Momentous events were to occur in Truman's first five months in office:

• • April 12 — Harry S. Truman becomes President because of FDR's death.
  • April 25 — Nations meet in San Francisco, California to create the United Nations
  • April 28 — Benito Mussolini of Italy killed
  • May 1 — Announcement of the suicide of Adolf Hitler
  • May 2 — Berlin falls
  • May 7 — Germany surrenders
  • May 8 — Victory in Europe Day
  • July 17–August 2 — Truman, Josef Stalin, and Winston Churchill meet at the Potsdam Conference to establish political landscape of post-war world
  • August 6 — Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima
  • August 8 — USSR declares war on Japan
  • August 9 — Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki
  • August 14 — Japan agrees to surrender (Victory over Japan Day)
  • September 2 — Japan formally surrenders aboard the USS Missour

  (wikipedia) back to top

 

United Nations & The Marshall Plan

Truman, a Wilsonian internationalist, strongly supported the creation of the United Nations. He included former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on the delegation to the U.N.'s first General Assembly in order to meet the public desire for peace after the carnage of the Second World War. Communist advances in Greece and Turkey that suggested a hunger for global domination. Truman and his foreign policy advisors concluded that the interests of the Soviet Union were quickly becoming incompatible with the interests of the United States. The Truman administration articulated an increasingly hard line against the Soviets.

Truman was able to win bipartisan support for both the Truman Doctrine, although the opposition Republicans controlled Congress and he claimed no personal expertise on foreign matters, which formalized a policy of containment, and the Marshall Plan. To strengthen the U.S during the cold war against Communism Truman tried to "scare the hell out of Congress." To get Congress to spend the vast sums necessary to restart the moribund European economy, used an ideological argument, arguing forcefully that Communism flourishes in economically deprived areas. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 and reorganized military forces by creating the Department of Defense, the CIA, U.S. Air Force (separate from the U.S. Army), and the National Security Council. (wikipedia)

back to top

Fair Deal

After many years of a Democratic assembly in Congress ( two Democratic presidents), Republicans hit the scene gainig 55 seats in the House of Representatives and several seats in the Senate. Although Truman cooperated closely with the Republican leaders on foreign policy, he fought them on domestic issues. He failed to prevent tax cuts and the removal of price controls. The power with in labor unions was significantly abridged by the Taft-Hartley Act, which was enacted by overriding Truman's veto.

To get ready for the up and coming 1948 election, Truman made it more than clear that he's a Democrat in the New Deal tradition. Supporting universal health insurance, the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, and an aggressive civil rights program. Taken together, it all constituted a broad legislative program that he called the "Fair Deal." Truman's Fair Deal proposals were not well received by Congress. Only one of the major Fair Deal bills, an initiative to expand unemployment benefits, was ever enacted. (wikipedia)

back to top

Recognition of Israel

Truman, a key figure in the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, had been a supporter of the Zionist movement as early as 1939. In 1946, an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the gradual establishment of two states in Palestine. However, there was little public support for the two-state proposal, and with Britain's empire in rapid decline with pressure to withdraw from Palestine due attacks on British forces by armed Zionist groups. a special U.N. committee and Truman recommended the immediate partitioning of Palestine into two states, this initiative was approved by the General Assembly in 1947.

The British announced that they would leave Palestine by May 15, 1948, and the Arab League Council nations began moving troops to Palestine's borders. The idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East was popular in the U.S., and particularly so among one of Truman's key constituencies, urban Jewish voters.

The State Department, however, was another matter. Secretary of State George Marshall, and most of the foreign service experts, strongly opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Thus, when Truman agreed to meet with Chaim Weizmann, he found himself overruling his own Secretary of State. In the end, Marshall did not publicly dispute the President's decision, as Truman feared he might. Truman recognized the State of Israel 11 minutes after it declared itself a nation on May 14, 1948. (wikipedia)

back to top

 

Berlin Airlift

On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union blocked access to the three Western-held sectors of Berlin. The Allies had never negotiated a deal to guarantee supply of the sectors deep within the Soviet-occupied zone. The commander of the American occupation zone in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, proposed sending a large armored column driving peacefully, as a moral right, down the Autobahn across the Soviet zone to West Berlin, with instructions to defend itself if it were stopped or attacked. Truman, however, following the consensus in Washington, believed this entailed an unacceptable risk of war. He endorsed an unprecedented plan to supply the city by air. On June 25, the Allies initiated the Berlin Airlift. The airlift continued until May 11, 1949 when access was again granted, and for several months after that. The Berlin Airlift is considered one of Truman's great foreign policy successes as president, and aided his election in 1948. (wikipedia)

back to top

 

Defense Cutbacks

Truman, Congress, and the Pentagon followed a strategy of demobilization after the war, mothballing ships and sending the veterans home. (Many voters complained that the members of the military were being released too slowly.) The reasons for this strategy were largely financial. In order to fund domestic spending requirements, Truman had advocated a policy of defense program cuts for the U.S. armed forces at the end of the war. The Republican majority in Congress, anxious to enact numerous tax cuts, approved of Truman's plan to "hold the line" on defense spending. In 1949, Truman appointed a political supporter, Louis A. Johnson as Secretary of Defense. Impressed by U.S. advances in atomic bomb development, Truman and Johnson initially believed that the atomic bomb rendered conventional forces largely irrelevant to the modern battlefield. This assumption had to be revisited, however, when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in the same year.

Nevertheless, reductions in force continued, adversely affecting U.S. conventional defense readiness.Both Truman and Johnson had a particular antipathy to Navy and Marine Corps budget requests.Truman had a well-known dislike of the Marines dating back to his service in World War I, and famously said "The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force, and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's."Indeed, Truman had proposed disbanding the Marine Corps entirely as part of the 1948 defense reorganization plan, a plan that was abandoned only after a letter-writing campaign and the intervention of influential congressmen who were Marine veterans

Under Truman defense budgets through FY 1950, many Navy ships were mothballed, sold to other countries, or scrapped. The U.S. Army, faced with high turnover of experienced personnel, cut back on training exercises, and eased recruitment standards. Usable equipment was scrapped or sold off instead of stored, and even ammunition stockpiles were cut.The Marine Corps, its budgets slashed, was reduced to hoarding surplus inventories of World War II era weapons and equipment.It was only after the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans in 1950 that Truman ramped up his defense requests to Congress -- and initiated what might be considered the modern period of defense spending in the United States. (wikipedia)

back to top

 

Civil Rights and desegregation of the military

Further information: President's Committee on Civil Rights

A 1947 report by the Truman administration entitled To Secure These Rights opened the civil rights issue for the first time since 1890. The report presented a detailed ten-point agenda of civil rights reforms. In February 1948, the President submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress that proposed creating several federal offices devoted to issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices. This provoked a firestorm of criticism from Southern Democrats in the time leading up to the national nominating convention, but Truman refused to compromise, saying "My forbears were Confederates... But my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten."Later that year — in the middle of a presidential election campaign — he signed the landmark Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the U.S. military.(wikipedia)

back to top

1948 election

The United States presidential election, 1948 is best remembered for Truman's stunning come-from-behind victory.


Truman was so widely expected to lose the 1948 election that the Chicago Tribune ran this incorrect headline. Truman is standing on the rear platform of the train car Ferdinand Magellan at St. Louis Union Station.
At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Truman attempted to place a tepid civil rights plank in the party platform so as to assuage the internal conflicts between the northern and southern wings of his party. A sharp address, however, given by Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr. of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and candidate for the United States Senate—as well as the local political interests of a number of urban bosses—convinced the party to adopt a strong civil rights plank, which Truman endorsed wholeheartedly. Within two weeks he issued Executive Order 9981, racially integrating the U.S. Armed Services following World War II. Truman took considerable political risk in backing civil rights, and was very concerned that the loss of Dixiecrat support might destroy the Democratic Party.
Truman's "whistlestop" tactic of giving brief speeches from the rear platform of the observation car Ferdinand Magellan became iconic of the entire campaign. His combative appearances, such as those at the town square of Harrisburg, Illinois, captured the popular imagination and drew huge crowds. The massive, mostly spontaneous gatherings at Truman's depot events were an important sign of a critical change in momentum in the campaign -- but this shift went virtually unnoticed by the national press corps, which simply continued reporting Dewey's (supposedly) impending victory as a certainty. Truman's no-holds-barred style in the face of seemingly impossible odds became a campaign tactic that would be repeated by, and appealed to by, many presidential candidates in years to come, notably George H. W. Bush in 1992, another trailing incumbent who fought constantly with Congress. Bush, and indeed most of the candidates who have compared themselves to Truman, went down to defeat.
The defining image of the campaign came after Election Day, when Truman held aloft the erroneous front page of the Chicago Tribune that featured a huge headline proclaiming "Dewey Defeats Truman".
Truman did not have a vice president in his first term. His running mate, and eventual Vice President for the term that began January 20, 1949, was Alben W. Barkley. (wikipedia)

back to top

Second term (1949-1953)

With information provided by its espionage networks in the United States, the Soviet Union developed an atomic bomb much faster than was expected and exploded its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949. On January 7, 1953, Truman announced the detonation of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb. (wikipedia)

back to top

 

People's Republic of China

On December 21, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces left the mainland for Taiwan in the face of successful attacks by Mao Zedong's Communists. In June 1950, Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy into the Taiwan Strait to prevent further conflict between the PRC and the Republic of China on Taiwan. Truman also called for Taiwan to cease any further attacks on the mainland. (wikipedia)

Soviet espionage and the rise of McCarthyism

In August 1945, fearful of Soviet surveillance of her movements in Washington D.C. and New York, Elizabeth Bentley, an American and a Soviet intelligence agent, defected to the FBI. She provided information on the Golos and Greg Silvermaster spy rings operated by Soviet intelligence. Two counterintelligence debriefing memoranda with outlines of Soviet espionage in the United States were passed to the White House, the initial debriefing with code name "Gregory" disclosing the networks, together with an extensive memo with Bentley's real name attached. The memos included the names of high level administration officials accused of complicity in passing classified information to Soviet agents.A patriotic man with a strongly regional viewpoint, Truman disbelieved reports of potential Communist or Soviet penetration of the U.S. government, and the official White House response was to dismiss the Bentley allegations as a "red herring."
On August 3, 1948, former Soviet NKVD agent and senior Time Magazine editor Whittaker Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and presented a list of what he said were members of an underground Communist network working within the United States government in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the names on that list was Alger Hiss, a State Department official who had participated in the creation of the United Nations. Hiss confronted Chambers on August 17, 1948.
Chamber's revelations led to a sensational trial. On February 9, 1950, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in a speech at the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia accused the State Department of being riddled with Communists. McCarthy and HUAC received considerable public support in the wake of the Soviet Union nuclear explosion, the loss of U.S. atom bomb secrets, the fall of China and new revelations of Soviet intelligence penetration of other U.S. agencies, including the Treasury Department. (wikipedia)

Korean conflict

On June 25, 1950 the North Korean People's Army under the command of dictator Kim Il Sung invaded South Korea, precipitating the outbreak of the Korean War. Poorly trained and equipped, without tanks or air support, the South Korean Army was rapidly pushed backwards, quickly losing the capital, Seoul.
Stunned, Truman called for a naval blockade of Korea, which went into effect; while the U.S. Navy no longer possessed sufficient surface ships with which to enforce such a measure, no ships tried to challenge it. Truman promptly urged the United Nations to intervene; it did, authorizing armed defense for the first time in its history (the Soviet Union was not in attendance at the Security Council vote). Truman sent in the full military resources based in Japan. United Nations (primarily U.S.) forces under U.S. General Douglas MacArthur crushed the North Korean invasion in 90 days. However, Truman decided not to consult with Congress, a decisive error that greatly weakened his position.
In the first four weeks the American infantry forces hastily deployed to Korea proved too few and were underequipped. The Eighth Army in Japan was forced to recondition World War II Sherman tanks from depots and monuments for use in Korea.By 60 days into the war Truman had sent a massive amount of military supplies into Korea, and UN forces outnumbered the invaders and had far more supplies, munitions, air supremacy and naval supremacy.
Responding to a firestorm of criticism over readiness, Truman fired his Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, replacing him with retired general George C. Marshall. Truman (with UN approval) decided on a roll-back policy—that is, conquest of North Korea. UN forces led by General Douglas MacArthur led the counterattack, scoring a stunning surprise victory with an amphibious landing at the Battle of Inchon that nearly trapped the invaders. UN forces then marched north, toward the Yalu River boundary with China, with the goal of reuniting Korea under UN auspices.
China surprised the UN forces by a large-scale invasion in November. The UN forces, heavily outnumbered in severe winter weather, were forced back to below the 38th parallel, then recovered and in early 1951 the war became a fierce stalemate at about the 38th parallel where it began. UN and U.S. casualties were heavy. Truman rejected MacArthur's request to attack Chinese supply bases north of the Yalu, but MacArthur promoted his plan to Republican House leader Joseph Martin. Truman was gravely concerned that further escalation of the war might draw the Soviet Union further into the conflict—it was already supplying weapons and providing warplanes (with Korean markings and Soviet fliers). On April 11, 1951, Truman fired MacArthur from all his commands in Korea and Japan. Fierce criticism hit Truman accusing him of refusing to shoulder the blame for a war gone sour and blaming his generals instead. The war remained a stalemate for 2 years until a peace agreement restored borders and ended the conflict. The war, and the dismissal of MacArthur, helped to make Truman so unpopular that he was defeated in the New Hampshire primary and was forced to cancel his reelection campaign. In February 1952, Truman's approval mark stood at at 22% according to Gallup polls, the all-time lowest approval mark for an active American President. Truman thus inherited a war already in process and left office while an entirely different war was still underway. (wikipedia)

Vietnam

United States' involvement in Vietnam began during the Truman administration. On V-J Day 1945, Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence, but the US announced its support of restoring French power. In 1950, Ho again declared Vietnamese independence and was recognized by Communist China and the Soviet Union. He controlled some remote territory along the Chinese border, while France controlled the remainder. Truman's "containment policy" (calling for opposition to Communist expansion) led the U.S. to continue to recognize French rule and the French client government. In 1950, Truman authorized $10 million in aid to the French, sending 123 non-combat soldiers to help with supplies. In 1951, the amount escalated to $150 million. By 1953, the amount had risen to $1 billion (one third of U.S. foreign aid and 80 percent of the French cost). A basic dispute emerged: the Americans wanted a strong and independent Vietnam, the French cared little about containing China but instead wanted to suppress local nationalism and integrate Vietnam into the French system. (wikipedia)

back to top

White House renovations

View of the interior shell of the White House during reconstruction in 1950.
In 1948 Truman ordered a controversial addition to the exterior of the White House: a second-floor balcony in the south portico that came to be known as the "Truman Balcony."
But at the same time it was becoming clear that the building, much of it over 130 years old, was in a dangerously dilapidated condition. That August a section of floor actually collapsed and Truman's own bedroom and bathroom were closed as unsafe. No public announcement was made until the election had been won, by which time Truman had been informed that his new balcony was the only part of the building that was sound. The Truman family moved into nearby Blair House; as the newer West Wing, including the Oval Office, remained open, Truman found himself walking to work across the street each morning and afternoon. In due course the decision was made to demolish and rebuild the whole interior of the main White House, as well as excavating new basement levels and underpinning the foundations. The work lasted from December 1949 until March 1952.

Assassination attempt

On November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate Truman at the Blair House. Torresola mortally wounded a White House policeman, Leslie Coffelt, who shot Torresola to death before expiring himself. Collazo, as a co-conspirator in a felony that turned into a homicide, was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death in 1952. Truman later commuted his sentence to life in prison.
Acknowledging the importance of the question of Puerto Rican independence, Truman allowed for a genuinely democratic plebiscite in Puerto Rico to determine the status of its relationship to the United States.

back to top

Scandals

In 1950, the Senate, led by Estes Kefauver, investigated numerous charges of corruption among senior administration officials, some of whom received fur coats and deep freezers for favors. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was involved. In 1950, 166 IRS employees either resigned or were fired, and many were facing indictments from the Department of Justice on a variety of tax-fixing and bribery charges, including the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Tax Division. When Attorney General Howard McGrath fired the special prosecutor for being too zealous, Truman fired McGrath. Historians agree that Truman himself was innocent and unaware—with one exception. In 1945, Mrs. Truman became the recipient of a new, expensive, hard-to-get deep freezer. The businessman who provided the gift was the president of a perfume company and, thanks to Truman's aide and confidante General Harry Vaughan, received priority to fly to Europe days after the war ended, where he bought new perfumes. On the way back he "bumped" a wounded veteran being flown home. Disclosure of the episode in 1949 humiliated Truman, and he responded by vigorously defending Vaughan, who was involved in multiple influence peddling scandals from his White House office. [Donovan 1982, 116-17].
Charges that Soviet agents had infiltrated the government bedeviled the Truman administration and became a major campaign issue for Eisenhower in 1952. In 1947, Truman set up loyalty boards to investigate espionage among federal employees. Between 1947 and 1952, "about 20,000 government employees were investigated, some 2500 resigned “voluntarily,” and 400 were fired". From 1945 to 1946, J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly warned Truman that Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, was a Soviet spy. The Prime Minister of Canada warned the FBI about White, and the information was confirmed by Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko. Truman responded by making White the U.S. representative to the International Monetary Fund. Truman himself later asserted that the loyalty program was the biggest single mistake of his presidency.

back to top

Major legislation signed

National Security Act – July 26, 1947

Truman Doctrine – March 12, 1947

Marshall Plan/European Recovery Plan – April 3, 1948

Important executive orders

Executive Order 9981

Administration and Cabinet

(All of the cabinet members when Truman became president in 1945 had been previously serving under Franklin D. Roosevelt.)


President Truman signing a proclamation declaring a national emergency that initiates U.S. involvement in the Korean War.

OFFICE	NAME	TERM
President	Harry S. Truman	1945–1953
Vice President	None	1945–1949
	Alben W. Barkley	1949–1953
State	Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.	1945
	James F. Byrnes	1945–1947
	George C. Marshall	1947–1949
	Dean G. Acheson	1949–1953
Treasury	Henry Morgenthau, Jr.	1945
	Fred M. Vinson	1945–1946
	John W. Snyder	1946–1953
War	Henry L. Stimson	1945
	Robert P. Patterson	1945–1947
	Kenneth C. Royall	1947
Defense	James V. Forrestal	1947–1949
	Louis A. Johnson	1949–1950
	George C. Marshall	1950–1951
	Robert A. Lovett	1951–1953
Attorney General	Francis Biddle	1945
	Tom C. Clark	1945–1949
	J. Howard McGrath	1949–1952
	James P. McGranery	1952–1953
Postmaster General	Frank C. Walker	1945
	Robert E. Hannegan	1945–1947
	Jesse M. Donaldson	1947–1953
Navy	James V. Forrestal	1945–1947
Interior	Harold L. Ickes	1945–1946
	Julius A. Krug	1946–1949
	Oscar L. Chapman	1949–1953
Agriculture	Claude R. Wickard	1945
	Clinton P. Anderson	1945–1948
	Charles F. Brannan	1948–1953
Commerce	Henry A. Wallace	1945–1946
	W. Averell Harriman	1946–1948
	Charles W. Sawyer	1948–1953
Labor	Frances Perkins	1945
	Lewis B. Schwellenbach	1945–1948
	Maurice J. Tobin	1948–1953

(wikipedia) back to top

Supreme Court appointments

Truman appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:

Harold Hitz Burton – 1945

Fred M. Vinson (Chief Justice) – 1946

Tom Campbell Clark – 1949

Sherman Minton – 194

1952 election

In 1951, the U.S. ratified the 22nd Amendment, making a president ineligible to be elected a third time, or to be elected a second time after also having succeeded to the presidency and served more than two years. The latter clause would have applied to Truman in 1952, but he was still eligible to run for a third term since a grandfather clause in the amendment explicitly excluded the current president from its provisions.
At the time of the 1952 New Hampshire primary, no candidate had won Truman's backing. His first choice, Chief Justice Fred Vinson said no; Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson repeatedly said no; Vice President Barkley was considered too old; and Truman distrusted and disliked Senator Estes Kefauver, whom he privately called "Cowfever."
Truman's name was on the New Hampshire primary ballot, but Kefauver won, so Truman announced his decision not to run on March 29. Stevenson, having reconsidered his presidential ambitions, received Truman's backing and won the Democratic nomination. Eisenhower crusaded against what he denounced as Truman's failures regarding "Korea, Communism and Corruption" -- and won in a landslide. (wikipedia)

back to top

Post-presidency

Truman Library, Memoirs, and life as a private citizen.

Truman (seated right) and his wife Bess (behind him) attend the signing of the Medicare Bill on July 30, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson.
Truman returned home to take up residence at his mother-in-law's house in Independence, Missouri. His predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had organized his own presidential library, but legislation to enable future Presidents to do something similar still remained to be enacted. Truman worked to garner private donations to build a presidential library, which he then donated to the federal government to maintain and operate -- a practice adopted by all his successors.
Former members of Congress and the federal courts received a federal retirement package, and it was President Truman who had ensured that servants of the executive branch of government received similar privileges. The benefit did not, however, apply to former presidents. Once out of office, Truman quickly decided that he did not wish to be on any corporate payroll, a choice that reflected his view that to take advantage of such financial opportunities would diminish the integrity of the nation's highest office. He also turned down numerous offers for commercial endorsements. As a result, he faced an interesting set of financial challenges, having no federal pension, and, since his pre-politics business ventures had proved unremunerative, no personal savings.
He took out a personal loan from a Missouri bank shortly after leaving office, and then set about establishing another precedent for future former chief executives: a hefty book deal for his memoirs of his time in office. (Ulysses S. Grant had overcome similar financial issues with a similar book, but had declined to write about life in the White House in any detail.) Truman received a record sum of $600,000 as an advance on the publication of his memoirs, though much of that sum went to taxes and expenses of maintaining a staff to assist in writing.
Truman's memoirs were a commercial and critical success; they were published in two volumes in 1955-56:

Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Year of Decisions (vol. 1) (ASIN B000BC81YE)

Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Years of Trial and Hope (vol. 2) (ASIN B000CQXZWM)

In 1958, Congress passed the Former Presidents Act, offering a $25,000 yearly pension to each former President, primarily because of Truman's financial status. The one other living former President at the time, Herbert Hoover, also took the pension, even though he did not need the money; reportedly, he did so to avoid embarrassing Truman. (wikipedia)

back to top

Later life and death

In 1956, Truman took a trip to Europe with his wife, and was a sensation. In Britain he received an honorary degree in Civic Law from Oxford University, an event that moved him to tears. He met with his friend Winston Churchill for the last time, and on returning to the U.S., he gave his full support to Adlai Stevenson's second bid for the White House, although he had initially favored Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York for the nomination.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill at the Truman Library and gave the first two Medicare cards to Truman and his wife Bess. Truman had fought for government health care during his tenure.
He was also honored in 1975 by the establishment of the Truman Scholarship, a federal program launched in his honor that sought to honor U.S. college students who exemplified dedication to public service and leadership in public policy.
Upon turning 80, Truman was feted in Washington and asked to address the United States Senate. He was so emotionally overcome by his reception that he was unable to deliver his speech. He also campaigned for senatorial candidates. A bad fall in the bathroom of his home in 1964 severely limited his physical capabilities, and he was unable to maintain his daily presence at his presidential library. On December 5, 1972, he was admitted to Kansas City's Research Hospital and Medical Center with lung congestion from pneumonia. He subsequently developed multiple organ failure and died at 7:50 a.m. on December 26, at age 88. Bess Truman died on October 8, 1982. He and Bess are buried at the Truman Library. (wikipedia)

back to top

 

|Home| Back |