Truman was the first vice president to have a Secret Service agent assigned to him. The Roosevelt–Truman ticket achieved a 432–99 electoral-vote victory in the election, defeating the Republican ticket of Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and running mate Governor John Bricker of Ohio. One reason was that his wife and sister Mary Jane were both on his Senate staff payroll, and he feared negative publicity. Truman had repeatedly said that he was not in the race and that he did not want the vice presidency, and he remained reluctant.
As he concluded his address, he was handed a note that the strike had been settled on presidential terms; nevertheless, a few hours later, the House voted to draft the strikers. The unions had been promoted by the government during the war and tried to make their gains permanent through large-scale strikes in major industries. The costs of the war effort had been enormous, and Truman was intent on diminishing military services as quickly as possible to curtail the government's military expenditures.
The Nationalists had been major wartime allies and had large-scale popular support in the United States, along with a powerful lobby. Truman did not know what to do about China, where the Nationalists and Communists were fighting a large-scale civil war. The Solid South rejected civil rights as those states still enforced segregation. He broke with the New Deal by initiating an aggressive civil rights program which he termed a moral priority. As he readied for the 1948 election, Truman made clear his identity as a Democrat in the New Deal tradition, advocating for national health insurance, and repeal of the Taft–Hartley Act. This dissatisfaction led to large Democratic losses in the 1946 midterm elections, and Republicans took control of Congress for the first time since 1930.

Vice presidency (

With army friend Edward Jacobson he opened a haberdashery, but the business failed in the severe recession of the early 1920s. Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as president of the United States on April 12, 1945, after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Harry S. Truman served as the 33rd president of the United States from April 12, 1945, to January 20, 1953. After the war had ended, Truman played an important role in the reconstruction of Europe. The large-scale destruction forced the Japanese to surrender and quickly brought the war to an end. Although Europe was relatively safe and the war was nearly over, the Japanese front was still raging.

Life as the President

Although the allowance became taxable later in his presidency, Truman never reported it on his tax return, and converted some of the funds to cash he kept in the White House safe and later in a safe deposit box in Kansas City. Beginning in 1949, the president was also granted a $50,000 (equivalent to $661,000 in 2024) expense allowance, which was initially tax-free, and did not have to be accounted for. His finances were transformed by his accession to the presidency, which carried with it a salary of $75,000 (equivalent to $1,310,000 in 2024), which was increased to $100,000 (equivalent to $1,322,000 in 2024) in 1949. The highly unpopular Truman was handily defeated by Kefauver; 18 days later the president formally announced he would not seek a second full term. At the time of the 1952 New Hampshire primary (March 11, 1952), no candidate had won Truman's backing. The latter clause did not apply to Truman's situation in 1952 because of a grandfather clause exempting the incumbent president.
State and city party leaders strongly preferred Truman, and Roosevelt agreed. Outgoing Democratic National Committee chairman Frank C. Walker, incoming chairman Hannegan, party treasurer Edwin W. Pauley, Bronx party boss Ed Flynn, Chicago Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly, and lobbyist George E. Allen all wanted to keep Wallace off the ticket. Henry Wallace had served as Roosevelt's vice president for four years and was popular on the left, but he was viewed as too far to the left and too friendly to labor for some of Roosevelt's advisers.

First term (1945–

Truman was a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which established a formal peacetime military alliance with Canada and democratic European nations of the Western Bloc following World War II. The document was drafted by Paul Nitze, who consulted State and Defense officials and was formally approved by President Truman as the official national strategy after the war began in Korea. In February 1952, Truman's approval mark stood at 22 percent according to Gallup polls, which is the all-time lowest approval mark for a sitting U.S. president, though it was matched by Richard Nixon in 1974. The dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur was among the least politically popular decisions in presidential history. In the end, Truman held his betory casino registration progressive Midwestern base, won most of the Southern states despite the civil rights plank, and squeaked through with narrow victories in a few critical states, notably Ohio, California, and Illinois. In a personal appeal to the nation, Truman crisscrossed the United States by train; his "whistle stop" speeches from the rear platform of the presidential car, Ferdinand Magellan, came to represent his campaign.
In February 1948, Truman delivered a formal message to Congress requesting adoption of his 10-point program to secure civil rights, including anti-lynching, voter rights, and elimination of segregation. We must not tolerate such limitations on the freedom of any of our people and on their enjoyment of basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess. Truman wanted to keep the committee in place after the war was over, though his attempts at doing so were unsuccessful. By 1949, the Communists under Mao Zedong had won the civil war, the United States had a new enemy in Asia, and Truman came under fire from conservatives for "losing" China.

• In 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for Presidency for the 4th time.
• However, evidence eventually emerged that he amassed considerable wealth, some of it during his presidency.
• Truman was elected vice president in the 1944 presidential election and became president upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.
• Truman’s statement garnered a response from Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote a letter to the former president stating that he was “baffled” by the accusation, and demanded a public apology.
• As Secretary of State Acheson increased his pressure on Truman, the president stood alone in his administration as his own top appointees wanted to normalize relations.
• The waste and profiteering he saw led him to use his chairmanship of the Committee on Military Affairs Subcommittee on War Mobilization to start investigations into abuses while the nation prepared for war.
• Congress refused, so Truman issued Executive Order 9980 and Executive Order 9981, which prohibited discrimination in agencies of the federal government and desegregated the United States Armed Forces.

On January 31, 1950, Truman made the decision to go forward on the grounds that if the Soviets could make an H-bomb, the United States must do so as well and stay ahead in the nuclear arms race. Over the next several months there was an intense debate that split the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with the development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb. Truman's second inauguration on January 20, 1949, was the first ever televised nationally. The final tally showed the president had secured 303 electoral votes, Dewey 189, and Thurmond only 39. The three major polling organizations stopped polling well before the November 2 election date—Roper in September, and Crossley and Gallup in October—thus failing to measure the period when Truman appears to have surged past Dewey. The large crowds at Truman's whistle-stop events were an important sign of a change in momentum in the campaign, but this shift went virtually unnoticed by the national press corps.
This article provides a detailed timeline of Truman’s presidency, highlighting key events and milestones. The Truman administration went beyond the New Deal in the area of civil rights. On January 20, 1945, he took the vice-presidential oath, and after President Roosevelt's unexpected death only eighty-two days later on April 12, 1945, he was sworn in as the nations' thirty-third President.

Foreign policy

• In 1948, he proposed that Congress should pass comprehensive civil rights legislation.
• Truman gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program.
• He won bipartisan support for both the Truman Doctrine, which formalized a policy of Soviet containment, and the Marshall Plan, which aimed to help rebuild postwar Europe.
• Harry S. Trumanb (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953.
• It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens … it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights.
• The president’s approval rating dropped from 82 percent in the polls in January 1946 to 52 percent by June.
• Harry S. Truman served as the 33rd president of the United States from April 12, 1945, to January 20, 1953.

Many of the New Deal programs that persisted during Truman's presidency have since received minor improvements and extensions. In one notable instance of bipartisanship, Congress passed the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, which replaced the secretary of state with the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate as successor to the president after the vice president. When Truman dropped to 32 percent in the polls, Democratic Arkansas Senator William Fulbright suggested that Truman resign; the president said he did not care what Senator "Halfbright" said. The president's approval rating dropped from 82 percent in the polls in January 1946 to 52 percent by June.

Worldwide defense

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country's efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens … it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. The speech took place at the Lincoln Memorial during the NAACP convention and was carried nationally on radio. On June 29, 1947, Truman became the first president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Under his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Fair Employment Practices Committee was created to address racial discrimination in war-related work.

World War I

The end of World War II was followed by an uneasy transition from war to a peacetime economy. Though this was the first time the Soviets had been officially given information about the atomic bomb, Stalin was already aware of the bomb project—having learned about it through atomic espionage long before Truman did. To many in the general public, gambling and bourbon swilling, however low-key, were not quite presidential. Truman was a very hard worker, often to the point of exhaustion, which left him testy, easily annoyed, and on the verge of appearing unpresidential or petty. Roosevelt rarely contacted him, even to inform him of major decisions; the president and vice president met alone together only twice during their time in office. On April 10, 1945, Truman cast his only tie-breaking vote as president of the Senate, against a Robert A. Taft amendment that would have blocked the postwar delivery of Lend-Lease Act items contracted for during the war.