The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson who faced the nation.

In 1952, President Truman faced a crisis against an implacable ideological global foe, bent on the destruction of the West and its slothful libertine

ways. Americans were anxious about the communist threat and the potential nuclear consequences,

ducking and covering against an attack that might hit them at home. They even made videos about it

at school. There was a turtle by the name of Bert, and Bert, the turtle was very alert.

When danger threatened him, he never got hurt, he knew just what to do.

He got, shh, and cover, duck, and cover.

He did what we all must learn to do.

You and you and you.

And you.

And cover.

Any inconvenience that thwarted a president's solemn duty to protect Americans against the perceived threat had to be vaulted over, stomped down

or dispensed with quickly. The president was a man of action. The buck stops here, read the plate

on his desk, so when the steel company bosses and union workers couldn't come to an agreement in

1952 in the spring in April, the president stepped in, seizing the steel companies, raising the

American flag over the furnaces and producing the tin to keep the vegetables for the dinner table fresh and to keep fresh the supply of bombs raining down on the North Koreans.

The move set off a predictable and bitter battle between the branches of government.

In Beech the bastard, said the Republicans in Congress. Democrats, too, said the same. The judges also tried to stop

the president. It was one of the boldest, most controversial decisions of the Truman presidency,

and one of the greatest modern uses of executive power. And how it all played out comes next.

Our whistle stop today is April 24, 1952. And the United States District Court, Judge David A. Pine is questioning

...