Harry S. Truman: Truman Doctrine

About the Author

Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, to a farming family. His family moved to Independence, Missouri, when Truman was six years old. Although he suffered from myopic vision, as a boy Truman enjoyed reading history and pleased his mother by playing the piano. In 1901 he graduated from Independence High School. Although he failed to pursue a college degree, in 1923 and 1924 he enrolled in night classes at the Kansas City School of Law.

After serving as a construction timekeeper and bank clerk, in 1906 he helped his family by working at the Grandview, Missouri, farm owned by his grandmother. Truman continued his farm labors until his military service during World War I. Truman, who had been a member of the Missouri National Guard since 1905, served as a captain with the 129th Artillery Regiment in France.

After the war, Truman married Bess Wallace, and they had a daughter, named Margaret. He also opened a haberdashery in Kansas City with Eddie Johnson, an army friend, but the business went bankrupt during the farm depression of 1920 to 1922. Truman turned to politics, winning an election in 1922 as eastern district judge, the equivalent of a county commissioner, in Jackson County. After being defeated for reelection in 1924, Truman joined the Democratic Kansas City political machine of Tom Pendergast, which was extending its influence into more rural areas of the state. In 1926 and 1930 he was elected presiding judge of the county court, earning a reputation for personal honesty despite his connection with the Pendergast machine.

Truman was the Pendergast candidate for Senate in 1934, and he easily won the general election after a difficult Democratic primary campaign. In the Senate, Truman was a consistent supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and he served on the Interstate Commerce Committee, sponsored the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, and urged national military preparedness.

During his second Senate term, Truman won acclaim for his chairmanship of a committee investigating fraud and corruption in the national defense effort. In 1944 party regulars at the Democratic National Convention dumped liberal Vice President Henry A. Wallace in favor of Truman as Roosevelt's running mate. Truman and Roosevelt were not close, and the vice president was not well informed when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Despite his lack of foreign policy experience and being left out of planning for the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, Truman's presidency was consumed by the developing cold war with the Soviet Union. He argued with Stalin over postwar developments in Germany and Eastern Europe at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Truman also ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insisting in his memoirs that this decision shortened the war and saved lives. Deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union persuaded Truman to institute a policy of containment with the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, National Security Act, and Berlin airlift after the Soviets blocked access to the western sector of Berlin.

On the domestic front Truman called for a Fair Deal, a reform program similar to Roosevelt's New Deal. Truman advocated national health insurance, expanded public housing, civil rights legislation, and repeal of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act. Most of his legislative efforts, however, were blocked by the Republican Congress. Truman's reelection prospects appeared dim in 1948 when the Democratic Party split, with former Vice President Henry A. Wallace running as a Progressive in protest of Truman's aggressive cold war policies and with the governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, forming the Dixiecrats in opposition to Truman's support for civil rights. Wallace's campaign was beset with accusations of Communist influence, while Thurmond's candidacy was unable to resonate beyond the Deep South. Truman's Republican opponent, New York's Governor Thomas Dewey, was overconfident, and the embattled Truman campaign was able to attain one of the greatest upsets in American political history.

Truman's second term, however, was troubled. The cold war accelerated with the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949 and the triumph of Mao Zedong's Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops invaded South Korea, and under the auspices of the United Nations, the Truman administration came to the defense of South Korea. Under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, the American troops pushed the North Koreans toward the Yalu River and border with China. However, when Chinese forces entered the conflict, the war bogged down along the thirty-eighth parallel, dividing the two Koreas. When MacArthur openly disagreed with the president's strategy in Korea, Truman fired the general despite his widespread popularity.

Although Truman instituted a policy of loyalty review boards, the president was continually hounded by such critics as Wisconsin's Senator Joseph McCarthy, who asserted that the administration needed to take a tougher stance against Communism. Truman, who was personally honest, was censured for corruption within his administration. With his popularity ratings low, Truman did not seek reelection in 1952. He endorsed Democratic Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, who was defeated by the Republican nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Truman and his wife, Bess, in retirement, moved back to Independence, Missouri, where he wrote his memoirs and organized a presidential library. Truman died from pneumonia in Kansas City on December 26, 1972. Often maligned during his presidency, Truman is usually rated a near-great president in polls of professional historians.