In our previous episode, we covered President Harry S. Truman's unlikely rise to power

and his first few months in office.

He had made the momentous decision to drop the atomic bomb.

World War II was over, and America and the world now looked to an era of peace.

But new problems were on the horizon.

The victorious allies were now forging a new world order,

but couldn't agree on what that order should look like.

The world had suffered through two world wars

and desperately feared a third one,

especially now that the atomic genie was out of the bottle.

How President Truman handled these challenges is the subject of this episode, of this American president.

Thank you. I'm . . As we covered in our previous episode, Truman succeeded to the presidency upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the longest-serving president and one of the most consequential chief executives in American history. It was not easy to follow a president as popular as FDR, and Truman would spend much of his presidency trying to measure up.

But for those who knew Truman and worked with him, there was something about him that people admired.

In a previous episode about FDR, I noted that he was a bit devious. He was a true politician

who often gave his staffers contradictory information and manipulated them. Roosevelt's

Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who served as a cabinet member for two previous presidents,

described him as, quote, the poorest administrator I've ever worked under. Not so with Truman.

This Midwestern haberdasher was refreshingly straightforward, even with the media.

Journalist Cable Phillips wrote, quote, he used the press occasionally as most presidents have done

to test the wind, but he never tried to con them with flattery and devious favoritism.

Harry Truman worked less to ingratiate himself with people, but succeeded better at it than any

important public figure I've ever known. He did it, I think, because he was so utterly honest with

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