Transcript: Chapter 02

April 12, 1945. Vice president Harry S. Truman received a call urging him to come quickly and quietly to the White House. As he ran through the corridors of the Capitol, he refused to face what lay ahead:

"I thought I was going down there to meet the president," Truman said later, "I didn't allow myself to think anything else."

NARRATOR: At 5:25 P.M. Truman entered the first lady's second floor study.

Eleanor Roosevelt put her arm around his shoulder.

"Harry," she told him. "The president is dead,"

"Is there anything I can do for you," Truman asked.

"Is there anything we can do for you," Mrs. Roosevelt replied, "For you are the one in trouble now."

NARRATOR: He was only a high school graduate, a farmer until he was 33, a haberdasher gone bankrupt at 38. No one in Washington had ever even heard of Harry Truman before he was 50.

Now at 60, he was president of the United States

VICTOR REUTHER, Assistant to the President, UAW: Here was a little haberdasher from Missouri, a small businessman, for him to step into the shoes of the great FDR, there was an enormous feeling of let down.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH, Biographer: For many people, it was as if the presidency had died, not just the president. People were shaken, not just by Roosevelt's death, but, what did this mean to have this unknown quantity step in to such a powerful and important position.

NARRATOR: "If Harry Truman can be president," Americans everywhere were saying, "so could my next door neighbor."

ARCHIVAL FILM, TRUMAN: Our hearts are heavy. The cause which claimed Roosevelt also claims us. He never faltered. Nor will we.

VERNON JARRETT, Journalist: I felt that the man was out of his element. And I think many other Americans expressed the same fear. We got an incompetent that we know nothing about in the White House. It was kind of frightening thing to contemplate.

NARRATOR: Of all the men who had been president, he was one of the least prepared. Vice president for only 82 days, excluded from Roosevelt's inner circle, he knew nothing about the war raging across three continents and two oceans except what he read in the papers.

But within four months, Harry S. Truman would have at his command the most terrible weapon ever devised by man, and he would have to decide whether or not to use it. Title Card: AN ACCIDENT OF DEMOCRACY

NARRATOR: "Now Harry, you be good," Martha Truman had told her 11-year-old son. And Harry Truman had wanted to be good. He dreamed of becoming a concert pianist and practiced with the same determined, optimistic spirit his pioneer grandparents brought with them when they first came West to Missouri.

Born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Harry was six when his family settled in Independence, a town still close to the rugged life of the American frontier. Men carried knives or guns. Fistfights were common.

Independence, Missouri, was not a place where young boys played the piano.

ALONZO HAMBY, Biographer: He's this young kid who looks sort of like a sissy. There is a surviving picture of him that was made around the time he was eleven. You see this kid who looks sort of like Little Lord Fauntleroy, dressed up in his Sunday best, sort of pudgy, wearing these big thick glasses in a day when it was very unusual for a kid to wear eyeglasses.

NARRATOR: "The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists," Truman remembered years later. "I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy. If there was any danger of getting into a fight, I always ran." But in spite of the teasing, Harry kept on playing the piano. All his life, Harry Truman would show the same dogged perseverance.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: There was that little boy up every morning at five o'clock, for two hours in absolute earnest before going to school, sitting there in the half-light working away at Mozart or Chopin.

NARRATOR: It was Harry's mother who first urged him to play the piano and encouraged him to practice. Harry was the sort of boy, a friend recalled, "who seemed to do whatever his mother told him."

The daughter of a pioneer farmer, Martha Truman had gone to college and studied music, art and literature. Before Harry was five she sat him on her lap and taught him to read from the family Bible.

CHARLES BABCOCK, Truman Family Neighbor: I think Harry's mother wanted him to be a real gentlemen. And do things just right. She actually babied Harry a good deal if you want to say it that. But she had no other choice because he couldn't do the rough and tumble with the other kids.

NARRATOR: Harry's introduction to politics was rowdy and boisterous. Election day at the end of the 19th century was marked by high spirits, carousing and brawls. And in Independence, Harry's father, John Truman, was always right in the middle of the action.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: His father was about five foot four, or so, but tough. He would fight at the drop of a hat. He would take after people, particularly on election day. And once when a man in a courtroom accused him of being a liar, he chased the fellow out into the street and threatened to beat him up.

NARRATOR: Like Harry's mother, John Truman also came from pioneer stock. He earned his living trading horses and mules.

"A fiery fellow," people said of him ... "very stubborn, but on the square ... A man of his integrity and industry ... you excuse a whole lot of things."

All his life, Harry would try to earn John Truman's respect.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Once his father got young Harry a pony. And the father was leading the pony, and the little boy fell off the pony and started to cry. And the father said, "Any little boy that cries when he falls off the pony has to walk home." So he had to walk all the way back. And Mrs. Truman, Harry's mother, didn't like that at all.

NARRATOR: "Mamma thought I was badly mistreated, but I wasn't," Truman remembered. "In spite of my crying all the way home, I learned a lesson."

Harry learned that a man kept trying until he succeeded, that a man never admitted he was afraid, that a man had to speak bluntly and be prepared to fight. But no matter how hard he tried, Harry could never quite measure up.

ALONZO HAMBY: My own impression is that he really wanted to relate to his father. He felt that their relationship was not as good as it should have been, it was not as close as it should have been.

NARRATOR: Harry was not his father's favorite. His younger brother John Vivian was. John Vivian shared his father's interest in trading horses and mules. Harry preferred to read. Harry was one of the few boys in town who went to high school. Most of the students in his class were girls. He spent his spare time going to concerts ... when he wasn't devouring books.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: He claimed to have read every book in the little town library. He particularly liked biography and history. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee, they were his heroes and he wanted to be like they were.

NARRATOR: Everything he learned reinforced his native optimism and taught him to admire the simple, old-fashioned virtues.

"A true heart, a strong mind, and a great deal of courage," he wrote in a school composition, "and I think a man will get through the world."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Truman grew up in a town where there were certain standards of behavior. Selfishness is not tolerated; hypocrisy is detested. You were put down if you started acting a little to big for your britches and you judge people by the work they do, doing a good job.

NARRATOR: Independence, Harry said, was a place where "Right was right and wrong was wrong, and you didn't have to talk about it." Throughout his life, Truman would idealize his hometown. But Independence was also a place where Catholics and Jews were not to be trusted, Italians and Irish not to be hired. Blacks lived in a cluster of shacks called "Nigger Neck."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Independence, Missouri was more like the South than it was like the Midwest. It was a Jim Crow town. When the Civil War veterans gathered on the town square for reunions they were Confederate veterans. And Truman grew up in a family where racial slurs were used. Where old habits of the mind and the mouth prevailed.

ALONZO HAMBY: Harry's grandmother especially just hated Abe Lincoln. Harry's mother didn't feel very good about Abe Lincoln either. Her, her big hero was Robert E. Lee, and you get the impression from what you learn about Truman's mother that she thought John Wilkes Booth was a great man.

NARRATOR: Harry began life with all the prejudices of his family, and most of his friends and neighbors. The best and worst of small town America helped shape his moral imagination.

In 1900, Harry and his father went to the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City. John Truman was a life-long Democrat, who passed his staunch party convictions along to his son.

It was the 16-year-old boy's first taste of national politics, and he loved it ... the crowds, the hoopla, and as the new century began, the spirit of optimism that filled the air -- the dreams of better and better times ahead.

John Truman had his own dreams. Fiercely ambitious, always attracted to the big score, he began speculating in grain futures.

ALONZO HAMBY: He wanted to get rich. He thought you had to work hard. He was an enormously hard worker, but he thought you needed some luck in order to get rich. And he bet the family savings and indeed eventually the family home in Independence on the grain markets.

NARRATOR: "Youth, the Hope of the World," read the Latin slogan above the heads of Harry Truman's 1901 high school graduating class.

But now at 17, Harry's own hopes were shattered. He had wanted to go to college. But his father's gamble on the grain markets proved disastrous, and the Trumans lost everything they owned.

But Harry never complained about his luck. He never would. Determined to help support his family, he headed for nearby Kansas City.

back to top