CAPTAIN TRUMAN
Harry S. Truman had only been vice president of the United States for 82 days when urgently summoned to the White House on April 12, 1945. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt greeted the then 60-year-old former senator from Missouri and gently touched his shoulder. “Harry,” she told him, “the president is dead.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been recovering from exhaustion in Warm Springs, Ga. While sitting for a portrait artist, he’d suddenly complained of a “terrific headache” and slumped over, unconscious. Two hours later the 63-year-old was pronounced dead. He’d suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage.
Truman asked the First Lady what he could do to help. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.” That evening, still reeling from the shock of Roosevelt’s death, Truman was sworn in as the nation’s 33rd president.
Journaling from the battlefront of World War II in Europe Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. was among several senior U.S. military leaders to express displeasure over the ascension to the Oval Office of a man they considered too weak and indecisive to be wartime commander in chief. “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference,” Patton wrote, “people are made vice presidents who were never intended, neither by party nor by the Lord, to be presidents.”
But as Patton and other wary Americans would soon discover, the Missourian did indeed have the leadership skills and steely determination his new position required. He’d developed those vital traits as a
