President Harry S. Truman
President Harry S. Truman On an April evening in 1945, a clerk from the White House hurried up the marble stairs of the Capitol and down a dim corridor toward the office of the vice president. Inside, Harry S. Truman was sitting with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, sharing a drink and the easy, almost gloomy camaraderie of two men who had spent years in the rough-and-tumble of Congress. The vice presidency, Truman liked to say, was about as useful as a cow’s fifth teat. He had not been invited into the inner circle on the great questions of the war. He did not know the secrets that Franklin Roosevelt and a handful of advisers carried around like invisible weight. When the phone rang and a voice ordered him at once to the White House, he could not yet imagine that in a few minutes his own life—and the life of the country—would tilt on a hinge. Selenius Media
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