by Harry Truman
MY FATHER BEGAN work on this book shortly after he left the White House and finished his basic material many years ago. He dictated a lot of it to his secretaries, and he wrote a lot of it on little scraps of paper, and he took some of it from things he’d said in interviews and speeches, and he also dictated a lot of it to my mother and me. I guess “told” is a better word because neither of us knew shorthand, and we just copied everything down slowly and laboriously. Eventually, he ended up with what probably amounted to a couple of thousand pages, and from that material, I’ve shaped the present book.
My father asked that the book not be published until he and my mother had left us. He decided this because he wanted to feel free to say things about people and events in his usual frank and honest fashion. No words minced, no punches pulled.
This is not a complex book or a profound one. My father was a modest man and said frequently that he wasn’t capable of writing a complex book even if he wanted to do so, but the fact is that he didn’t want to write such a book. He wanted to leave behind him a book that would express, in plain and simple language, his viewpoint on the presidency, various presidents, the American government and the way it functions and operates, our history, and, in general, all of the things he had observed and thought about as a boy and young man and in his political offices. And he wanted to express himself in a manner that would be clear and comprehensible to most men and women - to the kind of person he considered himself to be, an average American. The single difference between himself and other men, he felt, was that, unlike most other men, he was, as he says in this book, “struck by lightning” one day and woke to find himself president of the United States.
I’VE OFTEN SAID that there are a million men in this country who could have done the job I did as president, or who were qualified for the job. I think that’s true, but they didn’t have the chance. A great many men who are well qualified to be chief executive have been passed up and overlooked. It takes luck, conditions that prevail at the time, and when the right moment comes, ability to meet that situation. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that myself because I was finally nominated and elected president of the United States. But it’s true.
Most men don’t aspire to the presidency. It comes to them by accident. And don’t think for a minute that the men who were defeated for the presidency were necessarily weaker men or less capable individuals than the men who beat them, or forget that it’s an honor to run for the presidency even if you’re defeated. There are places in history for many men who were defeated for the presidency. I can name them right down the line, and many of them were great men. Samuel Tilden was defeated by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 - though “defeated” isn’t exactly the right word, since Tilden had the majority of both the popular and electoral votes - and he was a great man because he let Hayes have the presidency in order to avoid seeing the War Between the States start all over again. Take James G. Blaine, who was defeated for the presidency and afterwards became a good secretary of state in the cabinet of Benjamin Harrison. Or take Charles Evans Hughes, who was defeated for the presidency and became Chief Justice of the United States. William Howard Taft was defeated for reelection and also became Chief Justice of the United States.
A great many of the men who were not elected to the presidency afterwards became good public servants and great citizens of the United States, and made a contribution to the welfare of the country. People who run for office and are defeated aren’t rejected in the usual sense of the word. They’re just defeated because they couldn’t get enough votes that one time. It doesn’t mean the public despises them. It’s a preference for somebody else for that particular office at that particular moment, that’s all. The examples I’ve given have shown that when those men were passed up, they were still highly thought of and were still great men. There were a good many like that. You take the Adams family. After John Quincy Adams passed on, there were Adams descendants in Lincoln’s cabinet. They wrote important histories and things of that kind. Even in the states, some good men are governors who have been defeated previously in elections, even in previous tries for governor. If they don’t become pessimists and decide to lay down and take it, if they get up and start over again, why, they don’t have any trouble.
The defeated man I admire is one who can take it and like it. One of my favorite people is Francis Merriam Cockrell, who was a major general in the Civil War and was in command of the Missouri Brigades in Vicksburg. Then he came back home, and after the Reconstruction had fixed it so people could run for office, he wanted to be governor, I think in 1872. He was defeated by one vote at the convention. He stood out in the middle of the aisle in the old Capitol Building in Jefferson City, Missouri, and threw his old black hat up into the dome and said, “I’m still for the ticket.” He was elected by the legislature of Missouri to the United States Senate and stayed there for thirty years. (I get a little envious as I write those last words. I think most people know that it’s my opinion that Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t seek a third term - events forced him into it. The same thing happened with a fourth term. And if the fourth term hadn’t come about, I wouldn’t have been president. I would have been in the Senate and would be there yet, where the happiest time of my life was spent.)
I’ll have a lot more to say about all that in this book, of course, and a lot more to say about some of the men who became presidents and whose election was a good thing for the country, and about some of the men who were elected to the presidency and shouldn’t have been, and about some of the men who weren’t elected and should have been, and about presidents and the presidency and the government and the country in general. Among a lot of other reasons, I’m very anxious to get the truth about some of our presidents available to people in a plain-spoken manner, so that they can understand what it means to be the responsible executive of a great republic. A great many presidents have had biographers who’ve been very careful to give us a distorted idea of exactly what sort of a man the president was and how he turned out as the chief executive of the nation. They’ve been misrepresented both ways. They’ve been slandered, and they’ve been built up, in some cases, to a height to which they had no business to be built. And I think the second kind of portrait is just as bad as the first kind.
There are heroes in our history who have been set up on pedestals, and maybe they ought to have been, but it’s my opinion that those who’ve been deified were just ordinary men trying to do the right thing and lucky enough to get it done. And then there are some that we’ve mistreated in history: for example, Andrew Johnson and two or three other presidents have certainly been misrepresented, because when the facts are revealed about what those men tried to do, it’s clear that they tried their best to do what was right; most of them have. And it would be nice to get the facts straight so that people realize that nearly every one of the men in government in the United States - in any capacity, whether he was a general or the president or the governor - tried to do his best, and that when an ordinary man gets the responsibility, he really tries to do what’s right. And essentially that’s been the case in the history of our presidency, though some of the men haven’t been good presidents because they were lazy and didn’t like to work. That wasn’t a terrible thing against them; I think the human animal is like that because none of us like to work too much. But most of us do the best we can. So I don’t mind the fact that some men and women have been deified, but I don’t want them to overshadow those people who have not, and who have also made great contributions to the country.
I guess as good a way as any to start is to write out a list of the men I think were our best presidents, and a few who might possibly have been our worst, and I think I can put some new light on what they did and didn
’t do if I compare their work with what actually happened in my own experience as a president. And I think I can do it objectively because my perspective on the presidency and some of our past presidents changed a lot after I became president. Naturally that would happen. When you find yourself in a very responsible position, especially in the chief executive position, you begin to understand some of the things with which men were faced who were in the same position before that time. Sometimes you may not agree with them, but after you’ve been in the position yourself and understand what a man was up against, you look up the facts on all sides of the matter, and then you can change your mind on what he was doing. I think it’s fundamental and basic, as I’ve said, that history is made in our country by men who have the welfare of the people in their minds, and they have to make frequent and difficult decisions in order to get that done. Sometimes those decisions are not exactly what they ought to be, but a man who’s willing to make a decision in the first place can always make another one to correct any mistake he’s made.
Well now, there are about six or seven men who understood the presidency for what it is: the chief executive, the man who runs the greatest republic in the history of the world. And there are at least that many who paid no attention to their powers and duties; that is, they didn’t shirk the fact that they were presidents, but they didn’t exercise the powers that were given to them under the Constitution, either. I’ll name the strong presidents, in my opinion, and that doesn’t mean that they’re the only ones.
Washington, of course, was the fellow who set up the government, and he was one of our great and strong presidents. There isn’t any question about Washington’s greatness. If his administration had been a failure, there would have been no United States. A lesser man couldn’t have done it. He had all the background that caused him to know how to make it work, because he had worked under the Continental Congress. Then he had one awful time with them trying to get things done when he was commanding general. He was always available. In his time, the first capital was in New York City and then in Philadelphia, but he was always on the job. Not only that, he went by stagecoach from one end of the country to the other to give people some idea of what the government meant. He went to South Carolina from New York by stagecoach and then back. Whenever it was necessary for him to appear on the scene, he did it, at his own expense and a lot of trouble. Some presidents have limited their roles to being administrators of the laws without being leaders. But Washington was both a great administrator and a great leader, a truly great man in every way.
I guess, in fact, that the only anti-Washington thing I can say is that he made a mistake when he established the precedent of the two-term limitation on the presidency, and even there he had a good personal reason for wanting that, at least for himself. He was attacked viciously by the press of his day; he was called so many terrible things that he told friends even during his first term that he wasn’t going to run again. But Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton persuaded him to go ahead and run for a second term, and finally he did. After he’d gotten through his second term, though, he made up his mind that he just wouldn’t take it anymore, and he quit. That established the precedent, though, of course, it wasn’t actually law until it became necessary for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to stay on for four terms because of the world war, and - I won’t mince words here - the Republican 80th Congress took a sort of revenge on Roosevelt’s memory because he’d made a lot of those people look bad by comparison.
The amendment limiting presidential terms, incidentally, didn’t apply to me. I could be elected to the presidency as often as I wanted, even to succeed myself, as often as I felt like it, but I’d had enough, too. So it isn’t for personal reasons that I say that the Twenty-second Amendment, the one limiting a president to two terms, is, excepting only the Prohibition Amendment, the worst thing that’s ever been attached to the Constitution. In fact, I think the Constitution has had only two bad amendments, the Two-Term and the Prohibition amendments, and the Prohibition Amendment was finally repealed. There was even talk of limiting a president’s term to one four-year term or two two-year terms, but four years just isn’t enough. It’s the continuation of a president’s program that’s necessary, and in most cases, it isn’t possible to get measures through the Congress in two separate terms of two years or one term of four years. Therefore, if the president has a policy that’s agreeable to the people, and he feels like working his head off for another term or several more terms, he’s got a right to run for it. There are clearly times when more than two terms are both necessary and wise, and times when two terms are enough, and in my case I felt it was about time for the country to awaken to the fact that the people are responsible for the kind of government they get, and that somebody else should take over. (Unfortunately, the person who took over was Dwight Eisenhower, about whom I’ll also have more to say later on. All I’ll say now is that when the people elect a man to the presidency who doesn’t take care of the job, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.)
The next great president, in my view, was Jefferson. I’ve heard it said that Washington is rated highly as the man who fought for independence and established a new government, Lincoln is rated highly as the liberator, and Jefferson is lost somewhere in between. Well, I don’t think he is. Washington and Lincoln were involved in events that were more spectacular and dramatic, and there isn’t any doubt in my mind that, if Lincoln hadn’t saved the Union from being broken up, we’d have had four or five nations where just one is now established as one of the strongest of the great nations of the world, and we’d have no country at all without Washington. But Jefferson was just as important because he was working continuously for the preservation of free government as established by the Constitution. So let’s simply say that the objectives the three men had in view were as follows: Washington’s to establish the government, Jefferson’s to maintain it, Lincoln’s to prevent it from being broken up. And each did his job, every single one of them, as a man dealing with the period in which he lived.
Jefferson also had his share of press criticism and people who didn’t like him, and I wonder how many people remember our history and realize how close Jefferson came to losing the election in 1800, and how close Aaron Burr came to being our third president, which would have been just as bad as electing Richard Nixon today.1 In those days, the nomination of the president was made by congressional caucus. They usually nominated three or four men, and then the one with the highest number of votes was supposed to be president and the one with the second-highest total was supposed to be vice president. John Adams was popular in New England and got sixty-five electoral votes, but Jefferson and Burr dominated the southern states and the middle states and ended up with a tie of seventy-three votes apiece. This threw the election into the House of Representatives, and Hamilton, certain that the people clearly wanted Jefferson over Burr, whispered in a lot of ears and Jefferson became president and Burr vice president. That didn’t satisfy Burr, incidentally, and he tried to take the southwest part of the country away from the United States because he was miffed about not being elected president, but more about that in my chapter on Jefferson.
Jefferson was also called a runaway president because he pushed through our purchase of Louisiana over a lot of opposition. I think that Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana was one of the best decisions ever made because, if we hadn’t taken over Louisiana, then either Britain, France, or Spain would have owned it and our country would have ended at the Mississippi River, whereas the greatest part of our development has been by our ability to expand beyond the Mississippi River. I don’t like this talk about runaway presidents, because the truth is that a president just does what he has to do.
Two of my other choices as great presidents are Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, and they were characterized as runaway presidents, too. Jackson had his troubles with the courts when he was enforcing the law, the tariff act that South Carolina decided they
wouldn’t pay. The old man wouldn’t stand for nullification, South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the tax, so he sent General Winfield Scott and a naval force to Charleston and they paid. Lincoln, in his period, suspended habeas corpus, allowing military authorities to arrest and try people accused of helping the South or impeding Federal troops, and he did several other things that he had to do in order to save the Union at the time. He dismissed the Circuit Court of Appeals and appointed new judges in the District of Columbia and extended the Supreme Court from seven members to eleven. But all of the former protections were restored when the emergency was over.
Jackson is my next choice as a great president after Jefferson, the next president who really did things. He was elected after a period of what they called in James Monroe’s time “the era of good feeling.” Well, when the era of good feeling got to feeling too good, meaning that the people and the government became too complacent and too lazy, why, the country went to the dogs, as it’s always done. You have got to have opposition if you’re going to keep a republic going. Old Jackson remedied that, and he did it in a way that was perfectly satisfactory to all concerned. Among a lot of other things I’ll discuss when I have more to say about Jackson, the economic royalists, the favored few, had control of the government by controlling the finances of the country. A man named Nicholas Biddle and his Bank of the United States had all the government’s money, and Jackson took the money away from him and, in effect, put all the dollar bills back into the Treasury of the United States, where they ought to be, by spreading all the funds around into various state banks. Of course, he was roundly abused for doing things of that sort, but all the great presidents had emergencies to meet, and they met them as best they could and usually came out on top. Not necessarily in their own lifetime, you understand. Admiration for Lincoln didn’t come about for thirty or forty years after he was dead. Jefferson wasn’t appreciated until he’d been dead forty or fifty years. It sometimes takes people a long time to find out exactly what past results were, and that’s customary with all history.