Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  Wilson also established the League of Nations, which didn’t succeed, but which served as a blueprint for the United Nations, which might succeed yet despite some built-in problems. He was a man who believed that the people ought to be kept informed on what the president wanted to do, and he reestablished the precedent of the president’s going down and delivering his messages in person to the Congress. That hadn’t been done, I don’t think, since Jefferson’s time.

  Wilson was called a radical when he came in and organized all the reforms that were made in the financial setup of the government. But Jackson was also called a radical by his opponents, and Franklin Roosevelt was called a radical, and so was every other president who has done anything. Any man who does things for the welfare of the majority of the people is always called a radical. He doesn’t necessarily have to be one. I’m going to try to avoid labels in this book because they’re often misleading. Jackson was also called a liberal, and so was Jefferson, but some other presidents were called liberals, too, and they were mediocre presidents. All a good president tries to do is accomplish things for the good of the people, and if you want to call that liberal, then I’m with you. I guess the best way to describe Wilson, if I’ve got to use a label, is to say that he was a commonsense liberal. He wasn’t one of these synthetic liberals who are always talking liberalism and who act some other way, and he wasn’t one of these screaming liberals who aren’t very liberal to people who think differently from the way they do. He was a genuine liberal who used his heart and his brain.

  The final great president on my list is, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It goes without saying that I was highly impressed by him for a thousand reasons, but a main reason is that he inherited a situation that was almost as bad as the one that Lincoln had, and he dealt with it. And he was always able to make decisions. Presidents have to make decisions if they’re going to get anywhere, and those presidents who couldn’t make decisions are the ones who caused all the trouble.

  I’m going to end this chapter right here because I’ll be mentioning FDR many times in this book, of course, and saying a lot more about him. But anybody who’s looking for any comments that are less than admiring had better go to the bookstore and see if he can get his money back.

  THE PURPOSE OF these next few chapters is to flip the coin and write about some presidents of the opposite variety.

  It’s a remarkably varied thing, the way various presidents have handled the powers with which they’re charged in the Constitution. Some of them haven’t been interested at all in taking charge of things and operating as they should. It’s a fascinating study, too, especially if a man happens to have lightning strike him and he becomes a president himself as I did. He’s suddenly the chief executive of the greatest country in the world, and if he wants to exercise that prerogative, he can do it. If he doesn’t, he can sit still and take things as they come. I’d made quite a study of the presidency, and I liked the work, and I hope people will agree that I worked hard. The history of the Republic is a struggle between the three branches - the courts, the executive, and the legislature. It’s natural for a president to have problems with the Congress or the Supreme Court; in fact, it’s my opinion that if a president isn’t in an occasional fight with the Congress or the courts, he’s not doing a good job. If the executive has the ability and the desire to make himself felt, he can run the government properly. If he doesn’t, he can’t.

  A strong president is a president who carries on the operation of the United States as the Constitution provides, and has the willingness to decide what ought to be done and then put it over. Regardless of consequences. It doesn’t make any difference whether or not the thing he decides to do is unpopular or whether his doing it makes him unpopular for a while. If he does the right thing, the popularity will come. If he doesn’t, well, then, too bad. And I don’t think there’s such a thing as too strong an executive, or that we’ve ever had too strong an executive in the White House. We’re stuck with some men while they’re in there, but that’s all right, and that’s the way it should be; they’ve been elected, and they should have their chance. But it’s no danger because each man’s term is limited. You can always put him out if he gets too big for his britches.

  The United States has never suffered seriously from any acts of the president that were intended for the welfare of the country. It’s suffered from the inaction of a great many presidents when action should have been taken at the right time. I don’t think there’s ever been a president who really did damage because he wanted damage to be done. I don’t think any of them willfully and maliciously tried to get the country in trouble; I think you’ll find that most of them were anxious to see useful things done. But some of them didn’t act as they should in their position as chief executive, and that brought about some of the country’s difficulties.

  I’ve been asked if I really believe that most or all of our presidents had the welfare of the people in mind, or if that’s just a myth. Yes, I do, and no, it isn’t. I think the vast majority of the presidents were always as anxious as they could be to serve the people to the best of their ability. I believe that all of our presidents, good or bad, were genuinely interested in the welfare of the American people. You won’t necessarily find that in inherited monarchies where the chief executive inherits the job. You’ll find that some of the kings and princes and emperors and empresses were deliberately trying to increase their own power and their own welfare rather than the welfare of the people. That’s what caused some of those revolutions. But that hasn’t been true with the elected office of the president of the United States. Most - no, I’d say all - of the men who were elected president of the United States were willing and anxious to do what was right, if they knew what it was. Some of them didn’t know, that’s all, and some had an inkling or real knowledge but were just too lazy or too timid to do the work involved or take the flak that would come from opponents or the opposition press. That’s why some presidents did a good job, some did a fair job, and some didn’t do any job at all, so I guess the best way to rate presidents would be to call them great, near great, and do-nothings.

  Zachary Taylor was one of the do-nothing presidents. Benjamin Harrison was that sort of president, too, and I think that Rutherford B. Hayes was almost that sort of president, although he lived in especially turbulent times and did manage to get a thing or two done. A couple of others were Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore. Ulysses S. Grant was a pretty bad president, too. In our own days, Calvin Coolidge is the nearest example to a sit-still president that we’ve had, except possibly Dwight Eisenhower.

  Zachary Taylor was the president immediately after Polk, and from the beginning of his administration in 1849 until the end of James Buchanan’s administration in 1861, we had the same sort of situation, a period of stagnation. The four presidents in that period were Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. I think it was one of the worst periods the country ever went through, and it brought on the War Between the States.

  Taylor was a field general, one of the great ones. He was on active service when Texas was already in the Union, but there was a big question about the state’s southwestern border; Texas said it was the Rio Grande and the Mexican government said it was the Nueces River. Polk ordered Taylor to cross the Nueces River and take over the disputed territory, and when Taylor did that and Mexican troops attacked, Polk and his Congress said that Mexico had, in effect, declared war and told Taylor to move deeper into Mexico. At the same time, a sea and land expedition headed by General Winfield Scott captured Mexico City, and Americans in California proclaimed their territory part of the United States, and Mexico quit, and Polk made his deal that got us all those western areas.

  But when Taylor became president of the United States, I don’t think he knew what to do. I can’t be charitable and say that he failed to carry out his program; he didn’t have any program to carry out, so he couldn’t fail because he had no
program.

  He was elected just as a military figure, and he spent his year in office behaving like a retired general. We’ve had that happen time and again, for example in the cases of Ulysses S. Grant and the occupant of the White House after me. Most generals have the idea that as commanding generals they’re going to retire someday to a nice post and sit there and wait for their term to end, and some of them think they can retire to the White House as commander in chief and do the same thing. But they can’t. The administrative job of the president is the hardest job in the world, and there’s no general or anybody else who has any job that approaches the responsibility and the work that the president has to do to make the job work properly.

  The things, of course, that test the effectiveness of a president are the special conditions and problems that exist, domestically and in foreign affairs, during his term or terms in office, and the things that determine whether or not a president is a good president are his ability to have ideas for the welfare of the country, and - most important of all - his willingness to work hard to turn his ideas into action and make things happen. He must have ideas and imagination as to what’s needed for the good of the country, and he can create conditions that will make him great, or he can take things as they are and do nothing, like Taylor.

  Taylor certainly became expert at doing nothing. There was a corruption scandal involving some members of his cabinet, but he delayed and delayed firing any of them. He was a slaveholder himself and in fact, briefly the father-in-law of Jefferson Davis (his daughter died of malaria a few months after her marriage to Davis), but he just looked the other way on the slavery question, making noises one day that sounded proslavery, and noises the next that sounded antislavery. And when Stephen A. Douglas and Henry Clay were putting together the Compromise of 1850, which proposed that California come in as a free state, that Utah and New Mexico become territories without requiring them to become either for or against slavery, and that Texas, which already had slaves, be compensated for some of its area that had been given to New Mexico, the betting was about even on whether Taylor would sign the bill or veto it because nobody could tell how Taylor felt about it or even if he’d thought about it. Nobody ever found out, because Taylor stayed out in the sun too much and ate too much on an especially hot July Fourth in 1850, and he became very sick and died five days later. The Compromise of 1850 was passed after Taylor’s death. It was one of Clay’s greatest achievements, along with his Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state while simultaneously allowing Maine to separate from Massachusetts and come in as a free state, but prohibited slavery forever in the upper Missouri Valley. If these compromises had been able to stand up, I doubt if the Civil War would have come in 1861. Of course, after the fact, it’s always easy to decide what ought to have been done, but the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 were eventually repealed, and I think those were among the things that really brought on the War Between the States.

  Millard Fillmore was Taylor’s vice president and, of course, became president when Taylor died. He was another of those detached, do-nothing presidents.

  Fillmore was a lawyer from Buffalo, New York, who entered the House of Representatives in 1832 and became a kind of protégé of Henry Clay’s. He was proposed by Clay for the vice presidency in 1844 but didn’t get the nomination. Then Clay and his people supported Fillmore when he ran for governor of New York that year, but he lost that one, too, and he returned to private law practice. Finally, in 1848, when Taylor was nominated for president, Clay, who didn’t like Taylor very much, insisted that Fillmore get the vice-presidential spot, and this time Fillmore made it. He had no regular viewpoint on anything. He started in politics as an anti-Mason, one of those people who thought the Masons were going to take over and ruin the country and possibly the world; he was a Whig as vice president and president, but later became a member of the National American Party, the Know-Nothings, because he decided one day that his defeat as governor back in 1844 happened because foreign-born voters didn’t like him; and toward the end of his career, he supported the Democratic candidate, General George B. McClellan, against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. He was a man who changed with the wind, and as president of the United States, he didn’t do anything that’s worth pointing out.2

  Fillmore kept losing support during his term because of his invisibility, then lost more when Clay died in 1852, and he was defeated for the Whig nomination by General Winfield Scott, the fellow who became popular when Polk sent him out against the Mexicans. But another general, Franklin Pierce, opposed him on the Democratic ticket, and the Democrats won. Neither Scott nor Pierce did any real campaigning as candidates; Scott moved around a little, but Pierce just stayed home and said he supported the policies of his party, including the Compromise of 1850, and apparently that was enough.

  Pierce was a Democrat from New Hampshire, and he was a very popular man in the North and a compromiser with the South, so he was overwhelmingly elected by both northerners and southerners. But, although he was a compromiser, he ended up being the man who signed the bill repealing Clay’s two important Compromises, which really brought on the Civil War. It was Pierce’s foolish notion that he could cool down the slavery question and make people forget about it by doing two things: filling his cabinet with people of differing viewpoints and concentrating almost entirely on foreign policy and territorial expansion instead of slavery problems. But the net result of those ideas was that his cabinet members kept bickering with each other and didn’t accomplish much, and Pierce’s moves in other directions didn’t distract people’s attention from slavery problems for a minute.

  Pierce was a well-educated man who graduated from Bowdoin College, in a class that included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and then went on to law school. His father, Benjamin Pierce, was a Revolutionary War veteran who became governor of New Hampshire in 1827, and when old Ben Pierce ran for reelection and made it, Franklin Pierce ran for the state legislature and was elected, too. He was reelected three more times and eventually went on to the House of Representatives. He wasn’t even thirty years old at the time, and he married a woman named Jane Appleton just before his thirtieth birthday, but the trouble was that his wife didn’t like politics or Washington, and she didn’t go with him when he returned to the capital after their honeymoon. That, of course, was a great handicap to him, because a man shouldn’t have the distraction of attempting to live a celibate life when he’s trying to concentrate on helping to run the country. And judging from pictures of the lady I’ve seen, she was also good-looking enough and smart-looking enough so she might have become a great hostess when Pierce became president, maybe even as good a hostess as Dolley Madison, who was the most glamorous of the First Ladies. (I could say excluding Mrs. Truman, but Mrs. Truman never had any idea of being glamorous.) And being a hostess and throwing parties is important in Washington, because a great many important things are transacted at these functions that might otherwise never have been discussed.

  Pierce went on to the Senate in 1836, the youngest man in that group of fogies, but his wife kept bothering him to give up Washington and come on home to New Hampshire, and finally, six years later, he did. His life in Washington hadn’t exactly been exemplary; he did so much hard drinking with other bachelor and sort-of-bachelor legislators like himself that he developed an alcoholism problem that stayed with him all his life. He became state chairman of the Democratic Party and the United States district attorney for New Hampshire, but he refused other things that would have taken him away from home, including an invitation from Polk to become his attorney general. But then the Mexican War came along, and he became a colonel and then a general, and he was back in the national public eye again and headed toward the presidency.

  Pierce wasn’t the Democrats’ first choice for the nomination; the contest was pretty much between James Buchanan and a fellow named Lewis Cass. But Buchanan and Cass kept canceling each other out, nei
ther one getting the two-thirds majority, and Pierce’s name was entered as a dark horse possibility on the thirty-fifth ballot. He finally got the nomination on the forty-ninth ballot. Mrs. Pierce fainted when she heard the news, and Pierce, who’d gone to the convention in Baltimore because he and his supporters had the notion that what did happen might possibly happen, had to lie to her and tell her that he hadn’t had the slightest notion he was even a possibility.

  Pierce had even features and curly hair and was one of the best-looking men ever in the White House. He was also one of the vainest men ever to occupy the White House, which I guess was on account of the fact that he was so good-looking. But though he looked the way people who make movies think a president should look, he didn’t pay any more attention to business as president of the United States than the man in the moon, and he really made a mess of things. He had those two foolish notions I’ve already mentioned, and even though he was a northerner, he believed in slavery, pretty much, and once said in a speech, “I believe that involuntary servitude, as it exists in different States of the Confederacy, is recognized by the Constitution.” So when Pierce finally turned attention to the seriousness of the slavery problem, he allowed Senator Stephen A. Douglas to influence his thinking in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and even helped Douglas get the thing through.