Transcript: Chapter 10

NARRATOR: The vice president, Truman would say, is a "political eunuch." He presided over the Senate, writing letters home during the long senatorial debates, dropping by for a late afternoon drink with his old friends in Congress.

He seemed wholly unaffected by his new title -- "homespun as ever," one senator remarked. One afternoon, at a luncheon at the National Press Club, the vice president sat down at the piano to play the Missouri Waltz.

ALONZO HAMBY: Suddenly a young beautiful actress, Lauren Bacall, perches herself on top of the piano for some publicity portraits, showing a rather daring amount of leg by 1945 standards. Truman doesn't quite know how to react to this. He does what is probably the only intelligent thing to do, which is to keep smiling and keep playing the piano.

NARRATOR: Flashbulbs exploded. The audience cheered. The photos were an international sensation. Bess was furious.

ALONZO HAMBY: It did have kind of a loose association with the idea of the vice president being the piano player in a house of ill-repute.

Throughout his vice presidency, Truman was always kept outside Roosevelt's inner circle. FDR never took Truman into his confidence. The vice president met alone with the president just two times. He could never shake, Truman said, the feeling that the Roosevelt White House considered him "small potatoes."

Alonzo Hamby: He has what you might almost call a love-hate relationship with Roosevelt by this time. He admires him on the one-hand, doesn't quite trust him on the other hand. And the fact is that Roosevelt didn't pay much attention to his new vice president.

NARRATOR: Even when they had met for a private luncheon at the White House during the campaign, Roosevelt told Truman nothing of importance, posing for photographers and making small talk.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: And it was as that point that Truman saw Roosevelt close-up for the first time. And saw how badly he looked. Saw the circles under his eyes, saw the droop of his shoulders, and noticed that when Roosevelt went to pour his cream into his coffee that his hand trembled so he could hardly do it.

NARRATOR: "I had been afraid for many weeks that something might happen," Truman admitted. "But I didn't allow myself to think about it."

ROBERT LIFTON, Biographer: I think Truman and everybody else at one level knew that Roosevelt wouldn't live out his term. But there was a shared denial that was overwhelming. It came from Roosevelt and from Truman. So that the result was that there was absolutely no preparation of the vice president by a very sick president for the presidency. And Truman, he didn't take the most modest kind of effort toward imagining himself as president and preparing himself for the presidency.

ALONZO HAMBY: He tells a friend in Missouri that Roosevelt has the pallor death on his face. He's very worried that he's going to have the presidency thrust on him and that it might happen at any moment.

NARRATOR: On April 12, 1945, Truman rushed to the White House. Franklin Roosevelt was dead. Vice president for just 82 days, Harry S. Truman was now president of the United States. He was frightened and insecure. "I'm not big enough for this job," Truman said. After taking the oath, Truman gathered his cabinet around him. He barely knew these men.

Now he asked for their support. Secretary of War Henry Stimson remained while the rest silently drifted away. "He wanted me to know about an immense project," Truman wrote later, "to develop a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. That was all he felt free to say at the time, and his statement left me puzzled." Harry Truman was president, and he knew nothing about the atomic bomb.

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