Harry S. Truman

Harry Truman became president of the United States after the death of Franklin Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. President Truman led the U.S. through the end of World War II and made the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan. Roosevelt was already the longest-serving president in U.S. history when he chose Truman, then a senator from Missouri, to be his vice presidential candidate in 1944. Roosevelt died suddenly the next year, and Truman became the 33rd president and commander in chief of U.S. forces, just as war was winding down in both Europe and the Southeast Pacific. He made the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945, finally ending the war. Truman steered the U.S. through the post-war period with the no-nonsense Midwestern style and colorful harangues of Congress that are now his hallmark. (He placed on his desk a plaque reading "The buck stops here," a reference to the notion of avoiding responsibility by "passing the buck.") Truman was then re-elected in 1948, in a contest many expected him to lose to the Republican candidate, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York. (A famous photograph shows Truman holding up a premature edition of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman.") Truman tangled diplomatically with the Soviet Union in Berlin and elsewhere, founding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and setting the tone for the nearly five decades of the Cold War that followed. He gave up politics at the end of his second term, due in part to public discontent with the U.S. involvement in the Korean War. He was succeeded as president by Dwight D. Eisenhower.