Episode Details

Harry Truman was a failed farmer, a bankrupt hat shop owner, and the only modern American president without a college degree. He was chosen as vice president because he was inoffensive, became president because Roosevelt died, and then made more world-shaping decisions in his first year than most presidents make in two terms — dropping the atomic bomb, recognizing Israel, launching the Marshall Plan, and creating NATO.

This episode traces Truman from his Missouri farm through the Kansas City machine politics that launched his career, the vice presidency he barely held before Roosevelt's death, and the presidency that remade the postwar world.

• Truman's failed business ventures and the Pendergast machine that launched his political career
• The eighty-two days as vice president before Roosevelt's death made him commander-in-chief
• The decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Cold War architecture he built from scratch