BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World by A.J. Baime
Truman’s presidential odyssey began on April 12, 1945, the day Franklin Roosevelt died. It is impossible to overstate the shock to the world FDR’s death caused. “The Romans must have felt this way when word came that Caesar Augustus was dead,” the columnist I. F. Stone wrote at the time.
This amazing book covers the tumultuous days from post WWI, the Roaring Twenties, Hoover administrations "get rich" for financial insiders that crashed markets, saw foreclosures of homes, businesses and brought about the great depression, known as the “Hoover Days”. It also set up President FDR for four terms that saw the United States enter WWII.
After reading this informative and amazing book you will see that FDR’s pick of Harry Truman as Vice President did America a great favor.
What came next derailed American democracy, and was the last war that America would win.
EXCERPTS:
No generation had ever lived through such leaps of innovation so ruthlessly squeezed into a lifetime. The ubiquity of telephones, movies with sound, paved streets roaring with motorcar traffic, the rise of the supermarket with branded products such as Post Toasties cereal and Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon mayonnaise—none of this had existed thirty years earlier. The war had accelerated the speed of modernization. Truman could recall as a young man of nineteen reading about the Wright Brothers’ first controlled flights. Now the U.S. Army Air Forces were flying thousands of 56,000-pound B-24 bombers, equipped with radar and gyrocompasses that enabled the dropping of bombs on precision targets. Racial integration, women on assembly lines—it all felt like an H. G. Wells novel. In the previous eighteen months the nation had come of age.” Americans—especially in Washington—felt the pull of destiny, that their country had become the world’s moral arbiter.
The month had flown by in a montage of historic events. The Axis surrender in Italy, the execution of Mussolini, the suicide of Hitler, the Russian capture of Berlin, Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, the liberation of death camps, the firebombings of Japan. The United Nations Conference was under way in San Francisco, and the president had been briefed on the most startling secret in human history.
Bastards,” “yellow monkeys,” and vermin-infested “louseous Japanicas.” But American feelings toward the Japanese went beyond racism. A hatred had sunk deep into the American consciousness following Pearl Harbor, a hatred that did not come into play in the European war, even toward the Nazis.
The bomb was on the way.
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