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Presidency of Harry S. Truman #1
Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman 1945-1948
Stated First Edition. A near fine copy in a very good dust jacket. The dust jacket's spine is faded and has tears at its head. Rubs to the corners. Tanning to the rear panel.
473 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
About the author
Robert John Donovan
23 books3 followersRobert John Donovan was a Washington correspondent, author and presidential historian. Donovan attended Lafayette High School in Buffalo, New York, where he was Captain of the Hocke Herald Tribune after the war and served as a foreign correspondent and Washington Bureau Chief. During the latter period he was President of the White House Correspondents' Association. From the Tribune, he moved to the Los Angeles Times as Washington Bureau Chief and for a short time as Associate Editor in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 18, 2026
I'm always stunned when I read about how little Truman knew of the Manhattan Project during his time as vice president. Roosevelt's secretiveness, which I'd already suspected from other reading, seems confirmed by that omission alone.
Donovan traces Truman's evolution from a president who made quick decisions to one who grew more deliberative with time. He kept a portrait of Roosevelt in his office and would often glance at it, then at whatever guest sat before him, and wonder aloud what Roosevelt would have done. Truman held a simple, decisive sense of right and wrong, and that same simplicity sometimes made him headstrong and too quick to act, a trait that occasionally led to real missteps. He struggled with problems that resisted easy answers, and the question of a Jewish state in Palestine tortured him more than almost anything else in his presidency.
He liked most of the New Deal's policies. He just wasn't fond of the men Roosevelt had appointed to run them.
Before Roosevelt's death, the Allies and Stalin clashed over who would govern Poland. The country's prewar government sat in exile in London while the Soviets pushed for a communist regime. Both sides agreed to reorganize the Polish government, then interpreted that agreement in entirely different ways. History has since made clear the Soviets never intended to allow free elections.
Truman learned about the Manhattan Project only weeks after taking office. He reaffirmed the plan to use the bomb on Japan, reasoning that Congress would demand answers if he set the weapon aside and instead spent a million American lives on an invasion the bomb might prevent.
Donovan argues the U.S. could eventually have starved Japan into surrender through conventional military power, but it might have taken years. Truman wanted the bomb dropped on a dual target that included military facilities, with no advance warning to Japan. Some advisors floated a demonstration for Japanese officials, but building a mock town for that purpose proved impractical; without one, the Japanese would likely have dismissed it as an American fireworks show. Okinawa reinforced Truman's fear of what a homeland invasion would cost: the fighting there produced nearly fifty thousand American casualties on an island some sixty miles long and, at its narrowest, only about two miles wide.
The chapter on the bomb's use held me spellbound, partly because I've spent a lifetime wondering what it would be like to make a decision of that magnitude, whether I'd toss and turn over it or decide quickly and sleep in peace. Truman insisted he felt no remorse, and his remark to a Georgia congressman wasn't a change of heart; it was his way of saying only two bombs would be used, full stop. He acknowledged Japan had acted the part of the beast but didn't think America needed to answer in kind, and his stated concern was for Japanese women and children. I've since listened to his radio broadcast announcing the bomb's success, and its flat, matter-of-fact tone stands in stark contrast to the turmoil I imagine I'd have felt in his place.
Churchill and Truman had never met before Potsdam brought them together. Churchill may have seemed the more commanding figure, but it was the American empire on which the sun never set. Britain was nearly bankrupt and its military overextended. However eloquent Churchill was, Truman held the cards, despite his relative inexperience. I was fascinated to learn that Truman and Stalin got along well at first; Truman compared him to the political machine bosses he'd known back home.
Domestically, the postwar years brought labor conflict and strife, including serious unrest among mine and steel workers. Conservatives who'd hoped Truman would join their ranks gave up on him; he stayed left of center but never embraced socialism. The most compelling thread here, for me, was his proposal for national health insurance. I had no idea Truman had even considered such a plan, and the discovery caught me off guard at first, though the more I sat with it, the more it seemed to fit his political character. Lyndon Johnson, a man whose politics never impressed me much, paid Truman a real tribute by signing Medicare into law at the Truman Library, a piece of history I hadn't known before this book.
Donovan devotes several chapters to 1946, a rough year for Truman. Labor strikes dominated the early months. Columnist Drew Pearson took offense when Truman's wife and daughter used a private rail car, and Truman threatened to punch him in the nose; Pearson wisely apologized. That same year, Churchill traveled to Fulton, Missouri, and delivered his now-famous speech warning of an "iron curtain." Truman also fired Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace over a foreign policy speech, one Wallace insisted Truman had approved in advance, calling for a more conciliatory approach toward the Soviets. Wallace's forced resignation didn't slow the growing anticommunist tide, and the 1946 midterms delivered a Republican landslide that introduced the country to Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. Donovan lays out the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan with real clarity: one aimed to contain communism, the other to feed Europe and keep it out of Soviet hands. Meanwhile, the misguided Loyalty Program took shape at home, meant to root out disloyalty to the Constitution.
The debate over Jewish statehood is one of the book's most gripping threads. Truman believed the Jews had a right to a homeland in Palestine, but grew impatient with the more strident tactics of some American Zionists, remarking that the oppressed, once on top, could be just as cruel as their former oppressors. He supported statehood, but felt some demands moved too fast and risked American security. Even so, by the spring of 1948 Israeli independence was inevitable, and Truman showed real courage in recognizing the new nation. His own State Department opposed the move, and the decision badly strained his friendship with George Marshall, who also opposed it. One source Donovan cites credits Truman's familiarity with the Old Testament for his decision. Donovan argues that with Hitler's crimes still so fresh, no American president could have handled the question differently.
Modern Israel has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, though I'll never make it there myself. At nine years old, I followed every scrap of news I could find about the Six-Day War, and my toy-soldier-playing heart was floored by how decisively it ended. My older brother and I agreed, in the way only two easily impressed kids could, that you didn't mess with the Israelis if you wanted to live. That old fascination is part of why the 1948 fight for independence has always pulled me in, and this book sharpened it further: some of the most determined advocates for the new nation turned out, without meaning to, to be among its biggest obstacles. I knew Truman and the State Department clashed over the decision, but I hadn't grasped how deep the strain ran with Marshall, a friendship that had been close by every measure until this pushed it hard.
The final chapters cover the chaos of the 1948 campaign: a badly botched speech in Nebraska, and an attempt to dedicate an Idaho airfield to a fallen veteran who turned out to be a sixteen-year-old girl. In one tense moment, Truman jabbed his finger into the chest of James Roosevelt, the late president's son, and reminded him that FDR had given Truman a job he hadn't wanted, and that FDR would be turning in his grave to see how his son behaved. The job was his now, Truman said, and it would stay his after the election.
The 1948 Democratic National Convention was pure chaos. No one believed Eisenhower when he said he wanted no part of politics, though in the end they had no other choice. Truman's first choice for a running mate, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, turned him down; Truman then turned to Kentucky senator Alben Barkley, who accepted. When civil rights language made it into the platform, delegates from Alabama and Mississippi walked out. A bill to reduce farmers' grain storage bins became fodder for Truman's campaign, proof that small issues can carry outsized weight; he used it to convince farmers the Republicans meant to keep them down. While Dewey and his advisors grew certain of victory, Truman's train kept pulling into one more town, drawing crowds through the efforts of labor organizers. The result is history's favorite headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman."
This was easily a five-star read for me. I'm no history expert, so others may find fault where I didn't, but I found this an evenhanded look at Truman's first term with just a touch of sympathy for Roosevelt's successor. Some would say a book can't be both evenhanded and sympathetic, that you have to pick one. I found a good measure of both here, and that combination is exactly why I enjoyed it. There were stretches, when Donovan dug deep into policy, that made me wonder if the book ran too long. But given how much ground it covers, I'd say the length is justified. It brought the war's final months and the years just after vividly to life. My parents would have been in their mid-twenties then, and I found myself wishing I could call them and ask whether they remembered the grain bin shortage, or whether they were surprised when Eisenhower refused to run in 1948. I'll never know what they'd have said, but I suspect they were among the rural voters who surprised the pollsters and voted for "Give 'Em Hell Harry."
I haven't read many other Truman biographies, so I can only speculate on how this one compares. What I can say is that Donovan showed real discipline here, delivering exactly what the cover and the publisher promised, and there's a particular pleasure in a book that does that. Truman has always carried real weight for me because of when I grew up. I was a teenager during Watergate, and when Chicago sang "America Needs You, Harry Truman," I sang along with gusto and meant every word. Merle Miller's oral history "Plain Speaking" came out around that same stretch, though I've never gotten around to reading that one either. Anyone with even a casual interest in Truman or in the years just after the war will enjoy this.
History matters because it teaches us how to move forward. This book tells the story of a man who stood alone at times and kept standing, whose homespun Missouri roots made him an object of ridicule even as he pushed ahead, and whose real mistakes still make you wince decades later. He carried those mistakes and kept going anyway.
The book left me wondering how I would have voted in 1948, and what would have gotten me to the polls. I wouldn't be born for another nine years; Ford versus Carter was my first election. But a book earns its stripes when it can make you consider how you'd have reacted to Israeli statehood, a grain bin shortage, and looming conflict in Korea and Berlin, all at once. I hope, if you read it, Donovan carries you back as effortlessly as he carried me, to that somber April day in 1945 when an unassuming Missouri politician who liked poker and the piano found himself leading a nation at war, with a decision about a devastating new weapon just weeks away. Donovan's writing got me there, and I'm grateful for it.
Donovan traces Truman's evolution from a president who made quick decisions to one who grew more deliberative with time. He kept a portrait of Roosevelt in his office and would often glance at it, then at whatever guest sat before him, and wonder aloud what Roosevelt would have done. Truman held a simple, decisive sense of right and wrong, and that same simplicity sometimes made him headstrong and too quick to act, a trait that occasionally led to real missteps. He struggled with problems that resisted easy answers, and the question of a Jewish state in Palestine tortured him more than almost anything else in his presidency.
He liked most of the New Deal's policies. He just wasn't fond of the men Roosevelt had appointed to run them.
Before Roosevelt's death, the Allies and Stalin clashed over who would govern Poland. The country's prewar government sat in exile in London while the Soviets pushed for a communist regime. Both sides agreed to reorganize the Polish government, then interpreted that agreement in entirely different ways. History has since made clear the Soviets never intended to allow free elections.
Truman learned about the Manhattan Project only weeks after taking office. He reaffirmed the plan to use the bomb on Japan, reasoning that Congress would demand answers if he set the weapon aside and instead spent a million American lives on an invasion the bomb might prevent.
Donovan argues the U.S. could eventually have starved Japan into surrender through conventional military power, but it might have taken years. Truman wanted the bomb dropped on a dual target that included military facilities, with no advance warning to Japan. Some advisors floated a demonstration for Japanese officials, but building a mock town for that purpose proved impractical; without one, the Japanese would likely have dismissed it as an American fireworks show. Okinawa reinforced Truman's fear of what a homeland invasion would cost: the fighting there produced nearly fifty thousand American casualties on an island some sixty miles long and, at its narrowest, only about two miles wide.
The chapter on the bomb's use held me spellbound, partly because I've spent a lifetime wondering what it would be like to make a decision of that magnitude, whether I'd toss and turn over it or decide quickly and sleep in peace. Truman insisted he felt no remorse, and his remark to a Georgia congressman wasn't a change of heart; it was his way of saying only two bombs would be used, full stop. He acknowledged Japan had acted the part of the beast but didn't think America needed to answer in kind, and his stated concern was for Japanese women and children. I've since listened to his radio broadcast announcing the bomb's success, and its flat, matter-of-fact tone stands in stark contrast to the turmoil I imagine I'd have felt in his place.
Churchill and Truman had never met before Potsdam brought them together. Churchill may have seemed the more commanding figure, but it was the American empire on which the sun never set. Britain was nearly bankrupt and its military overextended. However eloquent Churchill was, Truman held the cards, despite his relative inexperience. I was fascinated to learn that Truman and Stalin got along well at first; Truman compared him to the political machine bosses he'd known back home.
Domestically, the postwar years brought labor conflict and strife, including serious unrest among mine and steel workers. Conservatives who'd hoped Truman would join their ranks gave up on him; he stayed left of center but never embraced socialism. The most compelling thread here, for me, was his proposal for national health insurance. I had no idea Truman had even considered such a plan, and the discovery caught me off guard at first, though the more I sat with it, the more it seemed to fit his political character. Lyndon Johnson, a man whose politics never impressed me much, paid Truman a real tribute by signing Medicare into law at the Truman Library, a piece of history I hadn't known before this book.
Donovan devotes several chapters to 1946, a rough year for Truman. Labor strikes dominated the early months. Columnist Drew Pearson took offense when Truman's wife and daughter used a private rail car, and Truman threatened to punch him in the nose; Pearson wisely apologized. That same year, Churchill traveled to Fulton, Missouri, and delivered his now-famous speech warning of an "iron curtain." Truman also fired Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace over a foreign policy speech, one Wallace insisted Truman had approved in advance, calling for a more conciliatory approach toward the Soviets. Wallace's forced resignation didn't slow the growing anticommunist tide, and the 1946 midterms delivered a Republican landslide that introduced the country to Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. Donovan lays out the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan with real clarity: one aimed to contain communism, the other to feed Europe and keep it out of Soviet hands. Meanwhile, the misguided Loyalty Program took shape at home, meant to root out disloyalty to the Constitution.
The debate over Jewish statehood is one of the book's most gripping threads. Truman believed the Jews had a right to a homeland in Palestine, but grew impatient with the more strident tactics of some American Zionists, remarking that the oppressed, once on top, could be just as cruel as their former oppressors. He supported statehood, but felt some demands moved too fast and risked American security. Even so, by the spring of 1948 Israeli independence was inevitable, and Truman showed real courage in recognizing the new nation. His own State Department opposed the move, and the decision badly strained his friendship with George Marshall, who also opposed it. One source Donovan cites credits Truman's familiarity with the Old Testament for his decision. Donovan argues that with Hitler's crimes still so fresh, no American president could have handled the question differently.
Modern Israel has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, though I'll never make it there myself. At nine years old, I followed every scrap of news I could find about the Six-Day War, and my toy-soldier-playing heart was floored by how decisively it ended. My older brother and I agreed, in the way only two easily impressed kids could, that you didn't mess with the Israelis if you wanted to live. That old fascination is part of why the 1948 fight for independence has always pulled me in, and this book sharpened it further: some of the most determined advocates for the new nation turned out, without meaning to, to be among its biggest obstacles. I knew Truman and the State Department clashed over the decision, but I hadn't grasped how deep the strain ran with Marshall, a friendship that had been close by every measure until this pushed it hard.
The final chapters cover the chaos of the 1948 campaign: a badly botched speech in Nebraska, and an attempt to dedicate an Idaho airfield to a fallen veteran who turned out to be a sixteen-year-old girl. In one tense moment, Truman jabbed his finger into the chest of James Roosevelt, the late president's son, and reminded him that FDR had given Truman a job he hadn't wanted, and that FDR would be turning in his grave to see how his son behaved. The job was his now, Truman said, and it would stay his after the election.
The 1948 Democratic National Convention was pure chaos. No one believed Eisenhower when he said he wanted no part of politics, though in the end they had no other choice. Truman's first choice for a running mate, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, turned him down; Truman then turned to Kentucky senator Alben Barkley, who accepted. When civil rights language made it into the platform, delegates from Alabama and Mississippi walked out. A bill to reduce farmers' grain storage bins became fodder for Truman's campaign, proof that small issues can carry outsized weight; he used it to convince farmers the Republicans meant to keep them down. While Dewey and his advisors grew certain of victory, Truman's train kept pulling into one more town, drawing crowds through the efforts of labor organizers. The result is history's favorite headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman."
This was easily a five-star read for me. I'm no history expert, so others may find fault where I didn't, but I found this an evenhanded look at Truman's first term with just a touch of sympathy for Roosevelt's successor. Some would say a book can't be both evenhanded and sympathetic, that you have to pick one. I found a good measure of both here, and that combination is exactly why I enjoyed it. There were stretches, when Donovan dug deep into policy, that made me wonder if the book ran too long. But given how much ground it covers, I'd say the length is justified. It brought the war's final months and the years just after vividly to life. My parents would have been in their mid-twenties then, and I found myself wishing I could call them and ask whether they remembered the grain bin shortage, or whether they were surprised when Eisenhower refused to run in 1948. I'll never know what they'd have said, but I suspect they were among the rural voters who surprised the pollsters and voted for "Give 'Em Hell Harry."
I haven't read many other Truman biographies, so I can only speculate on how this one compares. What I can say is that Donovan showed real discipline here, delivering exactly what the cover and the publisher promised, and there's a particular pleasure in a book that does that. Truman has always carried real weight for me because of when I grew up. I was a teenager during Watergate, and when Chicago sang "America Needs You, Harry Truman," I sang along with gusto and meant every word. Merle Miller's oral history "Plain Speaking" came out around that same stretch, though I've never gotten around to reading that one either. Anyone with even a casual interest in Truman or in the years just after the war will enjoy this.
History matters because it teaches us how to move forward. This book tells the story of a man who stood alone at times and kept standing, whose homespun Missouri roots made him an object of ridicule even as he pushed ahead, and whose real mistakes still make you wince decades later. He carried those mistakes and kept going anyway.
The book left me wondering how I would have voted in 1948, and what would have gotten me to the polls. I wouldn't be born for another nine years; Ford versus Carter was my first election. But a book earns its stripes when it can make you consider how you'd have reacted to Israeli statehood, a grain bin shortage, and looming conflict in Korea and Berlin, all at once. I hope, if you read it, Donovan carries you back as effortlessly as he carried me, to that somber April day in 1945 when an unassuming Missouri politician who liked poker and the piano found himself leading a nation at war, with a decision about a devastating new weapon just weeks away. Donovan's writing got me there, and I'm grateful for it.
August 6, 2015
Great overview of the immediate period following WWII and the beginning of what became the Cold War. Truman was not expected to become President, nor was he prepared for it. We still live with some of his blunders (mainly, how supporting Israel was just playing dumb politics over the wise advise of the State Department). A bit too much time is spent reviewing minor figures in the US Congress and House of Representatives, but it remains a well-balanced biography. Now to tome 2, with the unexpected second term.
August 17, 2012
Not bad, but McCullough's biography of Truman is much better.
March 20, 2023
This is an objective reading with good observations about Truman, a simple but honest politician who surrounded himself with cronies who by and large turned out to be poor political advisers. The book is a bit dense and written academically, covering a four-year period in over 400 pages.
Donovan points out that no leader before or since really had such a multitude of crises with which to contend: world war, subsequent Russian aggression that lead to the Cold War, communists taking over in China, communists ramping up for war in Korea, economic turbulence and starvation in Europe. On the home front, Truman had to contend with strikes from workers tired of deprivation during the war years and consumers angry about the unavailability of goods.
Truman was ill-prepared for the gigantic tasks before him, none more monumental than being kept in the dark about the development of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
Yet rather than feeling overwhelmed, Truman stepped up to all the tasks facing him. He pressed for funding to feed starving masses and contain communism through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. He put forward a comprehensive national health care plan. He supported the creation of Israel and civil rights (including ending discrimination in the armed forces) as humane causes when few saw them that way. Truman avoided war with the Soviets by persisting with the Berlin Airlift.
No one thought he would be elected in 1948, but his populism carried the day.
Donovan points out that no leader before or since really had such a multitude of crises with which to contend: world war, subsequent Russian aggression that lead to the Cold War, communists taking over in China, communists ramping up for war in Korea, economic turbulence and starvation in Europe. On the home front, Truman had to contend with strikes from workers tired of deprivation during the war years and consumers angry about the unavailability of goods.
Truman was ill-prepared for the gigantic tasks before him, none more monumental than being kept in the dark about the development of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
Yet rather than feeling overwhelmed, Truman stepped up to all the tasks facing him. He pressed for funding to feed starving masses and contain communism through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. He put forward a comprehensive national health care plan. He supported the creation of Israel and civil rights (including ending discrimination in the armed forces) as humane causes when few saw them that way. Truman avoided war with the Soviets by persisting with the Berlin Airlift.
No one thought he would be elected in 1948, but his populism carried the day.
August 9, 2025
The Truman presidency was one of the most consequential in American history, which makes it all the more shameful that I cannot like this volume more. Robert Donovan was an ace story teller, I once gave a talk in high school on his tale of John F. Kennedy in the Pacific, PT-109, yet here he shows neither a gift of yarn nor a historian's eye for judgment. Finishing out Franklin Roosevelt's fourth term, starting in 1945, Truman had to make the decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan, meet Stalin and Churchill, later Atlee, at Postdam to build a better post-war Europe, announce the Marshall Plan, put Churchill's anti-communist "Iron Curtain" speech, significantly delivered in Truman's hometown of Independence, Missouri, into practice with the Truman Doctrine, and at home deal with strikes, inflation, and a Republican-controlled Congress in 1946. Donovan devotes just one breezy chapter to how Truman's personal life and Missouri politics prepared him for the tough job ahead, with no sense of how Truman confronted a world of conflict unprecedented in American history. No American president, not even Wilson or Roosevelt, ever had to deal with simultaneous conflicts around the globe. The prose is clumsy too: "Why is Harry Truman running this morning to the Capitol? He could be running because..." Donovan was a great journalist and second-class historian.
September 29, 2018
Book didn't end the way I like a book to end. Still a good read.
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July 6, 2024Good easy rea
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