Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The presidential veto power, incidentally, was another thing that was debated pretty fiercely during the Constitutional Convention. It was Elbridge Gerry who first suggested that the president should have the right to veto a bill or law that he felt was harmful to the people, but that the other legislators should also have the right to overrule him if enough of them felt that he was wrong; his exact language was that “the National Executive shall have a right to negative any legislative act, which shall not afterwards be passed by - parts of each branch of the National Legislature.” (He left the amount blank that would be needed to overrule.) Hamilton and James Wilson felt that the chief executive’s veto power should be absolute, and that the legislators shouldn’t have the right to overrule him under any circumstances, but Ben Franklin and others argued that this would give the president too much power. Finally, it was agreed that the president should definitely have veto power, but that a presidential veto could be overridden if two-thirds of the legislators voted to override the veto. There was a subsequent effort to require the president to get the approval of some members of the judiciary in order to veto a bill, but this was shot down by a very narrow margin; with nine states voting, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia were for it, Delaware, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and South Carolina were against it, and Georgia and Pennsylvania were split on the subject. And that’s the way the veto situation remains today.

  Another way in which Washington worked hard was that he did a lot of traveling in order to talk to people and give them an idea of what the Constitution meant and what he was trying to do to make it work. He made tours all over the country at a time when it took months to travel from one place to another; he traveled by stagecoach and on horseback and he made it his business to visit every single state in the union. Whenever Congress wasn’t in session, he went from Georgia to Massachusetts and from Delaware to Virginia, time and again, familiarizing the people with the government of the United States and with the presidential viewpoint. He was working to establish the government, the hardest thing any man can ever do, and I think he did more than any other person of the period to knit the country together as the United States of America.

  He accomplished it by having meetings all over the place. He just talked to the people and explained things. And I suppose that, when he went on his trips, one or two of his cabinet officers came along with him and helped him do it. I don’t know that for sure; I don’t think there’s any record of it. But I’m sure that when he went into the states where these men came from, they were there to receive him because he was so well liked and admired in every state. It couldn’t have been otherwise, or they wouldn’t have argued him into being president that second time.

  He wasn’t a great orator, but he was able to put his thoughts across so that people could understand what he was talking about, and could understand what he was trying to do and leave the meetings convinced that he was capable of doing it. I’ve read a couple of books over the years that sneered at the way Washington talked and wrote, saying he was long-winded and flowery, but that’s just nonsense. The formal and wordy way of writing, and to some extent speaking, was the customary style of the day, and they all did it. They all used long sentences in their speeches; go ahead and read some of Daniel Webster’s speeches if you don’t believe that. And they had a system of something they called polite correspondence; people were taught how to write letters and how to close letters and how to address each other, and there was a great deal of flowery language involved in those things, and some of it crept into Washington’s speeches and correspondence and messages. We’ve got his messages here in the Truman Library, all of them, and I’ve read them many times, so I know what the nitpickers are talking about. But for heaven’s sake, everybody wrote that way and talked that way to a certain extent at that time, and the simple proof of that is that, as the historical records show, a lot of the things he signed weren’t written entirely by him. When he wrote a message to Congress, every one of his cabinet members made a contribution to it, and if he discussed a matter with members of the Congress, he sometimes inserted a paragraph or two in the exact language that somebody in Congress had suggested to him. We all do that when we have to do it.

  I think every president ought to travel a lot, and I think every president ought to make it his business to give the people an exact outline of what his program is and why he wants it. That’s a lot easier to do now because we have a far better transportation system and communications system than we had at that time. But Washington was a full-time president, and if it took travel by stagecoach or horseback to inform the people of his country of what was going on, then he jumped on his horse or got into a stagecoach and did it. He was a full-time president, all right, not like one or two of the lazy fellows we’ve had since his time.

  I’m sure Washington felt that his travels were a plain and simple necessity because I’m certain that he had the same difficulties that all other presidents have when we’re trying to get things done for the welfare of the country - at least what we’re convinced is for the welfare of the country. As I’ve mentioned, he was attacked viciously in the press on nearly every decision he made, but it didn’t stop him because he thought that he was doing right, and he was willing to try and carry things through. And as long as he got the proper support in the Congress, he did carry things through.

  This isn’t to say that those attacks by the press didn’t upset him. They worried him and made him feel bad and sometimes discouraged him for a while. One time he even threatened to resign the presidency; and when the time came along for the second administration, as you know, they had to do a lot of persuading to get him to continue in the job because of those vicious and public attacks. He didn’t like it very much, you may be sure; in fact, under ordinary conditions, and if he hadn’t been president of the United States, there isn’t any doubt that he would have fought some duels with the men who made the meanest remarks about him. But that doesn’t make him an egotist; he just wasn’t used to attacks like that because they didn’t do that kind of thing when he was a general in the Continental Army. For the most part, his problems were essentially with the press. He didn’t have much trouble with the major politicians of the day because many of them had served under him, and they liked him and thought he was all right. When he put forth policy, of course, there was sometimes opposition. Jefferson opposed some of his policies, and that’s one of the other reasons Jefferson quit the cabinet. But Jefferson and the others had a perfect right to oppose policies when they felt the policies were wrong, and I’m sure Washington understood that and dealt with those situations calmly and sensibly.

  He was a good executive, and a tough one when necessary, but I don’t think he was the hard-boiled person some historians say except in his military career. When he was the commanding general, he acted like a commanding general, but I think as a president he acted like a servant of the people. And that’s the reason he made those tours all around the country - to let people know what he wanted and why he wanted it, and to give them the chance whenever they wanted to ask questions about the various things he was doing or planning.

  THERE’S ONE OTHER matter I want to take up, and that’s Washington’s reputation for conservatism and isolationism.

  I don’t think there’s any question about the fact that Washington was about as conservative as it’s possible for a man to be in many of his views, and it’s natural that he was because, in those pioneer days, a man had to think more about staying alive and about the welfare of his family and his own welfare than about the needs of the rest of the world. And I don’t think there’s any question about the fact that Washington’s administration was more conservative than anything else, and that conservatism rather than liberalism was the order of the day. TThe thing has been going on ever since Washington’s time in the same sort of way, with the pendulum swinging from one side of the clock to the other and conservatives controlling the country part of the time and liberals (some of whom weren�
�t so liberal) controlling the country the other part. But the thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that Washington and his people had to be conservative in order to start the country off; they had to think more about themselves and their needs and problems than about the rest of the world. And that doesn’t mean because that kind of thinking was proper and correct for the eighteenth century, it’s also the right way to think now.

  I’ve been asked if Washington would have been the same sort of conservative president during this period as he was during his two terms in office. Damned if I know. You never can tell; that’s another of those hypothetical questions at which you can only guess the answer. But I doubt it. Washington, I’m sure, would have done what he thought was the right thing whether the people agreed with him or not. And if the country happened to be on one of those pendulum swings at the time where the conservatives controlled the thinking, whereas Washington felt, as I do, that we’re now at the point where every resident of the world has to think of the well-being of every other citizen of the world, he would have been a liberal president and not a conservative.

  The same thing applies to Washington’s attitude of isolationism. Washington is often used as an example of America’s minding her own business, and the first of our isolationists, and I’m afraid it’s quite true. There’s no question about the fact that Washington was almost an absolute isolationist. In his Farewell Address, Washington said very clearly and very specifically that we should detach ourselves from the rest of the world in every way except commerce, and it’s that message that isolationists have always read in the Senate since that time. These were his exact words: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.”

  Washington wrote the speech with Hamilton’s help. They tried to get Jefferson in on it, but I don’t think he had anything to do with it because he was concerned with freedom of the seas and other international problems, and he was a lot more interested in help from other nations than the other two men. Washington never actually gave the speech; he just had it printed in the Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser’s issue of September 17, 1796. But it was the greatest isolationist document that’s ever been written, and every modern isolationist’s point of view is the direct descendant of that Farewell Address. And when I was in the Senate, and I guess right up until recently, it was standard practice for someone to read that address on Washington’s birthday.

  Well, Washington’s brand of isolationism was just good common sense on his part. It was a long way to Europe, and we were defended by two oceans that were hard to navigate, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and that created the idea of an isolationist Western Hemisphere. And at that time, the 3 million Americans scattered from Maine to the southern boundary of Georgia were not in a position to become a loud voice in world affairs, anyway.

  The strongest countries at this point in history were France and England, of course, and they were at each other’s throat much of the time. During most of the Napoleonic period, it looked very much as if France would have absolute control of all Europe and wipe Britain out, but it didn’t happen because the British controlled the seas. Spain was pretty much on the downgrade. The Spanish government began its downgrade when the Spanish Armada was wiped out by Sir Francis Drake, and they never really recovered from it; and then later on, Spain was controlled entirely by Napoleon during the height of his success. So the two powers that really counted were Britain and France, and we were avoiding involvement with the two major powers because we were weak. We didn’t want to get involved in a foreign war at that time. We couldn’t afford it, and we didn’t have the men to put in a foreign war in any case. Washington, therefore, was trying to reach a balance in American thinking regarding those two countries so as to protect the new government of the United States, and he thought that the less we meddled in the foreign affairs of Europe - that’s all they looked at then, the foreign affairs of Europe - the better off we’d be.

  But that was then, and this is now. We’re no longer a small country that can’t afford to get mixed up in foreign affairs; we’re one of the great leaders of the free world, and that message of Washington’s doesn’t work anymore because he was faced with an entirely different situation. That’s one of the things we’ve always got to keep in mind: that we’ve always got to meet situations as they shape up now with present-day considerations and conditions, and not base decisions entirely on situations of the past, which may be entirely different from today’s conditions. It goes without saying that the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean are no longer defense barriers. You can cross either one of them now in less than three or four hours, and it’s going to be that soon we’ll cross them quicker. Communication is instantaneous. We can talk to London, Paris, Moscow, Peking, or anywhere else in the world, just like that. It doesn’t take any longer than the snap of the fingers to get hooked up to them, and we know instantly what goes on in every section of the world. And that means that the world has changed from a thirty-inch globe to a globe the size of an orange, or maybe even a grape.

  Washington, of course, was afraid that the strong European countries, the royalists, would come in and try to take over the Western Hemisphere as they’d done before. But as time passed, it became more and more clear that you can’t protect the country, you can’t keep the United States safe, by pretending not to be part of the world. It took the United States a long, long time to realize that we were part of the international community and that we must be ready to oppose other countries when necessary and help them when necessary, but we finally came around to accepting that fact.

  The first major example of our acceptance of these facts of life occurred during the administration of our fifth president, James Monroe, when it became clear that Spain, with the help of France, was planning to seize some of its former possessions in Latin America and make them Spanish colonies again, and that Russia was also thinking about insisting that its territory in Alaska extended right down into what is now Oregon. This worried both Great Britain and our own country, since both countries had territorial claims in the Pacific Northwest at that time, and we also both had good commercial relationships with the independent Latin American countries. Britain’s foreign secretary, George Canning, suggested that we join forces and warn off the European countries together, but John Quincy Adams, who was then Monroe’s secretary of state and later, of course, became our sixth president, advised Monroe that we ought to take our own stand and not, in Adams’ words, look like “a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”

  In 1823, therefore, Monroe made our position clear with some strong statements that became known as the Monroe Doctrine, warning that we wouldn’t tolerate the establishment of any new European colonies in the Western Hemisphere or any attempts to seize existing countries that were already independent. The Monroe Doctrine wasn’t a new American law or anything of that sort, as most people who’ve forgotten their history lessons seem to think; a doctrine is just a principle that someone proposes or advocates, and Monroe made his statements as part of his annual address to Congress. But in very plain language, he stated that all Western Hemisphere territories were “henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers” and that any movement into the Latin American countries for the purpose of “controlling their destinies” would be considered an act of unfriendliness toward the United States, and his words were heard and understood very clearly. And that policy has been the American position ever since that time.

  It didn’t always hold up, of course. During the Civil War, for example, when we had our hands full with a few other things, France moved into Mexico and set up an empire there. But when our war was over, the empire was broken up and Mexico became a republic. And in Cleveland’s second term in office, toward the end of the ni
neteenth century, there was that business with Great Britain’s colony, British Guiana, and the neighboring country of Venezuela, where some Americans became convinced that Britain was trying to expand its territorial holdings by insisting that part of Venezuela’s acreage actually belonged to British Guiana, and the United States sent Great Britain a note boasting that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent” and implying that the Monroe Doctrine had been violated and insisting on immediate arbitration between Great Britain and Venezuela.

  That one was more than a little bit hysterical, particularly since Cleveland referred to his communication publicly as a “twenty-gun note” and followed it up with a message to Congress demanding that this country “must resist by every means in its power” Britain’s move to take territory from Venezuela. The British were offended at first by the high-handed note and did nothing whatsoever, but fortunately they were essentially good-natured about it; 1,300 British authors and more than 300 members of Parliament sent messages designed to cool things down, and so did a great many Americans, and eventually arbitration between Venezuela and Great Britain took place. For the record, most of the arbitration was decided in favor of Great Britain.