by Maurice Sassoon

Created on: September 08, 2008

Harry Truman was the thirty-third President of the United States, from April 12, 1945, until January 4, 1953. He was Vice President during Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term as President, and became President when Roosevelt died. He was re-elected in November, l948, but refused to run for another term in 1952.

President Truman was in office at the conclusion of World War II and the first man to authorize the use of the atomic bomb in warfare. After his term in office, Harry Truman retired to his home in Independence, Missouri where he wrote his memoirs regarding his political career during one of the most troubled and eventful periods of United States history.

Harry Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, a town of about 3,000 in the southwestern corner of the State, on May 8, 1884. His middle name caused a family problem: Should it be Shippe, for one grandfather, or Solomon, for the other? They decided to use only a middle initial to stand for both names. His father was a farmer. When Harry Truman was a boy, he moved to a farm at Grandview, Missouri, near Independence, Missouri, a few miles from the big city of Kansas City, Missouri. He attended schools in Independence. He met his future wife, Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, in high school. They were not married until about twenty years later.

After he finished high school, Truman had several jobs. He worked for the Kansas City Star, then as a railroad timekeeper, and then as a helper in a Kansas City bank. He tried to obtain an appointment to West Point, but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. At the age of 2l, he joined the National Guard.

In 19l8, Harry Truman and a friend from his Army days opened a haberdashery shop in Kansas City. The business failed. His first election to any public office was in 1922, when he was elected a county judge in Jackson Count, Missouri. He attended the Kansas City School of Law from 1923 to 1925 and continued to serve as judge throughout this period. He was defeated in his campaign for re-election to the judgeship in 1924, but won the election of 1926 and became presiding judge. He remained in this position for eight years. In 1934, he was elected to the United States Senate on the Democratic ticket, and in 1940, he was re-elected. He won national fame as head of the Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program and was instrumental in saving the taxpayers of the country millions of dollars by pinpointing the cause of wasteful and inefficient methods that hindered

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