The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“Americans were aware of this turning of events [declining relations with the Soviet Union] but only of the surface details reported in their newspapers. A majority of them had long since placed their faith in their president to surmount such problems. In the future, many historians would look back on the Roosevelt presidency and find his greatest fault to be his failure to brief his vice president on the critical shift in global affairs, for Roosevelt would not live to see this narrative play out.”

Truman assumed the presidency at a critical moment in American history, as the US was about to inherit a leading role in a postwar world and square off against a Soviet Union similarly driven to have its own model of governance shape the decades to come. Truman may have come into office with little knowledge of the details, but Baime argues that his work ethic and sensitivity to history prepared him in ways far beyond what his resume suggested.

“Four words raced through Truman’s mind: the lightning has struck! ‘I was fighting off tears,’ he later recalled. ‘It was the only time in my life I think that I ever felt like I’d had a real shock. I had hurried to the White House to see the president and when I arrived, I found I was the president. No one in the history of our country ever had it happen to him just that way.’”

Truman was certainly not the first person to assume the presidency upon the unexpected death of his predecessor, but Truman’s journey to the highest office in the land did seem particularly unlikely. An unlikely senator and an even unlikelier vice president, Truman barely had time to settle into his new job when the office was thrust upon him at a critical moment in World War II and US history.

“‘Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president of the United States…’ As Truman uttered these words, the others looked on. ‘In that moment of actual succession, he seemed almost sacrilegiously small,’ press secretary Daniels said of Truman. A photographer captured the scene, but when it was over the chief justice told Truman that he had failed to raise his right hand while he held the Bible. And so the oath was repeated. Truman uttered the final words ‘firmly and clearly,’ as one in the room remembered.”

Baime often describes Truman as seemingly out of step with the magnitude of the moment, awkward and fumbling as history happens around him. Observers often tended to see this as Truman’s lack of ability, but Baime sees Truman as someone with deep reserves of character and little regard for pageantry. Incidents like this one foreshadow Truman’s eventual triumph as he rises to meet the moment.