NARRATOR:  In 1944, a little-known Senator from Missouri was campaigning for the office of Vice-President. New Orleans, Houston, Portland, Seattle, Boston, New York City, Washington, Pittsburgh, St. Louis - he criss-crossed America.

One night in his private pullman car, he awoke in a cold sweat. He had dreamed that Franklin Roosevelt had died, and he, Harry Truman, was President of the United States. In all his life, Truman told a reporter, he had never had such a terrifying nightmare.

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:  (SOF)

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 3 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.

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 6 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 5 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 5 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 home town. 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. For a seventeen-year-old boy just starting out in life, Kansas City was brimming with possibilities.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  It's a big, rough, boisterous, overgrown cowtown. It's got everything, including lots of opportunity for sin if that's what you wanted. Prostitution, gambling, and wide-open, all night hell-raising. To what extent Harry experienced any of that we'll never know. My suspicion is not at all. He was a good boy.

CHARLES BABCOCK:  Harry was a nice guy. And his mother had raised him very well. I don't think he was about to get in trouble in Kansas City even though a lot of people did in those days, you know. Harry didn't have a lot of money so he worked all the time, so he couldn't get in very much trouble that way because his time was spent working.

NARRATOR:  Mailroom boy for a newspaper, timekeeper for a railroad construction company, bank clerk - Harry took what jobs came his way, and made the most of them. Kansas City, Harry reported, was a place with "things doing." He went to concerts, theater and vaudeville, saw the 4 Cohans and Sara Bernhardt. Once he heard Theodore Roosevelt speak from the back of a railroad car. The President, Harry thought, appeared to be surprisingly short. He joined the national guard and enjoyed the company of other young men. Women, though, were another matter. "I was always afraid of girls," he once wrote.

After 4 years, Harry was drawing a good salary as a bank clerk and finding new friends. He was 21 years old, just beginning to make a life for himself, when once again his father thwarted his ambitions.

Down on his luck, John Truman had been forced to sell his house, all his livestock, and had even taken a job as a night watchman. He saw his chance to get back on his feet when his wife's mother asked him to take over the family farm 15 miles South of Independence. But he knew he couldn't run the huge 600 acre farm without the help of both his sons. He told Harry to quit his job and come home. Again, without complaint, Harry did as he was told.

CHARLES BABCOCK:  I don't think he was by nature a farmer. I think he liked people better. So it was tough on him. He didn't want to do it, I'm sure.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  It was hard work, hard, hard work, and blistering heat in the summer time in western Missouri. And cold, cold winters where the whole landscape turned to iron. And he'd never done this before, this was new to him. He'd grown up in town, he'd gone to work in the bank, he had clerks jobs, he looked like a clerk.

ALONZO HAMBY:  He remembered in later years friends who told him he wouldn't last 6 months. And he'd be back at work at the bank.

NARRATOR:  John Truman was a stern taskmaster.

"If a crooked row, or a blank space showed in the cornfield or wheat," Harry remembered, "I'd hear about it for a year."

ALONZO HAMBY:  He's working for his father, and working for John Truman wouldn't have been easy...but he was determined to prove he could do it. I think he was still dissatisfied with his relationship with his father and thought that maybe this was his last opportunity to repair it.

NARRATOR:  For nearly 8 years, Harry worked at his father's side.

"We were real partners," Harry remembered. "He thought I was about right. I knew he was."

"Dear Bessie,

I've been sowing oats all week, and hauled about six tons of hay yesterday.... You know the wind blew something fierce last Tuesday and Wednesday and the sun also had some effect. Between them I look like raw beef."

To escape the drudgery of his daily life, Harry stole time to write a young woman from his high school graduating class - Elizabeth Wallace -- Bess.

SUE GENTRY, Editor, The Independence Examiner:  The story he tells, they were in Sunday school together when they were six years old. There was a year's difference in their age. And from that moment on, he thought of no one else but that blue-eyed, golden haired little girl.

NARRATOR:  It took five years, Harry said, before he could summon the courage even to talk to her. He would remain in awe of Bess for the rest of his life.

Bess was popular, outgoing and a great athlete. A superb tennis player, the best female fencer in town, and a terrific third baseman.

SUE GENTRY:  She belonged to a special family in Independence. A family that was prominent and recognized. Of course Harry came- was from a farm family.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Bess Wallace and her family lived in one of the biggest houses in Independence. They had a servant to wait on the tables, there were lace curtains in the windows and Brussells carpets on the floor. And you walked up those steps onto the Wallace front porch and you rang the doorbell and when you crossed the threshold into that house, if you were Harry Truman, you were stepping into a different world, where people didn't work with their hands, where to all that he knew at least, they had no such thing as debt or worry, or concern about weather and insects and all the- all the burdens of farm life. And he courted her with a determination that is very expressive of the kind of man he was. It was his first campaign. And he didn't give up.

NARRATOR:  He wrote her letter after letter, day after day.

LETTERS

"Dear Bessie,

I don't care what kind of paper you write on. I should be just as pleased to get a letter from you on wrapping paper as on the finest stationery."

....You certainly did write me one fine letter (put the emphasis on fine, not on one, because they're all fine)..."

"Dear Bess,

I shall sure be glad to go to Salisbury's for dinner Sunday. But don't you think I am a terrible tightwad if we walk?"

Harry was in love, but Bess held herself aloof.

SUE GENTRY:  She had lots of beaux. And her mother always thought, so I'm told, that Bess could do better than Harry, a farm boy.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  I once asked Mae Wallace, Harry Truman's sister-in-law, if it was true that Mrs. Wallace, her mother-in-law Madge Wallace, didn't think that Harry was good enough for Bess. And she said, "Oh, yes, that's right. She didn't think Harry was good enough for Bess, but she didn't think anyone was good enough for Bess."

NARRATOR:  Madge Wallace would never think Harry was good enough.

Once a beautiful girl from a much admired family, she had become a reclusive troubled woman, grown more and more dependent on her only daughter, ever since the tragic death of her husband.

ALONZO HAMBY:  Precisely why David Wallace got up very early one morning, climbed into the family bath tub, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger we don't really know. Some accounts have it he was depressed because he was heavily in debt. But why would such a fine man do this?

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Bess' father was an extremely popular, charming man who often rode the horse at the head of political parades. But he was an alcoholic. And like the character in the poem Richard Cory he went home one night and put a bullet through his head. And his wife, Bess' mother, came apart. She never was able to cope again.

NARRATOR:  Her husband's suicide scandalized the small town. Madge Wallace became, someone said, "a prisoner of shame."

ALONZO HAMBY:  It cast a pall over the rest of her life. Mrs. Wallace gave Bess the impression that it was Bess' duty to take care of her. Her mother became very reliant on her.

NARRATOR:  Bess was just 18. A neighbor remembered how, in the hours immediately following her father's suicide, "Bess was walking up and down in back of the house with clenched fists."

"Dear Bessie

I certainly enjoyed myself the evening I was there and you may be assured that I shall repeat the offense as often as I can or you will allow me. The cake and coffee couldn't be beat.... there's nothing better than cake but more cake.

Bess was 25 when Harry first began to court her. She was a young woman on the verge of spinsterhood, the bonds forged by maternal need and filial duty drawing ever more tightly around her.

But Harry idolized her. All through elementary and high school, he had shyly loved her -- from afar. Even as a young man in Kansas City, he had dreamed always and only of Bess.

Now he was 26. And he had never had a girlfriend.

ALONZO HAMBY:  Truman from the time he was a kid had always been somewhat uneasy with the opposite sex. Maybe Bess' distance and his idealization of her provided an excuse for not getting involved with women for a long time. He's been hooked on this woman ever since he met her at the age of 5, and he has never been able to get interested in any other women since.

NARRATOR:  Harry saw Bess whenever he could, nearly every Sunday. They enjoyed concerts, plays, and continued to exchange letters: Dear Bessie,

You may be very, very sure that your letters cannot possibly come too often or too regular for me...

Dear Bessie,

My voice is somewhat weary from yelling at the horses. Please write me when you have the time as I enjoy your letters very much...

Finally Harry drew up his courage and proposed -- in a letter: Dear Bessie: You may not have guessed it but I've been crazy about you ever since we went to Sunday school together. But I never had the nerve to think you'd even look at me. I don't think so now but I can't keep from telling you what I think of you.

Were I an Italian or a poet I would use all the luscious language of two continents. I am not either but only a kind of good-for-nothing American farmer... If you turn me down, I'll not be thoroughly disappointed, for it's no more than I expect. Please write as soon as you feel that way. The sooner, the better pleased I am.

More than Sincerely,

Harry

It took Bess three weeks to respond. She refused.

And Harry wrote to thank her for not ridiculing him.

"You know you turned me down so easy I am almost happy anyway. I was never fool enough to think that a girl like you could ever care for a fellow like me.

NARRATOR:  But Harry wouldn't give up. He bought a second-hand Stafford touring car to take Bess courting. When he learned that she liked tennis, Harry built her a grass tennis court out behind the farmhouse and threw a tennis party in her honor. She didn't come.

"I really worked all day Sunday getting that court ready for you," he wrote her. "We also had a supply of watermelons on hand. But you can make it some Saturday, and Mamma says you must come to dinner next time."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Persistence is a very strong theme in Harry Truman. He doesn't give up very easily. He really set his mind that Bess was the one. And she always would be. Never any variation in that. He just kept at it--

NARRATOR:  2 years after she had turned him down, Bess began to change her mind. She told Harry that if she ever married anyone, it would be him.

"Dear Bess,

"It doesn't seem real that you should care for me... I've always thought that the best man in the world is hardly good enough for any woman. But when it comes to the best girl in all the universe caring for an ordinary gink like me - well, you just have to let me get used to it. I'm all puffed up and hilarious and happy."

But Bess would never marry a farmer. The farm was $12,000 in debt, and Harry was still working for his father. Then, in 1914, John Truman, straining to remove a boulder from a road, severely injured himself. X-rays revealed a tumor blocking his intestine. Doctors recommended surgery, but held out little hope. The operation failed. Harry saw his father grow weaker and weaker. Near death, the wiry, once ambitious man looked back on his life. "I have been," he told his son, "a failure." On the evening of November 2, 1914, Harry rested at his father's bedside. "I had been sitting with him and watching a long time," Truman said later. "When I woke up he was dead." Years later, when a writer asked Truman if his father had been a failure, Harry told him, "How could he be a failure if his son became President of the United States?"

ALONZO HAMBY:  The death of John Truman was a liberation for Harry. Once he gets past the point of grief and shock at his father's death, he is finally free to set out in directions of his own. And he decides pretty quickly that those directions are going to be away from the farm.

NARRATOR:  After hearing tales of easy money to be made in Oklahoma, Harry headed South.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He's going to do as his father had done, only make what his father had tried, work. His father gambled. His father gambled and lost. He was going to gamble and win.

NARRATOR:  Harry borrowed several thousand dollars against his livestock, and gambled it on a zinc mine.

CHARLES BABCOCK:  He decided he'd get rich quick to catch up with Bess, because Bess was well to do.

NARRATOR:  Dear Bess,

Our foreman says we have a much better mine than he expected... When I see you I hope to tell you that we are going full blast and making ore so fast it makes our heads swim."

ALONZO HAMBY:  He seems to assume that things are not going to go wrong, you work hard, lady luck will be on your side and you'll make it. But what Harry doesn't understand and what he's never good at is that you buy low and you sell high.

NARRATOR:  Dear Bess,

The mine has gone by the board. I have lost out on it entirely. There was never one of our name who had sense enough to make money. I am no exception.... You would do better perhaps if you pitch me into the ash heap and pick someone with more sense and ability and not such a soft head."

But he sank another $5,000 in an oil well company and convinced Bess to risk some money too.

"Dear Bess,

People seem to think our... project has some merit. We got $225 yesterday.... Hope to see you Sunday, and be so full of oil that I'll float."

ALONZO HAMBY:  He is always optimistic. He comes out of this culture that says people can get ahead if they work hard. And then it also says if they have a little luck too.

NARRATOR:  Harry's company ran out of money and went bust. Bess lost everything she had invested. Harry sold his stake to a better-financed outfit. The new company kept drilling, and struck it rich. If Harry had hung on, drilled just a little deeper, he would have been a millionaire.

"Dear Bess,

I seem to have a grand and admirable ability for calling tails when heads come up. My luck should surely change. Sometime I should win. I have tried to stick. Worked, really did, like thunder for ten years to get that old farm in line... and I have had a crop failure every year. Thought I'd change my luck and see [where it's got me]."

Harry Truman was thirty-three years old and had failed at everything he had tried. But Harry didn't feel sorry for himself for long. He closed his letter by asking Bess,

"Can I come over Tuesday night? Just remember how crazy I am about you and forget all the rest."

When America went to war in 1917, young men from small towns all across the nation responded with patriotic fervor. Harry Truman was one of them. That spring Harry left the farm in the hands of his mother and sister and joined the army. And at long last, Bess agreed to marry him. But now Harry refused

"I don't think it would be right for me," he told her, "to ask you to tie yourself to a prospective cripple."

The Great War had already taken the lives of an entire generation of Europe's young men. 1 million men died at the Somme. Nearly another million more at Verdun. But for Harry, like other raw recruits, war still shimmered with romance. He later said that he was "stirred by the flame."

"I felt that I was Galahad after the Grail."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  There was no need for Truman to have ever gone to war. He was technically blind in one eye. His eyesight was so bad that he could never have gotten in at all but for the fact that he memorized the eye chart in advance of the examination. But he wanted to go. He was determined to go.

NARRATOR:  Harry had never been to college, never been in a fight in his life, but he earned the rank of captain, was sent to France and given command of 4 rapid-fire guns and 194 men.

On the morning of July 11, 1918, Captain Harry Truman introduced himself to the notorious Battery D, a rowdy bunch, mostly Irish from Kansas City, some of the most insubordinate soldiers in the United States Army.

"Never," Harry said later, "have I felt so nervous."

MCKINLEY WOODEN, Battery D:  We had been pretty tough bunch. We had got rid of three captains. But the first night he addressed the battery, he says, I didn't come over here to get along with you fellas. You're gonna get along with me. I said to an Irishman, "What do you think of the new captain." He says "Ninety days, ninety days."

NARRATOR:  "You could see," one of the men remembered, "that he was scared to death."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  World War I was the crucible for Truman. It was the formative experience of his life. It changed everything for him - changed him. Changed his understanding of himself.

NARRATOR:  At the end of August Captain Truman led his men into battle for the first time. Battery D opened fire on a company of German soldiers encamped four miles away. Before the Germans could return the fire, Truman ordered his men to take a new position, but they couldn't move without the horses to pull the cannons.

MCKINLEY WOODEN:  Harry gave the first sergeant orders to have the horses up at a certain hour. But the first sergeant was thirty minutes late in getting up there. We'd have been away from there if he had'a. That's where the trouble started.

NARRATOR:  It was dark and raining when the Germans opened fire. Battery D was trapped, it's big guns mired in the mud. The men panicked - many ran.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  And Truman is caught in the middle and he sees everybody taking off. And he stands there and he calls them every name he can think of and he knew a lot of names.

NARRATOR:  You "no good Irish sons of bitches" he hollered and ordered his soldiers to re-group. The men, stunned by his rage, inspired by his courage, did as they were told. Through the dark and rain, Truman marched them out of danger.

"Dear Bess,

The men think I am not much afraid of shells. But they don't know I was too scared to run..."

Battery D had escaped without a single casualty.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  And they thereafter saw him differently. Because he had stood his ground. And after a while they began to realize that this fellow with the eyeglasses and the bank clerk look about him was in fact a man of real determination.

NARRATOR:  "Captain Harry," the men decided, was good luck. "We have a captain," one soldier wrote his father, "who cannot be beat."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He was about as unheroic in his eyeglasses as one could be. But there is a photograph of him that is on his I.D. card. And he has his glasses off and you look at that photograph and you see the strength. You see what a rugged character he is. Harry Vaughan once said that, "if you want to understand Harry Truman you have to understand that he is one tough son of a bitch of a man." And if you look at that picture, you can see the iron. You can see what his men must have recognized and understood.

NARRATOR:  At night, Harry would sit and stare at a photograph he brought with him to Europe.

"Dear Bess,

I have two breast pockets in my blouse. Naturally you can guess whose picture stays in the left hand one... It has never left me... nor will it ever. I have looked at it many, many times and imagined that you were there in spirit, as I knew you were, and it helped a lot... I hope you have a most happy birthday and that you will never see another one without me to help celebrate and then may they go on without end..."

By November, the war to end all wars was over. Captain Truman and the boys from Battery D had seen some of the bloodiest fighting in American history.

"Dear Bess,

You know I have succeeded at doing what was my greatest ambition to do at the beginning of the war. That is to take a Battery through and not lose a man. We fired some ten thousand rounds at Heinie and were shelled ourselves time and again but never did the Hun score a hit on me."

ALONZO HAMBY:  Truman's wartime service was awfully important to him because it was the greatest success he had had in his life up 'till that point. He comes out of it having established himself as a leader of men. That's something he never could have said about himself at any point earlier in his life.

NARRATOR:  In January, 1919 Harry watched as President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris to a tumultuous reception. World leaders were gathering to ensure a lasting peace, empires had fallen, the map of Europe was about to be re-drawn, but Harry Truman simply wanted to go back to Missouri.

"For my part," he wrote, "I don't give a whoop whether there's a League of Nations or whether Russia has a Red government or a Purple one and if the President of the Czecho-slovaks wants to pry the throne from under the King of Bohemia, let him pry, but send us home.

But it would be months before the army would let Harry go back to Missouri. He toured France, saw the Riviera and Paris -- the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Folies Bergere. Forty years later Harry would remember it as "disgusting." At the time he wrote that it was what you'd expect to see in Kansas City - "only more so."

7 weeks after returning home, on June 28, 1919, a day so hot the flowers in the chapel wilted, Harry Truman married Bess Wallace at tiny Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence.

Harry was thirty-five. 29 years had passed since he had first seen Bess in Sunday School; 8 years since he'd first proposed. He had never dated another woman.

One of Truman's men from Battery D wrote him,

"I hope you have the same success in this new war as you had in the old."

After a honeymoon on the Great Lakes, Harry moved all of his belongings into his mother-in-law's house.

ALONZO HAMBY:  I think it was very important to Bess that he was willing to live with her obligations to Mrs. Wallace and absolutely live with Mrs. Wallace who was an awfully hard person to live with. Harry spent much of his adult life almost being a punching bag for her. He never talked back to her. He forced himself to think only the nicest thoughts about her, at least as far as anything that's ever been recorded.

NARRATOR:  Although his new bride assured him the situation was temporary, Harry would live with Bess' family for the next 15 years. In 1919, as America celebrated the end of World War I, Harry Truman was just another soldier in search of a job. Eddie Jacobson - Harry's old army buddy - was out of work too. Eddie suggested they go into business together in downtown Kansas City. Just before Christmas, they opened up a little haberdashery on 12th Street selling "gents furnishings". Kansas City had grown famous for its soul stirring jazz. Harry didn't take much to the music, never even learned to dance, but jazz made the downtown swing - and that was good for business. Everybody seemed to have money to spend. "We sold shirts at 16 dollars," Eddie remembered.

RUTH GRUBER, Jacobson Family Friend:  Harry was the salesman, and Eddie was the buyer. They really understood each other in the business. There were no conflicts. And they were good buddies. They played poker every Saturday night. Truman called Eddie you bald-headed SOB. They were cut from the same Midwestern cloth... except that the religious background was not the same.

NARRATOR:  Eddie Jacobson was Jewish, born on New York City's lower east side. Although Harry and Eddie were friends, Harry couldn't bring Eddie home for dinner -Bess' mother objected. Harry and Eddie made a good team. They worked hard - from eight in the morning to 9 at night - but the little haberdashery struggled. And in 1922, after just 2 years, caught in a post-war recession, it went under. Harry was 38 and deep in debt.

"Went into business all enthusiastic," he wrote. Lost all I had and all I could borrow." Feeling "fairly blue."

Harry was facing failure once again, but his luck was finally about to change.

Old army pal Jim Pendergast thought Truman's war record would make him a good candidate for political office and put in a call to his uncle Tom.

NARRATOR:  Tom Pendergast was a raw-boned, thick-necked, spat-wearing Irishman. Crass and colorful, Pendergast was a hard drinker and a reckless gambler. In time, he would lose, some said, 6 million dollars on the ponies. But he knew how to win at politics. A tough, backstage operator, he would build a political machine so strong and control it with such an iron grip that one day pundits would call Kansas City "Tom's Town." Pendergast made money selling the county concrete and real estate - monopolizing the market and lining his pockets with lucrative kickbacks. But in Kansas City in the 20's there were many ways to get rich. Gambling, bootleg liquor, prostitution, narcotics - Pendergast was into all of it. He was deeply involved in the Kansas City rackets, and manipulated Jackson county politics.

In 1922, when Pendergast needed someone to stand for county commissioner, or judge as the position was called, Pendergast chose war hero, Harry Truman. Harry saw his chance, and without hesitation, grabbed it.

KEN HECHLER, White House Assistant:  Pendergast turned to Truman to sort of perfume the Pendergast machine by getting a person who had integrity, who also had strong support among veterans of WWI.

NARRATOR:  But Pendergast did not yet control all of Jackson county. Harry would have to campaign hard, and he was green. He counted on Pendergast, his war record, and the boys from Battery D.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He was pathetic as a speaker. He could hardly express himself at all. And his pals from the army all went out and campaigned hard for him. And they would cheer at every rally and they would try and whip up excitement for their beloved Captain Harry. And at one point they decided it would be dramatic if Truman arrived by plane. So they got a World War I bi-plane, and one of the army pals flew the plane, Truman came sailing through the air, landed, climbed out of the plane, staggered across the field, violently ill, to a fence where he threw up in front of everybody, and that was sort of his first great entrance as a politician.

NARRATOR:  His speeches were blunt, his voice flat, his style coarse, even crude. But he liked politicking with the people of Jackson county, - the talk, the jokes, the camaraderie. He was tireless and energetic - and he won - by just 279 votes. He would be elected 2 more times in the next 10 years. After years of drift and failure, Harry Truman had finally settled into a career. County Commissioner was a big job. Harry was responsible for 700 employees and 7 million dollars a year.

WALT BODINE, Journalist:  He was famous, at that time for being a builder, and he built some great highways in Jackson County. That was at a time when they used to say of Missouri, "Stay out of Missouri and stay out of the mud."

NARRATOR:  Truman loved the job - the power, the prestige, the chance to do good things. He worked with Irish and Italian Catholics, and black community leaders, slowly moving away from small town prejudices. He earned a reputation for efficiency, honesty, won the respect of the newspapers. But he could not win the praise of Bess' mother, who disapproved of politics. But Harry never complained. His life had at last found direction. In 1924, Margaret, his first and only child, was born. Harry was nearly 40, with a daughter he adored, a wife he dearly loved, and dozens of friends.

He joined the Elks, the Masons, the American Legion, the American Veterans of Foreign Wars, the International Acquaintance league, and spent every Monday night in a backroom over a bank playing poker.

But he was troubled: Brought up to honor the difference between right and wrong, Harry found it more and more difficult to deal with the man to whom he owed his job. By 1930, Tom Pendergast dominated Kansas City politics while his involvement in Kansas City racketeering had become even more unsavory. The ruthless gangster Johnny Lazia was his lieutenant. Kansas City became notorious for shoot-outs, arson, kidnappings. Harry had nothing to do with mobsters, but he turned his back while Pendergast skimmed millions in public money. Torn between loyalty to Pendergast and his own self-respect, he began suffering from acute headaches, dizziness, insomnia. Pendergast demanded that Harry rig county contracts, Harry insisted on fair bidding. His honor, he said, was at stake. Pendergast told Harry his honor wasn't worth a pinch of snuff. Harry's anxiety grew so great that he quietly took a room at a hotel in downtown Kansas City, and poured out his troubles on pages he kept, but would never show anyone.

"Am I just a crook," he wrote, "to compromise in order to get the job done..."

DIARY

"I wonder if I did right... [I saved $3,500,000] but I had to put a lot of no good sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers. I believe I did do right."

Harry refused to condemn Pendergast himself: "He owned a bawdy house, a saloon and gambling establishment," Harry wrote, "but he's all man."

Harry did agree to give county jobs to machine loyalists, relatives, and friends, but he resolved never to take a bribe or a kickback himself.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Truman accepted his association with the Pendergasts as the price he had to pay to be in politics - not unlike, one might say, accepting living with Madge Wallace and in his mother-in-law's house as the price he had to pay to marry Bess.

NARRATOR:  In 1932, when Harry went with Pendergast to the Democratic convention in Chicago, he saw Franklin Roosevelt for the first time.

FDR:  Give me your help in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

NARRATOR:  In accepting his party's nomination, the fifty-one year old Roosevelt achieved a lifelong ambition.

Harry S. Truman was 48, unknown outside of Missouri. Now for the first time, he began to reveal his own ambitions. He let it be known that he wanted to run for Governor, or Congress. But Pendergast had other candidates in mind. Then, in 1934, when Pendergast was looking for a new Senator, some of the boss's aides recommended Harry.

"Do you mean to tell me," Pendergast bellowed "you actually believe that Harry Truman can be elected to the United States Senate?"

After three other men turned him down, Pendergast settled for Harry Truman and backed him in the Missouri primary. Truman's opponents called him Pendergast's bellhop. The election turned on Kansas City, where Pendergast made certain that Truman got all but 11,000 of its 148,000 votes.

KEN HECHLER:  Pendergast actually stuffed the ballot boxes with illegal votes and people that weren't registered.

NARRATOR:  The new United States Senator from Missouri was 50 years old - and had never been to Washington for more than a few days.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  So off he goes to Washington and Tom Pendergast's parting words to the new Senator from Missouri are, "Keep your mouth shut and answer your mail." And he arrives in Washington with a shadow over him, a cloud over him as the "Senator from Pendergast." And there are certain senators who won't even speak to him because he has such a stigma attached to him.

NARRATOR:  Harry, Bess, and Margaret settled into the nation's capital, moving into an inexpensive, 4 room apartment. But Bess wasn't happy there. She lasted just 5 months before she returned to Independence. Her mother wanted her home. She and Margaret shuttled back and forth to Washington, where the Trumans rented one small apartment after another. Throughout Harry's years in the Senate, Bess spent much of her time in Independence, leaving Senator Truman heartsick and lonely.

Dear Bess,

I've been wandering around like a lost soul this morning...It's a wrench to be without you. I never missed you so much before...

Dear Bess,

Your card was a lifesaver this morning. I never in my life spent such a lonesome night.

Dear Bess,

Your letter came on the second mail so everything is all right...

Dear Bess,

Your letter was in the first mail

Dear Bess,

I do wish you'd let me hear at least every other day.

Dear Bess,

Dreamed about you last night. Thought we were going through a flood together. We got through without disaster. The weather has been fine.

Dear Bess,

It was good to hear your voice last night, but not half as good as really seeing and talking to you --

Dear Bess,

I was so lonesome last night...even if my combination of words makes you sick sometimes...

Dear Bess,

Happy Birthday!...If your dress doesn't fit you send it back and we'll get a larger one.

Dear Bess,

You don't know how much I appreciated the letter that came in the morning's mail. I was so devilishly homesick...I could see you standing out there in the yard watching me drive away and I don't think you kissed me goodbye...

NARRATOR:  It would be years before Senator Truman gained enough confidence to work himself out from under Pendergast's shadow.

"He came in," a friend remembered, "with a real inferiority complex."

"I was as timid," Truman later wrote "as a country boy arriving on the campus of a great university."

With America caught in the grips of the Depression - Truman fell in line with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs. He called Roosevelt "the greatest of the greats."

But Roosevelt himself had no use for the junior Senator from Missouri. It took 5 months before the White House summoned Truman for a 15 minute meeting. After just 7 minutes, Truman was shown the door.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Roosevelt would have nothing to do with him. Roosevelt really gave him the back of his hand. People on the White House staff gave him the back of their hands. He couldn't get appointments. He wasn't somebody that they took very seriously.

NARRATOR:  Truman sat for months in the Senate Chamber without making a single speech. He was known as "Go-along, get-along Harry."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He has to prove to the people in the Senate, that he's somebody to be taken seriously, that he's a hard worker and that he's honest and that he's going to do the job. And he gave it everything he had. He would work longer days, harder days than anybody. He was in there before anybody showed up. He was assigned to committees and he would show up when nobody else would show up for dreary committee sessions and dreary committee hearings, very often the only one there listening to hours and hours of deadly testimony about deadly subjects, but he was going to do the job. He was going to learn the business. And, as time went by, in a matter of about 3 or 4 years, they began to realize what kind of a fellow they had on their hands.

NARRATOR:  Slowly, Truman began to prove himself. But even as he became more and more independent, he remained loyal to Tom Pendergast. He kept a framed portrait of the Missouri Boss in his office, even though Pendergast was in trouble. Pendergast was seriously ill, his gambling out of control, his debts in the millions. In 1939, a grand jury indicted him for tax evasion. Convicted, he was sentenced to prison for 15 months and banned from politics for 5 years. The scandal tainted Truman: and it couldn't have come at a worse time - in 1940, he was up for re-election. His opponents derided him as a fraudulent Senator, elected by ghost votes - a Pendergast lackey. Truman tried to convince voters that President Roosevelt supported him, but Roosevelt never did.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Roosevelt wanted to distance himself from Harry Truman. Roosevelt considered Truman an embarrassment to the Democratic party.

NARRATOR:  Without the support of the President, or Pendergast, Truman had to go it alone. Most observers didn't give him a chance. But he never gave up. And eked out a narrow victory - he won by just 8,000 votes. Truman returned to the Senate his own man, but he would remain a backbencher, until once again, a war would reveal his strength as a leader - and catapult him into the limelight. 1940 - Nazi armies swept across Europe. Great Britain was under attack. The United States wasn't in it yet, but America was getting ready. Building planes, munitions, tanks, army camps...Back in Washington, Truman was receiving complaints about waste, mismanagement, and even fraud, and all by himself, he decided to look into it.

WILBUR SPARKS, Truman Investigating Committee:  Without letting anybody in his party know what he was doing, he decided to go see for himself. And he took a long automobile drive... as I recall, he drove a dirty old Dodge in those days. And he climbed in his Dodge..drove south. He must have had a list of camps that were being built...And wherever he went, he stopped in one of these. He went in and started asking questions. Nobody ever asked him who he was or why he was asking these questions. He'd talk to workers. He'd talk to foremen.

NARRATOR:  Truman was appalled by what he saw.

"There were hundreds of men," he said, "just standing around collecting their pay, doing nothing."

WILBUR SPARKS:  He saw big piles of lumber just lying there. Nobody was using it. Trucks standing still and rusting.

NARRATOR:  Congress had authorized more than 10 billion dollars for defense contracts in just 6 months. From his own highly personal investigation, Truman feared the money was being squandered. On February 10, 1941, Senator Truman proposed the formation of a committee to investigate the entire national Defense Program.

WILBUR SPARKS:  The White House didn't like the idea at all. They didn't want anybody poking into what they were doing, but they thought that at the outset that they could probably control Harry Truman and that he would do just about anything the leadership of the Senate wanted him to do. They found out different.

NARRATOR:  On Dec. 8 America went to war. Truman was all at once thrust center stage. Labeled as the lackey of one of the most corrupt bosses in America, he would now move to stamp out corruption in the largest war machine ever assembled. Truman took on the most powerful men in America, and the country's largest industries - steel, aluminum, rubber, airplanes.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He had a distrust of big business, a distrust of Wall Street and he went after the people who were really selling shoddy goods or doing things that were clearly unpatriotic...

WILBUR SPARKS:  In a hearing he showed absolutely no fear. He made it clear that he meant business. He was not afraid to say anything to anybody. He was feared.

TRUMAN:  The committee investigating the national defense program has found waste, inefficiency, mismanagement and profiteering.

NARRATOR:  He questioned witnesses relentlessly, attacking them for bad planning, sloppy administration, graft. His reputation soared. The committee became known as the Truman Committee. He personally saved the nation billions of dollars. Reporters named him one of the ten most valuable men in Washington.

"The sudden emergence of Harry Truman in the Senate," Time magazine wrote, "is a queer accident of democracy."

Even President Roosevelt wanted some of the credit: "Yes, Yes," Roosevelt said , "I put him in charge of that war investigating committee, didn't I?"

KEN HECHLER:  Here was one of the products of one of the most corrupt political machines in the nation... the Pendergast machine.... yet he was able to rise above it. And that's one of the remarkable things about Harry Truman.

NARRATOR:  At last, Truman had found a home in the Senate. Popular, nationally known, he became an insider, a respected member of one of the most powerful clubs in America. His private life, too, had settled into a comfortable routine. Margaret Truman -- "Miss Skinny," Harry liked to call her -- had begun singing lessons and was already talking of a singing career. He looked always, his daughter said, as if he had just stepped from a bandbox. His suits were always cleaned and pressed, his style immaculate.

To Bess, he remained completely devoted.

"Dear Bess,

Well, I doubt you will remember it, but tomorrow is an anniversary of vital importance.... 23 years have been extremely short and for me altogether most happy ones.... A failure as a farmer, a miner, an oil promoter, and a merchant, but finally hit the groove as a public servant - and that due mostly to you and lady luck."

Senator Truman was content. But in the summer of 1943, he began to hear disturbing talk. Certain people wanted him to run for Vice-President. Truman called them "blowhards."

On July 18, 1944, when the Democrats convened in Chicago, the rumors that Harry Truman was going to be the next Vice-President were still just rumors. He had, in fact, arrived at the convention prepared to nominate another man.

"I don't want to be Vice-President," he would tell anyone who asked.

He was convinced that the President did not like him. But in 1944, the President would not dictate the choice for Vice-President. In the next few days, Harry Truman's fate would be decided by a group of powerful Democrats meeting behind closed doors.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  The future of the country and his own immediate future and fate are all in the hands of forces beyond his control... and he can't be anything but a kind of a chip on the surface of the water being swept along.

NARRATOR:  As the convention got underway, the Democrats prepared to give their nomination for the fourth time to Franklin Roosevelt. Many of them already knew it would be the last.

The President was ill. Diagnosed with heart disease, he had never asked, and was never told, the extent of his illness. But those close to him were frightened by the deathlike pallor that shadowed the once ebullient face.

PAT HANNEGAN, Daughter of Democratic Party Chairman:  It was not spoken of. The fact that Roosevelt might die. That was a deep, dark secret. It was war time and no one wanted to talk about the President failing in any way....[but] I think that had to be behind everybody's minds.

HARRY BYRD, Senator:  It was in the minds of many delegates that whoever was nominated for Vice President could very well become President within the next 4 years. The entire focus of that convention was on who would be nominated for the Vice Presidency.

NARRATOR:  The current Vice-President, Henry Wallace, was the man to beat. A champion of civil rights and labor, he was immensely popular with liberals, but conservative Democrats opposed him. Many of them turned to Jimmy Byrnes from South Carolina, a former Senator and Supreme Court Justice. An avowed segregationist, he was unacceptable to liberals. With the democrats divided, party leaders were searching for a compromise. Party Chairman Bob Hannegan wanted neither Wallace nor Byrnes.

PAT HANNEGAN:  My father and the other political advisors felt that Jimmy Byrnes would be a liability to the ticket. Southerners were a drawback at that time. Labor was not particularly fond of him. And my father was very concerned about Wallace as a possible President. He felt that he was sort of flaky. And from a politician's standpoint my father couldn't control him. So, my father felt that Truman would be somewhat blameless. That he would have no real drawbacks.

ALONZO HAMBY:  So he emerges as a compromise candidate. "The Missouri Compromise: some people say. He has conservative friends. Southerners like him. But he's been a good New Dealer. He's got labor union contacts. He emerges as the person everyone can agree on.

KEN HECHLER:  It was simply, actually a dipping into almost the bottom of the barrel, you could almost say, to appoint as Vice President, and to select as Vice President on the ticket, a man who didn't have anything against him.

CONVENTION SPEAKER (SOF):  Ladies and gentlemen of the convention...

NARRATOR:  Unknown to the delegates, the party bosses were determined to make Truman Vice-President. Two weeks before, they had made a trip to the White House.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  One July night in 1944, the big bosses met with Franklin Roosevelt and it was a very hot night, very humid with the long French doors open to the air and the curtain blowing and what little breeze there was, and they all sat around in their shirt sleeves, perspiring, talking about who ought to be the Vice Presidential choice. And the bosses all said it could not be Wallace, it could not be Byrnes, and it ought to be Truman. Roosevelt later told his son Jimmy that, in fact, he really didn't care. He was a tired, sick, ill man and his mind and what energy he had was all concentrated on the war.

PAT HANNEGAN:  I think my father and other party leaders did the choosing and Roosevelt went along with it. I don't think he cared at this point. I think it was, I don't think it was a matter of great concern to him. If it had been, he would have known very well how to put the matter to rest.

NARRATOR:  The most important Democrats were now lined up behind Truman, and, at the convention, Bob Hannegan told the Senator the Vice-Presidential nomination was his.

PAT HANNEGAN:  Once my father and his friends had pretty much set Truman up, then they had to convince Truman that he was going to run. And he was very much opposed to it, and he said he wouldn't do it.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He didn't want to be President and he certainly didn't want to be President after Franklin Roosevelt. He didn't want to come in and try and have to fill those enormous shoes. He didn't think he was qualified to be the President of the United States. He was very happy where he was, in the Senate. He had gone through the trauma of the Pendergast years where his name had been rubbed in the mud along with Pendergast machine, and it hurt his family. He was a very devoted family man. Bess had none of that kind of political ambition. She had no desire to see her husband become President. She certainly had no desire to be the First Lady. She didn't like the limelight and one of the reasons that they didn't want the nomination was a fear that her father's suicide would become public, that the country would find out that this disgraceful thing had happened in her past.

NARRATOR:  But the momentum was building toward a Truman Vice-Presidency, and Bess Truman would have to stand aside. On July 20, the party bosses summoned Truman to a suite in the Blackstone Hotel to listen in on a phone call that, unknown to the Senator, they had rehearsed in advance with the President.

PAT HANNEGAN:  My father got the President himself, President Roosevelt, to call him on the line and while he was on the line, he let Truman listen.

NARRATOR:  The President's voice boomed so loud everyone in the room could hear: "Have you got that fellow lined up yet?" the President asked.

"No," the President was told. "He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with."

"You tell the Senator," Roosevelt said, "that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that's his responsibility." And then he banged down the phone.

"Well," Truman said, pacing up and down the floor, "if that's the situation I'll have to say yes. But why the hell didn't he tell me in the first place?"

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM, CONVENTION ANNOUNCER:  Harry Truman has received more than a majority. I do now declare him to be the nominee of the Democratic Party for Vice President and the next Vice President of the United States.

NARRATOR:  On Friday, July 21, 1944, Harry Truman accepted his party's nomination for Vice-President.

PAT HANNEGAN:  I think he was somewhat excited. I don't think Mrs. Truman was happy at all. I don't recall her ever smiling the whole time. She was in a box not too far from us, and I don't recall any smiles down there. I think she was very unhappy about it.

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM, TRUMAN:  There's not much more that I can say to you except that I accept the honor with all the humility that a Senator of the United States can assume in this position. Thank you very much.

NARRATOR:  "After Dad's speech," Margaret Truman later wrote, "we were besieged by hordes of shouting, sweating photographers. Everyone wanted to touch us. Thankfully, the police formed a kind of phalanx around us, and we were able to get into a waiting car outside, where Mom looked at Dad, glared at him, and said, "Are we going to have to go through this for all the rest of our lives?"

As they headed back to Independence, Bess Truman refused to speak to anyone.

NEWSREEL OF TRUMANS READING LETTERS (SOF):  Margaret: Dad, here's a nice letter from Marion.

Truman: Oh, that's nice of Marion. You know I think Marion had a good time in Chicago. Here's one from your teacher, Miss Carr.

Margaret: Oh, Miss Carr.

Truman: And here's one from Mr. Buger from St. Louis. Listen to what he says, "Please convey my congratulations to your loyal wife, charming daughter and dear mother--whose great joy and happiness is shared by thousands of Americans. Isn't that nice?

Margaret: Certainly is.

PAT HANNEGAN:  Once he was in it he was all the way in it.

NEWSREEL OF TRUMANS READING LETTERS (SOF):  Margaret: Say Daddy, don't you wish you'd gone fishing last week.

Truman: Well, I did go on a sort of fishing trip to Chicago, or at least it resulted that way.

PAT HANNEGAN:  He was too much of a politician himself not to go for it all the way.

NARRATOR:  Truman campaigned with his usual energy and determination, travelling thousands of miles, skipping meals, washing his socks in the basin of his sleeping car.

ALONZO HAMBY:  He's designated as the party work horse. "This duty has been inflicted on me and I'm going to do it. But I'm apprehensive about the future."

NARRATOR:  The night that Roosevelt and Truman were elected, Harry Truman could hardly sleep. 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." 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 imaging 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.

NARRATOR:  The day after Franklin Roosevelt died, President Harry Truman met with reporters.

"Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now," he told them. I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."

"THE MOON, STARS, AND ALL THE PLANETS"

On his first full day in office, Truman surprised everyone with his show of energy and confidence.

ALONZO HAMBY:  Outwardly, Truman works very hard at looking confident, at seeming to be in charge. Privately, he clearly feels quite insecure about his new role. He lets close friends and confidantes know that this is a terrible challenge he faces.

NARRATOR:  "I'm scared," he admitted to his mother and sister. "Maybe it will come out all right."

His first chance to prove that he was up to the job came on April 16 when he addressed a joint session of Congress.

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM:  In just a moment you'll hear the voice of Speaker Rayburn as he introduces President Truman.

NARRATOR:  Anxious to reassure Americans - and himself- Truman fumbled.

He launched immediately into his speech, and all across the country, Americans listening on the radio heard the Speaker of the House correct him by his first name.

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM:  SAM RAYBURN'S VOICE

"Just a moment. Let me present you, will you, Harry?"

"Members of the Congress, I have the great pleasure and the high privilege of presenting to you the President of the United States."

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM:  TRUMAN

"In his infinite wisdom, almighty God has seen fit to take from us a great man who loved and was beloved by all humanity. No man could possibly fill the tremendous void left by the passing of that noble soul.

NARRATOR:  In spite of his nervous slip, the speech was a resounding success. Americans everywhere warmed to this seemingly simple, straightforward man from Missouri.

His small-town, folksy manner stood in striking contrast to the patrician manners of Franklin Roosevelt, and many Americans found the change refreshing.

"After a diet of caviar," an aide said, "You like to get back to ham and eggs."

ROBERT DONOVAN, Journalist:  Harry was a fresh and fast and darting about, and, the contrast sort of hit them. Truman was peppery and he'd walk along the street and the truck driver, I remember on one occasion, said, "Good luck, Harry!"

NARRATOR:  The press was soon praising him for his candor and cabinet officials for his hard work. Truman, many Americans, were saying was a man of the people.

ROBERT DONOVAN:  The thing I remember most, is his hand shake. I never felt such a hand shake. It finally dawned on me, this man had -- was a real dirt farmer. He worked behind a plow for ten years.

ALONZO HAMBY:  Truman was the ordinary American democrat, small "D". But did the American people want someone who was simply ordinary to lead them? Did they believe that someone of that type could? This is a problem that Truman would face throughout his Presidency.

NARRATOR:  When Truman took the oath of office, Americans were fighting the greatest war in history. All at once he was Commander-In-Chief of 16 million men and a terrifying arsenal of warships, tanks, and planes arrayed against the Japanese in the Pacific and Nazi Germany in Europe.

But what he knew about war came from his experience as a soldier in World War I and from books he had read as a child. Americans everywhere wondered how Harry Truman would end the war - and at what cost.

During Truman's first days in office, allied armies were sweeping toward Germany: the Soviet Union closed in from the East, the Americans from the West. But with the Nazi's on the verge of surrender, Truman feared that the Soviets could no longer be trusted.

The war-inspired alliance between Russia and America was beginning to come apart.

NARRATOR:  On April 22, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov paid a call on the White House. Molotov was a wily diplomat, a hardened veteran of the Russian Revolution.

Truman had been President for just 10 days. He had never negotiated a treaty before, never met a Russian in his life, and knew next to nothing about American foreign policy.

WALTER LAFEBER, Historian:  Truman was insecure and ignorant, ignorant not in the sense of being unintelligent. The man was very intelligent. Ignorant in the sense of not knowing what was going on. Of course, nobody really knew what was going on except Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was dead. The major problem was that the Red Army occupied much of Eastern Europe and was driving towards Berlin. And, consequently, what Truman faced was essentially a Russian occupation of Eastern and part of Central Europe.

NARRATOR:  Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin saw the countries of eastern and central Europe as a band of protection against any attempt to invade Russia. Truman feared Stalin would use the Red Army to force them to become communist.

"Whoever occupies a territory," Stalin said, "also imposes on it his own social system as far as his army can reach."

When Truman and Molotov sat down to talk, the fate of eastern Europe still hung in the balance. Truman believed the Soviets had already violated an agreement negotiated by Roosevelt... guaranteeing free elections in Poland.

The new President didn't hesitate to tell the Soviet Minister just what he thought.

MARSHALL SHULMAN, Assistant to the Secretary of State:  Truman gave him a -- a tongue-lashing-- "Why don't you people behave? Why don't you respect your obligations," and so on. And, according to Chip Bolin, who told me about this, who was the interpreter and was on the scene, said Molotov, in his stiff, ah, way, drew back and said, "I've never been talked to like this." And Truman said to him, "Well, you folks behave and you won't be talked to like this."

WALTER LAFEBER:  Truman then walked out of the room, saw a top State Department aide and said to the State Department aide, "I just gave him a straight one-two to the jaw." And then he stopped and looked at this man and said, "Do you think I did right."

NARRATOR:  "I'm here to make decisions," Truman said. "Whether they prove right or wrong, I'm going to make them." Within the next few months, Truman would have to make one of the most terrible decisions in history.

While Nazi Germany was crumbling, the Japanese remained a dangerous, unyielding enemy. They had already taken over fifty thousand American lives, and more and more were dying every day. But America had been developing a weapon that might force the Japanese to surrender. Just 13 days in office, Truman was handed a memorandum by Secretary of War Stimson: "Within four months," Truman read, "we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history."

Stimson went on to tell Truman about the secret site in New Mexico where scientists had been working round-the-clock for the past 2 1/2 years to fashion a weapon out of the elemental forces of the universe. But it would still be months, Stimson said, before any one would know whether the atomic bomb would work.

NARRATOR:  On May 8, Truman's 61st birthday, Nazi Germany surrendered. "Isn't that some birthday present?" he wrote his ninety-two year old mother. Now only Japan remained.

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM OF TRUMAN

"The victory won in the West must now be won in the East. The whole world must be cleansed of the evil from which half the world has been freed.

NARRATOR:  But Truman feared the Japanese would not surrender without a long and bloody struggle. Already they had been severely punished and yet showed no signs of yielding. While Truman was Vice-President, American B-29's had reined thousands of tons of bombs on the island nation. 5 weeks before he took office, American planes dropped 2 thousand tons of napalm on Tokyo, burning sixteen square miles of the city to the ground. In a single day, 100,000 Japanese were killed.

BARTON BERNSTEIN, Historian:  The fire-bombing raids prepares the way for even more devastating bombing. What has changed in the war is a redefinition of what is a legitimate target. A legitimate target is not simply a city, but people in the city who are primarily noncombatants in what is a redefined virtually total war. So that everybody becomes a target.

NARRATOR:  The bombing destroyed nearly all of Japan's biggest cities and killed more than half a million civilians. Still, the Japanese fought on.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Truman knew they were defeated, they knew they were defeated. That really wasn't the question, the question was would they surrender.

NARRATOR:  The battle for the island of Okinawa, 350 miles south of Japan, painted a bloody portrait for Truman of just how ferocious Japanese resistance could be. The fighting raged on for months. 10,000 Americans were killed, 27,000 wounded. And entrenched in the jungles and caves of the island, more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers were burned or bombed to death rather than surrender.

ROBERT LIFTON:  Okinawa was a bloody battle. One of the bloodiest battles of a vicious war. And Okinawa was an example of how much of a last ditch battle the Japanese could put up. And the kind of battle they might put up on their own islands in man to man combat. So Okinawa could be taken as an indicator that Japan needed dire measures to defeat it.

NARRATOR:  On June 1, with the struggle for Okinawa reaching a climax, Truman received a report from a committee he had appointed to study the atomic bomb. The committee urged the President to use the weapon - without warning. It did not recommend any alternatives.

BARTON BERNSTEIN:  The use of the bomb was not a topic of debate... the issue was never should the bomb be used....For us, the bomb, whether we approve or not, is a question that should have been asked. For them living history forward and not backward, what's important to understand is that the use of the bomb was not a question; it was an answer.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  If the weapon could stop the killing, then, it was felt, it had to be used. Was it right? Was it wrong? I don't think that was the issue. I think they saw it as necessary.

NARRATOR:  Truman did not know that some of the scientists who had helped create the bomb were now actively attempting to limit its use. They advocated a demonstration bomb that would convince the Japanese to surrender. Their petitions never reached the President, but it is unlikely they could have changed his mind.

GEORGE ELSEY, Administrative Assistant to the President:  I know of no occasion when President Truman ever spoke about doubts on -- on using the bomb. All his advisors, without exception, recommended the use of the bomb just as soon as it was available. And he agreed with them.

NARRATOR:  But the atomic bomb still remained untested. No one knew if it would work. June 18, Truman agreed to plans to invade Japan in early November. Tens of thousands of American soldiers were returning from the battlefields of Europe. For most, if the invasion went forward, it would be just weeks before they would sent back into battle. This time, fighting the Japanese.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  We were going to invade the home islands. And the loss of life would be terrible. And for Truman whether it was going to be 20,000 lives or 100,000 lives was not really the question. The question was to stop the killing.

ALONZO HAMBY:  Truman was one of the few Presidents of the 20th century to have actually experienced wartime combat. He had seen corpses stacked up. He knew what war was like. He was very, very anxious to get World War II over with as quickly as possible.

NARRATOR:  Only 30 days in office, Truman was still adjusting to the anxieties of being President, still telling his advisers that he didn't want the job. And Bess never wanted to be first lady. After just one month in the White House, Bess and Margaret went home to Independence.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Bess did not like living in the White House. She felt very uncomfortable, very ill-at-ease with all the fanfare and the attention of the press. Particularly when photographers pressed in around her, she would freeze and become kind of old stone face. And get an expression that looked as if her feet hurt. The spotlight, the limelight, did not appeal to Bess Truman ever. And she would return home to Independence as often as possible. Leaving the President feeling very alone, often desolate. It's hard for some people to understand what she was like and why the President was so devoted to her. But he adored her there's no question about that.

PAT HANNEGAN:  I think she was a very shy person. Very ill-at-ease in that kind of an environment. When she was in the White House she used to have her old bridge club from Independence, Missouri come up. And I think probably that's the only time she was really comfortable. So that there really was not a good niche for her. And I don't think she ever really enjoyed the public eye.

NARRATOR:  Bess Truman's first public appearance confirmed her worst fears.

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM:  At the National Airport, ambulances with wings- one each for Navy and Army. Ready to be christened by Mrs. Harry S. Truman, in her first public appearance. But Mrs. Truman is in for a surprise....Refusing to be rattled, the new First Lady joins in the crowd's laughter. By an oversight, the champaign bottle, unlike this one, hadn't been properly prepared-- etched to break the glass on impact. All's well that ends well.

NARRATOR:  Truman smiled when he saw the newsreel, as did most of America, but Bess is said to have told her husband she wished she had swung the bottle at him. On July 7th, the start of his 4th month in office, Truman steamed across the Atlantic on the United States cruiser Augusta. Destination -Potsdam, Germany.

"Dear Bess,

I sure dread this trip, worse than anything I've had to face. But it has to be done."

With scientists at Los Alamos poised to test the atomic bomb, Truman was about to begin a series of negotiations that would determine the fate of the post-war world.

He had been to Europe only once before - as a soldier on the western front. Now he was President of the United States, preparing to meet two of the legends of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin - "Mr. Great Britain" and "Mr. Russia," Truman called them.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Truman had to step onto the world stage with two of the most colossal figures of the century, two consummate performers, consummate actors who are very accustomed to commanding the stage. And who is he?

NARRATOR:  "Dear Bess,

The Prime Minister came to see me this morning."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Truman is suffering from a considerable amount of stage fright. He knows that Churchill had been 1st Lord of the Admiralty when Harry Truman was still plowing fields back in Missouri. He knows also the affection, the bond between Roosevelt and Churchill. And wonders if ever he can attain that kind of respect.

NARRATOR:  Churchill liked Truman, but the man from Missouri was not impressed by the Prime Minister's flattery: "Churchill gave me a lot of hooey," Truman wrote in his diary. "Well, I'm sure we can get along if he doesn't try to give me too much soft soap."

Following Churchill's visit, Truman asked to see Berlin. For months the German capitol had been the target of Allied bombs. Truman recorded his reactions in his diary.

"I never saw such destruction," Truman wrote. "I thought of Carthage, Rome, Babylon."

"What a pity the human animal is not able to put his moral thinking into practice. I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries."

NARRATOR:  While Truman was touring Berlin, the first atomic bomb was exploded over the deserts of New Mexico. Truman returned from his tour of a devastated Berlin to find Secretary of War Stimson with a coded telegram.

"Operated on this morning" it read. "Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations."

The President now knew that the atomic bomb would work. Plans were already in motion to drop a 2nd bomb as soon as possible - this one on Japan. The next day, Stalin came to call.

"A few minutes before 12:00," Truman wrote. "I looked up from my desk and there stood Stalin in the doorway."

"I got to my feet and advanced to meet him. He put out his hand and smiled."

One day Truman and Stalin would confront each other as enemies in the most dangerous ideological conflict in all of history. But on July 17 the United States and the Soviet Union were allies who had just defeated a terrible enemy. Both men were cordial and friendly.

ALONZO HAMBY:  Truman was rather impressed by Stalin. He thought that here was a tough guy. Stalin struck him as frank and straightforward, a sort of political boss type, who would keep his word once he gave it.

NARRATOR:  Truman said later that Stalin reminded him of the Missouri kingpin Tom Pendergast.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  Joseph Stalin was nothing like Tom Pendergast. This was one of the most blood thirsty, murdering, evil men of our time. But Truman had that very American idea - that old, American idea - that if he could just meet the fellow, shake his hand, look him in the eye, size him up - that they could work together, work things out. And everything would be o.k.

NARRATOR:  "I can deal with Stalin," Truman wrote. "He is honest but smart as hell." Stalin was less sanguine. He told an aide that Truman was worthless. The Soviet dictator had already determined that he would surrender nothing of any consequence when the bargaining began. That evening - July 17 - Truman, Stalin and Churchill sat down to discuss the fate of Eastern Europe.

WALTER LAFEBER:  The Soviet army is occupying Eastern Europe and parts of Central Europe. The question is, how do you negotiate the Russian armies out of Central and Eastern Europe?

NARRATOR:  Over the next 17 days, Truman would try to convince Stalin to withdraw his armies and allow the countries of eastern Europe to hold free elections.

"Dear Bess,

The first session was yesterday. It makes presiding over the Senate seem tame. The boys say I gave them an earful. I hope so. I was so scared. I didn't know whether things were going according to Hoyle or not."

While Truman was negotiating in Germany, the Enola Gay, a specially-modified, lightweight B-29, was soaring high above the island of Tinian, far-away in the Pacific, rehearsing maneuvers to drop the atomic bomb. A list of 4 target cities had been prepared. It was now all but certain that the bomb would be used on one of them within the next 3 weeks.

GEORGE ELSEY:  It was absolutely inevitable. It was a weapon that could bring the war to an early - immediate end. And in my view, had any President - Truman or anyone else - not used the bomb, that man would have been subject to impeachment.

ROBERT DONOVAN:  Here's a Democratic President. And the plan is about to move all our army now into the Pacific to invade Japan with who knows what casualties. And years later the public, or a few months later or sometime, it leaks out that the President had a bomb that would have ended all of that. What would have happened to the Democratic Party? What would have happened to Truman?

WALTER LAFEBER:  It was quite clear that the Bomb would not only shorten the war but it could be the kind of weapon that the other powers with which Truman had to deal would be in awe of. Consequently, there was no question about whether or not Truman was going to use the Bomb. The question was when and how and where.

NARRATOR:  At Potsdam, the negotiations were going nowhere. The first 3 sessions had ended in stalemate. On July 19, in the spirit of their war-inspired partnership, Truman threw a party for Churchill and Stalin and flew in two young American GI's to entertain - pianist Eugene List and violinist Stuart Canin.

STUART CANIN, Violinist:  I was so nervous when I started to play. I think I was shaking. Now I've been a professional violinist for 50 years. And I have never played for an audience like that. I mean I could barely hold the bow on the string. I don't know if you've ever seen a little upright piano, but it has kind of a bum piano rack. And the music was not staying put very well and Truman leaped up and he just turned the pages for Gene! Which was quite exciting, to have the President of the United States turn pages for you.

NARRATOR:  One night the President sat down at the piano and played for Canin and List a piece he had practiced for long hours as a boy in Independence, Missouri.

STUART CANIN:  The man had great feeling for music. He didn't always have the technique to do what he wanted. But the feeling was there and -- and you could sense that he really loved music. He said, "I wonder how much better off the country would have been if I had become a concert pianist?" Amazing for a President to say that!

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He took music very much to heart. He adored good music. He once wrote to Bess, "Did you ever hear an overture performed by a fine orchestra and imagine that things were as they ought to be instead of as they are?"

NARRATOR:  On July 21, two days after Truman's party for Churchill and Stalin, the President received a description of the test of the atomic bomb. For the first time, he became fully aware of its awesome power. Truman was told that thirteen pounds of explosives had evaporated a steel tower 60 feet high, left a crater in the New Mexican desert more than 2 miles wide, knocked down men 10,000 yards away, and was visible for more than 200 miles. Truman wrote in his diary: "We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied ... after Noah and his fabulous Ark."

"I have told the Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.

ALONZO HAMBY:  He tells himself in a diary entry that he wrote at that time that, "Of course, the bomb will be used against a military target because no matter how bad the Japanese have been, we can't kill women and children." But he had to have some understanding at Potsdam that he was kidding himself. It was wishful thinking.

ROBERT LIFTON:  He's aware that it will be much more than a military target; it will kill large numbers of ordinary civilians. But you must remember, he like all other Americans, saw this as a war against evil. And there was a lot of evil out there, real evil, on the part of the Nazis and Japanese militarism and fascism. In that sense, he can believe that the bomb is justified and that this greatest weapon ever developed has a place in overcoming or combating evil.

NARRATOR:  The day after Truman learned of the bomb's power, he confronted Stalin with new confidence. Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary that the President was "tremendously pepped up." In his high stakes game with the Soviet dictator, Truman now had a new card to play.

WALTER LAFEBER:  And Churchill later said that Truman, once he heard the news that the atomic bomb worked, was, quote, "a changed man". It was quite clear to Truman now that he had, as he would later say, "an ace in the hole and an ace showing." That is to say, the ace in the hole was the atomic bomb; the ace showing was American economic and military power.

NARRATOR:  On July 24, Truman rose from his chair and walked slowly around the table to have a private word with the Soviet dictator.

"I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force," Truman later wrote. "All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'"

GEORGE ELSEY:  Stalin was so bland and seemingly unconcerned about it that on the American side, there was some question as to whether he'd understood the import of what Truman was saying.

WALTER LAFEBER:  What we know now is that Stalin knew exactly about the development of the bomb because of Soviet spies at Los Alamos in New Mexico. We also know that as soon as Stalin walked out of that room, Stalin immediately got in touch with the man who was the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project and said that he must get to work and accelerate the project.

NARRATOR:  Meanwhile, the preparation to bomb Japan moved inexorably forward. Two atomic bombs were nearly ready. 7 more were on the way. On July 25 Truman gave control of the bombs to the military and ordered that they be used as soon as the Potsdam conference was over.

NARRATOR:  The next day, the Japanese were given one last chance to surrender.

"We call upon the Government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces," it was announced from Potsdam. "The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."

The ultimatum was called the Potsdam Declaration. 2 days later, the Japanese rejected it.

BARTON BERNSTEIN:  The United States was demanding an unconditional surrender and in particular that implied that the imperial system, namely the emperor, would be terminated. Truman had been informed by a number of his advisors that the unconditional surrender demand might make it more difficult to achieve peace. Truman received advice on various occasions to provide an explicit provision that the emperor could be maintained. Truman decided not to include that provision.

ROBERT LIFTON:  Unconditional surrender had been a central theme inherited from Roosevelt, it evoked the American spirit of fighting and winning this war against evil. So he held to it.

NARRATOR:  July 31 - the atomic bomb was now fully assembled. The most dangerous weapon on earth was waiting to be released. The Potsdam conference lasted 17 days. As the newsreel cameramen took their final shots, Truman smiled. The President remained fond of Stalin. He would later write, "I liked the little son-of-a bitch." But nothing had been accomplished.

WALTER LAFEBER:  I think the Potsdam conference can be seen as the beginning of the end of the Russian-American friendship. Truman and Stalin don't have a whole lot to say to each other anymore. Their armies are essentially doing the talking.

NARRATOR:  The allies agreed to divide a defeated Germany into joint zones of occupation, but Stalin refused to withdraw his troops from eastern and central Europe and permit free elections. The issue was tabled for further discussion.

At last Truman was heading home, trying to relax after the grueling round of negotiations. He strolled the deck, attended church services, enjoyed a concert by the ship's band. On his fourth day at sea, the mission which would forever mark his place in history began.

August 6, 2:45 A.M. - the Enola Gay, carrying a four-ton atomic bomb, was heading out over the Pacific Ocean toward Japan.

Some would later argue that Japan might have been forced to surrender without the bomb. The President might have warned the Japanese with a demonstration bomb, might have blockaded their islands until they surrendered, might have assured the Japanese that they could keep their Emperor. Truman would later say that to end the war quickly without invading Japan, the bomb had to be used -- and he used it.

8:15 A.M. - The atomic bomb dropped clear of the Enola Gay.

43 seconds later, it exploded over Hiroshima.

Harry Truman was eating lunch when he was handed a decoded message,"Results clear-cut; successful in all respects." Truman reacted immediately: "This," he said, "is the greatest thing in history."

GEORGE ELSEY:  The crew burst into applause and cheering when he announced this will end the war. Since most of the crewmen were anticipating that they'd have to go out and engage with the Japanese, you can see why there was great glee on the part of the crew, the officers, everyone, everyone present.

NARRATOR:  That afternoon, Truman issued a warning to the Japanese government.

ARCHIVAL FILM OF TRUMAN ON CAMERA:  "If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a reign of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth."

NARRATOR:  2 days later, Secretary of War Stimson showed the President aerial photographs of Hiroshima. Truman did not yet know that the atomic bomb had killed more than 80,000 men, women, and children and that tens of thousands more would die from radiation sickness in the days and years to come.

ALONZO HAMBY:  You see these pictures of Hiroshima just leveled for almost as far as the eye can see. Clearly he's distressed by that.

NARRATOR:  He told Stimson, "This places a terrible responsibility upon myself and upon War Department." 3 days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, but still, there was no word of surrender.

August 9, 11:00 A.M. - a second atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese seaport of Nagasaki. In 1/10 of one-millionth of a second, the city was destroyed. Another 40,000 people were killed.

ALONZO HAMBY:  Truman had not been any limitation on the use of the second bomb. Essentially after he signs the order at Potsdam, it's all on automatic pilot and, unless he changes his mind, up to the military.

NARRATOR:  The day after Nagasaki was destroyed, Truman took the authority to use the atomic bomb back from the military and placed it once again in his own hands.

Aug. 14 - The simple reason Truman always gave for using the atomic bomb was to end the war and save lives. Now after nearly four years, Japan surrendered. The war was over.

Years later, Truman would often say that he never brooded over his decision to drop the bomb.

"Once a decision was made," he wrote later, "I didn't worry about it afterward."

ALONZO HAMBY:  Time and again, Truman claimed, "I never lost a minute's sleep. Ah, I never felt any regret. I did what had to be done." But clearly, this was a somewhat more upsetting event than he let on.

NARRATOR:  The day after the bomb fell on Nagasaki, Truman had told his cabinet that "the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible." He hated the idea of killing "all those kids."

BARTON BERNSTEIN:  You can never feel comfortable about killing 100,000 or more people. And I'm sure that was true for Harry S. Truman, who fought vigorously always to deny it.

ROBERT LIFTON:  He wasn't a man who could allow self-questioning. He wasn't a man who could allow reflection. He could never take in fully what he had done and what that meant for the world. Here was a good man, a loving man, who made a decision to use the cruelest weapon in human history on a densely populated city and spent the rest of his life justifying that decision.

NARRATOR:  "I made the only decision I ever knew how to make," Truman wrote. "I did what I thought was right."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH, Series Host:  Good evening and welcome to The American Experience. I'm David McCullough. We continue tonight the story of the thirty-third President of the United States, Part Two of Truman, written and produced by David Grubin.

In April 1945, with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, an America at war had a new untried, unfamiliar commander-in-chief, a man as different from Roosevelt as any could be. Yet there he was and as the country would discover there was a lot more than met the eye.

As we've seen in Part One, Harry Truman came from a background of hard-working, plain-speaking middle Americans. He was a farmer, a World War One veteran, a failed haberdasher, and the devoted husband of the enigmatic Bess Wallace Truman. By a combination of grit, luck, machine politics, uncommon ability and strength of character, he wound up president at one of history's most difficult turning points. He faced decisions no one could have been prepared for, including the decision to use the atomic bomb to end the Second World War.

With the war over -- the point where we resume tonight -- a host of domestic problems nationwide descended on the still green president. And they were only the start. Europe was in ruins. Joseph Stalin ruled supreme over the Soviet Union. In Churchill's indelible words, an iron curtain had descended "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic."

The Cold War commenced. The Truman years were to be as eventful as any in our time. And at the center of all this is the story of the testing and growth of the seemingly ordinary man from Independence, Missouri, who liked to say, "If you can't stand the heat, you better stay out of the kitchen."

NARRATOR:  12 million GIs were coming home. They wanted jobs and houses and cars...coffee, butter, and meat on the table. After years of going without they longed to get on with their lives. But Harry Truman knew he couldn't give them all they wanted.

ROBERT DONOVAN:  You can't imagine a President having more on his shoulders that President Truman did in those days after the end of the war. The whole thing came down on his head. There had not been planning very well on post-war policy because the economists had been given to understand that the war might last until 1946, in any case, the war with Japan. All of a sudden the atomic bomb threw everything out of kilter.

NARRATOR:  For four long years, Americans everywhere had worked together to fight and defeat fascism. Now that spirit of cooperation had vanished.

Labor and business were once again at each others throats. During the war, the government had kept a tight lid on wages and prices. And in return, the unions had agreed not to strike. Now, their patriotic sacrifice over, workers walked off the job. They wanted higher wages, and they wanted Truman to hold the line on prices.

VICTOR REUTHER:  The expectations of working people zoomed because they wanted to make up for all the years that were lost. You know when you keep people in a straight jacket for as many years as the war lasted you have an explosion.

NARRATOR:  Truman was determined to keep prices from rising. But facing increasing pressure from businessmen, who wanted to set prices themselves, Truman wavered. He held the line on some prices and let others go-up.

ALONZO HAMBY:  He doesn't give the country any sense of direction. He comes to be the person that a public fed up with one strike after another blames for labor disorder.

NARRATOR:  But the President was determined to prove that he could lead the nation... that he could carry on in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt. On September 6, 1945, Truman proposed an increase in the minimum wage, aid for housing, and a bill for the first pre-paid medical insurance in the nation's history. But a coalition of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats refused him everything. The presidency, Truman wrote, was "like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed." Christmas morning, 1945, Truman woke to find the capitol covered in ice and snow. Bess and Margaret were in Independence, and the President missed them.

KEN HECHLER:  I've never known an individual who loved his wife and his daughter and his family so deeply but they of course were always interested in trying to get excuses to go back to Independence.

NARRATOR:  Anxious to see his family, desperate to escape the turmoil in Washington, he ordered the Presidential plane to fly him home. Editorials would call the flight foolhardy, absurd, "one of the most hazardous sentimental journeys ever undertaken." The plane, buffeted by sleet and snow, arrived an hour late.

ALONZO HAMBY:  When he finally gets to the Wallace house on Delaware Street, Bess is furious at him, for taking so long to get out there, for taking such a big risk.

Three days later, back in Washington, forlorn, Truman wrote Bess a letter: "Well I'm here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations. You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least a hundred things I didn't want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I'm something the cat dragged in...

He finished the letter, but Bess never got it. He left it tucked deep inside his desk drawer.

NARRATOR:  The new year brought a new wave of strikes - 5000 before the year was over. As a Democrat, Truman needed union support. But he had removed the lid on prices, appeasing businessmen, and the unions were angry. The cost of almost everything skyrocketed, and working men and women demanded that their wages keep up. At one point, more than a million workers walked off the job at the same time. Truman believed that the unions were holding the country hostage, and personally betraying him.

VICTOR REUTHER:  While Harry supported labor and the right to strike, he was never happy when there was a strike. He was seeing it as a small businessman and it could wreck a small business. He just didn't like strikes of any kind. And he was very frank about that.

NARRATOR:  Then, in May, the railway workers went out, forcing the country to a standstill. Truman was furious. While negotiators searched for a compromise, a frustrated Truman proposed a solution no President had ever dared: he threatened to draft the striking railway workers into the army.

VICTOR REUTHER:  That kind of a threat wasn't even made during the war! And, ah, I think everyone in the Labor Movement was quite shocked by that, but they felt, "Well, this is, ah, ah, an off-the-cuff Truman threat, but he won't carry through on that."

NARRATOR:  But Truman stuck by his plan. When his Attorney General questioned its constitutionality, Truman told him: "We'll draft 'em and think about the law later."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  [It] was as high-handed as -- unconstitutional a measure as imaginable. But he meant it -- because he saw the country being -- the very life of the country, at stake.

NARRATOR:  Never before had there been a total nationwide rail strike: more than 17,000 passenger trains, 24,000 freight trains - nearly all of them had stopped running. The country was paralyzed.

Telegrams flooded the White House.

"... zero hour is here. Who is to rule our nation?"

"... why don't you go ahead and act in this national crisis?"

"... less talk and more action."

ALONZO HAMBY:  Truman's annoyed at criticism. He thinks people are not taking him seriously enough and maybe he's still got this sneaking suspicion to overcome that he's not quite up to the job. Truman faced every new challenge with feelings of inadequacy. This leads to a build-up of anger that erupts every once in a while, with particularly vivid consequences in the Presidency.

NARRATOR:  Deeply troubled, Truman sat down at his desk and drafted one of the strangest speeches ever to come from a President's pen: "I am tired of government being flouted," he wrote.

"Let us give the country back to the people, hang a few traitors, make our own country safe for democracy, tell Russia where to get off... Come on boys, let's do the job."

CLARK CLIFFORD, White House Counsel:  He called me and said, "I want to get your reaction to this speech." And I started out and... this is the worst I ever saw. I believe it was his way of letting off steam. And I finally asked him, said, "Do you intend to give that speech?" He said, "Well, not quite this speech."

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM:  TRUMAN ADDRESSING CONGRESS

NARRATOR:  On May 25, 1946, even while negotiations to settle the strike continued, the President went before a joint session of Congress.

TRUMAN:  "This is no longer a dispute between labor and management. It has now become a strike against the government of the United States itself."

"I request the Congress immediately to authorize the President to draft into the armed forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government."

CLARK CLIFFORD:  He was getting to the crescendo. And I got a call.. it said the Railroad strike has been settled. And I wrote on a piece of paper and I took it to Les Biffle, the secretary. And Les then takes it up. Enormously dramatic.

ARCHIVAL SOUND-ON-FILM:  TRUMAN

"Word has just been received that the rail strike has been settled on terms proposed by the President."

CLARK CLIFFORD:  Great cheers. Great cheers. And it was they worked out the details after and the railroads were running.

NARRATOR:  The strike was over. But Truman had paid a high price. His gut response had cost him the support of the unions he so desperately needed.

ALONZO HAMBY:  The labor leaders and the liberals in general are shocked, horrified...not without reason. And from this point on it is going to be very, very tough for Truman to, ah, drum up labor-liberal enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket in the '46 elections.

NARRATOR:  The 1946 mid-term elections would be, for Truman, a disaster. Republicans blamed the President for America's problems, and most Americans seemed to agree. Truman's popularity plummeted.

ALONZO HAMBY:  It seems to me that Truman really hits rock bottom in the 1946 campaign. For an awful lot of people, he's still very much in the shadow of FDR.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH:  He wasn't coping very well and people were beginning to make fun of him. "To err is Truman." "I'm just mild about Harry."

ROBERT DONOVAN:  There were periods there when Truman didn't look up to the job. The Republicans would say, yeah, he was a little man, who came out of nowhere, a haberdasher.

NARRATOR:  There were shortages of practically everything - bread, meat, housing. And inflation was threatening to undermine the economy - prices had shot up 6 per cent in a single month.

NELSON LICHTENSTEIN, Historian:  What this meant was that millions and millions of potential Democratic voters, people who had voted for Roosevelt, they said, "To heck with it... they bungled it."

And the Republicans said, "Had enough?" That was their slogan. People agreed with them. Truman gets blamed. They stay home. The Republicans sweep to power.

NARRATOR:  The Republicans won control of the Senate, the House of Representatives, even the state governorships.

NELSON LICHTENSTEIN:  The elections of '46 were a Republican sweep, a huge turnaround and why? Not because everyone voted Republican, but because the Democrats, the New Dealers, the labor people, they stayed home.

NARRATOR:  Discredited by his own party, voted down by the American people, Harry Truman, pundits were saying, was an embarrassment.

NARRATOR:  The disastrous election over, Truman fled to his vacation hideaway on Florida's Key West.

"Dear Bess,"

I'm seeing no outsiders. I don't give a damn how put out they get. I'm doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them.

The only regret I have is that you are not here... You know I guess I'm a damn fool, but I'm happier when I can see you -- even when you give me hell I'd rather have you around than not."

Bess continued to spend as much time as she could in Independence. When asked how it felt to be First Lady, she replied, "So-so." She looked, her husband said approvingly, "exactly as a woman of her age should look."

When Bess and Harry Truman had first moved into the White House, Bess's mother Madge Wallace had moved in too. After more than a quarter of a century, she continued to call her son-in-law "Mr. Truman."

REX SCOUTEN, Secret Service:  She didn't care much for the President. She never did. That was I guess the thing that sticks out in my mind. She was a lovely lady, but she just never, never... we.... could never figure it out why she just didn't care for the President.

NORWOOD WILLIAMS, White House Butler:  I think that she felt that Miss Bess was above him. Even though he was President, he was beneath Miss Bess. He was a failure in his haberdashery. She would tell you. Oh, she didn't mind telling you that even though he was the President of the United States, that she didn't care much for him or for his mother. I'm sorry, but that's the way it was.

NARRATOR:  As 1947 began, Harry Truman had been President for nearly two years. Humiliated in the mid-term elections, he had little hope of advancing the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal through the stubborn, Republican-controlled Congress. But in the two years to come, the President who had been rejected at home, would make decisions that would determine the fate of the world for the next half-century.

NARRATOR:  Europe was devastated. The war had left a continent in ruins. As poverty and starvation spread, chaos threatened to overwhelm the western democracies. Some feared the election of communist governments. Others... Stalin, and the Red army. The Russian Dictator remained an enigma... his intentions, unclear.

Stalin did not yet have the atomic bomb, but the Soviet Union was a great military power, its armies spread across eastern Europe, poised to enforce Stalin's will. At Potsdam, Truman had been impressed with Stalin, even liked the man. When the war ended, the President, like most Americans, had clung to the hope that Stalin would not impose communism on eastern Europe. But Truman's optimism dwindled as he saw - Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany - fall behind a communist iron curtain. Many Americans still argued that the Russians were not a threat to the United States.

But in the beginning of 1946, Truman said he was growing tired babying the Soviets.

"I do not think we should play compromise any longer," he wrote his Secretary of State. "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist, another war is in the making."

One month later Stalin declared that communism and capitalism were incompatible. He called war inevitable. Russia and America were moving into two opposing camps. The turning point came in Greece and Turkey, where Truman feared further communist expansion.

NARRATOR:  In a civil war in Greece, Greek communists threatened to topple the monarchy. In Turkey, the Soviet Union was demanding control of the strategic Dardanelles straits. Two local conflicts would become the catalyst for a world-wide struggle against Communism.

WALTER LAFEBER:  I think at this point Truman begins to see Stalin as an expansionist dictator. And at that point you can begin to see Truman change and believe that the only thing that the Soviets understand, as he says, is strength, not negotiations.

NARRATOR:  Truman had changed his mind. Now, he would have to change the minds of still-ambivalent Americans. He would have to convince Congress that a crisis in two far-away countries threatened the security of the United States... that 400 million dollars in military aid was needed to save Greece and Turkey.

WALTER LAFEBER:  Truman had to go to this Republican Congress that had gotten into power in the elections of 1946 by promising to cut taxes and to cut aid overseas. Truman was now going to have to go to these penny-pinching Republicans and get $400 million dollars. The question was, how did you do this?

NARRATOR:  Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson had the answer. Acheson would one day become Secretary of State, and Truman would call him his "top brain man" in the cabinet.

In 1947, Acheson, Truman, and Secretary of State George Marshal gathered together a bipartisan group of the most influential men in Congress, and Acheson laid out Truman's request for aid in the starkest terms.

MARSHALL SHULMAN:  If you want the Congress to support the appropriations needed, there has to be a bit of a crisis atmosphere. And so Acheson made a very impassioned speech and he laid it on very heavily about how the Russians would sweep across Europe.

WALTER LAFEBER:  What Acheson said was, if the Soviets could win in Greece and in Turkey, then they would be in a position where there would be Soviet pressure on Italy, on the Mediterranean. Once that pressure was established, there would be pressure on Western Europe and pretty soon the United States would be standing alone.

MARSHALL SHULMAN:  Senator Vandenberg, who was a leader of the Republicans, said to Acheson and to Truman, "If you can get that kind of a view across to the American people, we'll support you."

WALTER LAFEBER:  There was the story that Vandenberg said to Truman, "Mr. President, you're going to have to scare hell out of the American people." Whether or not Vandenberg said that, that's exactly what Harry Truman did.

NEWSREEL NARRATION (SOF):  "President Harry Truman comes before a joint session of Congress to make a momentous announcement. A tense atmosphere prevails, for the nation's lawmakers realize that this may be the curtain raiser for events that will shape the destiny of America and the world."

ARCHIVAL FILM:  TRUMAN SOUND ON FILM

"The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress."

"I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

GEORGE ELSEY:  He was reminding Americans of what gradually had been sinking into the public consciousness that, ah, the aim of the Soviet Union was to expand its hegemony over as much of the world as it possibly could, and that was not to be permitted. We would help free peoples maintain their freedom.

ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL:  TRUMAN SOUND ON FILM: If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.

WALTER LA