Harry S. Truman

"Few chief executives have had so lasting an impact as our thirty-third president. It was Truman who ushered America into the nuclear age, established the alliances and principles that would define the Cold War and the national security state, started the nation on the road to civil rights, and won the most dramatic election of the twentieth century - his 1948 "whistlestop campaign" against Thomas E. Dewey." "Robert Dallek shows how this unassuming yet supremely confident man rose to the occasion in the years following World War II. It was not an easy task: Truman clashed with Southerners over civil rights, with organized labor over the right to strike, and with General Douglas MacArthur over the conduct of the Korean War. He personified Thomas Jefferson's observation that the presidency is a "splendid misery," but it was through his achievements that the United States truly came of age."--BOOK JACKET.