb, the Yalta agreements, or the emerging Cold War architecture. - [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] — Truman's [[Republican Party]] successor. Eisenhower inherited and sustained every major Truman foreign-policy creation: NATO, the CIA, containment, the Korean armistice. - [[Strom Thurmond]] — Led the Dixiecrat walkout at the 1948 Democratic convention in response to Truman's civil-rights platform, prefiguring the [[Southern Strategy]] realignment. - [[Thomas Dewey]] — Republican opponent in the [[1948 Presidential Election]]; the "Dewey Defeats Truman" upset. - [[Joseph McCarthy]] — The Wisconsin senator whose Red Scare campaign was enabled by Truman's own loyalty-oath infrastructure but directed against Truman's administration. See [[McCarthyism]]. - [[George Kennan]] — State Department official whose containment doctrine provided the intellectual framework for the [[Truman Doctrine]] and the broader Cold War strategy. ## See also - [[Truman Doctrine]] — The foundational containment-policy statement. - [[CIA]] — Created under the National Security Act Truman signed in 1947. - [[Department of Defense]] — Consolidated from the War and Navy Departments by the same act. - [[McCarthyism]] — The Red Scare that grew from Truman's loyalty-program infrastructure. - [[Southern Strategy]] — The electoral realignment whose opening act was the Dixiecrat revolt against Truman. - [[Party Realignment]] — Truman's 1948 civil-rights push triggered the first phase of the Southern Democratic-to-Republican shift. - [[New Deal]] — The domestic-policy framework Truman inherited and attempted to extend through the Fair Deal. - [[Desegregation]] — Truman's Executive Order 9981 was the first major federal action since Reconstruction. - [[Economic Bill of Rights]] — Truman's 1945 framing of material guarantees, and the source of the health plank that became Medicare. ## Notable Quotes - [[Harry S. Truman - unworthy of our traditions]] — 1952 veto message on the McCarran-Walter Act, denouncing the national-origins quota system as an ethnic hierarchy "unworthy of our traditions." Featured in [[Presidents on the Nation of Immigrants]]. - [[Harry S. Truman - the wrong kind of tax reduction]] — 1947 veto; opposed Republican tax cuts tilted "to the high income brackets to a grossly disproportionate extent." Featured in [[Presidents on Tax Fairness]]. - [[Harry S. Truman - the health of this Nation is a national concern]] — the November 1945 health message; the sentence LBJ came to Independence to answer twenty years later.