Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  I know I’m going off on another tangent here, but I just can’t help saying that, though freedom of the press is one of the greatest things we have in this country, it’s really more abuse of the press than freedom of the press when some writers attack people strictly because gossip and nastiness is more juicy and sells more copies than when nice things and honest things are said about people. I’m referring both to books like that Rupert Hughes book and to some newspapers that are guilty of abuse both for its own sake and because they’re pandering to influential advertisers who don’t happen to agree with the policies of the current administration. In fact, I feel so strongly on the subject that I’m going to end this chapter right here and give some space to the press in the next one.

  THAT SORT OF thing has been around since the beginnings of our country. Washington set up the United States government, so it continued to work, but he had a great many difficulties with it because he was attacked maliciously in the press of his day. If you’ll go to the Library of Congress and read what the papers of that day had to say about him, you’ll wonder how he continued. Well, he didn’t want to continue, and one of the principal reasons he quit at the end of his second term was because the press was so vicious in its treatment of him.

  Lincoln was an equally great man, there’s no doubt about that, but he wasn’t considered a great man by everybody, not by any means, when he was in the White House. At the Gettysburg celebration, Edward Everett, the great man of the day, made a speech for two hours, and Lincoln spoke for about four minutes. He got very little space in the national papers, and the Chicago Tribune made the statement as a sort of postscript that the President of the United States also spoke and made the usual ass of himself. Today nobody remembers that Edward Everett, that old preacher, was on that platform, but everybody knows that Lincoln was there, and they think he made the principal address, though he didn’t. And the only words that are remembered from that Gettysburg celebration are Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, so that shows how far the papers can be wrong at the time things happen. The newspapers also continually made slurring comments about Lincoln’s lack of “decent attire.” Well, I think he had decent attire.

  Washington was attacked because he was president of the United States. That’s customary whenever a fellow is in power; it doesn’t make any difference who he is. The establishment of the freedom of the press in this country was a precedent and had just about never been done before anywhere in the world, and some of the editors of the time were small men and went haywire on the subject. They worked it to death and might have been suppressed under other conditions, but Washington and Jefferson believed in a free press.

  The press in Revolutionary times was partisan and much more liable to attack people personally even than newspapers are today, and the men in the Continental Congress and in our first government, that great body of men, realized that if they were going to reach agreements and run the country, they had to do it in such a way that they could get things done and then explain to the people exactly what it meant. If the thing had been argued day by day in the press of the country, we wouldn’t have had any Constitution or any country.

  The Constitutional Convention had a good situation in which to work because the men who were discussing things weren’t afraid that they were going to have their hides torn off by some smart aleck newspaperman. I mean that for just what it says because that’s what we have today, and any committee in Congress right now, today, that doesn’t work with the same attitude as the Constitutional Convention never gets anything done. Otherwise, the members of the committee are always posing for television and looking out of the corners of their eyes to see what people think of them back home, and you can’t do that. A fellow in government’s got to have a viewpoint for the welfare and benefit of the whole country, and at the present time, for the whole world. And if he gets to posing for television or a radio set or a bunch of newspapermen, it just can’t be done. Those fellows in Revolutionary days knew what they were doing, and they had a chance to discuss openly exactly what they thought and gave the other people a chance to do the same thing, and then they got together with the best out of both arguments. Their purpose was to get things done rather than to try to set up a publicity stunt for the people.

  We’re supposed to have a free press today, and I guess we do in many ways, which is wonderful because, if you have a free press, there’s no way in the world for anyone to get by with the subversion of the country. It’s also very good because sometimes newspapers dig up things that ought to be dug up, crookedness on the part of public officials and other things like that, and the newspapers make a great stir about those things and they’re usually corrected. You take Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and old man Dana, Charles A. Dana - they were as mean as they could be in their papers now and then, but they made a real contribution to the freedom of the press. But the press today really isn’t free in some ways, not really. The press in early times was more personal; editors owned their papers and were responsible for them and sometimes got shot for things they said about people (not that I’m advocating that, you understand). Today the press isn’t the individual editor’s press that it was in times past; it’s a publisher’s press, a commercial proposition that sells advertising on the basis of circulation, and any approach that will increase the circulation for the purpose of increasing the advertising income of the paper is the fundamental concern. And there are very few newspapers in the country, even most of the so-called great ones, where the editorial policy is carried on by the editor. A lot of them even hire columnists on both sides of the fence, and you can never tell what they stand for. But most of the time, the policy of the paper is set by the publisher, and he sets his policy either to please his advertisers, the special interests who are his real customers or to say things that will sell more papers.

  One of the favorite methods of selling more papers is to abuse the current president even if he hasn’t done anything wrong. Just about every president has been roundly abused by the press in recent times. And when you take the top man in a great republic and throw bricks at him, you know the people are going to buy the papers and read them, and you can sell more advertising. That’s principally what’s behind the publishers’ attitudes. I don’t think any of them have any serious principles that they want to enforce. I don’t mind at all when a publisher says something in his paper that he obviously truly believes; publishers have their right to their opinions as any other part of the population has. But that’s rare. The press always claim that they’re on the side of the people, but they’re really on the side of the people who support them, and that’s usually the advertisers, so what we have isn’t exactly a free press.

  But every president who does anything has that sort of experience, and as you’ll see by Washington’s and Lincoln’s history, they didn’t lose anything by the attacks of the press. And no man who’s in a place of responsibility can pay any attention to what the editors of the papers have to say about him, because if he does, he’ll never have a policy and he can’t continue it. Those presidents who knuckle down to the press usually wind up being just ordinary presidents or worse, and we’ve had too many of them like that. A good president just can’t pay any attention when the press tries to abuse him; the papers often abuse him when he’s right because they believe - wrongly - that he ought to do something else, and if he knows he’s right and goes ahead with it, things work out and it doesn’t matter how much they’ve abused him. Or, as I say, they’ve abused him just to sell papers, and he certainly shouldn’t pay any attention to that.

  It’s hard, I suppose, to define what a free press really is. In the old days, I guess, from about 1840 or 1850 to about 1890, the papers were operated by the editors who wrote the editorials (they didn’t hire people to write them like they do today), and they had their own opinions and they fought each other as much as they fought the government. Well, that was free press. Today - well, the country press in Missouri and Kansas and Iowa an
d places like that, where there are still small-town newspapers, that’s the free press right now. The editors own their papers, they have their own opinions just as the old-time editors did, and they have the right to express them. The metropolitan press is a different proposition entirely. The great publishers control that press and they’re in cahoots with their friends and advertisers, other special-interest types like themselves, to make sure that people see what they think they ought to see, instead of giving them a complete set of the news.

  There are only a few papers in the country that give unedited news to their customers: The New York Times and the Washington Star are the best examples of that that come to mind. Well, of course, they sometimes get mixed up too much in politics, and then they’re propaganda sheets just like any other paper. But it doesn’t really matter; it’s been shown somewhere that in presidential elections, the recommendations of the press as a whole have been disregarded by the voters more than 60 percent of the time. That’s because the people don’t really trust the press. The great metropolitan papers think they can fool people by propaganda, but they don’t fool them, as that 60-percent statistic proves conclusively. One of the ways to avoid being fooled, incidentally, is to read the back pages of the papers. The prejudices of the publishers often appear on the front page and in headlines, and sometimes in garbled news, but if you turn the paper over and read the back pages, then you’ll often find out what really goes on. Of course, I’m probably a little prejudiced about all this myself, but I really do feel that big city newspaper publishers have abused the ability they have to give people ideas, when they set their presses to work. And though one of the things that’s brought publishers somewhat under control has been radio and television, where there’s a freer approach, that’s gradually being controlled by the same outfits.

  Editors and publishers don’t really know a heck of a lot of politics when you get right down to it, anyway. One of the most vivid examples of what happens to editors when they get into politics is Horace Greeley. He was nominated by the Republicans, and he was endorsed by some Democrats and he made a campaign for president in 1872, and he was thoroughly and completely whipped, and after that was over, he lived around three months and laid down and died. He couldn’t take it. I think that’s what would happen to most editors and publishers if they’d get into politics.

  The good thing, anyway, is that most presidents don’t really care what the newspapers say about them. Lincoln certainly didn’t. I don’t think he paid a great deal of attention to the press at all. I ran across one of his statements one time about a vicious editorial that had been written about him one time by, I think, James Gordon Bennett, and somebody asked him about it, one of the other newspaper people. He said, “Oh, well, if I spent my time fooling with things of that kind, and trying to reply to every lie that’s told about me, I wouldn’t have a chance to run the government.” That’s not his exact language, but it expresses his relations with the press.

  And though I’m not trying to compare myself with Lincoln in any way, that’s precisely how I feel. I used to read as many critical editorials as the other kind. Sometimes I had to get up early and go over and see the papers myself because my staff were sometimes ashamed to show me some of the mean things that were said about me. It didn’t bother me. When the newspapers are against any man in public life, it’s an asset in most instances, because, in the long run, it’ll be shown that they had an unfair prejudice. It doesn’t bother any man in office who wants to do the right thing. He goes ahead and does it no matter what the newspapers may say. I never cared anything about what they said about me as long as they didn’t jump on my family. If they did that, then they got in trouble.

  WELL, I DIDN’T mean to go on so long about the press in the last chapter, but I read newspapers a lot and do a certain amount of thinking about them. My favorite bit of newspaper reading, of course, is that one with the famous headline saying DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

  We come now to the final president in my no-enthusiasm category, Dwight David Eisenhower, and I’ve sprinkled enough comments throughout the pages before this one so that you know that I’m not one of Eisenhower’s admirers. I’m sure he has some, perhaps many, though, for the life of me, I can’t tell you why.

  I guess I’ve also made it clear that I just don’t think military men make good presidents, though I’m not entirely clear on why I feel that way, either. It’s not that I see any real danger in a military man becoming president because I don’t. With our Constitution and its built-in limitations, and our system of checks and balances, we never hesitate to get rid of a bad man, or have any trouble doing it when the time comes. I suppose my reason, as much as anything, is that history has proven that professional military men have trouble in running a free government, because a military man is used to being a sort of dictator in his military job. The occupant of the White House after me understood this himself, and he once wrote a letter to that old fellow who had that newspaper in Manchester, New Hampshire, Leonard Finder, that said the thing more clearly than almost anybody else has ever done. This was when Eisenhower was saying over and over again that he’d never run for president, before he turned around and ran, and he told Finder, “I could not accept nomination even under the remote possibility that it would be tendered me.” Then he explained, “The necessary and wise subordination of the military to civil power will best be sustained when lifelong professional soldiers abstain from seeking high political office.”

  The thing, you see, is that the professional soldier is educated in an institution that creates the idea that an officer in the Army is better than the private, the corporal, and the sergeant, and when he becomes the chief executive, he can’t get it out of his mind that he’s way above everybody else in intelligence and character and everything. He thinks the whole civilian population is inferior to him, when in fact they’re his equals and maybe better. You don’t have to have any special quality being an officer. Not necessarily.

  The other thing wrong with the professional soldier as president is that he doesn’t have any experience with the problems we civilians have throughout our lives because he’s pretty much protected as a military man. And the president of the United States is a man who should be able to understand what the ordinary, common man thinks about and worries about. A military man can’t do that. (I’m referring to professional military men. Not men of military experience, just professional military men who’ve spent their lives as military men or retired as generals. That’s where the difficulty lies.) I wouldn’t, you understand, exclude any environment or background as a possible source of a good future president. Not even the military. I just don’t think most of them have made or would make good presidents.

  But they certainly make attractive candidates. The fact that people elected Grant, and then reelected him after a terrible first administration, and then almost elected him a third time after an even worse second administration, is a simple example of hero worship. All the people, no matter where they come from, like a winner, like a hero. That’s worked nearly all the way through the history of our government. Jackson was a hero at the Battle of New Orleans. He won the only battle that was won in the War of 1812 and became the most popular man of his time - North, South, East, and West. Even Harvard had to confer a degree on him whether they wanted to or not. That was true of nearly every one of these generals except Winfield Scott. He was called Old Fuss and Feathers, and he was kind of a strutter, so people weren’t too crazy about him for that reason. The hero of the Mexican War was Zachary Taylor, because he was an ordinary, everyday fellow like everybody else, and yet he won the Battle of Buena Vista and one or two others. The same was true of Sam Houston in Texas. He won the Battle of San Jacinto with less than half the people that Santa Anna had at the battle. He was a hero and continued to be a hero until he was against secession in Texas, and then they almost hanged him for that.

  Well, the same thing was true of General Grant. He was a hero of the War Between the States
. He was in at the surrender of Lee and he caused the opening of the Mississippi River, and he turned out to be a great field general, and that’s the reason he was so well thought of. You’ll find that there were a great many other generals who were well thought of at the time. There was a great big old six-footer who was in command of the XI Corps at Gettysburg, General Winfield Scott Hancock - I wouldn’t be surprised if he was named after Winfield Scott - and he was so popular that he was nominated on the Democratic ticket in 1880, but the fellow who ran against him had also been a major general in the Federal army, Garfield, and they elected Garfield instead. I think Hancock was six feet four inches tall and weighed 230 pounds. He was one of the finest-looking men in the United States, but he was just a lazy, fat man. He didn’t make any effort to win, but he came very near to it.

  In 1888, it was Benjamin Harrison, you’ll recall, who beat Grover Cleveland for reelection, and Harrison was also a major general in the Federal army. They charged that Grover Cleveland didn’t go to war because he paid some other fellow to go for him, though whether he did or not I don’t know. It goes to show how far glamour and how far a military record can carry a man. William McKinley was a major in the Civil War. He was elected as Major McKinley on the Republican ticket. It isn’t necessarily confined to the United States of America, either. Old Lord Wellington was made prime minister on the grounds of winning the Battle of Waterloo, and he was a perfect dumbbell when it came to government administration. Napoleon III was put on the throne of France because he knew how to wear his uniform and because they thought he looked like the real Napoleon. It’s no different today; many people still like that kind of glamour. I can’t answer that question of why that’s so, but I know it’s true. I know absolutely that a military career, no matter on what small basis it stands, is the best asset a man can have if he wants to be elected to office in the United States of America, anything from constable to president.