Harry S. Truman - The Signing of the United Nations Charter

World War II had been raging for nearly six years when Harry Truman was sworn in as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president on January 20, 1945. After the inauguration, Truman saw very little of the president. Roosevelt was consumed with delicate negotiations with Joseph Stalin in the closing months of the war, leaving Truman almost entirely out of the loop—including on the top-secret development of the atomic bomb and the mounting difficulties with the Soviet Union.

On April 12, 1945, Truman was urgently called to the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt met him and quietly said, “Harry, the President is dead.” Truman later told reporters, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Thrust suddenly into the presidency, Truman quickly learned the weight of the office. “Within the first few months,” he said, “I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.”

When Germany formally surrendered on May 8, 1945—Truman’s 61st birthday—he proclaimed Victory in Europe, or VE Day. Carrying forward Roosevelt’s vision, he helped establish the United Nations and, in June 1945, witnessed the signing of the UN Charter by fifty nations committed to preserving peace through collective security.

But with Japan refusing to surrender, Truman confronted one of the most consequential decisions any American president has ever faced: whether to use atomic weapons to end the war. True to his motto, “The buck stops here,” Truman did not shrink from responsibility. After Japan rejected the Allied demand for surrender, he authorized the use of the atomic bomb—first on Hiroshima on August 6, and then on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The strikes brought World War II to a swift and devastating end.

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