by Harry Truman
And fortunately, there are plenty of good men around all the time if you look hard for them. I’d say that 96 percent of the men and women around most presidents are good people, even if they sometimes have interests that conflict with what the president may think is right for the country. The men and women have a right to that opinion, and if a president understands that there are all sections of the country and varied kinds of attitudes and opinions to be considered, then he can go ahead and take or not take the advice of the people who are around him.
A lot of the reports are not supposed to be advice, anyway, just information on what the situation is in different parts of the country. There’s a distinction between advice and reports: A report is made by a man who gives the president an outline of what the situation is in certain sections of the economy and the people, and advice is when that fellow tries to make his report a part of the policy of the president. The president doesn’t have to take that advice unless he wants to take it. He just has to consider everybody and everything and make what he hopes and believes is a good decision. And if it turns out that he’s made a wrong decision, then he’s got to be smart enough to realize it and brave enough to make another one.
My definition of a leader in a free country is a man who can persuade people to do what they don’t want to do, or do what they’re too lazy to do, and like it. Of course, you’ve got to have a program that you yourself believe is the best possible program you can get together. You’ve got to have that program in such a shape, or just one part of that program in such shape, that it will be for the benefit of all the people under the government. And you’ve got to have plenty of people around you whom you can trust to help you implement that program, whatever it may be, and whether or not they agree with that program, or all of it, themselves. And then you’re in a position to wake the public up to the fact that “here it is, here’s what we have to do to accomplish this. Now, come on, let’s do it.” And if you’re persuasive, people will do things even if they don’t like it or don’t feel much like doing it, and you’ll come out all right.
It really isn’t much of a trick for a president to get people to go along with his programs and policies because the president has so many ways to present his viewpoint and pound that viewpoint home. The best medium that the president has had to date, and it’s a relatively recent one, is the press conference, because he answers all sorts of questions and some of the papers print these things in toto. And the next best way is for the president to go from one end of the country to the other and tell the people what he thinks. That’s a form of campaigning, of course, but the presidential office is a constant campaign to get your programs over. And a president, to get his programs over, must inform the people of exactly what he’s trying to do and keep on informing them. The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it. Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they’ll believe it and go along with you.
That’s why I’ve always felt that a good president has to be the greatest public relations man in the world: because he’s got to make the country believe that what he wants to do is the proper thing. The problem with some presidents was their inability to understand that the human animal can be convinced of right when it’s right, and they didn’t make any effort to convince people. And some presidents, at least some of the time, didn’t really care whether people were convinced or not because it didn’t really matter to them whether the program they were pushing actually got into operation; they just wanted, in a very cynical way, to appear to be backing certain attractive or popular things in order to get a lot of space and admiration in the newspapers. I don’t like to charge presidents with trying to get themselves headlines, but the plain fact is that there have been some who loved press coverage more than anything else on earth, Teddy Roosevelt being as good an example of that as anybody. But I think most presidents were just anxious to do their duty, and most good presidents did believe in what they were trying to do and did make the effort to convince people of the value of their programs.
And if it turned out that the program the president was trying to put over wasn’t as good a program as he thought it was, that was no great tragedy; the president just admitted his error and tried something else. Obviously, there are times when a president will make a wrong decision. Well, if he’s a man of good sense, he’ll listen to the arguments against what he wants to do, and if he finds that he’s wrong, he’ll go ahead in the other direction. That’s merely a matter of laying the plans on the table and letting everybody have his say. I honestly believe that most presidents are pretty well-informed and convinced that the programs they want to follow are correct, but when they find out that they’re not, then they’re willing to admit that something else ought to be done.
I’m not referring to oratory when I say that a president has got to be a good public relations man. I don’t think oratory is an advantage to a president. He’s got to make himself understood, of course, and he’s got to deliver his statements in a manner that isn’t boring so that people will listen to him and be interested in what he has to say. In that case, he’s orator enough; the greatest orators have been the men who understood what they wanted to say, said it in short sentences and said it quickly, and then got out of there before people fell asleep. They say the greatest orator in history was Demosthenes, and if you read his famous oration, which made him great, it’s not long, and it’s said in a way that you can understand, even in translation.
It doesn’t really matter where the men who wrote the Constitution got the idea of the separation of powers, or whether my theories on how they got the idea, those theories I stated a while ago, are correct. It’s the right idea. And the way to accomplish this is to limit the president’s powers, that’s all, and the president’s powers are set out in the Constitution and limited by the Constitution. The legislative branch of the government is in a position to overrule anything the president does since the Congress can, by a two-thirds majority, pass a law whether he likes it or not. It’s not easy for Congress to put together that two-thirds majority, but it has been done.
At the same time, there’s an escape valve in a time of real emergency, which is the president’s emergency powers. The Romans, whenever they got into trouble in their Republic, always elected a dictator to carry the Republic along and get through the emergency, but you don’t have to do that with the Constitution of the United States. The president just exercises his emergency powers, which have to be okayed by Congress, but are just about always granted when they’re really needed because most senators and representatives realize that, in an emergency, you have to have the power to go ahead and do what’s necessary.
Decisions have to be made here and now - they can’t wait. And though this may sound like a strange thing to say, a crisis can sometimes be a good thing for the country, because some men don’t seem to be able to develop leadership when there’s no crisis. That’s been proven conclusively in the cases of those do-nothing presidents I’ve been naming to you, and the best actions of many presidents, I think, were brought about either by a crisis or the anticipation of a crisis. But under our form of government, you don’t have to have a dictator in order to deal with the problems. (In fact, there’s never even been a hint of possible dictatorship by any of our presidents because they’re all elected for a certain term and a certain period. If the people don’t like them, they know they can be thrown out.)
It also works the other way around, of course, since the president can also limit the power of the legislative branch if he doesn’t like something that they’re cooking up. This is done by way of the president’s veto power, which is one of the greatest strengths that the president has. The president has a perfect right to analyze legislation when it comes up, just as he has the right to analyze whether a law is constitutional or not. And when he decides that it’s not proper for him to sign something, or if it’s against one of his policies and he feels certain that his policy is right,
he vetoes it. And there’s also that pocket veto, which a president can use if, as often happens, a bill he doesn’t like comes to him late. If he doesn’t sign it within ten days after Congress adjourns, as I’ve mentioned before, the bill is dead anyway.
Some people have the mistaken impression that presidential veto power is a fairly recent thing, but it’s been going on almost as long as the country has been in operation. The first president to veto a bill, as a matter of fact, was the first president, George Washington. This took place in April 1792, and it occurred because a census taken in 1790 showed that, of the 4 million people in the country at the time, there were far more citizens in the North than in the South. This was because nearly a fifth of the southern population was made up of slaves, 700,000 men and women, and of course, they weren’t citizens and couldn’t vote. The legislative branch wanted to reapportion congressional seats and give more of them to northerners than southerners, but Washington came from Virginia, of course, and didn’t care much for this idea and vetoed it. The Congress couldn’t get up enough votes to override his veto, so they came up with a less drastic reapportionment, and this one Washington signed.
The Constitutional Convention, in fact, wanted to give the president the right of absolute veto, suggesting that “the National Executive shall have the right to negative any legislative act.” But that brilliant and farseeing fellow, Benjamin Franklin, opposed this, as well he should have. He said he feared that “the Executive will be always increasing here, till it ends in a monarchy,” and the delegates decided that the legislative branch should have the ability to kill a presidential veto in the same way they can kill one of his laws. So that, too, can be done with a two-thirds majority, though it’s even harder to accomplish than the one to kill proposed new laws.
The point in all this is that that’s the next thing it’s essential for a good president to have: the ability to work with Congress, the varied and independent and sometimes unpredictable men and women who make up the Senate and the House of Representatives.
It goes without saying that this isn’t always easy to do, or maybe a more accurate way to put it is to say that it’s rarely ever easy to do. Even Washington found this out the first time he went down to Congress in person to talk to the men assembled there. Washington was one of the richest men in the country and never lost sight of that fact, and he also knew he was looked upon almost like a god by a large segment of the population because mobs of people kept cheering him and throwing flowers in his path when he rode his horse from Virginia to take up his duties in the country’s first capital, New York City, so he was a pompous man in some ways. When he went to state affairs, for example, he wore velvet and satin and diamond knee-buckles and powdered his hair, things that were already going out of fashion among the plain people of the United States, and he had himself driven around New York in a fancy-looking coach with six horses and outriders.
But Washington was also an extremely modest man in his attitude toward himself as the first president, and in his nervousness about running a new and entirely different kind of country. His inaugural address was filled with references to his lack of experience in politics and administrative duties and his other flaws and deficiencies, statements that were sincere without a doubt; he wrote to General Henry Knox, his friend and his secretary of war (and the man for whom Fort Knox is named), that he felt “not unlike a culprit going to his execution”; and when he got to New York City, among the first things he did was to go to the Society Library there and read books like Law of Nations and Debates of the House of Commons in order to get some idea of what running a country would be like. So when he put together the first treaty he wanted the country to negotiate, which I think was one of his first attempts to get a treaty going with the Indian nations, he kept in mind the section of the Constitution which says that treaties should be made with the advice and consent of the Senate, and he hurried over there to do just that.
(The language of the Constitution, incidentally, is that the president can sign treaties but only with the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, and it doesn’t include the House of Representatives. This became important in 1793, when the country’s first Chief Justice, John Jay, prepared a treaty with Great Britain and the Senate okayed it. The treaty was very controversial; Jefferson and others hated it because Great Britain was at war with France, and the treaty seemed to be a betrayal of the friendship between the United States and France, which had helped this country during the Revolutionary War, and also because Jay’s Treaty didn’t attempt to rectify Britain’s practice of boarding American ships and pressing all English immigrants into British naval service on the grounds that, as far as the Crown was concerned, they were still Englishmen. But Washington was convinced that the treaty would postpone further hostilities with England, which the Americans were in no position to undertake at that point - and it did, of course, until 1812, when America was better prepared. So when the House of Representatives grumbled about the treaty and asked to see all the related documents, Washington refused on the grounds that only the Senate had to approve the thing. Which I think he felt was more than enough.)
Well, getting back to the time Washington went over to the Senate, the senators didn’t treat him very courteously. All he was trying to do was get the advice and consent of the Senate as specified in the Constitution, and they wouldn’t give it to him. You see, the Congress was a successor to the Continental Congress, and they were already organized. They had committees and everything of that kind, so when Washington went down to discuss the treaty with the Senate, when he wanted to get their advice on the treaty, they told him they couldn’t do business that way. They said that they had to have a committee, and they’d place the matter before the committee, and then they’d discuss it and get back to him, and they couldn’t operate anyhow with the president sitting right there in the Senate and staring at them. The old man15 got up and told them they could go to hell as far as he was concerned. He was worse than blunt. He called them a lot of interesting names, and he left in a huff and never went back. He was trying to advise and consent with the Senate, and the damn fools wouldn’t advise and consent, and after that, treaties were just written up and then sent over for consideration.
Washington wasn’t the only president who had his problems with Congress, of course, not by any means. Practically every president has had them: even Lincoln, as I’ve already discussed, when he was saving the Union and some people in Congress were trying to hamper him so he couldn’t do his job as president, and he got tough because he wasn’t going to let them do that. Franklin Roosevelt had his difficulties, too, particularly, if you remember, with what was called the matter of the nine old men, the Chief Justice and the associate justices of the Supreme Court. The trouble was that the justices were mostly conservatives left over from previous administrations, and Roosevelt felt that they were hampering his efforts to improve conditions in the country at a time when we were in the grip of the worst depression in our history; among other things, they decided that both his NRA and his AAA were unconstitutional, (The AAA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, was designed to reduce crop surpluses so that farm products would be less easily and cheaply available and farmers could take in more money for their products; and the NRA, the National Recovery Act, was designed to suspend antitrust and price-fixing regulations so that companies could work more closely together and hopefully improve business conditions, with participating companies agreeing as their part of the bargain to end child labor, reduce their workweeks, recognize labor unions, and improve conditions for employees in general.) Roosevelt’s desire was to get rid of the men he felt were preventing him from accomplishing his aims, but in his effort to change the situation, the truth of the matter is that he went about things in the wrong way and caused a lot of the difficulties. The plan he proposed was that all Supreme Court justices be required to retire at the age of seventy instead of being allowed to stay on for their lifetimes if they desired, or if that wasn’t acceptable
, that he be allowed to appoint one additional associate justice, up to a total of six, for each justice who was then, or subsequently reached, the age of seventy and had a minimum of ten years of service. His plan didn’t work because it brought protests from a lot of people - including some of his own supporters - that he was trying to “pack” the Supreme Court. In time, of course, many of the old men died, and he ended up with a Chief Justice and eight associate justices of his own selection, all of them far more liberal than the previous fellows.
But the interesting thing is that, even while the nine old men were still sitting on the bench, that conservative Supreme Court suddenly became a lot less conservative and passed a lot of the measures that Roosevelt wanted.
The one thing Roosevelt proved with the many measures he did get through is that the president is the boss and the only boss, and he can call the shots and not let himself be pushed around by the Supreme Court or Congress or any other body or individual. Every president becomes aware very quickly that there are congressional leaders, men serving at the same time as him, who are very anxious to move the power of the operation of the government of the United States into the legislative branch, but not every chief executive has been willing to get tough about it and say that that’s all wrong. We’ve had presidents who sat back and let Congress take their powers away from them. It depends altogether on the leadership that both parties have at any particular time, but it makes no difference how strong the leadership in Congress may be - it shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And if a president knows his powers and his duties, it won’t.