Truman was thrust into a job he neither sought nor wanted by a call summoning him to the White House. There First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told him that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead. Two hours later, with little formality, he was sworn into office. "I had come to see the president," Truman recalls in this autobiography. "Now, having repeated that simply worded oath, I myself was president." With World War II raging in the Pacific, the looming decision of whether to drop the atomic bomb, and seemingly intractable labor issues at home, no chief executive ever fell heir to such a burden on such short notice. This book is an invaluable record of Truman's tumultuous first year in office, his youth in Missouri, and his rise in politics. He shares glimpses of his family life; clear-eyed appraisals of world leaders, including Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, and Joseph Stalin; and candid disclosures about history-making national and international events.

    D. Roosevelt. All three were known to have been bookmen, though in varying degrees and in different fashion. The authors were well-suited to the task. Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., at the time professor of history at the University of Illinois, had established his reputation as an authority on American communitarian experiments; ahead of him was his recognition as one of the eminent constitutional scholars of his generation. David C. Mearns, as the time, could look back on a 35-year career at the Library of Congress. When the papers of Robert Todd Lincoln were unsealed in 1947, he was entrusted with bringing them to publication. Jonathan Daniels, in addition to a long career as newspaperman, first met Franklin Roosevelt as a youth, and served in a number of capacities in the Roosevelt administration. All three papers were presented as the fifth set of Windsor Lectures in Librarianship at the University of Illinois in 1953, but their interest far transcends library science.