Biography

Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A lifetime member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a U.S. senator from the state of Missouri from 1935 to 1945. He was chosen as incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate for the 1944 presidential election. Truman was inaugurated as the 34th vice president in 1945 and served for less than three months until President Roosevelt died. Now serving as president, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of communism. He proposed numerous liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the Conservative Coalition that dominated the Congress.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Bonitao

After high school, he engaged in various small business ventures from 1900 to 1905. From 1906 to 1917 he ran his parents' farm in Independence, Missouri. After the United States entered World War I in 1917, Truman joined the Army to fight as a captain in France. After the war, he and a friend founded a clothing store in Kansas City, which went bankrupt in 1921. In 1919, Truman married Bess Wallace, with whom he had a daughter. In the 1920s, Truman became involved in the Democratic Party. As their representative for Missouri, he was elected to the US Senate in 1934, where he was represented until 1944.

There he soon gained great respect as chairman of the "Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program". In 1944, Truman was elected vice president under President Franklin D Roosevelt. After Roosevelt's death in April 1945, Harry S. Truman succeeded him as the 33rd US president. As early as July 1945, the new head of government appeared as a sovereign statesman at the Potsdam Conference, where he met with Josif W Stalin and the British Prime Minister Min. C. Attlee brought about a compromise on the treatment of defeated Germany. A month later, Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, intended to bring about Japan's unconditional surrender, although the military necessity remained highly controversial.

In the run-up to the Cold War, the use of the atomic bomb also served the function of demonstrating the military strength of the USA to the Soviet Union. After the war, Truman struggled domestically with rising inflation and social tensions that resulted in strikes and racial unrest. His countermeasures were torpedoed by a Republican-dominated Congress. As the Cold War began, the American president, against the background of the crises in Greece and Turkey, which seemed to be falling into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence, developed a corresponding aid program that went down in history as the "Truman Doctrine". In his speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, Truman promoted his program of $400 million in military and economic aid to the two countries mentioned.

The president justified the investment with the USA's obligation to support all liberal-democratic nations that are threatened by totalitarian-communist aggression. Given the economic and strategic importance of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Truman Doctrine deliberately exaggerated Soviet expansionist efforts in order to gain the necessary support from the American public for the opening of the Cold War. Shortly afterwards, the "Marshall Plan" activated under Truman also served to stabilize the "free world" and the policy of "containment", which was intended to prevent an expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence: it was a unique aid measure for the reconstruction of Western Europe and the Supporting Western-oriented countries around the world.

Against the background of the intensifying East-West conflict, Truman contributed to the founding of NATO, the CIA secret service and, in 1948, to the realization of the legendary airlift that enabled the Berlin blockade to be overcome. After being overwhelmingly re-elected in 1949, Harry S. Truman continued to advance the Cold War in his second term with the development of the hydrogen bomb and in 1950 with the US intervention in Korea. Internally, in view of the intensifying Cold War, the impression of internal and external threats increased to the point of hysteria. The resulting climate of uncertainty and mistrust reached its climax through McCarthy's legal and moral persecution of left-wing democratic exponents and significantly reduced the reputation of the Truman administration.

In 1953, Truman resigned from the presidency and largely retreated into private life. Only in the 1960s did he emerge again on the political stage in support of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Harry S. Truman died on December 26, 1972 in Kansas City.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth