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The underdog president from Missouri looked like a physics professor than a politician. Harry S. Truman might've been the only president to wear perscription glasses throughout his two terms.

President Harry S. Truman took over toward the end of World War II. In the spring of 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt had died unexpectedly. This created a power vaccum as postwar negotiations between the Allies and Axis forces began taking root. Nazi Germany was shrinking from simulataneous, two-front attacks. Italian citizens had removed strongman, Benito Mussolini and his cohorts with "frontier justice". Japan was the only enemy, but fiercely determined, still standing. Later in 1945, President Truman had faced two catastrophic measures. He would either support a U.S. military invasion of Japan or support the dropping of the world's, newest and deadliest weapon, the atomic bomb.

Either plan would've reaped insurmontable, human casualties. To save American soldiers' lives, he had chosen the latter. However, he did have time to drench Tokyo with blistering air raid, killing over 50,000 people. When no surrender came, two Japanese, Hiroshima and Nagaski were virtually erased from the world's landscape in separate bombings. Emperor, Hirohito surrendered unconditionally to the Allies and faced justice for his war crimes.

President Truman wasn't just a destroyer of enemies. He was a rebuilder as well. In 1948, he implemented the Marshall Plan to economically and build Europe and Asia. Billions of American dollars went to bail out financially strapped nations. The Marshall Plan had also carved new borders for emerging countries. Israel's creation(and the Arabs' tragedy)had come from Truman's Marshall Plan. U.S. aid provided much relief as Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin started covering Eastern Europe under his stretching "Iron Curtain". Communist sympathizers began guerrilla movements in Turkey and Greece. Those violent uprisings were quelched by U.S. military aid. President Truman also tested the Soviet's nerve by breaking their Berlin blockade. American airplanes dropped humanitarian aid to starving Germans with the airlift that fall.

The next year, he faced another challenge. New York district attorney, Thomas Dewey took on Truman for the presidential race. Dewey had single-handedly put down the state's biggest organized crime syndicate after sentencing "Lucky" Luciano to thirty years in prison. Toward the election's close, Dewey held an impressive lead. Morning editions began

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