I.

Introduction

Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 34th Vice-President (1945) and 33rd President of the United States (1945-1953), who initiated the cold war foreign policy of containing communism and continued the modest welfare state established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. His decisiveness and willingness to accept responsibility for difficult decisions contributed to the trend begun under Roosevelt towards the centralization of power in the executive branch.

II.

Early Career

Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884, the son of a livestock trader and farmer. He attended high school in Independence, near Kansas City, held odd jobs and farmed for a time, and served in France during World War I as an artillery battery commander. Returning to the Kansas City area after the war, he married Elizabeth Virginia (“Bess”) Wallace and opened a men's clothing store, which failed in the post-war depression. In 1922 he entered local Democratic politics and was elected judge (commissioner) of Jackson County. With the support of the influential political leader Thomas J. Pendergast he was elected to the US Senate in 1934, where he voted consistently for New Deal legislation. During World War II he came to national prominence as chairman of a Senate investigating committee exposing waste in the war effort. President Roosevelt chose him as his running mate in 1944.

III.

Truman as President

On the death of Roosevelt in April 1945, Truman succeeded to the presidency. Although he was a veteran politician and legislator, Truman had no experience in foreign affairs. The ailing Roosevelt had not prepared him to take over a foreign policy that called for using the atomic bomb to bring the war with Japan to a close and for continuing cooperation with the Soviet Union, a US wartime ally.

A.

Foreign Policy

Truman had no difficulty carrying out the war strategy, but he was unwilling to make allowances for what Joseph Stalin contended were the Soviet Union's post-war needs. He did not accept Soviet reasons for the establishment of a buffer zone of satellite governments between the USSR and Western Europe—essentially the formation of a Soviet sphere of influence—and he became convinced that Stalin meant to extend Communist influence throughout Europe. By early 1947 Truman had a new foreign policy in the making. In its early stages this policy was called the Truman Doctrine and was confined to economic aid to Greece and Turkey to help those governments resist Soviet influence. In its later stages it was called “containment” and was aimed at blocking Communist expansion anywhere in the world. Under Truman, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were the major manifestations of containment and committed the United States to a role of world leadership it had never before been willing to assume. Implemented in 1947-1948, the Marshall Plan was a massive American-financed reconstruction programme for war-torn Europe. NATO was a military alliance established in 1949 to provide a common defence against potential Soviet military aggression, and it was the first peacetime military alliance the United States had ever joined.

After 1950, Truman's policy was modified in response to the Soviet acquisition of atomic weapons, the defeat by Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists in China, and the invasion of South Korea by Soviet-sponsored North Korea. The end of the US nuclear monopoly committed the administration to a nuclear arms race and the development of the hydrogen bomb. The fall of Chiang's government and the Communist action in Korea led Truman to expand his containment policy to include Asia—he committed US troops under United Nations sponsorship to a police action to ensure the territorial integrity of South Korea. Truman was already providing financial aid to the French in Vietnam, who were resisting an independence movement led by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.

B.

Expansion of Presidential Power

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.

C.

Domestic Affairs

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.