![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps Truman’s most significant act as President was his decision to enter and then stick with the war in Korea. And it was Senator Joseph McCarthy, more than Truman, who defined the political tenor of the era. As President, Truman was accused of “losing” China, but China was, of course, never really his to lose. “As a practical matter,” Frank notes, the decision “had been made for him.” Truman’s greatest foreign-policy triumph, the European Recovery Program, is credited to the military giant and Secretary of State George Marshall we don’t call it the Truman Plan. Truman acknowledged that he didn’t have much choice about whether to drop the bombs. His own accomplishments occurred somewhere in between. Truman inherited daunting challenges, and he borrowed other men’s visions in order to meet them. ![]() Once Truman assumed office, global events seemed to proceed according to their own logic and momentum. Truman was the ultimate accidental President, a pipsqueak senator from Independence, Missouri, who had been Vice-President for less than three months when Roosevelt died. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953” (Simon & Schuster). How much Truman shaped these events, and how much he was buffeted by them, is the puzzle at the heart of Jeffrey Frank’s new book, “The Trials of Harry S. Eisenhower, the war in Europe ended, Hitler killed himself, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the Cold War began, the state of Israel came into being, the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear weapons, China underwent a Communist revolution, the West created NATO, the world created the United Nations, and the Korean War began. Truman into office, and January, 1953, when Truman handed the Presidency to Dwight D. ![]() But the rhythms of our moment-pandemic, protest, pandemic, election, insurrection, pandemic, invasion of Ukraine-have nothing on the Truman era. Americans today seem to believe that we live in especially exhausting political times. ![]()
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