Word: truman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...obverse of Harry Truman's comment on April 13, 1945, the day after Franklin Roosevelt's death and his own swearing-in as President. "I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you," he told a group of reporters, "but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen...
...March 29, 1952, 16 years and two days before Lyndon Johnson served his notice of noncandidacy, Harry S. Truman appeared at Washington's National Guard Armory, where some 6,000 Democrats had collected for a ritual $100-a-plate Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. For months, the nation had been speculating about whether Truman, at 67, would run for re-election to a second full term, and as the President launched into a give-'em-hell harangue, partisans at the dinner smiled that Old Harry was off and running again...
Like Johnson, Truman was mischievously delighted by his own surprises. Not until near the end of his peroration did Truman deadpan: "I shall not be a candidate for reelection. I shall not accept a renomination...
...four "accidental Presidents" in this century-Vice Presidents who succeeded upon the deaths of their predecessors-Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge were at the crests of their popularity when they declined second full terms. Johnson and Truman were both in shoal waters. In Truman's case, three Democratic Senators - Oklahoma's Robert Kerr, Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Georgia's Richard Russell-were avowed candidates against him, and earlier that March Kefauver had embarrassingly defeated the President in the New Hampshire primary; just four months before, Truman's popularity polls had skidded to an alltime...
More important, Truman was hagridden by a long, apparently stalemated Asian war. While the Korean armistice negotiations begun ten months before remained in limbo, Republicans were sniping mercilessly at the Administration, hissing about Deepfreezes and mink coats, Communism and corruption in Government. More than ever, Truman was ready for the peace of Independence, Mo. In fact, he had made his withdrawal decision a full three years before, confiding it, like Johnson, to only a few intimates. In a memorandum to himself early in 1950, Truman wrote: "Eight years as President is enough...