'Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt's Shadow and Remade the World,' by David L. Roll

How can a mere mortal follow the reign of a god? In American history, a regular Joe suddenly thrust into the apex of power and responsibility following the death of a god is the story of Harry Truman. And what a story it is: Fate placed her cold hand on Truman's shoulder following the death of four-time-elected President Franklin Roosevelt in the midst of World War II. Just weeks later, Truman would find himself arm-wrestling with Stalin at Yalta, balancing aspiration (formation of the United Nations) with expedience (the fate of Poland) in the creation of a post-Third Reich world. Soon after, the buck stopped with him in deciding whether to loose on the world an atomic bomb that might foreshorten a terrible war but would forever change the relationship of humanity's genius to its own potential demise.

For we mere mortals who wonder how we might measure up should Fate so deal with us, the story of after-thought Vice President Harry Truman--earlier, a not-very-successful haberdasher from Kansas City and product of a corrupt big-city political machine--is a fascination. Truman, somehow and to the amazement of seemingly everyone except himself, resoundingly won the 1948 presidential election over the patrician governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, thereby finally emerging from Roosevelt's shadow--at least in Truman's own psyche. The photograph of Truman's triumphant visage holding the Chicago Daily Tribune's morning-after edition trumpeting "Dewey Defeats Truman" is an iconic image for the ages. (And an inspiration to appellate lawyers everywhere who remind us that it is not over until it is over.)

Now we can explore this exquisitely fraught story in depth given the April 2024 publication of David L. Roll's "Ascent to Power." If you care to read no further, here is my review: it's a great read offering terrific insight into a pivotal period of world history--April 1945 to November 1948--when America was truly the indispensable nation (think: the defeat of the Axis powers and the end of World War II, the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan) and its President truly the most powerful person on Earth with no close second. For serious students of history, or just a geek like me, I commend taking one's time in the extensive end notes. This is where Roll's scholarship shines as he repeatedly compares contemporaneous content from original sources and uses a historian's judgment to square the circles (e.g., was the actor's diary written for the truth or for a later burnishing of a legacy?)

The Truman story--myth, really--not surprisingly has a far more nuanced reality. When Truman was selected by the cigar-chomping Democratic machine as the VP candidate in 1944, a decision eventually ratified last-minute and tepidly by Roosevelt, he had not just fallen off the turnip truck. That said, he knew enough about turnips to later campaign using the "Turnip Day" strategy to call out the "do-nothing" 80th Congress in code understood well by America's farmers, then a sizeable proportion of the electorate. "On the 26th of July, sow your turnips wet or dry" was the old Missouri dirt farmer expression. He called a balky Congress back into session as of July 26, 1948, exhorting and demanding it to pass farm-favorable legislation. Farmers and farming communities in the Midwest were ecstatic that one of their own was calling out effete Washington elites in their own plain language. Others since have noticed the effectiveness of that stratagem.

Roll recounts the familiar Truman's resume for effective leadership and management, starting with his command of the Battery D artillery unit in World War I (whose members were a loyal following for decades thereafter), his rise as an efficient "judge"-- a municipal supervisor, really--in Missouri local politics, his entry onto the national stage, and his establishing a reputation for rectitude in his leadership of a Congressional committee dedicated to rooting out corruption in military appropriations. Roll explains, as appears to be the consensus view of other historians, that Truman's true character did not reflect the sordid and corrupt machinations of his original sponsor, Boss Pendergast in Kansas City. Nor did Truman's subsequent failed clothing business with longtime Jewish friend Eddie Jacobson reflect any lack of savvy or smarts. Jacobson's religion becomes relevant later in light of his kitchen cabinet advocacy, explained in detail by Roll, in favor of Truman's decision for the U.S. to be the first nation to recognize the new state of Israel in 1948. According to Roll, Jacobson had an uphill fight.

Still, VP Truman was wholly unprepared to take on the presidency. Truman literally ran to the White House in April 1945 when he was urgently summoned to receive important news. He was shown into Eleanor Roosevelt's sitting room who then told Truman, "Harry, the President is dead." Roll explains that Truman, shaken, eventually finds his voice and says, "Is there anything I can do for you?" Truman later wrote that Mrs. Roosevelt's response never left him: "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."

Roll reveals documentary evidence from Roosevelt's physician who advised FDR, as he contemplated the unprecedented fourth term, that he would not live long enough to complete it. He knew he was a dying man; the only question was how soon. Yet Roosevelt ran and won in 1944 but inexplicably did little thereafter to prepare his successor. Roll explains that it is not true, as the myth sometimes runs, that Truman had no idea that the U.S. was engaged in the titanic efforts of the Manhattan Project until after FDR's death. But it is true that as VP he had not been advised about its progress nor the strategic implications of employing, or not employing, a weapon so different in kind. Likewise, Truman was not kept abreast of the complex strategies FDR was employing playing Churchill and Stalin off one another in Casablanca and Tehran to realize America's policy choices for prosecuting the war and the peace to follow. Without such briefing and insights from his President, the Yalta and Potsdam conferences were nonetheless to occur with Truman's occupying Roosevelt's seat at the table.

Roll covers Roosevelt's shocking physical decline in his waning months, quite apparent to all. Perhaps Roosevelt had too much on his plate in 1944 and early 1945 to focus on succession planning. Still, one cannot conclude other than Truman's being kept out in the cold represented a colossal risk and failure of the final months of the Roosevelt brain trust. Although Roll does not go there, one wonders if Truman might have made different decisions had he been better advised and had more time to cogitate. There is a simmering counterfactual hypothesis that the 45-year Cold War with the USSR (and the Korean and Vietnam wars, among others) could have been avoided with different American choices during the period covered by this book.

The overriding theme of Ascent to Power is a VP, never having sought the limelight and personally feeling lonely and incarcerated in the "white jail," eventually rising beyond his internal pledge to do just as--and only as--Roosevelt would have done. Things change and Truman was wise enough to know he could not channel an inner Roosevelt to divine what FDR would have done. No, he needed to act on his own, mandate from the people or not.

For me, the excitement picks up when Truman wrests the Democratic nomination in 1948 from the party apparatus which thinks he has "loser" stamped on his forehead. On May 7, six months before the 1948 election, Truman's job approval rating was a dismal 36%. He was widely perceived as a caretaker lightweight. Truman then undertakes a grueling whistlestop tour across the country where he is encouraged by the crowds to "pour it on, Harry" and to "give them hell." He found his voice, usually speaking extemporaneously and with no notes. It worked; he won, capturing 303 electoral college votes of our 531 electors, compared with Dewey's 189 votes. For his part, Truman recalled, "I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell." If I could say one thing in my whole life as great as that, I would die a happy man.

Now a disclosure: I know David Roll although I have had no contact with him for more than a decade. He was the Chair (firm Managing Partner) of the international powerhouse law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP in its Washington, D.C. headquarters when I joined that firm in 1997 to open, develop and manage its Los Angeles office. I worked closely with Roll for some years in the late 1990s in our respective management positions. We shared an interest in American history and discussed it from time to time, but I never dreamed Roll would go on to become a distinguished historian and author. Roll's first book is a biography of Louis Johnson--the Johnson of Steptoe & Johnson--a Clarksburg, West Virginia lawyer-politico who decided following his move to D.C. for government service to take a few cases for clients on the side. From such a modest beginning was the D.C.-based Steptoe & Johnson formed. Roll's story of Johnson's decisive role in the late 1930s in the arming of America for the coming fight is a page-turner. Johnson went on to serve as Secretary of Defense in the Truman administration in the frightening early days of the Cold War. Roll has also written well-received biographies of Roosevelt insider Harry Hopkins and Secretary of State George Marshall.

Those interested in the longer and fuller Truman story, including an examination of the hardships visited upon Truman's grandparents by the Union army during the Civil War in Missouri and how it may have shaped young Harry's early thinking about race and power, there are a great many to choose among. I recommend David McCullough's 1992 Pulitzer Prize winner, "Truman," as good a book as has ever been written. Yet Roll's book too is a gem, for the significance of the time period under examination, for the depth of the research, and for its readability.