Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  How do I personally feel about the Electoral College system? Well, that other fellow I mentioned is me. I received the most votes in both categories when I ran against Dewey, but I didn’t receive the majority of the popular votes. I got 24,105,812 votes, which was 49 percent of the votes cast, while Dewey got 21,970,065 votes, 45 percent, Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat candidate, got 1,169,063 votes, 2 percent, Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive candidate, got 1,157,172, also 2 percent, and the other 2 percent got scattered among other people. But in the Electoral College voting, I got a stronger majority, 303 votes to Dewey’s 189 and Thurmond’s 39. (Wallace didn’t get any electoral votes.) I got the majority of electoral votes in twenty-eight states - Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming; the fellow with the little mustache got the electoral votes in sixteen states - Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Vermont; and Thurmond got Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. So it can certainly be said that I benefited personally, in a way, from the Electoral College system.

  Still and all, I don’t think I’ll abstain from this one; I think I’ll come right out and say that, all things considered, I’m in favor of a change to election of our presidents on the simple basis of putting in the man who gets the most votes from the people of our country. And I wouldn’t want to see some silly clause stuck in that says he has to get the largest percentage of votes as compared to the combined percentage of the votes for all the other sixteen people running against him, if you count all the candidates put up by the various little parties. It just seems to be elementary logic that, since every citizen in the country has the right to vote for his or her choice for president, the man who gets more votes than any of the other candidates ought to be told that he’s our next president. That’s simpler, cleaner, and it makes the most sense.

  LET’S GET BACK to George Washington. He was now president of the United States, and let me tell you, he really worked at it.

  As you can imagine, he was an unknown quantity as the first chief executive of a new country, and, of course, the country itself was an unknown quantity, made up of different kinds of people trying to work together as a single unit for the first time. It was one thing to fight together in an army against a common enemy, but an entirely different thing to function together in peacetime and create laws and systems that everyone would obey and follow. All Americans knew Washington as a tough general and as a patriot and as a man capable of running temporary organizations like the Constitutional Convention for brief periods of time, but nobody knew how he’d function at the long-range and complex job of running the country. Fortunately for all of us living in this country in later years, with all of its privileges and freedoms and blessings, he was good at it, good at the job of getting the country started and keeping it going.

  In my opinion, that’s the principal and outstanding thing in Washington’s character, even more than his ability as a military strategist or anything else, his ability to become a chief executive in a new government and act like a chief executive. And even when some decisions were hard to make, he made them, and he carried them through. I think he realized from the first day that it was the business of the executive to enforce laws, and he enforced them. The Whiskey Rebellion, which took place in 1794, is a good example.

  In 1791, Alexander Hamilton, who became the country’s first secretary of the treasury, levied a tax on liquor to help pay off the debts created by the war and to bring in some revenue to run the government. A lot of people in Pennsylvania didn’t care much for the new tax; many of the farmers made a practice of turning their corn crops into corn liquor and selling the liquor instead of undertaking the heavy expense of moving the corn long distances to sell it, and they felt that the new tax was discriminatory. They were mostly hard-bitten fellows of Scotch-Irish descent who enjoyed using up a little of their home product themselves, and they refused to pay the tax. Riots broke out in many places in Pennsylvania, and partly on Hamilton’s advice and partly because he felt the same way himself, Washington decided to get tough about it. He believed it was necessary and important to establish, once and for all, the right of the Congress of the United States to levy taxes in any way it saw fit, since the taxes were being levied by the representatives of the people. He sent 15,000 soldiers into Pennsylvania and showed up in person to review the troops, a simple and pointed show of federal strength, and the rioting stopped and the people of Pennsylvania paid the tax like everybody else.

  At the same time, however, Washington realized, the way a really good executive of any type should, that too much toughness isn’t a good idea, either - that an excessive show of authority can easily degenerate into toughness for its own sake, just to show who’s boss. So when Hamilton, who sometimes tended to behave on the autocratic side, wasn’t satisfied even when the riots stopped and felt it was necessary to make examples of the rioters and had some of them arrested, Washington promptly pardoned the men.

  As an executive, Washington was one of the best men who was ever in office. Some of the great, fundamental, basic laws that are still in force were passed in Washington’s administration, and it took a man who was a first-rate administrator and had the energy and the intestinal fortitude to make those things work. If Washington hadn’t been that sort of man, I don’t think we would have had a government.

  Naturally, there were accusations every time he felt it was necessary to put his foot down and do something tough, accusations that he was trying to act like a king. You’ll find all of that in the newspapers that were published at the time. He was treated like a pickpocket by the press when he was president. He was always being abused by nitpickers. He was called a traitor and a royalist, and he was accused of wanting to establish a sort of royal line to take charge of the government. None of it was true, of course. Hamilton was also accused of acting like a king, and so were the other people around Washington. But Washington didn’t want to be a king. He could have been if he wanted to be, too, because there was plenty of talk after the Revolution about establishing the country as a new kingdom with Washington as our first monarch. But Washington wanted the country to go according to the Constitution, which he had helped to write. He just wasn’t the kind of man who spent time trying to promote himself, which is evident, or should be, from the fact that he tried to get out at the end of his first term. But they persuaded him to go with a second term, and it’s a good thing that they did.

  He just wasn’t interested in absolute power or inherited power at all. He didn’t want a monarch as head of the government. He wanted the United States to have a chief executive who had been elected by the people, or as nearly elected by the people as the rules about the Electoral College in the Constitution would allow. And he consulted all the time with the men who surrounded him as advisors because he wanted the laws and operation of the country to be based on as many different viewpoints as possible.

  There were only four cabinet posts in the first government: secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, secretary of war, and attorney general. That was it, only those four, but Washington managed all right under the circumstances. As the country grew, of course, and the situation developed where the president needed more help, where responsibilities piled up, why, they expanded the cabinet, and it’s proper that that was done. But Washington did fine with what he had. Each member of his cabinet, naturally, had the help he needed to operate - I’m sure they all had secretaries - and Washington also had a staff just like any other president would have to have. He’d been in the habit of running an army, and he knew how to set up a proper staff. I don’t know how often he met with the members of his cabinet. He met with them as often as was necessary.
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  Jefferson was Washington’s first secretary of state; Hamilton, as I’ve mentioned, was his secretary of the treasury; Henry Knox was the first secretary of war; and Edmund Randolph, the fellow who came up with that Virginia Plan, was the first attorney general. But there were plenty of changes during Washington’s two administrations.

  Jefferson and Hamilton didn’t get along at all, and they had some outstanding debates during cabinet meetings that practically turned into fistfights. Hamilton was far from content with sticking to financial matters and spent a lot of time talking about foreign affairs, in which he was essentially pro-British, favoring a return to friendship with the British now that we were an independent country, and he didn’t care much for the French. The French were, of course, having their own revolution at that time, and surprisingly, or at least it surprised me when I first read about it, Hamilton was against that revolution despite his support of the American Revolution. Whereas Jefferson was pro-French and didn’t trust the British. (I suppose the reason, as much as anything, is that Hamilton tended to be aristocratic in his outlook and admired the British ruling classes, and he was against the revolution in France because the lower-class people were taking over and executing the aristocracy.

  Jefferson, on the other hand, was a supporter of the belief of the equality of all people. You’d have guessed, thinking about the backgrounds of the two men, that it would have been the other way around, since Jefferson had an aristocratic background - he was a direct descendant of King David I of Scotland - and Hamilton grew up in humbler circumstances. He was the illegitimate son of James Hamilton, a West Indies planter, and of Rachel Faucett Lavien, the estranged wife of a doctor and part-time planter. But that’s the way it was.)

  The quarrels between the two men became so severe that, in 1793, Jefferson quit and returned to private life for a while and was replaced by Randolph, transferring from his job as attorney general. But Randolph lasted only until 1795 because he was disliked by both the Jefferson and the Hamilton factions, and he was replaced by Timothy Pickering, a lawyer from Massachusetts and a friend of Hamilton’s, who kept everybody reasonably happy and continued in his job into John Adams’ administration.

  Hamilton served as secretary of the treasury until 1795, then resigned because he was starting to feel a financial pinch and knew he could make a lot more money as a lawyer and banker in New York than in government. (I should explain that he left the West Indies when he was seventeen to study at King’s College, which later became Columbia University, and then established a law practice in New York City. He subsequently married Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of General Philip Schuyler, which made him part of an old and respected New York family. He was also one of the founders of the Bank of New York, which is still around.) But even as a private citizen, he remained close to Washington and kept a hand in the development of the country, continuing to give advice to his successor, Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, and other government officials, and he also helped to write Washington’s eventual Farewell Address. Wolcott continued as secretary of the treasury throughout the remainder of Washington’s period in office and stayed on for a while for Adams.

  In the secretary of war post, Knox stayed on until 1794, then was replaced by Timothy Pickering until Pickering became secretary of state; then James McHenry of Maryland, who was a surgeon during the Revolutionary War, took over the job and continued into the Adams administration. Knox and McHenry were both well-liked; Knox got Fort Knox named after him, and McHenry got Fort McHenry in Baltimore named after him. I guess Pickering was okay, too, but after John Adams became president, he accused Pickering of scheming with his pal Alexander Hamilton to involve the United States in a quarrel and then a war with France, and fired him. So I can’t find any record of anything important being named after Pickering, but he did go on to become chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas of Massachusetts and then a United States representative and senator.

  In the attorney general’s job, William Bradford, a former judge in Pennsylvania, took over after Randolph moved over to become secretary of state in 1794; he lasted only a year and was replaced by Charles Lee of Virginia, who held the job into the Adams administration. This wasn’t the same Charles Lee who was a general in the Revolutionary War and behaved so poorly at the Battle of Monmouth, you’ll recall, that he was thrown out of the army. This one was a brother of Henry Lee, better known as Light-Horse Harry Lee, a general who was an excellent officer during the Revolutionary War, and also commanded the troops that Washington sent into Pennsylvania during the Whiskey Rebellion. He was also the man who wrote that famous line about Washington, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” (And just to be a bit mischievous, let me take a line or two to tell you about another side of the man. He was also such a poor businessman that he failed to pay some bills and was thrown in debtors’ prison for a while, even though he had plenty of money.) He was also the father of General Robert E. Lee of Civil War fame. I hope I’m not confusing you with all these generals and all these Lees.

  As you can see, Washington had a lot of talent surrounding him during his years in the presidency, many of these people of high intellectual order. He was, himself, a practical man who had been through all sorts of difficulties on the ground and knew how to act when problems came along; you might even say that he was a practical man surrounded by intellectuals. That’s a good combination. You’ve got to have highly educated people who know history and who have a viewpoint, maybe, that’s so idealistic that it won’t work practically some of the time, and then you’ve got to have practical men to put it into effect. A good president is a man who’s able to use the brains and ability of all the people that he can persuade to come and advise him. I don’t think you can overemphasize the importance of intellectuals because the intellectual is one of the best assets the country has, but you must also have a practical man around as a safety valve to show how the intellectual ideas can be put to work for the benefit of the people. That’s all there is to it, and it’s clear that Washington knew how to use his practical sense together with his advisors’ intellectual abilities.

  He was in touch constantly with all of the leading people in the government, the way any president who’s going to make a success of his job has to be, and he also tried his best to consult with Congress whenever possible. That wasn’t always as successful. You’ll recall that that one time Washington went over to the Senate in person to discuss a matter - that time that they were so discourteous to him that he cussed them out and left - almost ended all discussions or appearances by the president forever. This was a voluntary approach by the president because he believed in advice and consent as stated in the Constitution; but even though he pulled out that time and never went back again, I’m sure he still had plenty of conversations with senators and members of the House of Representatives. You know, of course, that congressmen aren’t hesitant about seeing the president if they want some special thing done in their part of the country. I’m certain that he met with senators and representatives whenever they wanted to talk to him, and I’m very sure that when he had important matters pending, he discussed the matters with individual congressmen. I don’t know whether or not he ever appeared before a congressional committee, but I know that the chairmen of those committees, and maybe the individual members, talked to Washington because he had to sign the things. And they certainly didn’t want him to veto anything, because he was so popular with the Congress in general that there was no chance that one of his vetoes could have been carried over his head.