Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  If a president has sound knowledge of history and combines this with new ideas, he’s going to do good and perhaps have some impact on history at the same time. And fortunately for our country and the world, men with new ideas always seem to come along in time to meet situations as they come up.

  Cleveland had some new ideas. Among other things, he was probably the first president who was completely nonpolitical in his attitude toward government employees, and he absolutely refused to drop good workers from their jobs just because they were Republicans, and he was a Democrat - despite tremendous pressure because he was the first Democrat elected since the Civil War, and there were 100,000 jobs up for grabs and Democrats were expecting to get practically all of them. He was the first president to try to do something about problems between labor and management, such as the growing number of strikes and a new idea - shocking to many businessmen - that people ought to work only an eight-hour day; his message sent to Congress suggesting a commission to deal with labor-management problems was the first message dealing strictly with labor sent by any president. He was the first president who tried to put some controls on big business; the Interstate Commerce Act, passed during his first administration (the good administration, as I’ve mentioned), created the first federal regulatory agency. (He was also the first president to get married in the White House - in fact, the only one thus far - when he was forty-nine and took as his bride Frances Folsom, aged twenty-one, the daughter of a former law partner. And the second of their five children, Esther, was the first child born in the White House. (I guess those aren’t the kind of accomplishments I’m talking about. But these things certainly confirm the fact that he was an original thinker.)

  Theodore Roosevelt had some new ideas, such as his creation of the Panama Canal and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Woodrow Wilson had many new ideas that were put into effect, including the Federal Trade Commission, the first child labor laws, and of course, the League of Nations, a concept in which I still have great faith despite some criticisms and some unquestionable flaws in the United Nations. And Franklin Roosevelt came along during a depression that was almost equal in difficulty to the problems that faced the Constitutional Convention when those men were creating a new nation, a new kind of nation, and he had a limitless number of new ideas and managed to put most of them into effect.

  That continues indefinitely, and it brings about a continual reorganization of the government of the United States, which is exactly the way that marvelous document called the Constitution was intended. We’re constantly up against situations where some reorganization is necessary even if it won’t be satisfactory to all the people, and if you organize and reorganize as you go along, you’ll deal with each problem as it comes up. Nobody knows that better than I do. Every problem can be met under the Constitution if an effort is made to do it, because we’ve been through every experience that a form of government can possibly go through from the time our government was formed up until now.

  A president, of course, can’t sit down and act as though the situation in 1789 or the situation in 1809 or the situation in 1840 or the situation in 1861 is the same as the one we’re meeting now; there are always differences. He’s always got to think of those differences and also be in the frame of mind to think ahead into the future as well. He’s got to be a man who understands what may happen in the future and have the ability of a public relations man to convince Congress to do what he thinks is best for what’s to come. Anybody can figure out what’s happening after a law is passed, but somebody has to think about the future, and that’s the president’s job. No president can afford to do nothing and let things happen around him. He’s got to have a lot of ideas, and he’s got to present his ideas, and if those ideas are genuinely for the welfare of the country, he’ll get them over in the long run. He might be able to get them over in the first session of Congress, he might get them over in the second session of Congress, but he’ll get them over sooner or later if he’s always looking to the future welfare of the country based on the historical past. He’s got to be the leader, and he’s got to be looking toward the future all the time.

  THE NEXT ESSENTIAL quality in a good president is the ability, as I’ve just said, to convince the Congress to go along with his ideas, and of course, also convince the general public that his ideas are good - particularly when, as often happens, a lot of legislators and a large segment of the general public don’t think much of the ideas when they’re first presented. And also with this quality must go the ability to be able to determine and understand exactly the way the people are thinking, so that you’re not taken by surprise because you think everybody’s for you and then find out that they’re talking to each other about burning you in effigy, or worse.

  As far as learning the public viewpoint is concerned, that’s easy, but a president has to work at it all the time. He has to be in close contact with everything that goes on. He has to know what the newspapers are saying and what radio and television are saying every day of the year. I read the great newspapers of the day and looked at television and listened to radio, and once in a while I’d even read the editorials in some of the newspapers, but much more important, I had my own people’s approach. I got a tremendous amount of mail and I read it all and I answered it all because I felt that a president really has to keep his ear to the ground on both local and national political situations and know exactly what people are thinking about in various states and various sections of the country. I used to get mail from thousands of people all over the United States, and I had a better understanding of what people thought and wanted than the newspapers did. Nine times in ten the newspapers don’t tell the truth, anyway.

  A president also has to be willing, indeed anxious, to talk to people. That’s what a public man always has to do: talk to everybody and listen to what everybody has to say, so that he can gather up information and thinking from all segments of the population in order to make up his own mind. Obviously presidents these days aren’t accessible to every visitor the way the early presidents were. The early presidents had no real staff; they had secretaries, no doubt, and military and naval aides, but the president was accessible to anybody who wanted to see him. That was true all the way up to James A. Garfield, but when he was shot in the back at the Baltimore and Ohio Station in Washington, they set up a guard for the president when he’s on trips and in the White House, and that’s been in effect ever since.

  I wasn’t sorry about that, needless to say, when two members of the Independence Party of Puerto Rico, Oscar Collazo and Girsel Torrasola, came to Washington and started shooting up the place. My family and I were living at Blair House because the White House was being renovated at the time,13 and the Secret Service weren’t happy about the security situation because Blair House was right out on a public street instead of being surrounded by grounds like the White House. The Secret Service people proved to be entirely right: Collazo and Torrasola, who wanted Puerto Rico to be an independent country even though most Puerto Ricans preferred either commonwealth status or statehood, got right up to Blair House, and there was only a screen door with an ordinary little latch between them and the inside of the house, where Mrs. Truman and I were in our bedrooms changing our clothes so that we could go and attend a ceremony. The Secret Service and the guards outside saw them, of course, but there were twenty-seven shots fired in the next three minutes, and Collazo shot and killed a young member of the military guard, Private Lester Coffelt, before Torrasola was also killed, and Collazo was wounded and captured. I watched the whole thing from my window before some Secret Service men yelled at me to get away from there, and I wasn’t really frightened; I said afterwards, and was quoted that way in the papers, “A president has to expect those things.” And I felt then, and still feel, that Collazo and Torrasola were misguided fanatics and not really killers at heart, and later I commuted Collazo’s death sentence to life imprisonment. But I certainly felt grateful to the Secret Service and my other guards.
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  Still, the president sees the general public when he’s going around the country selling one of his programs or supporting someone politically, and he’s using his head if he talks to everyone in sight and listens to everyone and listens hard. That isn’t always easy, because people who don’t agree with him will throw bricks at him and rotten eggs and everything else - the verbal kind, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily make them easier to take. But then that shouldn’t make any difference. If, once he makes up his mind, he’s sure that what he’s trying to do is right, then all he has to do is go ahead and make sure he puts it over. You’ll find that the willingness to talk to people is true of all the great men in our history.

  The president’s other main source of information, of course, comes from members of his staff, so he’s got to make damn sure they’re good people - and the right people. I think one of the reasons Washington was such a great president was that Jefferson and all the other brilliant men of the period were around him and being helpful to him. Any man who is in a responsible position like that, and who has able and brilliant men around him, is bound to be influenced by ideas presented at the meetings that they hold together, and I’m sure that the same thing applied at the first meeting of the cabinet of the United States under Washington as it does at the White House today. There’s no man in the world, I don’t care how much of a genius he is, who has a corner on all the ideas, particularly in government. And if he’s interested in meeting his responsibilities if he happens to be president of the United States, he usually has himself surrounded with men who understand all the situations that exist at the time.

  The president has to have an open mind. He has to get all the information he can possibly get, some of it difficult to obtain, the truthful facts behind a condition that’s before him. For that reason, he must be willing to listen to all the ideas of the people in whom he has confidence. I certainly wouldn’t say that the ability to listen to advisors is confined entirely to America, of course. The great prime ministers of Britain and the great rulers of France were also surrounded by men of brilliant minds.

  You take King Henry IV of France, whom I consider among the greatest of the French kings. He had one of the best and most brilliant cabinets that any king ever had, and he had the best administration up to that time that any government of France had had. The same thing was true of those great political figures of Britain, Burke and a number of others - for example, Disraeli. They all had advice and help from the people with whom they surrounded themselves.

  A president has to have people around him who are close to the various segments of the population and will give him frank statements of what goes on with those segments of the population. But he’s got to have experience in judging people before he arrives at the White House, so that he has a pretty good chance of having picked the right people when he gets there. He’s got to be able to understand what people are, what they mean when they say something or don’t say something, whether or not they’re essentially good people under the facade, and then he’s got to trust them to a certain extent. If they fail him, then he has to get someone he can trust more, a more worthy person.

  He can’t have a man who’s always expecting to get his picture in the papers and have a write-up about what he’s going to say to the president. He’s got to be a man who’s willing to be anonymous and interested strictly in giving the president the information he needs to carry on the government. It’s absolutely necessary to rely on people who aren’t a formal part of the government. A president has got to have someone in the financial sector, in the farm sector, in the labor sector, in the various other sectors that have to do with the general welfare of the people. He’s got to have people around him who can give him information without talking to the press and the public. Then he has to make up his own mind, and if something has to be said to the press and the public, it’s the president’s duty to say it. I certainly don’t think that anything like that will lead to a secret government. If the president’s got a will of his own, and most of them have, and it appears that the people on whom he relies are trying to work up a secret government for their own benefit, he’s got a far more important duty: to fire them and get somebody else.14

  JACKSON WAS THE first president to have a kitchen cabinet, and some people have compared me to Jackson because I did, too. Well, “kitchen cabinet” is the name they gave it, but all it means is a group of unofficial advisors in addition to the official advisors in his cabinet. Jackson felt that he had to have people to whom he could talk frankly and privately, people not in government but close to segments of the population, and who could tell him what was going on out there without thinking about their own public appearances in the press.

  These advisors are people outside the publicity and the limelight that shines on the White House, and in many ways, they’re more essential to the president than the people in his cabinet, who are in front of the limelight all the time, because they can give the president information he needs very badly without ever stopping to think about themselves.

  You can call these unofficial advisors what you please, but since Jackson, every president who knew what he was about has had them in one way or another, and I think they’re absolutely essential. The thing a president has to do is listen to all the reports of his staff, and all the reports of his cabinet, and to what the newspapers and radio and television have to say, and then, after he’s coordinated all of these things, he has to find out, from outside people on whom he can rely, exactly what the thinking is in each segment and section of the United States. He has to listen, read, and think all the time. He has to make up his mind whether or not this fellow or that is telling the truth and whether or not what he says is worthwhile, and that’s also the case when he reads the papers or whatever else he does: He has to decide if he’s in conformity with the newspaper articles or what people have said to him in those conversations.

  It’s not really hard to do. I had to do it constantly and got through it without too much trouble. And I think the presidents who got into trouble were the ones who didn’t pay much attention to the information that was available to them, or didn’t try to learn from other people or the newspapers, because they felt they had more important things to do. Or maybe it was because they felt they were more important than every other individual on earth, and smarter, too. Well, they weren’t.

  There’s no question about the fact that it’s a difficult task for a president to get the people around him, official people or unofficial, to understand him so completely that they’ll carry out his wishes or get him the exact information he wants without trying to intrude on his decisions with their own notions. They’re almost impossible to find, truly almost impossible to find, and yet you can find them if you work at it. Sometimes, when a fellow intrudes with some personal interest of his own and the president cross-examines him to find out what he has in mind, it may be all right for him to have that special interest. But if not, then the president simply has to tell him that that sort of thing doesn’t belong here, and if he doesn’t take the advice that the president gives him, then the president has to go somewhere else for his information, or get rid of the man. The president has to exercise his own judgment on policy, but he also has to be careful to analyze the people around him constantly and exercise his judgment in regard to them. And when it’s necessary for one of them to leave, he’s got to tell him to go.

  But you’ve got to listen to all of them, special interests and all, and then make up your own mind as to what’s right. And you’ve got to be a judge of men to determine if a man is honest. If he’s honest and frank and fair with the president, it doesn’t make any difference what his special interest is, it doesn’t make any difference where he stands - he’ll tell the president what he thinks is the truth. There’s really no adjective that can define an honest man. An honest man is a man who is intellectually honest, who believes in honor and straightforwardness. He’s either honest or he isn’t, and if he’s honest an
d doesn’t believe with the president on a particular matter, he tells the president what he believes, and the president can either see the good sense in it and change his own mind, or disregard that advice and come back to the man for advice on other matters.

  Naturally, a president can be hurt by placing confidence in unworthy advisors. All presidents have been. There are people in every administration in whom the president has confidence and who break that confidence and cause him trouble. I’ve had them. I had plenty of them. They didn’t affect me adversely at all. I used them to get one more point of view, and a lot of the time I was able to get information that way that I otherwise wouldn’t get. And then I made up my mind on the basis of all the information, information from the people I trusted and from the people I didn’t trust or suspected were stating viewpoints that weren’t genuine, but were designed to please me. That sort of thing doesn’t have any real effect on the final policy of the president, because, when he has a program to put over, he wants to put together everything he can gather on the subject and make his own decision. And when he finds that one of his confidants isn’t doing the right thing, he uses all that’s worthwhile from the man and then gets rid of him.