As Franklin D. Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman has always lacked the popularity of his predecessor
Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States to win World War II, but it was Harry Truman, an outlier among U.S. presidents.
Growing up on a farm in Missouri, Truman has no elite flavor, he speaks rudely and bluntly, he has never even gone to college, and with this background, he has become the president of the United States, which is a model of grassroots counterattack.
It doesn't matter if you don't go to college, anyway, Truman's dream when he was a child has always been to join the military, unfortunately, his eyes are not good, his right eye is highly myopic, his left eye is close to total blindness, West Point and naval academy can not go to school, had to enter the inferior National Guard.
When the United States entered World War I, the National Guard was transferred to active duty, and Truman sneaked into the American Expeditionary Force to fight in France by stealing an eye watch, serving as a captain company commander of a field artillery company.
With a more grandfatherly style than all the people in the company, Truman turned a loosely disciplined company into a crack soldier who had repeatedly made military achievements, and what was even more rare was that no one in the company was killed.
Truman and his political leader Tom Penderst
Truman discovered his leadership skills during the war and returned to politics, where he was elected to the Senate by the uncle of one of his comrades-in-arms, Tom Pendergerst, a political leader in Jackson County, Missouri.
After becoming a politician, Truman still cherished his military status, and he remained a reserve officer, eventually rising to the rank of colonel, and did not retire from the army until he stepped down as president of the United States.
During his term as senator, Truman actively supported Roosevelt's New Deal, and he led the "Truman Commission" to investigate corruption and waste in the military, saving the United States $11 billion in military spending, and he became famous.
In 1944, Roosevelt ran for the presidency for the fourth time, appointing Truman as his running mate, and he became vice president.
Roosevelt rarely consulted Truman on major issues involving war, so when Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945, his successor Truman was completely unprepared.
Rarely, Truman made some bold decisions almost instinctively, and he supported the founding of the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference, with the aim of changing the traditional Isolationism of the United States and embracing a postwar internationalist foreign policy.
Just 26 days after Truman took office, Nazi Germany announced its surrender, and he appointed General Dwight Eisenhower as commander of the occupation forces in Germany, advancing the "de-Nazification" movement and the reckoning of war crimes.
Leaders of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union attending the Potsdam Conference
In July 1945, Truman attended the Potsdam Conference to discuss with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee on the establishment of a new postwar international order.
The month after returning to the United States from Potsdam, Truman decided to use the atomic bomb on Japan, a decision he later said he never regretted or suffered because he saved the lives of countless American officers and soldiers.
With the end of World War II and the wartime friendship between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union becoming a semblance, Truman quickly concluded that the United States and Britain working together were the only way to prevent Soviet rule in Europe.
However, after the war, the United States demobilized a large number of soldiers, leaving only 391,000 troops in Europe, while the Soviet Union still has more than 2.8 million troops, and it is certainly impossible to fight.
Truman's ingenious use of The Economic Advantage of the United States and the temporary nuclear monopoly not only slowed the pace of Soviet expansion in Europe, but also succeeded in preventing them from invading Japan.
Truman carefully maintained his alliance until he completely turned the other cheek with the Soviet Union, but with the seizure of power by the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1948 and the Soviet blockade of Berlin, the Cold War was inevitable.
Truman, who had been prepared for this, came up with three of his magic weapons for dealing with the Cold War: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
With the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union also changed from allies to enemies
In a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, Truman established the basic principle of Truman Doctrine, namely that the United States would assist anti-communist regimes around the world and establish a global military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In response, Congress approved $400 million in economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey and sent military advisers to prevent their governments from being overthrown by the Soviet Union.
The $13 billion Marshall Plan fueled Europe's postwar economic renaissance while effectively preventing the Soviet Union from using economic chaos to expand its power, and the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries under its control refused aid in the face of the harsh conditions imposed by Washington.
In March 1948, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Treaty with the support of the United States, which was expanded into the Western European Union in 1955 and eventually developed into NATO, which was the anti-tit-for-tat confrontation with the Warsaw Pact.
The blockade of Berlin was Truman's first major challenge in the early years of the Cold War, responding by forcefully airlifting supplies to West Berlin and joining NATO in April 1949, reminding the Soviets that he would defend Western Europe with atomic bombs.
The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in Berlin eventually led to the division of Germany into East and West Germany, and the confrontation between the two camps did not end until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Truman called sending troops to North Korea "the hardest decision of his life," and although he won a military-political battle with General Douglas MacArthur, the United States was mired in north Korea and his support plummeted, which led him to abandon his participation in the 1952 presidential election.
During his nearly eight years as president, Truman refined U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, including the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Air Force, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Global Joint Military Command Network.
After leaving office, Truman returned to Missouri and lived a civilian life with his wife
After leaving office, Truman turned down executive and advisory positions at many large companies, refusing to even take on advertisements, believing that the former president had done such things to the dignity of the country.
Of the $670,000 he earned writing his memoirs, Truman distributed most of his taxes to staff, and his only income in his later years was $112.56 a month in a military pension.
Because Truman was so poor that even Congress could not bear it, he passed the Outgoing President Act in 1958, which provided a pension of $25,000 a year to the living outgoing president.
On December 26, 1972, the 88-year-old Truman died of emphysema caused by pneumonia in Kansas City, Missouri, and he was one of the presidents with the lowest popular support during his tenure, but after leaving office, the domestic evaluation of him has become higher and higher.