Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The end itself finally came in Yorktown, Virginia, near Chesapeake Bay. Lafayette and other officers, including General Anthony Wayne and General Friedrich Wilhelm, Baron von Steuben, a Prussian soldier who joined the Americans in 1777 and was with Washington during that terrible winter at Valley Forge, led their men in continuous attacks against the British in Virginia, and Cornwallis fortified Yorktown and settled down there to wait for reinforcements to come from Clinton, who was in New York. Washington and his French ally, General Rochambeau, were in New York, too, but they learned that Admiral François-Joseph- Paul, Comte de Grasse, a French officer who had been ordered to help the Americans, had defeated a British naval force and captured Tobago in the West Indies, and he and his men were now free and available. Washington and Rochambeau asked de Grasse to go immediately to Virginia. De Grasse blockaded the York River and the James River, effectively locking Cornwallis up in Yorktown, and Washington and Rochambeau moved at once toward Virginia themselves, leaving only a small force in New York. It was a brilliant military move. Cornwallis had no idea whatever that Washington and his men were coming until a huge combined American and French force descended on Yorktown, a total of about 16,000 men. Cornwallis had half that number, and he tried to escape, but he was surrounded by the Americans and French on land and by de Grasse’s fleet in the water. On October 18, 1781, he agreed to surrender, and the next day, he sent along his sword. Washington instructed General Lincoln to accept it, and the war was over. That old lunatic King George III couldn’t believe his ears, and for two years, he refused to regard his former colonies as a new country, entirely separate from England. But, in 1783, a treaty was finally signed between England and America. John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin represented this country in dealing with the British minister, William Petty Fitzmaurice, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, and Shelburne gave us all of the territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi without argument, up to Canada on the north border and down to Florida on the south border, turning over Florida to Spain. A lot of British high-hats, as I sometimes like to call the aristocracy, felt Shelburne had been too easy and too generous, and he was pushed out of office that year. But that was that, anyway. The Thirteen Colonies had become the United States of America.

  WELL, SO NOW we were a country, and we needed some good men to run the country, men who were going to be called presidents rather than kings or emperors because they were going to be put into their jobs by the populace and not by accidents of birth, and who were going to follow a written set of rules, and who were going to be advised and to some extent controlled by legislators serving along with them.

  I’m going to have things to say later on about that set of rules, our wonderful Constitution, and some more things to say about our government, and the way it’s run in tandem with those legislators, the senators and the members of the House of Representatives. But since I’ve made comments throughout this book about some of our bad presidents, I think this is a good place to write a bit about the men who became our best presidents. And the proper way to start, it seems to me, is with our first president, George Washington. I’ve said some things about Washington in discussing the Continental Congresses and the Revolutionary War, but there’s plenty more to say about him.

  First of all, I guess I ought to remind people that, although most of us tend to assume that Washington was a very popular president because he’s so much admired and idolized today, so legendary, as the Father of Our Country, the plain truth, unfortunately, is that this is far from the case. He was a very unpopular president; in fact, it’s my opinion that he was more roundly abused than any other president who was ever in the White House.20 As I’ve mentioned, he was abused constantly by the press, by the Congress, and by a lot of individuals like that bastard son of Ben Franklin’s, William Franklin. William Franklin was a bastard in that way, too. He was a royalist; he stayed with the British side and was one of the worst heartbreaks in life for old Ben Franklin. Ben raised that boy and thought the world of him, but the boy, who was an attractive fellow and well-liked by everybody at first, became the British governor of New Jersey and later did his best to keep the Colonies from becoming a free government.

  I don’t know why William Franklin behaved the way he did; I’ve read somewhere that it was because he loved the British aristocracy and the high-hat way of living so much, and I guess that’s as good an answer as any. He was a terrible disappointment to Benjamin Franklin, and you never see the man mentioned in Franklin’s memoirs at all. In 1776, after a terrible quarrel with his father, which didn’t budge him an inch in his convictions, he was arrested by order of the New Jersey congress and imprisoned in Connecticut for two years. His father managed to get him released, but even after that, he continued to favor the British, and in 1782, he moved permanently to England.

  The two Franklins met in England in 1784 and had a reconciliation, but William Franklin never let up on his anti-American and anti-Washington statements and writings. He even wrote one really scurrilous piece when Washington was stepping down, saying thank God the monarchy is gone, that corrupt monarchy, and just to show the readers of this book the way Washington was treated by the press of the period, the article was picked up and published in all the papers. Old Ben Franklin didn’t agree with any of that stuff, of course. The encyclopedias refer to William Franklin as Ben’s “natural” son, which I suppose is a polite way of saying it, but he seems pretty unnatural to me. He was the John Roosevelt of his day.21

  But natural or unnatural, William Franklin was far from alone. There were a lot of people just like this Franklin boy who enjoyed turning their venom on somebody in power, that’s all, just as there are people like that today. Even Thomas Paine followed up his brilliant Common Sense with an eventual not-so-brilliant “open letter” to Washington in 1796 that called him a “hypocrite in public life,” accused him of commencing “your Presidential career by encouraging and swallowing the grossest adulation, and you traveled America from one end to the other, to put yourself in the way of receiving it,” and added that “the world will be puzzled to decide . . . whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.” And as I’ve said, the newspapers were equally nasty in their criticism. This comment, published the same year as Paine’s outburst in a paper called the Philadelphia Aurora, is all too typical: “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington. If ever a nation was deceived by a man, the American nation has been deceived by Washington. Let his conduct, then, be an example to future ages; let it serve to be a warning . . .”

  As you can see, Washington wasn’t as popular with every citizen of our new country as you might have supposed. Nor was he the most intelligent or knowledgeable man of his day. He probably wasn’t as brilliant as Jefferson, nor as financially sound as Hamilton, although he knew how to keep his money and ended up, as I’ve mentioned, with a huge fortune for that day and age. His education wasn’t too great, either. The information that’s been left for us on that subject is pretty scanty, and historians differ in their statements, but it’s pretty clear that he didn’t get much formal education. One thing that’s certain is that his widowed mother didn’t send him to England for his schooling, as was often done with boys like him - though opinions vary on whether she just couldn’t bear to be parted from him or whether, in keeping with her reputation for being pretty tightfisted, she just didn’t want to spend the money. And opinions also vary on whether Washington was sent to an actual school in Fredericksburg or just given a smattering of basic education at home by an indentured servant.

  Nor was he much of a reader. I’m not one to insist that a man can’t possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kans
as City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I’ve tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading, and that wasn’t the case with Washington. He once made a statement about reading that is quoted in many biographies - “I conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which other knowledge is to be built” - but he rarely followed that precept himself. He usually read books only when he felt it was absolutely necessary, and these were mostly confined to practical books related to his daily life and daily needs like books on farming.

  I’ll end this catalogue of Washington’s deficiencies, or alleged deficiencies, with one more item. There were even critics then who said, and there are historians to this day who say, that Washington never won a battle in the Revolutionary War and wasn’t much of a commander, wasn’t much of a soldier. Can you live with that one? I can’t, and it gets me so mad that I won’t wait past this paragraph for it to be refuted. I’ll turn again to Nevins and Commager, who answered it beautifully and eloquently in their book, saying, “The culminating American advantage was that of leadership - for the Americans had George Washington. Chosen by Congress with little knowledge of his capacities, he proved all in all to the patriot cause its best guide and support He can be criticized on narrow military grounds. He never handled an army larger than a modern division, he made many missteps, he was defeated again and again, Yet, taking command at forty-three, he became the soul of the war. This Virginia planter and frontier colonel was its informing spirit because of his unflagging patriotism, his calm wisdom, his serene moral courage; because in the gloomiest hours he never lost his dignity, poise, or decision; because he knew how to combine enterprise and caution; because his integrity, elevation, and magnanimity never failed, his fortitude never faltered.”

  I don’t have their gift of language, so I’ll speak my own piece more simply and briefly. So they say that Washington never won a battle, do they? Well, he outmaneuvered the British and won the war, and that’s the thing that really counts.

  Having dealt with that, I’ll go on to say that, in my opinion, and despite all those deficiencies or alleged deficiencies, Washington was probably the greatest president of them all. Maybe that’s an overstatement or too black-and-white a statement; maybe I’d be stating it more accurately if I said that Washington was one of our three greatest presidents along with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. I still have some enjoyable arguments with friends over the order in which to rate these three men, and the reason it’s enjoyable is that I have fun concealing my real opinion, which is that they just can’t be rated one over the other. The truth is that they’re really peas in a pod, three equally great men, and America is damn lucky that three such giants happened to come along. And the only reason I sometimes rate Washington first and Lincoln second and FDR third is that that’s the order in which they arrived on the American scene.22

  For a couple of other reasons, however, perhaps Washington should be rated as our greatest president, after all, and not just because he happened to be born before Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. The first is that he had to make many personal sacrifices, as a soldier and as an opponent to the ruling government and as president, which neither Lincoln nor FDR had to make. The second is that he had to proceed into unknown territories in ways that never faced the other two men - again both as a soldier in the first war for freedom on this continent, an entirely new phenomenon, and as the president of a brand-new country. And with none of those guidebooks, like his books on farming, to help him, he met the challenge. And he succeeded, and the country succeeded and became the greatest country in the world.

  Take a minute or two to think about those sacrifices he had to make. When he attended the Continental Congresses, and when he accepted the job of chief officer and fought in the Revolutionary War, he ran the greatest risk of anybody because he was one of the richest men in the Colonies. He had his big house and his plantation and all that property all over the place, and he could have lived his life in peace and comfort and looked the other way when it became clear that a great soldier and a great leader was needed. He could simply have ignored the injustice going on around him because most of these things weren’t touching him personally. No matter what happened to other people, he would have become and remained the leading citizen of Virginia. But he was perfectly willing to throw everything away for the welfare and benefit of all the other colonists by joining the protests against the British and then becoming the leading soldier in the war against them. He was interested in anything and everything that had to do with the welfare of Virginia and the welfare of the nation, of what became the nation, and he didn’t have any partisan attachment to any part of the country. All he was interested in doing was making it all work together, and he made it happen. And let me tell you, it took a good man to do that at that time. I don’t think anybody else could have done it in that period.

  Some people have the impression that he was a cold man, but I don’t agree with that at all. Some people also have the impression that he was an egotist, but he wasn’t that either. He was certainly an aristocrat, but he wasn’t one of those aristocrats who believed that he was better than anybody else in the United States. And he was certainly a tough old general, as you can find out very clearly for yourself by tracking down some of the things that don’t appear in the more genteel books about Washington - such as the exact language he used to one of his subordinates, General Charles Lee, at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778.

  The battle was going well and was a certain victory for the Americans until Lee, totally disobeying orders to advance, suddenly turned tail and retreated without any good reason, which enabled Sir Henry Clinton to counterattack. Washington was in a fury, and what he said to Lee was something to write home about. In fact, Lee became such an enemy of Washington’s that he abused him publicly and at every turn, until a member of Washington’s staff, Major John Laurens, challenged him to a duel in which, fortunately, neither man was hurt. Lee was court-martialed for his actions at Monmouth because he was disobeying orders, suspended from command for a year, and in 1780, thrown out altogether. Washington was as tough a bird as could be, and when he got wrought up, he used language that any artilleryman could understand, including an old artilleryman like me, but the important point is that his handling of the situation at Monmouth, like everything he did, accomplished a purpose. He ordered Lee to the rear, and with the help of von Steuben and Nathanael Greene, managed to reform Lee’s soldiers and hold the British back until they retreated. And this allowed Washington to cross the Delaware, and there you are.

  Mostly, however, Washington was just a good human being with the ability to make people do what they sometimes didn’t want to do and like it, an ability he picked up and developed out of necessity because he had so much trouble running the war and winning it. And he was a man of his age with the unique qualities needed at that time to put over the Revolution and the war and the brand-new country. He knew how to command, and how far that command should go, and when to give up command, and that’s what he did throughout his life. You don’t find that very often. You don’t find it very often at all; very few leaders know when to quit as Washington did. I think you have to go all the way back to Cato the Younger in the Roman Empire to find a similar example, and, of course, Cato’s sudden retirement was different not only because he retired in a very drastic way, by committing suicide, but because, unlike Washington, he didn’t retire at the time of triumph but because his enemy, Julius Caesar, was doing so well.

  Life for Washington, on the other hand, was a series of triumphs, and the astonishing thing is how well he did at the very different things he undertook throughout his life. He was the commanding general of the forces that won the freedom of the colonies, and he was the presiding officer of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when that great document was being drawn up, and between those two things and the fact that he set up the government as the first president, succeeding in his complex purpose of making the
country operate and continue, shows how well his mind worked. As I’ve said, he may not have been as brilliant in some ways as Jefferson and Hamilton, but he knew how to make more brilliant men behave for the welfare of the country. I once described Washington as a doer surrounded by thinkers. He knew how to make the thinkers work for him, and only a truly superb politician and leader is able to do that.

  It took me quite a while to understand that myself, because, like most kids, I grew up knowing very little more about Washington than the silly fairy tales that that lying old preacher Parson Mason Locke Weems put in his book The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington. I didn’t learn until much later that there’s hardly a word of truth in the book because Weems fictionalized all his books “to increase their interest,” and that even the story of Washington’s chopping down the cherry tree didn’t get dreamed up by old Weems until he was getting ready to publish the fifth edition of his Washington book. It took me a long time to find out what Washington was really like. I had to read dozens of books about him and part of the 150 volumes of his papers and records to understand him as well as I think I do now.

  In a sense, you might say that Washington’s series of sacrifices and successes began when he became a soldier in the Virginia militia and in the French and Indian War. His decision to become a soldier wasn’t for entirely unselfish motives, but that’s nothing against him; even people who spend their entire lives doing good for other people do so partly for selfish motives, although sometimes the selfish part of it is nothing more than the fact that helping other people makes them feel good and lifts their self-esteem a bit. In those days, it was necessary for every property owner to be ready to defend himself and his property against raids, and these attacks came from two forces, of course: the Indians and the French. Some Indian tribes were growing more resentful of the intruders who were taking over their lands, and the French were the longtime enemies of the British and therefore the enemies of the colonists, who were British subjects.