Faced with the likely loss of the 1948 presidential elections, Harry S. Truman decided to do what he did best: talk straight. When Truman boarded the train to head west in June 1948, he and his campaign advisors decided to shift from prepared text to extemporaneous stump speeches. The “new Truman” emerged as a feisty, engaged speaker, brimming with ideas on policies and programs important to the common citizen. Steven R. Goldzwig engagingly chronicles the origins of Truman’s “give ‘em hell” image and the honing of his rhetorical delivery during his ostensibly nonpolitical train trip west, which came to be known as his “whistle-stop tour.” At the time, Truman was both applauded and derided by the public, but his speeches delivered at each stop helped win him the presidency. Goldzwig’s detailed look at the background of the campaign, Truman’s preparations and goals, the train trip itself, and the text and tone of the speeches helps us better understand how Truman carried the 1948 election and came to represent the plainspoken “man of the people” who returns from behind to win, against all odds.

President Harry Truman was a disappointment to the Democrats, and a godsend to the Republicans. Every attempt to paint Truman with the grace, charm, and grandeur of Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been a dismal failure: Truman's virtues were simpler, plainer, more direct. The challenges he faced--stirrings of civil rights and southern resentment at home, and communist aggression and brinkmanship abroad--could not have been more critical. By the summer of 1948 the prospects of a second term for Truman looked bleak. Newspapers and popular opinion nationwide had all but anointed as president Thomas Dewey, the Republican New York Governor. Truman could not even be certain of his own party's nomination: the Democrats, still in mourning for FDR, were deeply riven, with Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond leading breakaway Progressive and Dixiecrat factions. Finally, with ingenuity born of desperation, Truman's aides hit upon a plan: get the president in front of as many regular voters as possible, preferably in intimate settings, all across the country. To the surprise of everyone but Harry Truman, it worked. Whistle Stop is the first book of its kind: a micro-history of the summer and fall of 1948 when Truman took to the rails, crisscrossing the country from June right up to Election Day in November. The tour and the campaign culminated with the iconic image of a grinning, victorious Truman holding aloft the famous Chicago Tribune headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman."

The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian. The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.

On the eve of the 1948 election, America was a fractured country. Racism was rampant, foreign relations were fraught, and political parties were more divided than ever. Americans were certain that President Harry S. Truman's political career was over. The only man in the world confident that Truman would win was Mr. Truman himself. And win he did. Baime sheds light on one of the most action-packed six months in American history, as Truman not only triumphs, but oversees watershed events: the passing of the Marshall plan, the acknowledgment of Israel as a new state, the careful attention to the origins of the Cold War, and the first desegregation of the military. -- adapted from jacket

The plainspoken man from Missouri who never expected to be president yet rose to become one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century In April 1945, after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the presidency fell to a former haberdasher and clubhouse politician from Independence, Missouri. Many believed he would be overmatched by the job, but Harry S. Truman would surprise them all. Few chief executives have had so lasting an impact. Truman ushered America into the nuclear age, established the alliances and principles that would define the cold war and the national security state, started the nation on the road to civil rights, and won the most dramatic election of the twentieth century—his 1948 "whistlestop campaign" against Thomas E. Dewey. Robert Dallek, the bestselling biographer of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, shows how this unassuming yet supremely confident man rose to the occasion. Truman clashed with Southerners over civil rights, with organized labor over the right to strike, and with General Douglas MacArthur over the conduct of the Korean War. He personified Thomas Jefferson's observation that the presidency is a "splendid misery," but it was during his tenure that the United States truly came of age.

In The Last Campaign, Zachary Karabell rescues the 1948 presidential campaign from the annals of political folklore ("Dewey Defeats Truman," the Chicago Tribune memorably and erroneously heralded), to give us a fresh look at perhaps the last time the American people could truly distinguish what the candidates stood for. In 1948, Harry Truman, the feisty working-class Democratic incumbent was one of the most unpopular presidents the country had ever known. His Republican rival, the aloof Thomas Dewey, was widely thought to be a shoe-in. These two major party candidates were flanked on the far left by the Progressive Henry Wallace, and on the far right by white supremacist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. The Last Campaign exposes the fascinating story behind Truman’s legendary victory and turns a probing eye toward a by-gone era of political earnestness, when, for “the last time in this century, an entire spectrum of ideologies was represented,” a time before television fundamentally altered the political landscape.

This correspondence, which encompasses Truman's courtship of his wife, his service in the senate, his presidency, and after, reveals not only the character of Truman's mind but also a shrewd observer's view of American politics.

The election year of 1948 remains to this day one of the most astonishing in U.S. political history. During this first general election after World War II, Americans looked to their governments for change. As the battle for the nation’s highest office came to a head in Illinois, the state was embroiled in its own partisan showdowns—elections that would prove critical in the course of state and national history. In Battleground 1948, Robert E. Hartley offers the first comprehensive chronicle of this historic election year and its consequences, which still resonate today. Focusing on the races that ushered Adlai Stevenson, Paul Douglas, and Harry Truman into office—the last by the slimmest of margins—Battleground 1948 details the pivotal events that played out in the state of Illinois, from the newspaper wars in Chicago to tragedy in the mine at Centralia. In addition to in-depth revelations on the saga of the American election machine in 1948, Hartley probes the dark underbelly of Illinois politics in the 1930s and 1940s to set the stage, spotlight key party players, and expose the behind-the-scenes influences of media, money, corruption, and crime. In doing so, he draws powerful parallels between the politics of the past and those of the present. Above all, Battleground 1948 tells the story of grassroots change writ large on the American political landscape—change that helped a nation move past an era of conflict and depression, and forever transformed Illinois and the U.S. government.

The 1948 election was a war for the soul of the Democratic Party, with accidental president Harry Truman pitted against Henry Wallace, his embittered left-wing predecessor as vice president, and young South Carolina segregationist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. On the GOP side, it's a four-way battle between cold-as-ice New Yorker Tom Dewey, Minnesota upstart Harold Stassen, stodgy but brilliant Ohio conservative Robert Taft, and imperious but aged Douglas MacArthur. Author David Pietrusza goes beyond the headlines to place in context a down-to-the-wire fight against the background of an erupting Cold War, the birth of Israel, storms over civil rights, and domestic communism. Featuring a stellar supporting cast: Alger Hiss, Whitaker Chambers, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Earl Warren, Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Pete Seeger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joe McCarthy, Clark Clifford, William O. Douglas, George C. Marshall, John Foster Dulles, Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, H. L. Mencken, Harold Ickes, Clare and Henry Luce, and Ronald Reagan.--From publisher description.

Available for the first time in paperback is the critically acclaimed Working with Truman, a warm and lighthearted memoir of what it was like to work behind the scenes in the White House during Truman's term as president. Focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of those who worked closely with Truman and on the Truman not seen by the public, Hechler provides insight into one of our greatest presidents.