Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged From Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World

After just 82 days as a vice president who had been reluctantly chosen and then mostly sidelined, Harry Truman inherited the presidency in the most challenging possible circumstances: at the height of a world war and under the uniquely long shadow of a man who had been president for as far back as most Americans could remember. Roll’s exciting and insightful history deals with the last years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the long “transition” to Truman’s reelection, and Truman’s emergence as a president with his own priorities, policies, and national standing. Making rich use of primary sources, he traces Truman’s missteps, his growing grasp of the enormous issues that confronted him, and his successes. Truman and his key advisers made choices that still define the world: the successful conclusion of World War II, the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the confrontation with the Soviet Union, the construction of the North Atlantic Alliance, the conversion of a wartime economy to a peacetime one, and the launch of civil rights reforms at home. The volume is a dramatic, deeply researched telling of an immensely consequential era.