Roosevelt considered it his constitutional obligation to have a vice president, but nothing said he was required to actually use one. One of Roosevelt 's earlier vice presidents, John Nance Garner, had referred to the job as not being worth a pitcher of "warm piss." The word piss had later been changed to spit in an attempt to sanitize history. Roosevelt could accept this comment, but not Garner's temerity in trying to unseat Roosevelt as president. Garner had been dumped from the ticket, and it had brought about the 1940 pairing of Roosevelt with Henry Wallace. When Wallace's infatuation with Joseph Stalin and all things politically far left, if not Communist, became known, he too became unacceptable.

Enter Harry Truman, who was loyal, hardworking, honest, American, and not likely to lust after FDR's job. For the eighty-odd days he had served as vice president, Truman had been content to accept the honor of the office as a reward for long years of faithful service to his country and the Democratic Party. He considered it a pleasant prelude to a comfortable retirement.

On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt unexpectedly died of a massive stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Harry Truman, the dapper little man with the often snappish temper, had become president of the United States.

Now, as he paced the Oval Office and waited for the others to arrive, he could only ponder how wholly unprepared he had been for the job he now held. He had known absolutely nothing about the development of the atomic bomb or the agreements made by FDR at the Yalta conference in February 1945, where the United States and the Soviet Union had set the pattern for the world's future. FDR had operated in a world all his own, and Truman was only beginning to plumb its depths. He felt he had not disgraced himself at the recently concluded Potsdam conferences and was learning more each day about the office of president. But he sometimes came near to despair at how little he knew and how much he had yet to learn.