Happy Birthday to Harry S. Truman, the thirty-third president of the United States from 1945 to 1953. He led the U.S. transition out of its longest presidency and into the early stages into the Cold War. It is necessary to mention that he also made the decision to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese people by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Intriguingly, he ends his presidential memoirs by saying that when he passed the reins of the presidency Dwight D. Eisenhower, “He may have failed to grasp the true picture of what the administration had been doing because in the heat of partisan politics he had gotten a badly distorted version of the true facts. Whatever it was, I kept thinking about it.” I wonder if he ever talked to Eisenhower about this uneasiness and also how Eisenhower interpreted the situation. They had worked very closely when Truman was President and Eisenhower General of the Army and then Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. Scholar Samuel W. Rushay Jr. suggests that the tension related to leftover bitterness from the 1952 election campaign when Truman campaigned for Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson.
Citations: Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (New York: Signet, 1956), 2:587; Samuel W. Rushay Jr., “The Ike and Harry Thaw,” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 45, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2013): 47, https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2013/fall-winter/ike-harry.pdf; Abbie Rowe, “Truman shaking hands with Eisenhower,” photograph (location unknown, June 18, 1945), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/338955030.
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