Truman

David McCullough's biography follows Harry Truman from his 1884 birth in Lamar, Missouri, and a boyhood on the family farm through a young adulthood marked by failure, most visibly the men's clothing store he opened in Kansas City with Eddie Jacobson that went bankrupt in the 1921 recession and left Truman working for years to repay debts he did not finally clear until 1935. The book follows Truman's service as an artillery captain in France during the First World War, commanding a unit that, under his leadership, lost no men, and into the Kansas City politics of the Pendergast machine, which first put him in county office and later helped send him to the United States Senate in 1934.

McCullough follows Truman's rise to national prominence through the wartime Senate committee investigating military contracts, work credited with saving the government billions of dollars, and through the sudden, unprepared jolt of becoming president in April 1945 after barely three months as vice president, a transition so abrupt that Truman had not yet been told about the Manhattan Project when Franklin Roosevelt died. The book covers the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine that shaped the opening of the Cold War, the desegregation of the armed forces, the Korean War and the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur, and the come from behind 1948 election victory over Thomas Dewey that produced one of the most famous photographs in American political history.

McCullough writes with the narrative pull that made him one of the most widely read popular historians of his generation, and reading the book means following an ordinary seeming man forced by circumstance into some of the twentieth century's largest decisions. It suits a reader who wants the full sweep of a presidency explained through the plain spoken Missourian who found himself running it.