Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  I think our three branches are the best system, where the purse is controlled by the legislative branch of the government, where the executive operation of the government is, or should be, in the hands of a man who knows where he’s going and what to do, and where the judiciary passes on the laws as to whether or not they’re conforming with the Constitution. (The Constitution, incidentally, should be the only business of the high courts. Some people have asked me, hasn’t the Supreme Court proved to be one of the greatest stumbling blocks in connection with progressive legislation? The answer is yes, but it’s a good stumbling block. Because when legislation is considered, the Constitutional aspects are also considered, and then we have better government and better laws.) But none of that means that the president should be limited from doing good things for the country.

  The writers of the Constitution decided that there had to be a single chief executive, but they didn’t want an executive on the basis of the way Great Britain handled it because they’d had so much trouble with the political leaders of Great Britain, although some were their friends - Edmund Burke and two or three others. And besides, the British political leaders weren’t really the top men; they were under kings who considered themselves appointed by the Almighty and in charge of everything. The Americans wanted a man who was elected by the people, but was then really a chief executive, really running the government.

  There’ve been efforts ever since then by the Congress and a lot of other people in the country to hand most of the powers of the executive over to the legislative branch of government. I don’t believe in that at all, and I’m certain that isn’t what the writers of the Constitution intended. The Constitution is one of the plainest-written documents in existence, and one of the truly unique things about it, which puts it in a class by itself, is that there are only a few paragraphs on the powers of the head of the government. The writers of the Constitution didn’t do much arguing on the office of the chief executive: They set it up in a way that it could be used for the purpose for which it was intended. Aside from those few paragraphs, there are implications in the rest of the Constitution on what a president can and must do to meet situations as they come up, and great presidents have always met situations in the ways they thought were best and would have the best chance of succeeding. Only about a half dozen presidents, of course, as I’ve said, have been great presidents, only about a half dozen capable of meeting emergencies; some others may have been conscious of emergencies, but they were either timid or indifferent or didn’t care, and then there were some who tried. I believe I was one of those, and I did what I felt had to be done without worrying too much about limitations.

  Obviously, the Constitution has had to be amended in certain places, such as when they had to take out certain things that were not practical after the government became an operative organization. The writers of the Constitution were also thinking of national development rather than world considerations, and that’s all they could think about at that time. There were really only two great powers in that day, France and England, and they controlled just about everything in the world. Spain was on the way out; Spain had been a great country, and if Philip II hadn’t sent his fleet against the British, why, Spain might still have been the greatest country in the history of the world, but down it went. Still, though a lot of thinking has had to change as the world changes, the Constitution remains pretty essentially the same as when it was written, and a president must abide by it, but not be hog-tied by misinterpreting its intentions.

  The thing a president has to do in order to meet a situation, in my view, is to read the law, read the Constitutional background for that law, and make up his mind what he wants to do and tell the lawyers what he wants to do and have them find a legal way to do it. And if they don’t, do it anyhow, and then they’ll find the legal way.

  Well, it’s the business of lawyers to interpret documents of government - bills, constitutions, and whatever else is before the courts - but they have the habit of interpreting every A and B and every comma and semicolon in a way with the idea of winning a case. But when it comes to the operation of government, the commonsense statements in bills and in constitutions are those that a chief executive has to follow, and it was my policy to tell the lawyers what I was going to do and instruct them to find the proper way to do it under the law, which they can always do when they want to do it.

  The president has as much right to interpret the Constitution as have the courts or the legislative branch of the government, because it’s a three-branch government, each independent of the other, and the president’s interpretation of the Constitution is just as likely to be right as the interpretation of the Supreme Court. I think the first half-dozen presidents were all very strict constructionists of the Constitution, and there was no effort by any of them to overstep the boundaries as set out in the Constitution for operation of the government. But they were interpreting the Constitution in a very narrow way, and I don’t believe that some of the presidents who came along afterwards and saw things differently were overstepping the restrictions that were placed on the presidential office by the Constitution, either. A great many of them were good presidents who made it perfectly plain that they knew what their rights were under Article II of the Constitution of the United States, and they were going to enforce it. That’s the general policy, in fact - knowing my rights and expecting to get them - on which I’ve worked all the way through my lifetime, which has mostly been spent in that line of business.

  THE SECOND IMPORTANT quality that I believe a good president must have is strength. Again, you might think this is obvious, but it really isn’t because the odd but true fact here is that there are times when the general public seems to prefer weakness in a president.

  When Harding was elected, for example, the country had just lived through a major crisis, the First World War, and had had a very strong president, Wilson, who’d put pressure on the people and demanded sacrifices of them the way strong presidents sometimes have to do. And when the war was over, and Wilson’s terms were finished, people wanted to get away from the pressure; they wanted to go back to things as they were as people always do after an emergency. People are always tired when a strong president is in office and tells them what they ought to do and makes them do it. They don’t like it; they’d like to quit and relax.

  Sometimes, too, it’s made easier to give in to the temptation of voting for a weakling who looks as though he won’t bother you much because it appears that neither party has a strong candidate. That was also the case when Harding was running, because neither the Democratic presidential candidate nor the vice-presidential candidate were particularly well-known countrywide at the time. It finally became clear, in retrospect, that there was strong leadership available at that period, because the man running for president on the Democratic ticket was Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, who was really a very good man, and the man running for vice president was a fellow named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you know how he turned out. He became one of the greatest presidents our country has had. But the people wanted a change, and they felt they could get back to the easy life without any effort on their own part. It didn’t turn out that way. It finally cost us the Second World War.

  There’s also no question about the fact that a series of weak presidents also helped cause the Civil War. Some people believe that strong presidents usually come along after weak ones and save the situation, and we’re always hopeful that will always happen, but whether it always will or won’t we don’t know. It certainly didn’t happen with the fellow who came after Harding, old Cal Coolidge.

  I happen to be in the minority in my opinion of the man who came after Coolidge, Herbert Hoover. I know most people think he was a poor president and practically caused the depression single-handed, but I think he was actually a president who tried hard and did the best he possibly could, but was faced with difficulties that he just wasn’t able to overcome at the time. I think he and his administration w
ere blamed for things that were not their fault, things that were coming on ever since Woodrow Wilson left office and Harding became president in 1921.

  Every president inherits the last administration’s problem. Well, he can’t help that; he does, and there’s nothing he can do about it. But he’s got to find out what he’s inherited, assess it logically and realistically, and then see if he can meet the situation. Hoover assessed the situation as nearly accurately as he could with his background and experience, but one big problem was that his background and experience and general outlook weren’t good enough or the right kind. You see, he’d been out of the country for quite a while. He was the man who fed all the starving people when Wilson was president, the man in charge of the Allied Food Council, which gave millions of tons of food to civilians in areas torn apart by the war, and before that he made his fortune as an engineer in Australia and China and other countries. He wasn’t one of those fellows born with a gold spoon in his mouth, incidentally. His father was a blacksmith in West Branch, Iowa, and both of his parents died before he was nine years old, and he and his brother and sister were split up and sent to relatives. Hoover lived with an uncle in Newberg, Oregon, and he left school at fifteen and worked as an office boy and attended business college at night. And when he developed an ambition to become an engineer and applied to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, because they were just starting up an engineering school, he was almost rejected because his academic background was weak, but he was taken on because he showed real brilliance in mathematics in his entrance examination.

  But, as I’ve said, he spent a lot of his adult life out of the country, and when he came back to the United States and became involved in politics, his only real political job before he ran for the presidency was as secretary of commerce in Harding’s and Coolidge’s cabinets. So, in my opinion, his thinking didn’t start at the grass roots; he didn’t really understand the American people, and the needs of the American people, and what had to be done to meet the needs of the people. His viewpoint was that the president was the executive to enforce the laws and had nothing to do with making the laws, with which I don’t agree, of course.

  I don’t think we were a penniless nation after 1929; people just thought we were penniless, but when the facts became clear, we were not penniless and never would be, and I felt that Hoover could have enacted some laws to help things out as Roosevelt eventually did. But Hoover’s philosophy and outlook didn’t enable him to do that, and we had to wait for the next president to start to move out of the swamp. This was a shame, because, though Hoover’s administration was generally conservative, he was capable of progressive action when he felt it was important. For example, when he believed in the necessity for an organization like the RFC, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which lent money to small businesses and to people buying homes, he didn’t hesitate to organize it. And it was a great asset to the country - and not only in the latter days of the Hoover administration. It was also used up until my own administration, twelve years later.

  We had very different viewpoints on most policies, and his viewpoint on politics was also very different from mine, of course, but none of this made any difference in our friendship. We were always friendly, and I was always very fond of him. As far as politics were concerned, we both felt that this was our own business, and we never made a personal matter out of it. And as far as his point of view on the presidency and the people of the United States was concerned, I think he was an honorable, straightforward person. When he was feeding the people of the world, he had no thought or interest other than the welfare of the people he was feeding. And when he was president, I don’t believe he had any thought but the welfare of the country, of the United States, at heart.

  It isn’t easy, of course, to be a strong president. When John Adams was president, he functioned in a country that had about three and a half million people in it. Today, there are about a 180 million people, every one of whom must be considered and thought about every time a president makes an important move.12 It isn’t that the proscribed duties of the presidency have changed; they’re exactly the same as they were under the first president. It’s just that there’s a lot more to do. And in the early days, the state governments were almost independent for the simple reason that communications were such that a state government had to act most times for itself in the interests of that state because it couldn’t wait for the federal government to become involved, whereas today there’s constant coordination between states and the federal government. And that sometimes makes it even more difficult for the president to act as president because sometimes state interests and federal interests aren’t at all identical.

  Sometimes it seems that the president has so much to do that there doesn’t ever seem to be any time to get it done, but he can manage to do it if he works at it. I suppose there’s even a temptation for a president who follows a strong president to take it easy, because a strong president who’s accomplished a lot gives his successor a chance to coast along. The new president can always soothe his conscience with that business about the people being tired and anxious for a rest from the pressures of public concerns, and it’s true that people do seem often to expect the successor to a strong and demanding president to go back to the easy way of doing things. But fortunately, it doesn’t usually work out that way. For one thing, a number of strong presidents died or were assassinated before they came out of office, and the successors of these presidents had to carry through. I certainly never gave a thought to taking the easy route because the war was still on and because that’s just not the way I am, and that was the attitude of many of my predecessors. And for another thing, if a fellow has his heart in it, it’s his greatest pleasure and his greatest satisfaction to work hard all the time to try to get worthwhile things done.

  The thing that has to be remembered constantly is that it requires eternal watchfulness to preserve liberty, and the Constitution and the presidency and all the other offices are set up for the purpose of preserving the liberty of the individual. When people cease to understand that that’s the case, and let things run and take care of themselves, then we’re in trouble. It takes leadership all the way through, under any republic or any sort of government, to make it work.

  An equally important thing that a good president must have is the ability to come up with new ideas and an understanding of how the implementation of these ideas will affect not only the present, but the future. To put it a different way, a good president has got to have an understanding of history so that he’s aware of how things were done in the past, develop ideas that fit in with the way things are different at present, and make sure at the same time that these ideas, though beneficial to present-day people, don’t do injury to people of the future. That sentence is a mouthful, and if it also sounds like a handful to accomplish, it is. But it can be done.

  Most good presidents knew the history of our government intimately and thoroughly, and the reason this is important, of course, is that knowledge of the past enables you to understand what makes good government and what doesn’t. I think every one of our past presidents who made great names for themselves were men who knew history and through this knowledge, really understood the background of free government and tried to keep it established in this country.

  Every single one of our past presidents, in some situation, made some good decisions that can be guides to what might come up ordinarily in the operation of a present government. Now, of course, as I’ve said, the ones that I think were the greatest in that line were Washington and Jefferson and Jackson, and the modern ones were Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But even the mistakes made by some of the ones in between are good guides on what not to do. The mistakes were also very important, vitally important, provided you take the time and make the effort to weigh one against the other. This man did this under certain circumstances, and this man did this under the same circumstances, or what appeared to be the same circumstances
, at another time. This one may have been wrong, and that one may have been right, and you have to make up your mind which one is the right one and then try not to make a mistake like the fellow did who was wrong. But obviously, you don’t have that opportunity to judge present events in context with similar or identical past events if your knowledge of past history isn’t good enough.

  In a sense, that’s one of my main reasons for writing this book: to get people, perhaps some future presidents among them, interested in history and make them realize how important an understanding of the past is in dealing with the present and the future. My own period was an important and historic period, presided over for twelve years by Franklin Roosevelt when I took it over and carried it on. And I hope that readers will find the viewpoint of a president on what other presidents were up against, and what the presidency is all about, to be of some interest. The thing I have in mind is to try to interest people in the history of the presidency of the United States in a manner in which they’ll make it a point, on their own hook, to go ahead and read other books on presidents and the presidency and American government in general. There have been very, very many definitive biographies written on the various presidents, and even more books written on the United States, and I have most of them. Some of them are written in such a way that you can’t get the background of the man or the subject without reading the whole thing in a lot of dry language, but there are others that are interesting from the first word to the last, and these can be found if the reader works at it. Anyway, my hope is that this book will cause some people to go out and learn what I learned through a tremendous amount of study and reading of history, which began when I was ten years old.