From The Times Crunch time: Churchill, Truman and Stalin at the Potsdam conference, 1945. GETTY IMAGES Although there are plenty of good biographies of Truman, few are as entertaining as Baime’s, which focuses on the four months between his unexpected accession and the end of the war with Japan. On the morning of April 12, 1945, Harry Truman got up as usual, dropped his daughter at school and went to the office. He had little to do, and passed his time arranging a poker game