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Truman had been a surprise choice for vice president at the Democratic Party nominating convention in nineteen forty-four. Delegates considered several other candidates before they chose him as Roosevelt's running mate. That was at a time when presidential candidates did not make their own choices for vice president.

 
Harry Truman lacked the fame, the rich family and the strong speech-making skills of Franklin Roosevelt. He was a much simpler man.

He grew up in the Midwestern state of Missouri. Truman only studied through high school but took some nighttime law school classes. He worked for many years as a farmer and a small businessman, but without much success.

Truman had long been interested in politics. When he was almost forty, he finally won several low-level positions in his home state.

By nineteen thirty-four, he was popular enough in Missouri to be nominated and elected to the United States Senate. And he won re-election six years later.

Most Americans, however, knew little about Harry Truman when he became president. They knew he had close ties to the Democratic Party political machine in his home state. But they had also heard that he was a very honest man. They could see that Truman had strongly supported President Roosevelt's New Deal programs. But they could not be sure what kind of president Truman would become.

History gave Truman little time to learn about his new job. The most important power he now possessed was the power of atomic weapons. And soon after he became president, he faced the decision of whether or not to use that power for the first time in history.

 
Truman firmly believed that using the atomic bomb was the only way to force Japan to surrender. So in August of nineteen forty-five, he gave the orders to drop the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 
HARRY TRUMAN: "Having found the atomic bomb we have used it. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us. It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies. And we pray that he may guide us to use it in his ways, and for his purposes."

 
Days earlier, Truman had met in Potsdam, Germany, near Berlin, with the British and Soviet leaders, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, to plan the peace. The war in Europe had ended several months before.

 
NEWS ANNOUNCER: "Good evening, from the White House in Washington. Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States."
 
HARRY TRUMAN: "My fellow Americans, I have just returned from Berlin, the city from which the Germans intended to rule the world. It is a ghost city. The buildings are in ruins, its economy and its people are in ruins.

 
"Our party also visited what is left of Frankfurt and Darmstadt. We flew over the remains of Kassel, Magdeburg and other devastated cities. German women and children and old men were wandering over the highways, returning to bombed-out homes or leaving bombed out cities, searching for food and shelter.

 
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