Purchase
The American Presidents Series: The 33rd President,
Times Books
September 2008
On Sale: September 2, 2008
Featuring: Harry S. Truman
208 pages ISBN: 0805069380 EAN: 9780805069389 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The plainspoken man from Missouri who never expected to
be president yet rose to become one of the greatest leaders
of the twentieth century In April 1945, after the
death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the presidency fell to a
former haberdasher and clubhouse politician from
Independence, Missouri. Many believed he would be
overmatched by the job, but Harry S. Truman would surprise
them all. Few chief executives have had so lasting an
impact. Truman ushered America into the nuclear age,
established the alliances and principles that would define
the cold war and the national security state, started the
nation on the road to civil rights, and won the most
dramatic election of the twentieth century—his 1948
“whistlestop campaign” against Thomas E. Dewey. Robert
Dallek, the bestselling biographer of John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson, shows how this unassuming yet supremely
confident man rose to the occasion. Truman clashed with
Southerners over civil rights, with organized labor over the
right to strike, and with General Douglas MacArthur over the
conduct of the Korean War. He personified Thomas Jefferson’s
observation that the presidency is a “splendid misery,” but
it was during his tenure that the United States truly came
of age.
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