Harry S. Truman

While implementing this energetic foreign policy in the cold war atmosphere, Truman assumed more and more power at the expense of Congress. His boldest act was the use of US troops in Korea without prior congressional consent. His administration was also responsible for the establishment of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, which provided advice and information to the executive on foreign policy matters, independent of the State Department and Congress. At the same time, the White House staff and the bureaucracy of the executive office grew dramatically, and the president's Bureau of the Budget took over many planning tasks that had once been under the jurisdiction of congressional committees. This gave Truman and subsequent presidents more ability to function outside congressional restraints, especially in foreign affairs, but it made Truman vulnerable to conservatives and others who were critical of the expansion of the government's role.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities were convinced that the Truman administration had been infiltrated by Communists, and some critics actually saw Truman's centralization of authority as evidence of Communist influence. The president responded to the attacks of these critics by reluctantly establishing a stringent loyalty programme that required all federal employees to submit to screening by loyalty boards. Among other far-reaching consequences, this is credited with seriously undermining the recently founded United Nations, which lost large numbers of its brightest and most idealistic personnel among the US contingent, because their loyalty to the United States was deemed suspect. Unable to have his way with Congress in domestic legislative matters, Truman made frequent use of his veto power. In 1947 he tried unsuccessfully to halt passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which was designed to curb some of the powers acquired by trade unions during the New Deal. This won him a reputation as a friend of labour, and he appealed to other liberal factions within the Democratic party by supporting civil rights legislation and by recognizing the state of Israel in 1948. His aggressive anti-Communist policies abroad and his liberalism at home helped produce a three-way split in the Democratic party as he came up for re-election in 1948. On the left, former Vice-President Henry A. Wallace was critical of his hard line against the USSR; on the right, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, opposed his advocacy of civil rights. Truman used his fiery, folksy style to lambaste the “Do-Nothing” Republican-dominated 80th Congress in a tireless campaign that ended in his unexpected victory over the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey.

Truman saw his narrow victory as a mandate for an ambitious legislative programme, which he called the Fair Deal. During his second term, however, he was frustrated in his attempt to obtain civil rights legislation, federal aid to education, and a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, as well as his efforts to set up a public power project and a national health insurance system. He did manage to hold the line on such basic New Deal items as subsidies to farmers, public housing, social security, and the minimum wage. Truman chose not to seek renomination in 1952 and retired to Independence, where he resided until his death on December 26, 1972.