Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  But Eisenhower was told to cut out those few lines because McCarthy might not like a statement defending a man he was attacking, and Eisenhower dropped that section from his speech as quickly and meekly as if he were a private taking orders from a chief of staff. I’m talking about a statement concerning General George C. Marshall, you understand, who was not only one of the most decent and honorable men this country has ever produced, and the creator of the wonderful Marshall Plan that helped save Europe and put it back on its feet, but also the man who had done more for Eisenhower than anyone else on earth. Every major promotion that Eisenhower got during World War II, every major assignment, came about because George Marshall recommended it or ordered it. And yet Eisenhower cut out those few mild lines in defense of General Marshall because he was told that Joe McCarthy wouldn’t like it.8

  There’s been some speculation since then that Eisenhower dropped those lines about General Marshall because he was paying Marshall back for a big fight that the two men had had at the end of the Second World War.9 That isn’t the case. Eisenhower admitted to a number of people that he dropped the statement about Marshall strictly because he was told to drop it since it might irritate McCarthy. The truth is that Eisenhower was too chickenhearted to be vindictive. He was just a weak man cowering at a mental image of McCarthy’s pugnacious face and rasping voice.

  Eisenhower’s behavior toward McCarthy and McCarthyism didn’t improve after he became president. Another of McCarthy’s targets was the State Department, and McCarthy began to say in his speeches that overseas libraries funded by the United States were full of Communist and pro-Communist books. So a number of cowardly fellows in the State Department immediately started destroying a lot of books, just as Hitler had done a few years earlier. Eisenhower mumbled a few words about how terrible this was, but he didn’t do a thing to stop the book banning and book burning. Then McCarthy went after a professor at Johns Hopkins, a man named Owen Lattimore, whom he described as “Russia’s top espionage agent in the United States.” Lattimore was hit with all sorts of charges that were, in the words of Nevins and Commager, “pressed with vindictiveness by the Eisenhower administration,” and his life was made a living hell, but he ended up being cleared completely. And then McCarthy focused on Dean Acheson, my secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, saying that Acheson, like Marshall, was soft on communism and that there were 205 Communists in the State Department. (This number kept changing in McCarthy’s different speeches.) And again Eisenhower and his people said nothing and did nothing, and not a single Communist was found in the State Department.

  It took a man who wasn’t even connected with the government, Joseph Welch, who was hired as the Army’s chief counsel when the Army decided to respond to McCarthy’s charges, to bring McCarthy down. Welch showed his contempt for McCarthy and showed that McCarthy was contemptible, and as everybody remembers, McCarthy was finally censured by the Senate in 1954. McCarthy slunk away after that and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1957.

  I’LL END THESE comments on Eisenhower by mentioning that, in 1962, when Eisenhower’s activities or non-activities were still fresh in people’s minds, a poll was conducted among leading historians on the relative qualities of thirty-one of the men who’d served as presidents up to that time. Eisenhower was rated twenty-second in the list of thirty-one, and in an associated list of twelve “average” presidents, he was rated eleventh.10 This places him somewhat above Coolidge, who was rated twenty-seventh on the main list and fourth on an associated list of six “below average” presidents, and somewhat above Harding, who was rated thirty-first on the main list and second on an associated list of two presidential “failures.” (The other man on the “failures” list is Grant.) I guess that’s about right. I’ve been quoted a number of times as saying that Eisenhower didn’t know anything when he became president, and in his years in office, he didn’t learn anything. I guess that’s about right, too.

  I’VE BEEN THINKING about a way to start the next section of this book, which will deal with the presidency rather than individual presidents, and with the qualities and qualifications that make a good president and a good presidential administration rather than a poor one, and then after that I’ll have some things to say about how I think a government should operate and how it shouldn’t. I’ll be getting back to some individual presidents later on because, now that I’ve said quite a lot about our bad presidents, I want to balance things out with some facts and comments on our great presidents. But let’s deal with the presidency in general first.

  I’ll become a bit more serious later on, but I believe I’ll start out in a lighthearted way by saying that I certainly don’t think a man has to be big and tall, has to have a commanding appearance and impressive height, in order to be a good president. I’m saying this because I enjoy history and have been reading books of history all my life, and I keep coming across statements by historians, men who are smart enough to know better, to the effect that Washington and Lincoln became great presidents because they were so tall that people had to look up to them and tended to respect them for that reason, and therefore they were able to lead and get things accomplished. What total baloney! I guess I’m slightly sensitive about that subject because, though I never let myself be bothered by anything the press said about me, I could never understand why some sections of the press kept referring to me as “that little man in the White House.” (Well, maybe I let it bother me a bit, but it really is nonsense.)

  Washington and Lincoln were certainly tall: Washington was six feet two inches tall, and Lincoln was our tallest president, towering over everybody at six feet four inches. On the other hand, our worst president, Warren G. Harding, was also tall, six feet in height or slightly taller, and some of our nonentity presidents were also tall: Millard Fillmore was six feet tall, James Buchanan was about six one, and Chester A. Arthur was six feet two. And before you start building theories about that, wondering if Washington and Lincoln were the only good tall presidents, and that a president has to be small and quick to serve well in the Oval Office, keep in mind the fact that another of our bad presidents, Ulysses S. Grant, was such a little fellow that he almost missed being accepted for West Point because the minimum height requirement was five feet, and though he grew a bit after that, he was five feet seven inches at his tallest. And old Cal Coolidge was five eight. But none of that had anything to do with their being bad presidents.

  As for me, I suppose I make a smaller appearance or something like that, but to use that phrase that people in politics like so much, let me state for the record that I’m five feet ten inches tall. I’m shorter than Franklin Roosevelt, who was six one, though I guess people didn’t realize this since he had to lean on something when standing and rarely stood or was photographed standing, but I’m taller, for example, than Teddy Roosevelt, who was five eight like Coolidge, and I’m exactly as tall as Eisenhower, who is also five ten.11 I might also have looked shorter than I am because I weighed 185 when I became president, though I got rid of ten pounds in office, or perhaps the pressures of the office got rid of the excess weight for me. And that’s enough about me in that context.

  Anyway, I don’t think Washington’s and Lincoln’s commanding height had much to do with why they were respected. I think their leadership came from what was inside them. Of course, a wonderful appearance of a public leader is a great asset if he has something behind that public appearance to go with it. Otherwise, it isn’t worth anything; otherwise, it’s just deceptive like Harding’s handsomeness or Eisenhower’s smile. A president has got to have qualifications to do the job that he’s supposed to do. He has got to be honest. Particularly, he’s got to be intellectually honest, and if he isn’t, it doesn’t make any difference what kind of appearance he makes. In the long run, his good looks or good public presence doesn’t amount to anything because he’ll do a bad job, and he’ll be found out. Or even worse, as I’ve been pointing out in this book, some presidents go into the presidency and don’t do a
ny kind of job at all. A good president has to be a man - or as will come in time, a woman - who works for the people in a way that makes a great impression on the period in which he lives, and so far, there have only been about seven or eight presidents who’ve done that. The others have, to some extent, been presidents who were not truly interested in the events that were taking place and their part in it. In a sense, they retired from active life into the presidency, and that doesn’t work.

  The thing most people wonder about when you start discussing good presidents and bad presidents, is how to find the best available man. How, people ask, do you know if you’re voting for the right man, or if you’re someone like me and get to the point where you have some power in a political party, how do you know if the fellow you’re pushing to be your party’s candidate is the best man in your party at that time for the job. Those are difficult, possibly impossible, things to answer. You never can tell what’s going to happen to a man until he gets to a place of responsibility. You just can’t tell in advance, whether you’re talking about a general in the field in a military situation or the manager of a large farm or a bank officer or a president of the United States. You can never tell if a man is going to be a figurehead or a leader when you nominate him and elect him president. You’ve just got to pick the man you think is best on the basis of his past history and the views he expresses on present events and situations, and then you sit around and do a lot of hoping and if you’re inclined that way, a certain amount of praying.

  You’ve just got to think hard and make your choice and not look back later on and wonder if you should have voted for Mr. Smith instead of having voted for Mr. Jones the way you did. When you contemplate things like what another man would have done as president, the plain truth is that you just never can tell. That’s the kind of hypothetical question that can’t be answered. You never can tell what anybody else would have done as president until he’s in there and has a chance to act, so you’ve got to live with what you’ve got and hope for the best.

  The one comforting factor in this whole question of the selection of presidents is that I feel absolutely sure that the vast majority of past presidents wanted to do the right thing, and that this will be the case with the majority of future presidents as well. But I honestly think that most presidents really try.

  I’ll admit that my view of the history of the presidency in general, and the way I want to express it in this book, is to give the men who were president - as much as I can - the best of it. But I do want people to understand that these men were leaders in their time or they wouldn’t have been there, and that these men could never have been presidents of the United States unless they had something to offer, no matter how bad or how disappointing they turned out when they got there.

  You can’t breed or teach leadership; it comes about naturally. You can start a bunch of youngsters off in any program you desire, whether it’s a local civil government, whether it’s a local organization to raise wheat and make flour out of it, or any other thing you want to do, and there’ll be certain men of talent who come to the top naturally. It doesn’t make any difference what it is, whether it’s a farm or a great corporation or a government: Somebody has to have the brains to lead and to outline plans that will make the thing a success. There always has to be a man at the top who understands, or thinks he understands, where he’s going or what he wants to do. There always has to be a leader, whether it’s in the concentration of wealth or running a state or a country or whatever it is.

  This isn’t an aristocratic viewpoint. In our form of government, the ordinary fellow has the same opportunity to rise in the world as the fellow who started out with the handicap of too much money or being part of a famous family or any other thing you want to name. The poorest of poor men have gone straight to the top because of our type of government and philosophy. That happens in every line in this country. The reason it didn’t happen much in Europe until recent times is that there was an aristocratic fringe at the top who were supposed to rule the people. Well, that was upset in the United States, and it’s a great thing that there’s no such thing as an aristocratic fringe at the top in our country. Any man from the bottom to the top of the financial ladder can become a leader if he has the abilities. I don’t mean to say that there’s any such thing as a classless society here, because people naturally gravitate to the place and the point where they think they can do the most for themselves. But it makes no difference whether they’re rich or poor or whether they start out rich or poor. When they show ability under our form of government, they have a chance to get to the top.

  And that applies to our presidents, of course: It didn’t really make such difference whether they grew up rich or in poverty. The presidents were, after all, just men like all other men, and those who had or seemed to have talent and ability, and were or seemed to be hard workers, were the ones who came to the top. A man’s background is something to talk about and perhaps help get yourself elected, but in the final analysis, the thing that makes you a good president or a bad president is your character and your understanding of what makes a free government, meaning your knowledge of the history of government and your knowledge of the powers of the presidency and how they should be exercised.

  Let’s take a look, then, at the things I believe a man has to have as president.

  First and most important, in my view, is the fact that a president must be strong, particularly where there’s the temptation, as there so often is, to look the other way and do nothing because the matter at hand is unpopular or unpleasant or difficult to attempt or accomplish. It may well be true that the best government is the least government, but when it comes to the point where an emergency arises, or when something has to be done (and sometimes in a hell of a hurry), then you want somebody in charge who knows how to do the job and can take over and see that things happen.

  And that means, of course, a president who can make up his own mind, who isn’t afraid of controversy, who doesn’t allow himself to be held back by some of the limitations other people try to place on the presidency, and who doesn’t even allow himself to be held back by certain limitations in the Constitution. I’ll explain what I mean.

  the ability to make up your mind sounds as if it speaks for itself, but it really isn’t as simple as all that. First of all, the president has got to get all the information he can possibly get as to what’s best for the most people in the country, and that takes both basic character and self-education. He’s not only got to decide what’s right according to the principles by which he’s been raised and educated, but he also has to be willing to listen to a lot of people, all kinds of people, and find out what effect the decision he’s about to make will have on the people. And when he makes up his mind that his decision is correct, he mustn’t let himself be moved from that decision under any consideration. He must go through with that program and not be swayed by the pressures that are put on him by people who tell him that his decision is wrong. If the decision is wrong, all he has to do is get some more information and make another decision because he’s also got to have the ability to change his mind and start over. That’s the only way in the world that a man can carry on as chief executive.

  As far as controversy is concerned, a strong president can’t avoid controversy, and shouldn’t, either. The more controversy you have, the better it is for the big issues because then the president can go before the public and explain what the people who are against him stand for and what he stands for. I think that controversy is always a good thing, because, when programs come up about which not everybody is in agreement, the man who’s the leader has the chance to tell openly and specifically what he thinks ought to be done, and then go and do it. He’s got to keep reminding the people of the nation, and the people in government, that our country has never suffered seriously from any acts of the president that were truly intended for the welfare of the country; it’s suffered from the inaction of a great many presidents when action should hav
e been taken at the right time. He has to keep reminding people that a good president must do more than just believe in what he says - he must also act on what he believes. If he’s a weak man, a president sometimes can’t control things; if he isn’t, then he can meet the situation that he has to meet by getting the people who really count to go along with him. Reasonable people will always go along with a man who has the right ideas and leadership.

  And as regards the necessity, sometimes, for a president to do what he has to do despite some limitations in the way the government operates and in the Constitution that seem designed to prevent him from doing them, the plain fact is that there is such a need on occasion, and a president who wants to do his job properly and fully has just got to recognize that. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t a good reason for the limitations having been put there in the first place because there was. When the writers of the Constitution divided our government into those three branches, they knew exactly what they were doing. The reason for the separation of powers, of course, is that they’d been living under an absolute monarch, King George III, and the French also lived under an absolute monarch, and the people who made up the colonies didn’t want an absolute monarch. They felt that by the division of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the country they’d be much less likely to have a dictator, and that’s a main objective of the Constitution, to prevent a dictatorship. I don’t know where they got that idea, but it’s the right idea. It probably originated in this way - that those men knew the history of government. They were familiar with the Roman Republic and what happened to it, and the Dutch Republic and what happened to it, and they knew their own experience under the monarch in Britain and the experience of other people in Europe under other monarchs, and I think they decided that they’d try to get something that would prevent such things as an absolute monarch or a dictator from happening. It isn’t a contradiction, their agreeing quickly that there ought to be a single executive and yet agreeing just as quickly that there ought to be a separation of powers. The object was to give him certain powers but limit them, that’s all, limit them by the Constitution of the United States. The president has only certain powers set out by the Constitution, and the legislative branch of the government is in a position to overrule anything he does because they can pass a law by a two-thirds majority whether the president likes it or not. That’s the limitation that created the situation under which you’re safeguarded and can’t have a dictatorship in this country.