Born May 8, 1884
Lamar, Missouri
Died December 26, 1972
Kansas City, Missouri

U.S. president, vice president, senator

"I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." Harry S. Truman spoke these words to a reporter on April 13, 1945, the day after being sworn in as U.S. president. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) had died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage, and Truman was faced with leading the American people through mounting international crises.

Harry S. Truman, the thirty-third president of the United States, would be cast as a central player in the quickly developing Cold War (1945–91). The Cold War was an intense political, ideological, economic, and military global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies, involving hostility and conflict but not direct warfare between the...