Harry S. Truman

On April 12, 1945, Vice President Harry S. Truman was summoned to the White House and told by Eleanor Roosevelt that her husband was dead. Truman, who had been vice president for less than three months and had barely been briefed on the war, asked if there was anything he could do for her. She replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now." Within months he had decided to use the atomic bomb, seen the war end, and begun shaping the postwar world.

His chart describes a man built for crisis rather than for glamour. He was born at 4:00 p.m. on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, a time he gave in his own memoirs. His Sun is in Taurus in the eighth house, alongside Mercury and Pluto at the very start of Gemini. Taurus is steady, practical and immovable under pressure, and the eighth house concerns crisis, death and other people's resources. A Taurus Sun in the eighth describes someone who stays calm when everything is at stake, and few presidents have faced higher stakes in their first months.

His Moon is in Scorpio in the first house, with Libra rising. Scorpio Moons are intense, blunt and fiercely loyal, and in the first house that intensity shows. Truman's plain, combative manner earned him the nickname "Give 'em hell, Harry." The Libra Ascendant adds a sense of fairness and balance, and in 1948 he signed the executive order desegregating the armed forces.

He grew up on Missouri farms and could not attend West Point because of poor eyesight. He never earned a college degree, the last president of whom that is true. In the First World War he commanded an artillery battery in France; afterward a men's clothing store he ran in Kansas City failed. He entered politics through the Kansas City Democratic machine of Tom Pendergast, became a county judge, and in 1934 was elected to the Senate, where his committee investigating waste in wartime contracts made his reputation.

Jupiter sits at the end of Cancer in the tenth house of public life. Jupiter there tends to bring public office and a sense of protecting the nation. As president he launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Berlin Airlift and the policy of containment that shaped the Cold War, and in 1951 he fired General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination, a deeply unpopular decision that historians have largely endorsed.

In 1948 he won one of the greatest upsets in American politics, and was famously photographed holding a newspaper headlined "Dewey Defeats Truman." A sign on his desk read "The Buck Stops Here." The Taurus Sun in the house of crisis had taken it at its word.