As the 1944 election approached Democrat party bosses informed the gravely ill President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), who was insisting on running for an unheard of 4th term, that they would not support FDR’s ultra leftwing Vice President, Henry Wallace. FDR was forced to accept the unaccomplished party loyalist Harry Truman to be on his 1944 presidential ticket. FDR wins and soon dies, in 1945. Truman is then thrust into the White House.

Truman presided over the use of atomic weapons against Japan, and the formation of the national security state. A hostile GOP congress in 1947 began to investigate in earnest all the communists FDR had allowed into his New Deal and war era administrations. Truman repeatedly lied about the communist ties of key administration figures including Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. At one point Truman claimed executive privilege and locked up personnel files from the State Dept. and other agencies so GOP and Democrat congressional investigators couldn’t get at them. This was the first big “executive privilege” fight with Congress in the modern era.

Truman’s major domestic initiatives including an American version of the British government health system went nowhere in Congresses which were dominated by GOP and conservative Southern Democrats. No one in America thought Truman had a prayer of being elected in his own right in 1948. FDR’s wild Big tent of KKK’ers, Jews, Catholics, Labor, and many blacks fragmented. Extreme Leftwing Democrats split off to support former V.P. Henry Wallace, while many Southerners left the Democrats to form the “Dixiecrat” party.

Truman focused America’s rising anticommunist fervor overseas, while his political allies rehabilitated many leftists in the Democratic party, turning them into “Cold War Liberals,” ready to pronounce their opposition to communism with the new doctrine of “Containment,” which allowed them to oppose Moscow while not promoting any effort to defeat the worldwide menace. Truman united this faction of the party with the strong labor movement of that industrial era to defeat the weak GOP Establishment candidate, Thomas Dewey.

The Democrats elected with Truman in 1948 muted congressional investigations of communists within the U.S. government until Joe McCarthy ignited a new confrontation with Truman (and later Eisenhower) in 1950. Even the GOP internationalist Eisenhower, when he assumed the presidency, released information showing clearly that supposedly straight-talking Truman had LIED about key figures of his administration who he knew were communists.

The disastrous doctrine of containment came home to roost with the U.S. stalemate in Korea, setting a pattern of destructive, endless seeming no-win wars. Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, who insisted that we could not commit American soldiers to a conflict we did not intend to win. The Democrats elected with Truman in 1948 muted congressional investigations of communists within the U.S. government until Joe McCarthy ignited a new confrontation with Truman (and later Eisenhower) in 1950.

Episode 44 Hour of Decision: Harry Truman Was A Terrible President