Harry Truman cast himself in the mold of his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, and hoped to seize the possibilities afforded by victory in World War II to expand the New Deal at home. But the crises in postwar Europe and Asia, combined with the spectacular rise of anticommunism in the United States, forced him to take a different path. In the end, Truman went down in history not as a New Dealer, but as a Cold Warrior. The Cold War consensus that he ultimately embraced — the notion that resisting communism at home and abroad represented America’s most important postwar objective — shaped the nation’s life and politics for decades to come.