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"Harry S. Truman"
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Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960
The Cold War was in many ways a religious war. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and other American leaders believed that human rights and freedom were endowed by God, that God had called the United States to defend liberty, and that Soviet communism was evil because of its atheism and enmity to religion. Along with security and economic concerns, these religious convictions helped determine both how the United States defined the enemy and how it fought the conflict. Meanwhile, American Protestant churches failed to seize the moment. Internal differences over theology and politics, and resistance to cooperation with Catholics and Jews, hindered Protestant leaders domestically and internationally. Frustrated by these internecine disputes, Truman and Eisenhower attempted to construct a new civil religion to mobilize domestic support for Cold War measures, determine the strategic boundaries of containment, unite all religious faiths against communism, and to undermine the authority of communist governments abroad.
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The Truman Administration and Bolivia
The United States emerged from World War II with generally good relations with the countries of Latin America and with the traditional Good Neighbor policy still largely intact. But it wasn’t too long before various overarching strategic and ideological priorities began to undermine those good relations as the Cold War came to exert its grip on U.S. policy formation and implementation. In The Truman Administration and Bolivia, Glenn Dorn tells the story of how the Truman administration allowed its strategic concerns for cheap and ready access to a crucial mineral resource, tin, to take precedence over further developing a positive relationship with Bolivia. This ultimately led to the economic conflict that provided a major impetus for the resistance that culminated in the Revolution of 1952—the most important revolutionary event in Latin America since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The emergence of another revolutionary movement in Bolivia early in the millennium under Evo Morales makes this study of its Cold War predecessor an illuminating and timely exploration of the recurrent tensions between U.S. efforts to establish and dominate a liberal capitalist world order and the counterefforts of Latin American countries like Bolivia to forge their own destinies in the shadow of the “colossus of the north.”
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Little Helpers
In Little Helpers, historian John Robert Greene encourages us to rethink the scandals of Harry Truman's presidency by providing the first political biography of the man who precipitated them—Gen. Harry H. Vaughan. As the former president's close friend and military aide, Vaughan brought a number of disreputable figures into the White House, in addition to committing plenty of misconduct on his own. Although aware of Vaughan's misdeeds, Truman remained unwilling to rid his administration of him and his hangers on. Vaughan's scandals have largely gone overlooked by historians—a tendency that Little Helpers corrects.
Greene begins with the story of how Truman and Vaughan met during World War I, then examines Vaughan's support for Truman for the Senate and later as President. The majority of the book, however, considers the various cronies that surrounded Vaughan and illustrates the significance of his relationship with Truman—and the president's inability to rein him in.
Drawing from primary and archival sources, many never before published, Little Helpers is further distinguished by its use of the correspondence between Vaughan and Truman. Greene also provides a dramatic narrative account of the inner workings of the Truman administration, making the book accessible to the general reader as well as the specialist.
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Ascent to power : how Truman emerged from Roosevelt's shadow and remade the world
\"From Franklin Roosevelt's final days through Harry Truman's extraordinary transformation, this is the enthralling story behind the most consequential presidential transition in U.S. history. When Roosevelt, in failing health, decided to run for a fourth term, he gave in to the big city Democratic bosses and reluctantly picked Senator Truman as his vice president, a man he barely knew. Upon FDR's death in April 1945, Truman, after only eighty-two days as VP, was thrust into the presidency. Utterly unprepared, he faced the collapse of Germany, a Europe in ruins, the organization of the UN, a summit with Stalin and Churchill, and the question of whether atomic bombs would be ready for use against Japan. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was growing increasingly hostile toward U.S. power. Truman inherited FDR's hope that peace could be maintained through cooperation with the Soviets, but he would soon learn that imitating his predecessor would lead only to missteps and controversy. Spanning the years of transition, 1944 to 1948, Ascent to Power illuminates Truman's struggles to emerge as president in his own right. Yet from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth, Truman's legacy transcends. With his come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, Truman's decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today\"-- Dust jacket flap.
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Truman and the Bomb
Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman's
decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In
destroying these myths, Truman and the Bomb will
discomfort both Truman's critics and his supporters, and force
historians to reexamine what they think they know about
the end of the Pacific War. Myth : Truman didn't
know of the atomic bomb's development before he became president.
Fact : Truman's knowledge of the bomb is revealed
in his own carefully worded letters to a Senate colleague and
specifically discussed in the correspondence between the army
officers assigned to his Senate investigating committee.
Myth : The huge casualty estimates cited by Truman
and Secretary of War Henry Stimson were a postwar creation devised
to hide their guilt for killing thousands of defenseless civilians.
Fact : The flagrantly misrepresented \"low\" numbers
are based on narrow slices of highly qualified-and limited-U.S.
Army projections printed in a variety of briefing documents and are
not from the actual invasion planning against Japan.
Myth : Truman wanted to defeat Japan without any
assistance from the Soviet Union and to freeze the USSR out of the
postwar settlements. Fact : President Franklin D.
Roosevelt and President Truman desperately wanted Stalin's
involvement in the bloody endgame of World War II and worked
diligently-and successfully-toward that end. Using previously
unpublished material, D. M. Giangreco busts these myths and more.
An award-winning historian and expert on Truman, Giangreco is
perfectly situated to debunk the many deep-rooted falsehoods about
the roles played by American, Soviet, and Japanese leaders during
the end of the World War II in the Pacific. Truman and the
Bomb , a concise yet comprehensive study of Truman's decision
to use the atomic bomb, will prove to be a classic for studying
presidential politics and influence on atomic warfare and its
military and diplomatic components. Making this book particularly
valuable for professors and students as well as for military,
diplomatic, and presidential historians and history buffs are
extensive primary source materials, including the planned U.S.
naval and air operations in support of the Soviet invasion of
Manchuria. These documents support Giangreco's arguments while
enabling the reader to enter the mindsets of Truman and his
administration as well as the war's key Allied participants.
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Harry and Arthur
With Franklin Roosevelt's death in April of 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America's new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time to craft a dramatic new foreign policy through which the United States stepped boldly onto the world stage to protect its friends, confront its enemies, and promote freedom. These two men transformed America from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader; from a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape; and from a nation with no real military establishment to one that now spends more on defense than the next dozen nations combined. Lawrence J. Haas, an award-winning journalist, reveals how, through the close collaboration of Truman and Vandenberg, the United States created the United Nations to replace the League of Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from communist threat, launched the Marshall Plan to rescue Western Europe's economy from the devastation of war, and established NATO to defend Western Europe.
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