biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1884–1972)
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| biography:
| US statesman and 33rd president (1945–53), born in Lamar, Missouri, USA. A farm boy, he could not afford college, but he was commissioned a lieutenant with the National Guard when he went off to France to fight in World War 1. He returned to help run a Kansas City, MO clothing store that proved unsuccessful. In the 1920s he joined the local Democratic Party machine, which put him in several county offices. Although he never took a law degree, he read law and served as presiding judge on a county court (1926–34), a post that did not involve judicial duties, but was more like a county administrator. He then was elected to the US Senate (1935–45). His personal integrity helped him get re-elected in 1940 despite the exposure of the Missouri machine's corruption. He came to national attention heading what was called the Truman Committee, which investigated government wartime production and saved taxpayers millions. That prominence brought him to office as Franklin D Roosevelt's new vice-president in 1944. When Roosevelt died the next April, Truman became president, and he went on to win a close election in 1948. This apparently colourless ‘everyday American’ surprised everyone with his boldness in a troubled time. During his administration he dropped the first atom bombs on Japan, authorized the Marshall Plan to aid post-war Europe, proposed the Truman Doctrine of Communist containment and support for free peoples, organized the Berlin Airlift (1948–9), ordered the desegregation of the armed forces (1948), established NATO (1949), sent US troops to deal with the Communist invasion of South Korea in 1950, and dismissed the popular General MacArthur for insubordination in Korea. His visionary, Roosevelt-style social programme, which he called the ‘Fair Deal’, was largely thwarted by a conservative Congress. Truman declined to run in 1952, and settled in Independence, MO for a long retirement of writing and speaking his mind. The motto of the man and the politician was on a plaque on his desk - ‘The buck stops here’ - and with each passing decade, he has come to be regarded by both historians and ordinary Americans as one of their favourite and even greatest presidents. |
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