Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  Harrison was the oldest man ever to be elected president,31 aged sixty-eight and two months when he died on April 4, 1841. But that isn’t all that old, and he probably would have survived a little icy wind except for the fact that he also showed off in other ways. He read the longest inaugural speech ever read by an incoming president; he spoke for about an hour and three-quarters and got everybody tired out, including himself, and even Daniel Webster, who had difficulty quitting during his own speeches, said that Harrison killed off two or three Roman councils and a Roman emperor or two in that message, it was that long. And then they had two or three inaugural balls that night, and he kept going from one to the other in his uniform and with no overcoat. And it killed him.

  The Whigs had no platform at all during the campaign; Harrison was nominated and elected on the false premise of Van Buren’s prosperity and his own poverty, and on the fact that he was a military hero, and he was against everything that had gone before. (Yes, Virginia, “aginners” sometimes win. It’s happened in our own times as well.) And of course, Harrison didn’t accomplish a thing during the month he was in office. He made no contribution whatever. He had no policy. He didn’t know what the government was all about, to tell the truth. About the only thing he did during that brief period was see friends and friends of friends, because he was such an easy mark that he couldn’t say no to anybody, and everybody and his brother was besieging him for jobs. He had to get up early in the morning because people were sitting on his doorstep and sleeping on the White House grounds in order to get to see him. That wasn’t unusual; it was the same way during Jackson’s and Van Buren’s administrations and continued for a long time. People just showed up and asked the president personally for jobs after he was in office. That continued all the way up to the time of Grover Cleveland, when the civil service bills were passed. Up until then, the president was always importuned for all kinds of jobs. It hasn’t been so bad since then, but it’s bad enough, as I know from experience.

  I mentioned that I was going to devote a small amount of space to old John Tyler, and here it comes.

  I guess the reason I have a certain amount of grudging respect for old Tyler is that he knew his own mind and stuck to his decisions. He was the first vice president to take over when a sitting president died, and the decision he made at that time is the best example of what I mean. Daniel Webster was the secretary of state at that point, and Webster wanted it to appear that Tyler was just acting president; Webster, in fact, wanted Tyler to call himself acting president. Well, I think I’ve made it clear that I’m not too impressed by Dan Webster, even though he’s probably better known to the general public today than some of our past presidents because he was from New England and those New England historians gave him a lot space in their writings. As far as I’m concerned, he was just a ballyhoo artist, and my old great-great-uncle shut him up pretty fast. He let Webster know that he knew the Constitution just as well as Webster did, and he said, “The Constitution provides that I’m the president of the United States when the president passes on, and I’ll function in that capacity. And for that reason I’m president and not acting president, and I’ll call myself president, period.”

  He even sent back letters that came addressed to Acting President John Tyler; he wouldn’t even open them. He was the first man who followed through on that constitutional directive, and there have been six others who’ve done the same since, including me, of course. Webster backed down immediately because he knew that was Tyler’s attitude at all times: “As long as you support me, you can stay, but as soon as you feel you can’t support my policies, you’re free to resign. And if you don’t resign, I’ll kick you out.” That’s another thing I like about him because disloyalty is one of the things I despise most in life; I always tried to be loyal to people around me and expected loyalty in return from them.

  And an even stronger example than Dan Webster’s foolishness about the acting-president business showed up in August and September 1841, just a few months after Tyler became president. Tyler came into the presidency as a Whig because he ran as vice president with Harrison, but he was really a Democrat, and he was an admirer of Jackson even though he didn’t agree with all of Jackson’s policies, by any means. So when Henry Clay pushed through a bill to bring the Bank of the United States to life again, Tyler vetoed the bill, and when Clay followed up with a bill to create a Fiscal Corporation, which amounted to the same thing, Tyler made it clear that he felt that the president and not some outside organization should have the final say on the fiscal policies of the country and vetoed that one, too. He vetoed that second bill on September 9, and two days later his entire cabinet resigned - all except Webster, who liked his job and wanted to keep it for a while, though he, too, finally left in 1843 and eventually returned to the senate. Webster felt he was particularly qualified for the office, and the people who hired him apparently felt he was, too, but I never thought so. Anyway, the mass resignation was all right with Tyler, and he just put in other people he thought were as good or better.

  Webster also tried to convince Tyler that it was the custom for each member of the cabinet to have one vote and the president also to have one vote, and therefore, if the president was outvoted by his cabinet, that should be it. And President Tyler informed Webster very carefully that if the cabinet had five or six or seven votes or a million votes, and the president’s one vote went the opposite way, then that would be it. Lincoln carried that through in the very same way when his cabinet voted on the Emancipation Proclamation. The whole cabinet voted against it, and Lincoln said, “The ayes have it. There’s one vote for it, and that’s the vote of the president of the United States.” And the cabinet began to find out that they’re employees of the president of the United States, and the president’s decision is the one that counts.

  Tyler was also the president who finally brought Texas into the Union. He tried to accomplish it at first by signing a treaty of annexation with Texas in April 1844, about eleven months before he left office, but the Senate wouldn’t ratify the treaty. But later that year, Polk began to campaign and made the admission of Texas one of the strongest planks in his platform, and he was supported and elected so enthusiastically that the members of Congress finally saw the light. They passed a joint resolution okaying Texas’ entry into the Union, and on March 1, 1845, two days before he left office, Tyler signed the important piece of paper. Two days later, on his very last day in office, he signed another important piece of paper that made Florida part of the United States.

  Those are some things I admire about Tyler, but there were also plenty of things that weren’t so admirable. He wasn’t overly strong for labor; he thought labor ought to be kept in its place. He had a superior attitude toward the ordinary fellow; he was a big landowner in the state of Virginia, and all those big landowners thought the small farmer was beneath consideration, so he was very careful to see to it that the ordinary fellow who had a small farm didn’t have much of a say in the community. And he was a states’-rights man all the way and finally joined the Confederacy, though he didn’t do so until Virginia seceded, and he went along with his state. It was a bad thing to do, but as I’ve said, he was a stubborn and contrary old son of a gun, and he had his own beliefs and stuck to his beliefs.

  Tyler almost died in office himself. On February 28, 1844, he went with a lot of other people to inspect and cruise along the Potomac on the Princeton, a new warship that was very modern and advanced for its time, and a terrible accident occurred that took a lot of lives. One of the things they all went to inspect was a big gun called the Peacemaker, which was the largest naval gun in the world at that point in history, and the gun was fired twice for the visitors without incident. But on the third firing, the gun suddenly exploded, killing Tyler’s new secretary of state, Abel P. Upshur, who took over the job when Webster left, his secretary of the navy, Thomas W. Gilmer, his valet, a close friend, David Gardiner, and a number of other people. Tyler himself was belowdecks at
that moment and wasn’t hurt, and he helped carry Gardiner’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Julia, to safety on a nearby rescue vessel. Four months later, he and Julia Gardiner were married, even though he was thirty-one years older than his bride.

  Tyler had had a very happy marriage with his first wife, the former Letitia Christian - the marriage lasted twenty-nine years and gave them seven children - but he had been a widower for about seventeen months at the time of the accident, and he didn’t like the single state. The papers laughed at the couple because of the difference in their ages, but they went on to have seven more children, making Tyler the president with the largest number of children in our history. I admire him for that, too.

  Tyler made no effort to run for reelection when he completed his single term on March 4, 1845. He was disavowed by the Whigs because of the stands he’d taken against Whig policy on financial matters, and he knew he wouldn’t be chosen as the Democratic candidate because he was officially a Whig president, so he thought briefly about running as a third-party candidate and organized a party that he called, and I’m not joking, the Democratic-Republican Party. His main motive was to oppose Henry Clay, who was going to run for the third time and as a Whig, and to oppose Martin Van Buren, who seemed likely to run again on the Democratic side, but then the Democrats nominated James K. Polk, and Tyler dropped out because he didn’t want to take votes away from Polk and give the election to Clay. He went down to Sherwood Forest, his 1,200-acre plantation about thirty miles away from Richmond, Virginia, and had those seven more children, five boys and two girls, and lived there happily until his death on January 18, 1862.

  In one of those believe-it-or-not incidents, Julia Tyler predicted her husband’s death. He was a member of the Confederate House of Representatives at that point, and the House was meeting in Richmond and Tyler was staying at the Exchange Hotel in that city, and Julia was busy with her family and not planning to join him. But she had a nightmare in which Tyler was mortally ill, and she hurried into Richmond. Tyler assured her that he was feeling fine, but two days later, he became dizzy and nauseated, and he fainted suddenly in the hotel’s dining room and died soon after that. He was seventy-one years old. No official notice was taken of his death because he was the only president to join the Confederacy and considered a traitor. Well, he had those few good points, but all things considered, I think I was right in listing him as one of the presidents we could have done without. And I think maybe I would have listed the man he replaced, William Henry Harrison, as another president we could have done without if he had lived long enough.

  Anyway, Polk managed to follow Tyler into the presidency, though he didn’t win by a tremendous margin. Clay was still a very popular fellow around the country, and even though an even more popular fellow, Andrew Jackson, was a good friend of Polk’s and campaigned hard for Polk throughout Tennessee, which was also Polk’s home state, Clay still managed to win the state. (Jackson and Polk were so close and thought so much alike about so many things that Polk was nicknamed Young Hickory. Politics is a funny business, though, and Jackson’s support and the fact that Polk’s birthplace and residence were in Tennessee still didn’t help enough.) But when all the counting was over, Polk had 1,338,464 votes, representing 50 percent of the popular vote, and Clay had 1,300,097 votes, representing 48 percent, with a splinter candidate, James G. Birney of the Liberty-Abolitionist Party, getting 62,300 votes, the remaining 2 percent. Polk racked up 170 electoral votes, and Clay got 105.

  Polk was forty-nine when he became president, our youngest president up to that point. (Eventually other presidents were elected who were even younger. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, was forty-six when he became president in 1904. John F. Kennedy was only forty-three when he was elected in 1960. That was essentially a young men’s contest. Nixon was forty-seven in 1960, though I thought those jowls of his and his unshaven appearance made him look about sixty when I watched him on television.) Polk was also supposed to be the first of our dark horse presidents to be elected, but that’s hooey - or at least, if he was a dark horse president, he wasn’t such a dark dark horse. He’d certainly been around, and visible on the political scene, long enough despite his relative youth.

  He was born in 1795 and was a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives by the time he was twenty-eight, a member of the House of Representatives in Washington from 1825 to 1839, speaker of the House for the last four years of that period, and then governor of Tennessee from 1839 to 1841. He had his upsets, of course - he was defeated by a Whig named James C. Jones when he ran for reelection as governor in 1841, and Jones beat him again for governor in 1843 - but he was definitely being considered seriously for either the presidency or the vice presidency when the Democratic Convention started up in Baltimore in May 1844. I guess the reason he’s thought of as a dark horse is that he was a sort of compromise candidate, and it took nine ballots to get him picked. Van Buren was back in the running and led on the first ballot, but it would have taken a two-thirds majority to end it right there, and he didn’t get that much; and then Van Buren’s vice president, Richard M. Johnson, started to pick up steam, and so did old James Buchanan and another fellow, Lewis Cass, who had been our minister to France and later became a senator from Michigan.

  By the fifth ballot, Cass was in the lead, and Polk didn’t get a single vote right through the first eight ballots. But then people began to line up behind Polk, and on the ninth ballot, he received 233 votes while Cass got only twenty-nine and Van Buren only a miserable two. Polk’s running mate was George Mifflin Dallas, a former mayor of Philadelphia, senator from Pennsylvania, minister to Russia, and after his term as vice president under Polk, minister to Great Britain. I’ve also been told that Dallas, Texas, was named after George Dallas, though I’m not sure why because I’ve read a number of things about the man and didn’t see any mention that he ever went near the place.

  The news of Polk’s nomination, incidentally, was telegraphed to Washington, the first official use of Samuel F.B. Morse’s newfangled invention. But nobody believed it because they were so sure that Van Buren or Cass would get the nod.

  People always look surprised when I mention that I consider Polk one of our greatest presidents. In fact, you can almost see them thinking, “James Who?” as though they hardly recognize the name. Well, I suppose I can understand that reaction because Polk wasn’t one of the presidents who had a hundred books written about him, but there are a lot of reasons I feel the way I do.

  I’ve already mentioned the main reason, which is that he was the ideal chief executive in the sense that he knew what he wanted to do and had to do, and he did it and left, and in the sense that he said that his program could be accomplished in a single term and was accomplished in a single term. But let me expand on that a little bit.

  Polk became president at a particularly crucial period in our history. First, he followed a whole string of weak presidents, Van Buren and Harrison and Tyler, and he had a lot of catching up to do because of the lack of activity of his predecessors, who hadn’t really measured up to the presidency. And I think he suspected that the same situation might develop, with more mediocre presidents, after he left office, particularly since he knew that two of his generals, Zachary Taylor and Old Fuss and Feathers Winfield Scott, both of whom were Whigs, had presidential ambitions. Polk didn’t think much of either man; he referred to them as “super-pampered” and living high on the hog and loving their lives of luxury, and I’m sure he got a certain amount of satisfaction out of putting them to work when the Mexican War came along. He made them disturb themselves: Old Winfield Scott, in particular, didn’t want to go to Mexico and command our troops down there, but he had to go.

  And Polk was right about those presidential ambitions, of course. Both men became candidates for president, and though Old Fuss and Feathers never got his ambition accomplished, Taylor became the next president of the United States in 1848. (Scott ran against Franklin Pierce in 1852 and was defeated.) Polk was a
lso correct if he did have that suspicion about the quality of the presidents who followed him. Exactly the same situation occurred after Polk’s administration as had been the case before it; we had four presidents who were just there. And then, when Lincoln came along, he had to catch up on all the rest of them to save the Union.

  We had some very, very poor sticks as presidents during that period. Taylor was a military man and nothing more, and the only reason he didn’t do a whole lot of harm is that he didn’t last very long; he died a little over a year after he got into office, aged sixty-five. There are conflicting theories on the cause of Taylor’s death. Some reports say he died of typhoid contracted while he was in Mexico; other reports say he died of heat prostration because he sat in the sun for hours listening to some long speeches at the Washington Monument, which was being built at the time; still others say he ate a whole bowl of cherries and drank a whole pitcher of milk after those speeches, which was a dangerous thing to do because sanitary conditions were terrible in Washington in that period and dairy products and raw fruit were usually avoided. I guess, in view of the way I sometimes felt after listening to long speeches, I’d pick the middle explanation.

  That put his vice president, Millard Fillmore, into office, and Fillmore was a nonentity who’d only been put on Taylor’s ticket because he was a Know-Nothing and the Taylor people wanted to pick up that part of the vote. The Know-Nothings, for those of you who aren’t familiar with that sorry bunch, were a political group of people who were anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. The official name was the Native American Party, which sounds like some of those hate organizations that sprang up in our own time.