It’s hard not to like Harry Truman, a man raised in a four-room house next to a small mule-barn. He worked on a farm, as an itinerant railway construction timer, and as a bank clerk, and became a combat artillery captain in World War I, later retiring as a colonel in the Army Reserves. He was co-owner of a haberdashery that failed in the postwar recession, worked for 14 years to retire all his debts, and took night courses in law while serving as a municipal judge (really a county commissioner—he wasn’t a trial judge). He was nominated and elected U.S. senator from Missouri in 1934 by a narrow margin, and in 1940—despite standing resolutely on President Franklin Roosevelt’s coattails as he sought a third term—Truman again was rather narrowly reelected. It was effectively a fluke that he was chosen as vice president by Roosevelt and a small group of party elders in 1944 when it was agreed that the incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace, was too far left and too erratic to be renominated.
