by Harry Truman
There’s also going to be some discussion in this book about why I think that military men make poor presidents. Before anybody asks me how I can say that and square it up with my admiration for old Jackson, let me point out that Jackson wasn’t a professional military man. He was a volunteer military man. He had gone from North Carolina to Tennessee, and he became interested in the government of Tennessee and the organization of that state and helped to write its constitution. He was a private practitioner of law and was in the Senate of the United States. When the War of 1812 came along, he was a volunteer general of the militia and organized the people who fought the Battle of New Orleans. He wasn’t educated as a professional soldier. He was a citizen soldier who learned his military affairs from the ground up on his own hook. It’s the fellows who go to West Point, and are trained to think they’re gods in uniform that I plan to take apart in that discussion.
My next choice for this list of great presidents is a man who usually doesn’t get on lists of this sort, and it may surprise some of the people reading this book. But since this chapter is long enough already, I’ll save it until you turn to the next page.
THE NEXT MAN on my list of great presidents, a man who isn’t much thought about these days, is James K. Polk. (I’ve read somewhere that his real name was Leonidas Polk, and if so, I don’t blame him for changing it.) I won’t say everything about him here because I’m going to say more about him later on, which he certainly deserves. For now, I’ll just say that he’s on my list, among a lot of other reasons, because of three accomplishments.
The first is that he exercised his powers of the presidency as I think they should be exercised. He was president during the Mexican War, and he was living in an age when the terrible burden of making decisions in a war was entirely in the hands of the president. And when that came about, he decided that that was much more important than going to parties and shaking hands with people. I know exactly how he felt, but in my time there were more able and informed people who were helping the president, and that made a difference. Polk not only had troubles with his generals, but he also had troubles with Congress. Every president, of course, always has his troubles with his generals and with Congress. If he’s in the midst of a war, he’ll have trouble with his generals, and every strong president always has trouble with the Congress whether there’s a war on or not. But whenever the president knows what he’s doing, and knows it’s right, he can always convince the Congress that his ideas are the ones to be followed. All you have to do is bring in the leaders in the Congress, tell them what the situation is and why certain things have to be done. You never have any trouble with them after that. There have certainly been some stubborn men in the Congress, but they don’t usually have control, thank goodness.
The majority of the Congress is made up of men who are elected for sensible reasons, and they’re reasonable men. The stubborn men in the Congress are a natural corollary of free government, but when the president of the United States makes up his mind that he wants to do something that’s right, he can always convince the majority of the Congress that he’s right, and when he does, the stubborn men don’t count. Weak presidents never seem to understand this, but fortunately Polk wasn’t weak. He brought in the leaders of the Congress and told them what he wanted to do, and it was done.
The second important thing about Polk is that he bought the southwest part of the country for just about the same price that Jefferson paid for Louisiana. It was quite a bargain and really helped make us a great big country. We got California and the area between California and Texas, which was called New Mexico at the time, and which included the present areas of Nevada and Utah. Altogether, we acquired a total of about 918,000 square miles, and I don’t think anybody’s going to argue about the fact that that’s a pretty impressive acquisition.
And the third impressive thing about Polk that I want to mention right now is that he did something that most of the rest of us who were presidents weren’t able to do: He decided when he went in there that he would only serve one term, and that’s what he did, exactly. I don’t mean that he served one term and then was turned out by the voters with a lot of things unfinished. I mean that he was a man who knew exactly what he wanted to do in a specified period of time and did it, and when he got through with it, he went home. He was a chief executive of the kind we dream about, and very seldom see. He died three months after he got out of the White House; he retired on March 4, 1849, and died in June. He did what he promised, to serve one term and put his program over in one term. It was almost as though he knew his work was finished, and he wasn’t much interested in living a lot longer. He said a moving thing on his retirement, “I now retire as a servant and regain my position as a sovereign.” He was right, absolutely right. I’ve been through it, and I know.
THERE WERE A number of weak presidents after Polk: Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. The last two were the presidents immediately preceding Lincoln, and Pierce was a nincompoop and Buchanan was just as bad. A president who’s important in his period is one who has to meet a serious situation and does it with courage and ability. But there are times when that’s not done, and one of those times, except for Polk’s single term, was probably the period between the end of the Jackson administration and through the Buchanan administration, a time when things were allowed to drift, as far as the chief executive was concerned. And then came Abraham Lincoln, a strong executive who saved the government, saved the United States.
Lincoln didn’t even dream about the presidency until he was a prospective nominee. Before that, I don’t think he ever had it in mind. He wanted to be a senator from Illinois more than anything he ever wanted in his life, and he was defeated. And when an opportunity came along to be nominated by his party, the Republicans, which was a minority party at that time, why, he set up an organization and got himself nominated. I don’t think he ever had in his mind an ambition that he could ever be president of the United States any more than I did. I never thought I would be president. I never wanted to be, to tell you the honest truth, though maybe Lincoln did.
I think that, when he was nominated by the Republicans in Chicago, they were absolutely certain that they didn’t have a chance to elect anybody. That helped him to get the nomination because the other Republicans felt it was meaningless, and they didn’t care much who got it. But he wanted the nomination, and he worked for it, and he had the best organization that there was at that convention, some of the best politicians in Illinois and Missouri working for him. I don’t believe he thought he was going to be elected, but he wanted to be nominated because it was an honor even if he was eventually defeated. And when he was elected, I think he was as much surprised as anybody else in the country. Interestingly, though, he didn’t carry his home state.
My people didn’t think much of Lincoln, but I thought he was wonderful. It took me a long time to come to that realization, however, because my family were all against him, and all thought it was a fine thing he got assassinated. (Well, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much.) I began to feel just the opposite after I’d studied the history of the country and what he did to save the Union. That’s when I came to that conclusion, and that was a long time ago.
He was a president who understood people, and when it came time to make decisions, he was willing to take the responsibility and make those decisions, no matter how difficult they were. A lot of people aside from my family didn’t think much of him, even some of his cabinet; you’ll see that if you read the cabinet viewpoint, and practically all of those fellows wrote memoirs. Some of them thought he didn’t have much sense at times, some of them thought he was just a common old farmer from Illinois, and some of them thought he was just a baboon. He was all of those things, except the baboon. Most of all, he knew people. He knew how to treat people and he knew how to make a decision stick, and that’s the reason his administration, which he carried through for the salvation of the Union, is considered on
e of the greatest administrations in the history of the presidency. He had a good head and a great brain and a kind heart. He’d educated himself to the point where he knew how a government should work, and he tried his best to make ours work that way.
Carl Sandburg and a lot of others have tried to make something out of Lincoln that he wasn’t. He was a decent man, a good politician, and a great president, and they’ve tried to build up things that he never even thought about. I’ll bet you a dollar and a half that if you read Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln, you’ll find things put into Lincoln’s mouth and mind that never even occurred to him. He was a good man who was in the place where he ought to have been at the time important events were taking place, but when they write about him as though he belongs in the pantheon of the gods, that’s not the man he really was. He was the best kind of ordinary man, and when I say that he was an ordinary man, I mean that as high praise, not deprecation. That’s the highest praise you can give a man, that he’s one of the people and becomes distinguished in the service that he gives other people. I don’t know of any higher compliment you can pay a man than that. He was one of the people, and he wanted to stay that way. And he was that way until the day he died. One of the reasons he was assassinated was because he didn’t feel important enough to have the proper guards around him at the Ford’s Theater.
The president after Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, wasn’t too bad, but he was overwhelmed by a hostile Congress. I’ll write a little bit more about him and about that in my chapter on Lincoln later on in this book. Ulysses S. Grant was next, and he wasn’t even a chief executive; he was another sleepwalker whose administration was even more crooked than Warren Harding’s, if that’s possible. Then there was Rutherford B. Hayes, who was elected by a fluke and knew it, and he did his level best to do a good job. Then along came James A. Garfield, who was assassinated six months after he was inaugurated. He was followed by Chester A. Arthur, who was vice president when Garfield was elected, and the only thing that stands out about Arthur is that he took all the wonderful furniture that had been brought to this country by Jefferson, Monroe, and several of the other presidents of that period and sold it in an auction for about $6,500. I think it was nine vanloads of furniture, any one piece of which would be worth more today than he got for the whole load. (I tried to get some of the pieces back when I was president, and they couldn’t be obtained. People who had them wouldn’t sell them at all. I don’t blame them, either.) A bit more about some of these men later, too, but then the next great president showed up: Grover Cleveland. At least he was a great president in his first term; in his second term, he wasn’t the same Grover Cleveland he was to begin with.
Some presidents in our history limited their roles to being administrators of the laws without being leaders. Cleveland reestablished the presidency by being not only a chief executive but a leader. In the period from Grant’s administration through the administration of that fellow who sold all the furniture, the policy of the government was not for the welfare and benefit of the people but for the few who had access to the government and to major government officials. Cleveland spent most of his time in his first term working on bills that came from the Congress, and he vetoed a tremendous pile of bills that were passed strictly for the purpose of helping out people who voted for the Republican ticket or who promised to vote for the Republican ticket. He also saw to it that a lot of laws were passed, if he felt those laws were needed for the good of the general public, and even if the laws weren’t popular with some members of the Congress.
In other words, Cleveland was a good president because he was familiar with the powers of an executive, and unlike some of his predecessors, he wasn’t afraid to use them. He had been sheriff of Erie County, mayor of Buffalo, and then governor of New York State, and he knew how to use the powers of his various offices without abusing them. In Johnson’s period in office, for example, a bill had been passed that prohibited presidents from firing members of their cabinets. Cleveland felt that this took powers away improperly from the presidency and succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court that that bill was unconstitutional. He also succeeded in placing some controls over the insurance companies, which were going pretty strong in those days. And Cleveland was really the first president to make anybody stop intruding into this hemisphere. The only reason the Monroe Doctrine had stood up in earlier days was because Britain was our ally and helped keep others out. But then, in Cleveland’s time, we had to keep Britain out. The British tried to take over some territory in Venezuela to which they weren’t entitled, and Cleveland told them that the Monroe Doctrine still worked. He sent a very strong message to Congress denouncing Great Britain’s attempted intrusion into Venezuela, and the British backed off.
For the most part, however, Cleveland was a considerably less impressive man in his second term. He had been elected for the first time in 1884, but he was defeated by Benjamin Harrison in 1888; he had the majority of the popular vote but was defeated in the Electoral College. He went to work for the Prudential Insurance Company and became one of the directors of Princeton University along with a lot of other businessmen, and when he ran for the presidency again in 1892 and was reelected, his viewpoint had substantially changed. The big corporations were then beginning to get control of the economic situation of the country; we were changing from an agrarian state to an industrial state, and if you remember, the big campaign cry in 1896, the period after Cleveland’s second term, was for “a full dinner pail.” Cleveland had a terrible time with strikes, and he called out the soldiers and they fired on the strikers. It was also during Cleveland’s second term that a number of smaller companies got together and formed great big companies for the suppression of competition, companies like Standard Oil and the United States Rubber Company and United States Steel. These were formed not only to suppress competition, but to exact higher prices from the buyer. And the administration did nothing about it: These things weren’t corrected until Woodrow Wilson, and then Franklin Roosevelt became president. That’s why I say Cleveland was a great president only in his first term. In his second term, he didn’t do so well.
Cleveland was a Democrat, but he didn’t care for the 1896 Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, so he supported William McKinley, a Republican. His son followed through with that and became the Republican leader in Baltimore. I don’t hold that against either of them, but McKinley didn’t turn out to be much of a president. Theodore Roosevelt was next, and in my view, missed being a great president, though only by a narrow margin.
The trouble with Teddy Roosevelt is that, though he was the president who finally awakened to the fact that the welfare of the country was wrapped up in its physical assets - that is, in the forests and the mines and the other things the country owned - and he tried to conserve the situation as best he could, he had his troubles in the Congress and he had his troubles with the trusts, and he didn’t get a heck of a lot done. He finally got to be called a trustbuster, but he didn’t bust very many of them. I think he made a sincere effort to take the financial control of the government away from Wall Street and put it back in Washington where it belongs, as Andrew Jackson had done in his period and as Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in doing later on, but he ended up adding up to more talk than achievement. And some really bad things were allowed to happen during his two terms, one of which was his agreement with the Japanese under which they agreed that they wouldn’t issue passports to laborers wanting to come to the United States. That became the Chinese-Japanese Exclusion Act in the end. That was a part of it; the original Chinese Exclusion Act became law back in 1882, but Teddy Roosevelt’s administration expanded and legitimatized it. This all happened just after the turn of the century, and I wasn’t old enough to pay much attention to it, but a lot of people in California and the rest of the West Coast thought it was a good thing. They said they didn’t want cheap labor competing with Americans in California or Oregon or Washington. The cry was, how can a man who has to have $2 a
day compete with a man who can live on two cents a day? Which is nonsense, because immigrants learn very quickly about the joys of living better. I wasn’t old enough to do anything about that act, but afterwards, when the same situation came up, I did everything I possibly could to get the Japanese and the Chinese treated on the same basis that our own American labor force is treated. But there are still restrictions. It’s economic. Purely economic. And it stinks.
So Theodore Roosevelt doesn’t get on my list of great presidents, and neither does the man who followed him, William Howard Taft, a fat, jolly, likable, mediocre man. But the president after that, Woodrow Wilson, certainly does.
I’ve been asked which presidents served as models for me when I was president myself, and the answer is that there were three of them. Two were Jefferson and Jackson, and the third was Woodrow Wilson. When a fellow in modern times becomes the chief executive, it’s his job to find out the relationship of the things with which he’s faced with what has gone before. And then he has to try to project what he has to do in the future, and see whether the examples of past presidents are what he’s looking for or whether he should set an example of his own. Every president has to act on his own, no matter what the situation may have been before he came along, but he has to have that background, that knowledge of past history, to be sure that he’s doing what’s right. And Woodrow Wilson served as a constant example to me of how to operate and function as president of the United States.
In many ways, Wilson was the greatest of the greats. He established the Federal Reserve Board. He established the Federal Trade Commission. He didn’t make a great publicity stunt of being a trustbuster, the way Teddy Roosevelt did, but the trust situation was never really met until Wilson became president. Wilson really felt that the monopolies ought to be controlled, and he controlled them. (That’s the greatest thing Teddy Roosevelt ever did, incidentally: He contributed to the election of Wilson. Not intentionally, of course.) Wilson had no territorial ambitions, but when Victoriano Huerta seized control of Mexico and arrested some American sailors in Tampico, and when Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and tore up an American flag, Wilson took quick action each time to make it clear that the United States expected respect and was going to get it. But he also made it understood that we were against those two murderers and not against Mexicans, and we’ve had friendly relations with Mexico ever since.