Harry S. Truman

Truman got his first pair of glasses at eight — flat eyeballs, the doctor told him, farsightedness bad enough that rough games were forbidden — and spent his childhood reading instead, and practicing the piano at five in the morning. The eyes kept him out of West Point. He memorized the chart to get into the National Guard. He remains the last president without a college degree. From 1906 to 1917 he worked his father's farm at Grandview, roughly 600 acres of it, and he was 33 before he left Missouri for anything. In France in 1918 the Army handed him Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, a unit that had run off its previous commanders, and he brought all of it home.

Then a county judgeship, the Senate, a committee on war contracts that made his name, 82 days as vice president, and the job itself at the worst hour available. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Containment and the doctrine that carried it. The Marshall Plan, NATO, Korea, the armed forces desegregated by signature rather than statute, and Douglas MacArthur relieved of command. BriefHistory lays all of it out with the arguments still attached. Turn there for the record. Stay here for the house he came from, and the two things nobody in it would discuss.

Truman's family had owned people and had never got over losing the war. His mother, held with her family in a Union camp as a girl, refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom when she came to visit. He used racial slurs in private letters that his own presidential library now publishes without softening. The other silence was on his wife's side. In June 1903 Bess's father, David Wallace, shot himself, and Bess was 18. Her mother Madge became a recluse, never spoke of it again, moved in with the Trumans after the 1919 wedding, lived with them for 33 years including in the White House, and by every account never thought Harry was good enough for her daughter. She died there in 1952, with him still president.

He died on December 26, 1972, at 88, in a Kansas City hospital, after weeks in which one system after another gave out. He was buried in the courtyard of the library he had built in Independence and worked in most days, and Bess joined him ten years later. One story about his old age turned out to be wrong: the presidency did not leave him broke and Congress did not invent the presidential pension to rescue him — the records show he had money, some of it made in office. The truer scene is smaller. On July 30, 1965, Lyndon Johnson flew to Independence, signed Medicare into law inside Truman's own library, and handed him the first card issued.

Harry S. Truman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Truman Committee reports other
  Wartime contract investigations credited with saving billions of dollars 1941
• Economic Cooperation Act law
  The Marshall Plan, funded at 13 billion dollars 1948
• Executive Order 9981 law
  Desegregated the armed forces without a vote in Congress 1948
• North Atlantic Treaty law
  The first peacetime military alliance the United States ever joined 1949
• Memoirs book
  Two volumes, written at the library he had just built 1955
• Harry S. Truman Presidential Library building
  He kept an office in it and sometimes answered the door himself 1957

• 1892 aged ~8 Gets his first glasses at eight and is told to give up rough games He read and played piano instead, practicing at five in the morning.
• 1906 aged ~22 Goes back to the family farm at Grandview, where he stays 11 years
• 1918 aged ~34 Takes command of Battery D in France The battery had already driven off several officers. He lost none of his men.
• June 28, 1919 aged 35 Marries Bess Wallace, nine years after his first proposal was refused
• April 12, 1945 aged 60 Becomes president 82 days into the vice presidency
• April 25, 1945 aged 60 Is briefed on the atomic bomb for the first time Henry Stimson delivered the news 13 days after Truman took the oath.
• April 11, 1951 aged 66 Relieves General Douglas MacArthur of command
• July 30, 1965 aged 81 Receives the first Medicare card from Lyndon Johnson at his own library
• December 26, 1972 aged 88 Dies in Kansas City at 88

• Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964
  Commander who led major Pacific campaigns, oversaw Japan’s occupation, and became central to the Korean War controversy. fired
• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. appointed
• Strom Thurmond 1902–2003
  Long-serving South Carolina senator who ran as a segregationist Dixiecrat and later joined the Republican Party. defeated
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. authorized the use of his work