Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  There have been exceptions to that attitude, of course. There was nothing more thoroughly looked down on by many people than an old soldier, for example, from about 1886 until about 1900, when the Spanish-American War came along. I’ve heard my mother and father talk about the old Bluecoats and the old Fuzz and Gray, and how they were stealing from the Treasury as long as they lived. That’s an attitude people sometimes take, but when the emergency comes along, then there’s nothing too good for a man in uniform. Then people feel that the military was willing to be shot and didn’t mind going up and standing between us and what was coming. I know, having been a private and a corporal and a sergeant and a captain, but the truth is that, in present times, the most dangerous place that a man can be is behind the lines and not in front of them. But a military man still has a lot of glamour.

  Fortunately, we’ve had some pretty good men with military backgrounds. One of the greatest of the great presidents, George Washington, was a field general, and he set up the government and knew how to make it run. Jackson was another one who was a field general and knew how to make the government run, who was a chief executive in fact, as well as in name. I even think it helps to have some military background, because a president is also the commander in chief and he ought to have a certain amount of knowledge of how the military works. I had very little. I was only a captain in the First World War, but I’d studied the military from start to finish and knew something about it, and it helped. But there were so many military men like Grant, men who were perfectly willing to fill chairs and let the Congress run the government if the Congress wanted to run the government - and sometimes the Congress did and sometimes the Congress didn’t. The bad presidents weren’t intending to do damage to the structure of the government. I don’t think Grant, for example, intentionally tried to do what was wrong, but he didn’t intentionally try to do what was right, either. He was just unsuited for the job, and inept. And that’s my opinion of the man we’ve just elected twice.

  Eisenhower’s personal history is recent enough so that I’m sure everybody knows it, at least in broad outline, but I’ll just sketch it in anyway, since I’m doing that for other presidents in this book. His family were Kansas people, but Eisenhower himself was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890; his father had been working in a general store in Hope, Kansas, but the store failed, and the elder Eisenhower was offered a job in Denison and moved where the work was. He was given the name of David Dwight Eisenhower but switched the first two names around early in life to avoid confusion because his father was also named David. Eisenhower was one of six brothers; a seventh brother died in infancy. All six of the Eisenhower boys were nicknamed Ike when they were kids, but the name stuck only with the man who followed me into the White House.

  When Eisenhower was two years old, his father got a better job in a dairy in Abilene, Kansas, and moved back there, and that’s where Eisenhower grew up. He graduated from high school but couldn’t afford to go to college, so he went to work at the dairy alongside his father for about a year. He had no thoughts in his early life about becoming a soldier; what he really wanted was a good general education. In fact, he became a soldier entirely by accident. He heard about the chance for a college education without cost; examinations were being given in Topeka for entry into Annapolis, so he applied quickly and might have ended up as a sailor. Which would have been a sad turn of events for the country, because our army was the somewhat more important factor in World War II than the navy, and there’s no question about the fact that Eisenhower was one hell of a good soldier. On the other hand, we wouldn’t have ended up with eight years of a mediocre presidency, either, because I doubt that he would have been elected president, or even suggested as a candidate, if he’d been an admiral in the war. We’ve never had an admiral for a president. I don’t know why, but I guess it’s because we’ve never had an admiral who was glamorous enough to get himself nominated for president. And I guess it’s also because the people didn’t understand sea power until the last two or three administrations, and then, finally, they began to find out what it was all about, and also because people don’t really think about us as a sea power the way the world used to think of England. We tried to flaunt our sea power all the way back in the War of 1812, and we got licked - there was only one victory in the whole war, and that was Andrew Jackson at New Orleans - but even now, with our position on the seas very different indeed, I don’t think there’ll be an admiral in the White House in the near future.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter, because, when Eisenhower got to Topeka, he found out that the test was for both Annapolis and West Point. He passed the test, but since he was over twenty years old at the time, he was told that he was over the entrance age for Annapolis, and he was sent to West Point. He was just an okay student: He graduated sixty-first in a class of 168 men in 1915. And he went on to appear to be just an okay soldier. He spent World War I at training camps in this country teaching soldiers how to use tanks, even though there weren’t any tanks at the camps, and he had to work out of a textbook, and he spent the years between the wars in Panama and in the Philippines working with the Philippine Air Force and in other jobs like that. Eisenhower’s importance as a commander began to show up when we entered the war in 1941. He was a brigadier general by this time, in charge of the Third Army in Texas, and General George Marshall called him to Washington to work at the War Department because of his knowledge of the Pacific theater. He was so good at what he did there that General Marshall gave him the important assignment of setting up the plans for a second front in France, and then sent him there personally to run the European Theater of Operations. As everybody knows, he did a wonderful job, and President Roosevelt made him supreme commander of all the allied forces. And after the war, I used him myself when I was organizing the Department of Defense and working on my plan to put all of the armed forces under one command; and when he quit the Army in 1948 to become president of Columbia University, I asked him to come back into service in 1950 as supreme commander of NATO. But then that fellow Dewey, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, the fellow who beat me for president back in 1948 according to the Chicago Tribune, began to push Eisenhower hard to run for president on the Republican ticket, and that’s the sad part of the Eisenhower story in my view. It wasn’t a new idea; a lot of people thought he’d taken the job at Columbia as a step toward the presidency, to show people that there were more sides to him than just a one-note soldier, and he was so well liked by people that important people in both major parties were mentioning him often as a presidential possibility. But Eisenhower kept saying over and over again that he just wasn’t interested, and even his personal preferences were sort of like at Topeka, where he could have ended up as either a sailor or a soldier; nobody even knew whether he was a Republican or a Democrat because he just wouldn’t say, and there’s doubt in my mind, and in the minds of a lot of other people, if he ever went to the polls in his life before 1952 and voted for anybody in either party. But Dewey obviously convinced him that he was a Republican and that he ought to run, and he did and won 33,936,234 votes to Adlai Stevenson’s 27,314,992 and 442 electoral votes to eighty-nine.

  It wasn’t much of a contest from the start. Adlai Stevenson was an extremely intelligent and capable man, and his grandfather had been vice president in Grover Cleveland’s second term, but he wasn’t all that well-known outside of Illinois, where he’d been governor, even though he’d also served in Washington in a number of important jobs. He was also being damned regularly by the Republicans - and, I’ve got to admit with regret, by a lot of Democrats as well - as being that truly terrible thing, an intellectual. I liked him a lot, and I believe I was primarily responsible for convincing him to make the run for the presidency, and I also had a lot to do with convincing Governor Averell Harriman of New York to drop out after the second ballot at the Democratic convention and turn over the New York delegation to Stevenson. But he didn’t really have a chance against the man who was qui
te properly the great hero of the people after World War II, and he was beaten even more strongly when he ran again against Eisenhower in 1956 - 35,590,472 to 26,022,752 and 457 to seventy-three electoral votes.

  I TRIED VERY hard to make the transition smooth and efficient. The objective I had in view was to avoid the confusion that occurs when one man comes in, and another goes out. About a week after the election, I called Eisenhower and invited him to come over and sit with the cabinet, and I had each member of the cabinet report exactly what was going on and what had to be done. I also invited the President-Elect to send his budget directly to the White House, because I had to make up my last budget, with which he’d be associated. I also asked him to send over his prospective secretary of state, prospective secretary of defense, and all the rest of his cabinet, so that they could have their programs and approaches coordinated with my cabinet members, and to send in his people who were going to work in the White House so that they could be shown the various programs that had been followed and the functions of all the various people who were already there.

  For the most part, it worked very well. The only time it didn’t work at all is when Eisenhower asked if he could also send over Sherman Adams, whom Eisenhower described as his personal assistant, the man who would be taking over the White House staff, but who later became so powerful and threw his weight around so much that a lot of people began to refer to him privately as the president in chief. (I’m sure everybody also remembers that, in 1958, Adams also got into trouble because he allowed a Boston industrialist, who had problems at the time with both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, to pay substantial hotel bills for Adams and his family, and for accepting a lot of big gifts from people, and Adams was forced to resign.) I turned Adams over to John Steelman, whose title was assistant to the president, and told Adams that he could find out exactly how things worked from Steelman. But Adams tried to take immediate charge. He actually wanted to take over! He didn’t offer to function for me administratively; he tried to take over my administrative staff immediately and tell them what to do, and I called him in and told him he couldn’t do that, and that’s all there was to it. I told him that I was still the President until the twentieth, and he was there on sufferance to find out what he had to do when his time came, and that’s all he was there for. And I said that if he wanted to find out what went on, all right, but if he didn’t, then he could go out and sit down in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue as far as I was concerned.

  I guess it also didn’t work too well with the man Eisenhower appointed as secretary of defense, Charles E. Wilson. Wilson had been the chairman of the board of General Motors, and I suppose that made him think that job gave him more knowledge than anyone else under the sun about everything. Wilson was briefed and told exactly what the situations were all around the world and what he had to do. Every outgoing president has certain projects in view at the end of his administration, and he’s more in a position then to have good ideas about how to carry things out, for the simple reason that he’s had the experience of being president and he’s had the opportunity to observe and think about everything that’s taken place. And naturally there are things that he’d like to see carried out but hasn’t been able to accomplish or complete by the end of his term.

  At the end of my term, there wasn’t really anything, I’d say, of particularly strong importance except our positions and relationships in foreign affairs, in which I was vitally interested. For this reason, I felt that Wilson was of particular importance. But Wilson thought he knew more than the fellow who was briefing him, even though he hadn’t even begun work on the job and my secretary of defense happened to be Robert M. Lovett, who was also a major industrialist and the head of a great bank. And that was that. For the most part, however, my invitations to Eisenhower and his people worked well. New cabinet members often have trouble taking over. But being briefed as they were, and being allowed to sit with the members of my cabinet and seeing what their functions were, Eisenhower’s people didn’t have any trouble. It was the first time in the history of the country that these things had ever been done, and it was the most orderly turnover in the history of the White House.

  Even if I say so myself, I tried so hard to be pleasant and cooperative when I was turning the office over to Eisenhower, but he acted as if I were his enemy instead of the fellow who’d had the job just before him. I had a meeting with him right after he was elected and offered him some pictures that had been given to me by several governments, and he told me to keep them because he was sure those governments would give the new president new pictures. I offered him the globe map I used at the White House, one he’d used during the war and given to me when I saw him in Frankfurt before going on to Potsdam in 1945, and he took it but didn’t even say thanks. But he was saving his worst behavior for the inauguration.

  It’s been the custom right from the beginning of this country that the new president comes over and picks up the outgoing president and takes him to the inauguration, but Eisenhower said he wouldn’t do that; he wanted me to come over to his hotel, the Statler, and get him. Well, I wouldn’t do it, of course. There have been only two times when a president didn’t show the established courtesies to the former president: one was when John Adams behaved like a damn fool and sneaked out with Mrs. Adams at midnight so he wouldn’t have to make a turnover to Jefferson, because he didn’t like Jefferson and was jealous of him as well, and the other time was when Roosevelt didn’t go up the stairs with Hoover - and that time wasn’t discourtesy at all, but because Roosevelt was paralyzed and couldn’t climb stairs.

  So I wouldn’t do it, and I said Eisenhower would have to come and get me the way every other new president had, and he finally, grudgingly, agreed. But he showed up at the White House and wouldn’t get out of the car; he sat there as if he were carved out of stone, and I finally went down and got into the car, and we didn’t talk much to each other on the trip. You get disgusted sometimes, and I certainly did, when a man has a chance to make an orderly and pleasant transfer and doesn’t have sense enough to do it. But that’s a reflection on my successor. It’s interesting that a single thing, that great smile of Eisenhower’s, gave him the worldwide and lifelong reputation of being a sunny and amiable man, when those of us who knew him well were all too well aware that he was essentially a surly, angry, and disagreeable man, and I don’t just mean to me, either.

  None of that is important; the important thing is that he didn’t do a thing as president. Perhaps the people who talked Eisenhower into running for president knew this in advance; perhaps they knew Eisenhower would do nothing but look good up there. If they did suspect this, or possibly even planned it that way, I’m sure their thought was that that would accomplish getting the Democrats out of the highest office, and then the Republicans would also control the Congress, and the Congress would do all the work that’s always needed, and Republican policies would be the order of the day. But it didn’t turn out that way. For one thing, Eisenhower’s personal popularity, the halo he wore from 1952 to 1960, didn’t extend to the rest of the party. In the midterm elections in 1954, the Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate, and in 1956, when Eisenhower ran for the second time, the voters put Eisenhower right back in office but again elected more Democratic senators and representatives than Republicans.

  And for another thing, it just doesn’t work like that. It just isn’t the case that when, as I believe Eisenhower did, a president thinks that he’s a kind of monarch or king who should be above everything that happens in the world and in the country, the Congress will do all the work. That’s bad not only for the presidency; it’s bad for the country and the world. The chief executive has to transact the business of the country: He has to provide leadership, and he has to have a program and the guts and ability to put it over. And Eisenhower never made any effort to put forward the leadership to which he was entitled, and he didn’t have any program.

  I�
��ll list some of the things Eisenhower didn’t do when he was supposed to be performing the job of president and running the country:

  In July 1955, a meeting was arranged in Geneva between Eisenhower, the leaders of Great Britain and France, and three important Russians, Nikolai Bulganin, the premier of Russia, Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Communist Party, and Georgi Zhukov, Russia’s defense minister. The word was that Eisenhower was going to arrange for world disarmament, at least in a limited way, arrange for the unification of the two Germanys, and ease the Cold War tensions between the United States and Russia, which had been growing for years. Eisenhower was also going to push a good idea that wasn’t his own, of course, but had been suggested by Nelson Rockefeller and some other people: an open-skies agreement that would allow the nations at the conference to fly freely and do photographic reconnaissance freely over the other countries so that the countries involved could make sure that armament, and any agreed disarmament, was kept within promised limitations. However, there was no agreement on disarmament; there was no decrease in Cold War tensions; there was no unification of the two halves of Germany; the open-skies agreement never happened.

  On October 23, 1956, there was a revolution in Hungary, which the Russians had taken over by killing the head of the government, Imre Nagy, and thousands of other people, and the Hungarian people appealed to the United States for help. Eisenhower ignored the plea completely, and Russian tanks rolled into Hungary and killed many more people, and the revolution was soon over. And the United States began to get a reputation for turning its back on its friends.