Harry Truman's wife Bess was not amused when she saw the photo of her husband playing the piano while Lauren Bacall's legs dangled in front.
There was widespread misconduct in Harry Truman’s administration, but historians discount the president's responsibility.
Miscalculations and blunders by world leaders precipitated the Korean War 60 years ago
Nixon on Truman, 1962
Recently discovered documents shine a new light on the President’s biggest decision
TWO CHEERLEADERS AND A CORPSE
Fifty years ago in the frozen mountains of Korea, the Marines endured a campaign as grueling and heroic as any in history
How bad is it when Presidents get really sore?
The Korean conflict erupted fifty years ago this June. Many Americans still believe that it began in debacle (which is true) and ended in a humiliating compromise that changed nothing (which is not).
DAVID McCULLOUGH tells why he thinks history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects
An overheard remark sent the author off on a years-long quest to discover the truth about a man whose power to inspire both rage and reverence has only grown after his death
Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later
America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult for all that, and there were plenty of shadows along with the sunshine
An Interview with the President and the First Lady
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow Executives. Once in a great while one was even flattering.
Thus did Franklin Roosevelt characterize the man who was to be his running mate in 1944 and—as everyone at the astonishing Democratic Convention knew—almost certainly the next President of the United States. Here is FDR at his most devious, Harry Truman at the pivot of his career, and the old party-boss system at its zenith.
It took us longer to name the war than to fight it
Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.
When the President fired the general, civilian control of the military faced its severest test in our history
A noted historian argues that television, a relative newcomer, has nearly destroyed old—and valuable—political traditions
Harry Truman’s lifetime correspondence with his adored Bess opens a window on their time
His newly discovered diary reveals how the President saw the conference that ushered in the Cold War
Unpublished letters from Dean Acheson to Ex-President Harry Truman
The ex-Presidency now carries perquisites and powers that would have amazed all but the last few who have held that office
The American Experience With Foreign Aid