Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  But for the most part, Monroe’s basic idea of preventing the expansion of European colonization in the Western Hemisphere has worked all right, and it’s given us some very good neighbors. It’s also resulted in the escape from bondage of some countries, such as when, after the Spanish-American War, the Cuban Republic and the Philippine Republic were set up and the proper freedom of Puerto Rico was established.

  I don’t have to be reminded of the fact that some Puerto Ricans don’t like Puerto Rico’s close ties with our country, since, you’ll recall, a couple of Puerto Rican extremists showed up in Washington in 1945 with the idea of shooting me and I’m lucky they didn’t succeed. And I don’t have to be reminded that Cuba eventually became a very corrupt country and then a Russian satellite. But I’m certain that most Puerto Ricans are strongly in favor of our relationship, and this is borne out by the fact that, when I said, during a visit to San Juan on November 1, 1948, that the Puerto Rican people “should have the right to determine for themselves Puerto Rico’s political relationship to the United States,” and convinced Congress to enact laws enabling Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor and other officials and control all local affairs, most Puerto Ricans came out for commonwealth status and some for statehood. Practically nobody except a few extremists was interested in total separation from this country.

  And as far as Cuba is concerned - well, I’m an optimist, and I still feel there’s hope for that country as a totally free nation at some point in the future. We’ve just got to keep working at it. Whenever a foreign country like Russia tries to establish a position in the Western Hemisphere, they’ve got to be stopped just as they were in Monroe’s time, and just as the French were in Mexico, in Lincoln’s time. And I feel that, sooner or later, that will happen.

  We’ve always tried, as far as we can, to be of help to our neighbors. I think there’s no country in the history of the world that’s been as fair and has treated our neighbors as well as we have. (Sometimes we didn’t treat our own inhabitants as well as we should have, but we’re learning.) I think our policies, and in particular our love of freedom, has been good for Canada and for Mexico and a lot of other places. If we hadn’t had our revolution, we’d be in the same position that Canada is in now, a commonwealth of the British hegemony, and that’s not what was best for the world. I’ll even wax religious for a moment and say that I think Almighty God straightened that out. Canada is all right, it’s fine, but I believe that one of the reasons Canada has been able to grow is that they have a good neighbor south of them. I think we’ve contributed far more to Canada’s growth and welfare than Britain has. There isn’t any doubt about that because western Canada was mostly settled by people from the United States, and if the situation hadn’t developed that Canada’s government is along the same lines as our own, we would probably have annexed the whole west end of Canada. And they’ve got autonomy because they’re alongside one of the great free nations of the world, a country that has always helped them to get that autonomy. And we’re continuing to do that.

  But the main point in all this is that we can’t transact business today on Washington’s program or Monroe’s program; we’ve got to have a program of our own to meet conditions as they are now. In many ways, we stayed in the isolationism rut until after the First World War. We were still almost entirely isolationist up to that time, and there were still some isolationists left in the period between 1920 and 1932. But when we became a world power after the First World War and the Second World War, we could no longer be a country concerned only with ourselves. We had to get along with our neighbors in every part of the world, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do ever since.

  I can give you an exact parallel in ancient history, a situation that is exactly the same as now, and that’s the Roman Empire, which by communications and transportation made the whole Mediterranean area into one great country. And as long as the Romans were interested themselves in the maintenance of that whole situation, they had no trouble. When they got lazy and fat, why, down it went. The world is now in that same situation. The whole world is now in a position to transact the business of the world just as we transact the business of the state of Missouri with 114 counties. Every one of those counties thinks it’s an independent state, but it isn’t. It’s under the government of Missouri. Every one of our fifty states thinks it’s absolutely independent and can do anything, but it can’t. It takes the federal government with the power to act for all the people, and there may be a similarly powerful group of people who can, I hope, do the same thing for the whole world. It’s my dream, of course, that that group will be the United Nations.

  Now, I may be a nut on the subject, but I believe sincerely that the United Nations can work, despite its weaknesses and obvious problems, if we just have patience and give it enough time and don’t become discouraged with it. I was strong for the League of Nations, too. I’m very well aware of the fact that it’s been said often that war is an instrument of settlement when settlements can’t be made without it, and that that’s been the customary procedure since the beginning of the world, but it’s my opinion that that can be overcome if we can succeed in getting a group of nations to work together in an organization to settle difficulties just as we’ve succeeded in getting it done among the states of the United States. It doesn’t matter if the association of nations is called the United Nations or League of Nations or whatever you want to call it. When a war is over, life goes on, and then the important thing is to bring countries together and at the same time try to correct the things that caused the war in the first place.

  If we can get a situation set up in world affairs such as was finally set up here after the War Between the States, with the states back together under a federal government, if we can get the world set up on the same basis, I think we can settle our difficulties without going to war, by settling them through judicial approaches. When Kansas and Colorado got into a controversy recently over ownership of the Arkansas River water, Kansas sued Colorado. They didn’t go to war. They didn’t go to the National Guard. They let the courts settle it. And if we can do the same thing with all the countries that make up the United Nations, then maybe eventually we won’t have anything but local border troubles that we can settle without having to go to all-out war as we did in 1914 and as we did in 1941.

  I’m not saying that it’s going to happen fast or be easy. The situation was a little different, a little better, even when I was president. We’d been working hard on friendship with Russia and China. Roosevelt had been working on it for twelve years, and I continued it for eight years more, and it had its effects. But when special interests get control of a country and really don’t give a damn about the freedom of the people there, as has been happening more and more in those two countries and in other places, then you have tremendous difficulties.

  But there’s certainly nothing new about that. Even back in the early days of our country, when there was a display of Russian friendship toward us in our purchase of Alaska and the removal of the Russians from the west coast of the North American continent, the friendship was because the Russian government of that time was an enemy of Great Britain and was making overtures to a country that the leaders thought would be a thorn in the side of the British. You’ll remember that the Russians owned Alaska; they settled Alaska and had fur trading places up there; some towns up there now still have Russian names. And they had claims in California, too, but their friendliness toward us when we settled with them was really unfriendliness toward Britain and to some extent toward France. We weren’t naive about Russia then, and we’re not naive about Russia and China and other places now. But you’ve still got to keep trying.

  We did our best to help China. We sent immense amounts of money and immense amounts of equipment to China, but the people with whom we were doing business in China didn’t have the right attitude toward their own people. In fact, the Communists in China used the equipment we sent to run the government of free China out o
f China, making the country surrender something like 700 million people to 300,000 Communists. They used the equipment we sent for the use of the free Chinese to chase the free Chinese out of China. And of course we’ve also done plenty for Russia. We loaned them $6.6 billion under Lend Lease, and they still haven’t settled their debt. If it hadn’t been for that Lend Lease, Hitler would have taken Moscow, and Leningrad, too. The Russians answer that by saying that we were only trying to save our own skin by doing it. We were not. We were trying to save Russia, and they’ve repaid us by attempting to discredit us before the whole world.

  It just seems to be the objective of Russia and China at the present time, under their present governments, never to tell the truth. It seems to be their objective to promulgate the big lie and try to make it stand up. I really don’t know how to offset that kind of propaganda. We’re just not built on a basis where we like to tell a big lie and keep telling it and hoping somebody will believe it. We try to give people the right information as to what we really are, and we try to help other people of the world in the way we helped China and Russia. And we’ve tried to help all those countries in South America, and to a very large extent, we’ve been of great help to them in their development. I suppose there really isn’t a thing you can do when you’re up against countries with propaganda machines like Russia and China, countries that don’t care anything about the truth or the facts. You can make anybody appear to be a no-good, no-account man if you lie about him enough. That’s what the Russians and the Chinese have tried to do to us. I just don’t know how you’re going to overcome it, except just to go ahead and do the right thing as we’ve always done.

  The big problem with Russia and China, of course, is that they’re anxious to control the whole world all by themselves. No matter what they say, that’s what they want. And they’re willing to control the world by conquest. And that’s what concerns, or should concern, the leaders of free countries, not the fact that they’re Communists. Let me stick in my statement right here that communism isn’t all bad, by any means, not when you spell it with a small “c” rather than the capital letter. In the first part of the Acts of the Apostles, in the King James version of the Bible, it says that the Christians in Palestine put all their belongings into a pool and handed the people the things that they needed when they needed them. That’s the first example of real communism. In fact, if you remember, the Romans fought their wars to maintain the Roman Empire in every direction, and they always improved the countries they took over and adopted their gods. But the one instance in which they didn’t do that is when they took over Palestine and didn’t adopt the Christian religion, and I think the reason is that the Christians were practicing actual communism, real communism, and this was such a new idea that the Romans were afraid of it and were afraid it would develop as a worldwide program. Well, we’ve got to be careful not to be afraid of an idea just because it’s new and radical, but the type of communism practiced by the Russians and the Chinese is a very different matter entirely. It’s just a political organization on a totalitarian basis, and the leaders of those two countries seem perfectly willing to ignore the welfare and limit the freedom of their people in order to accomplish their aims.

  And that’s not what we want, not at all. We want to see a world control that will have every nation, large and small, properly represented so that justice can be obtained under every situation. My personal dream is for the development of the nations that now exist to a point where they’ll have plenty to eat, plenty of room to live, and plenty of clothing and everything else it takes to make life livable and enjoyable in this day and age, and I believe that’s the dream and the wish of most Americans. That may also be the dream of most Russian and Chinese people,25 but many of their leaders have entirely different motives, and it’s important that they don’t succeed.

  Well, they won’t succeed as long as we stay together with our friends in the free world. And we do have many friends in the world in addition to our longtime allies in Europe. I think that we have a friend in Japan. We have a friend in the Philippines, and eventually, if things work out, we should have friends in Indonesia. And we know we have friends in Australia and New Zealand. We’re not exactly together with all of our friends in the free world as I write this, and there’ll be plenty of other times when we’ll be scrapping with some of our friends or facing similar disagreements with people with whom we agree most of the time.

  We have our difficulties. We sit around and let the Communists come in and organize right next door to us when it shouldn’t have happened. There’s an article in The Economist, in one of the recent issues, in which the writer makes the statement that if the situation had gone along as it should have gone, Cuba might have been a state in the United States, and that it would have been so much better for Cuba if that had happened. A lot of presidents have wanted to take over Cuba as a possession of the United States, but that wouldn’t have been right; the ideal thing would have been a voluntary joining with us on Cuba’s part. That would be just like Hawaii, which wouldn’t allow itself to be associated with anyone else and voted to come in as a state. Our best opportunity was back in the 1890s and the beginning of the twentieth century, but at that time we had some presidents who just weren’t thinking along those lines. It would have been a wonderful thing if Cuba had been kept as our friend and had wanted to become a part of the United States. Or it could have been handled the same way that Puerto Rico was. Puerto Rico is, of course, now a free commonwealth of the United States, and I hope that the history books will give me a little credit for that. Well, at some time in the future, Cuba may still do that if they get rid of the present dictator.

  It was the great king of France, King Henry IV, who first had the idea of an association of countries to keep the peace, a congress of European nations. He lived and died a long time ago - he was born in 1553 and died in 1610 - but he was more modern in some of his thinking and more interested in the welfare of his people than most of the world leaders since his time. As I’ve mentioned, it was Henry IV who proposed and signed the Edict of Nantes, which gave a certain amount of religious freedom to the Huguenots, the Protestants, even though he converted to Catholicism himself, and he also did a lot of other things to improve and advance France like building roads and canals, increasing farming activity and productivity, encouraging the colonization of Canada, and signing trade agreements with England, Spain, and Turkey. He was also working all the time to improve living conditions for the poor people of his country; it was Henry IV, in fact, not President Hoover, who first used that famous phrase, though his wording was slightly different, “There should be a chicken in every peasant’s pot every Sunday.” So it isn’t surprising that he was probably the first man in history to come up with the astonishing idea that perhaps nations ought to try to face each other around a conference table and work together for peace rather than face each other on the battlefield.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t get very far with it; he was on his way to try to put it in effect when he was assassinated by a religious fanatic named François Ravillac, and then it all went to pot. And then the idea pretty much disappeared until it was revived by Woodrow Wilson with the League of Nations.

  The difficulty as far as the United States was concerned, as I’ve said, is that we were too wrapped up in ourselves at first, too busy getting ourselves on track, to do much thinking about the rest of the world. If it hadn’t been for Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, there’s no telling when we might have started making our move toward relationships with other countries and toward becoming a world power. But Franklin went to France and spent enough time there to make them our friends, and Jefferson backed him up a little later on, and that’s what really began to give us our foreign connections. Foreign policy, after all, is nothing more than the ability of a country to get along with its neighbors, and the ability to carry on trade with other countries, and that was the next step; inevitably, we began to deal more and more with other countries
once we wanted them more and more as markets for our products and as suppliers for things we didn’t make, or didn’t make in large enough quantities, ourselves.

  We didn’t become a very great trade nation until we became interested in sea power. That started with Jefferson, too, when he was president, and we were having a lot of trouble with the Barbary pirates and Jefferson decided to do something about it. The situation was that these pirates from Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers kept demanding tribute from ships in the Mediterranean Sea, and when a ship refused to pay, the pirates boarded the ship and looted it and shanghaied the sailors. The worst thing about it is that most countries paid the tribute, and even Jefferson went along with this for a while even though he hated paying the tribute; but then, in 1801, Tripoli increased its tribute demand, and that finally stiffened Jefferson’s backbone and he refused. Tripoli immediately declared war on the United States, and when, in 1803, Jefferson sent a naval force, the pirates seized one ship, the Philadelphia, and drove the rest of the fleet away by firing the Philadelphia’s own guns at them. But then Jefferson really got mad and sent every ship he could put together into the Mediterranean Sea, and in 1805, Tripoli gave up and no longer demanded tribute. (I’m sorry to have to add that Tripoli continued to hold the crew of the Philadelphia, and Jefferson finally had to pay $60,000 to get them free. And we continued to pay tribute to Morocco, Tunis, and Algiers for another ten years.)

  But it was a start, and our next move toward sea power was, of course, at the time of the War of 1812, when we were willing to go to war to maintain freedom of the seas because of the British practice of impressing seamen on American trading ships into their navy on the claim that the men were citizens of Britain no matter how free the United States considered itself. After that, we were able to move around pretty much as we pleased, and by the middle 1840s, we had those big clipper ships that ran between Boston and China and made a lot of millionaires up in New England. And by the time of the War Between the States, when Britain again began to interfere a little bit with our transportation across the Atlantic, we demanded heavy damages, and they paid it.