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To his friends in Congress, President Truman said humbly and simply that he just wanted to assure them in person of his intense desire for cooperation. Temporarily, at least, the days of Congressional-Executive fights are gone. To Senators Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg, delegates to the San Francisco conference, Harry Truman said: "I expect you men to do a good job. I'm depending on you for that." (Same day it was announced that President Truman would not go to San Francisco, but would stay on the job in Washington.)
Lunch over, Harry Truman showed another side of his character. Spotting newsmen waiting outside Les Biffle's office, he shook hands all around and asked: "Did you ever have a bull or a load of hay fall on you? If you have, you know how I felt last night. I felt as if two planets and the whole constellation had fallen on me. I don't know if you boys pray, but if you do, please pray God to help me carry this load."
Citizen-Soldier. Upon what sort of man had this cosmic load fallen? After their first shocked incredulity at the news that Franklin Roosevelt was dead, almost the next words of most U.S. citizens were: "What's Harry Truman like?"
His career was shaped by: 1) two wars; 2) life inside the narrow horizons of a small farm; and 3) an early political career in a machine that knew little and cared less for broad-scale statesmanship. Son of a Missouri farmer, he went no farther than high school before setting to work. He was a timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad in Kansas City, wrapped papers for the Star, clerked in a bank. Then he went back to the farm until World War I swept him in. A longtime National Guardsman, he went to France a captain, won commendation for his coolness under fire (he once disciplined a panicked company in combat) and returned a major. From then on, Harry kept up his citizen-soldier interest in the Army, still holds a colonel's commission in the Army Reserve. He is the first ex-soldier to sit in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt.
In Kansas City after World War I, Harry Truman was a hero, but he soon sank back into anonymity. With a war comrade he opened a haberdashery: it failed. He went into politics, became a county judge (an administrative, not a judicial post). He probably would have remained a minor politician except for a lucky break given him by Kansas City's late Boss Pendergast. In 1934, as a fine magisterial whim, Boss Tom made unknown Harry Truman a U.S. Senator. With Pendergast's control of the state, it was as simple as that. In 1940, Senator Truman won reelection, solely because of a party split and not because of his own record in the Senate, which had been one of hard work, colorlessness, and fidelity to the New Deal. In his second term, the war came; what he did about it made him a national figure.