‘Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.’

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 48.

“The burden of reconciling the hopes of many Americans for a better life with the responsibilities of global power fell to Harry Truman. He was a seemingly mundane Mid-Westerner, the son of a failed Missouri farmer who had gone on to fail himself as a haberdasher. Too poor to go to college, and hence the last non-graduate US president, Truman distinguished himself as an artillery officer in the First World War. He was five feet eight, with grey-blue eyes and steely hair. His personal integrity, based on a strong Baptist faith, somehow managed to coexist with being part of the deeply corrupt regime of the Democrat Tom Pendergast in St Louis. Chosen to put an honest face on the Pendergast machine in Congress, Truman was elected to the Senate in 1934, aged fifty.

His experiences of the havoc debt played on families such as his own gave him a horror of government overspending and waste. The profligacy of the armed forces and defence contractors with taxpayers’ money was a particular bugbear. Washington DC was not Truman’s kind of town, certainly not the smart salons of Georgetown. He was quick to resent the East Coast ‘pinko pansies‘, 'striped pants’ patrician snobs and impertinent journalists who darkened his path.

Nothing about Harry would have mattered much in broader historical terms, until on the evening of 12 April 1945 he was summoned to the White House. A grieving Eleanor Roosevelt said: ‘Harry, the President is dead.’ ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked, to break the silence. Mrs Roosevelt replied, ‘Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.’ The intimacy of this scene contrasted with the fact that FDR had met Truman only three times before he drafted him to replace the left-liberal Henry Wallace, and then three times more, perfunctorily, after Truman had become vice president. Now, aged sixty, Truman was president. While conscious that there were a dozen people who could do the job better, he told friends and colleagues that Providence had destined him for the role.