The first full scale biography of Harry S. Truman, his life and times by David McCullough, distinguished historian and prize-winning author. Much of the story is drawn from newly discovered archival material and from extensive interviews with Truman friends, family, and figures once prominent in Truman's Washington. And much will come as a surprise to many readers. Here in colorful detail is the story of his political beginnings with the powerful Pendergast machine that ruled Kansas City, and of Boss Tom Pendergrast who sent Truman to the United States Senate, where rapidly, unexpectedly, he proved himself no small-time party hack but a man of uncommon vitality and strength of character. With a telling account of Truman at Potsdam and his momentous decision to use the atomic bomb, McCullough's Truman shows a gritty, untried, unprepared new President facing responsibilities such as had weighted on no man before, confronting a new age and the growing menace of Soviet power, and, in a handful of years, under terrible pressures, defining the course of American politics and diplomacy for the next forty years. 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, Dean Acheson--and never has the story been told with such sweep and understanding as it is here.