President Truman's relief of General Douglas MacArthur creation of a professional military. This made civilian control increasingly problematic when coupled with the constitutional division of powers between the President as commander-in-chief, and the Congress with its power to raise armies, maintain a navy, and wage wars. In relieving MacArthur for failing to "respect the authority of the President" by privately communicating with Congress, Truman upheld the President's role as pre-eminent. Harry S. Truman became President of the United States on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, and won an unexpected victory in the 1948 presidential election. He was the only president who served after 1897
President Truman's relief of General Douglas MacArthur were true. Truman then "decided that we could not afford the courtesy of Secretary Pace's personal delivery of the order," and called a press conference at which he issued his statement to the press: In Tokyo, MacArthur and his wife were at a luncheon at the American embassy for Senator Warren Magnuson and William Stern, executive vice president of Northwest Airlines, when Colonel Sidney Huff, MacArthur's aide and one of the "Bataan gang" who had escaped from Corregidor with the general in 1942, heard about the relief from commercial radio broadcast. Huff promptly informed Mrs. MacArthur, who in turn told