It's been three years since we began our series on the Cold War and released the first episode of that series, which was titled Harry Truman, The Power of the Universe.

And since then, we've covered several of the Cold War presidents, and the series ended with our episode on President George H.W. Bush.

Lately, Harry Truman has been on my mind, mainly because I just saw the movie Oppenheimer,

and also in part because it was the 78th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over

Hiroshima on August 6th. So I went back and listened to our episode on Truman. And with the Oppenheimer movie out, I thought it might be a good time to re-broadcast it for our listeners.

Truman has always been a bit of a recurring interest for me.

He's not one of those presidents that I study repeatedly over and over on a regular basis.

But every few years when a new movie or some new

scholarship comes out on the Cold War or the atomic bomb, I find myself being drawn back into

his story, back into the momentous decisions that he made that changed the fate of the world.

And it never ceases to amaze me that a man who seems so ordinary

in so many ways, and who, in a sense, accidentally became president, could have such a huge

impact on the world. So we've decided to rebroadcast our Truman series, and we hope you enjoy it.

And for those who've seen the movie Oppenheimer,

in which Truman's decisions form a major backdrop for the movie, we hope that our episode

enriches your understanding of the movie and that era. On April 12, 1945, at 3.35 p.m.,

Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage while vacationing in Warm Springs, Georgia.

He had been president for 12 years, longer than anyone in history, so long that many Americans could barely remember another president.

And he had led the United States through its greatest economic crisis, the Great Depression, and through World War II,

the most destructive conflict in world history. Four times, the American people entrusted him

with the nation's highest office in those critical years, something they had never done with anyone

else. The United States had been at war for three and a half years. In Europe,

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