Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The First Amendment, as most people know, guarantees freedom of speech, worship, press, and assembly. The Second guarantees the right to bear arms by state militias and the like. The Third prohibits the quartering of soldiers in homes without permission. The Fourth protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The Fifth, one of the best-known amendments, allows a person to refuse to testify against himself, and protects against double jeopardy and incarceration without indictment. The Sixth provides for an impartial and speedy trial in criminal matters (though unfortunately “speedy” is a relative word), and the Seventh provides for the right of trial by jury in common-law matters. The Eighth prohibits excessive bail, fines, and “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Ninth makes it clear that the fact that the Constitution states some specific rights held by the people doesn’t mean that they’re denied or don’t have other rights not specifically named. And the Tenth states that rights not granted to the federal government as needed for the operation of the country, are reserved to the states.

  The first ten amendments became law in 1791. And just to give you the complete picture, the Eleventh prohibits suits against a state by foreigners or residents of a different state; the Twelfth was the one set up after that mess between Jefferson and Burr and requires that a president have a majority of electoral votes to be elected; and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth were those especially important amendments that came after the Civil War and abolished slavery and guaranteed civil rights to all Americans. The Sixteenth enabled Congress to collect an income tax; the Seventeenth provided for popular election of senators rather than through state legislatures; the Eighteenth was that dumb one, the Prohibition Amendment; and the Nineteenth allowed women to vote as of 1920, and about time. The Twentieth moved up the opening of Congress to January 3 and the inauguration of the president to January 20 so that presidents and other legislators who were no longer in office wouldn’t be around for four months, as they’d been previously, and have all that opportunity to push through bad last-minute laws; the Twenty-first was the sensible one that got rid of Prohibition; the Twenty-second provides that no one can be elected president more than twice; the Twenty-third allows residents of Washington, D.C., to vote for president, finally eliminating in 1961 the antiquated law that prohibited them from doing that; and the Twenty-fourth, passed in 1964, at last eliminated the poll tax and other types of discrimination against “poor people,” which should never have been law in the first place.

  I don’t know whether or not you’re aware of the fact that there have been somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 amendments to the Constitution introduced since Washington’s time, and it’s interesting that only the twenty-four I’ve described have actually been accepted to date.29 That’s because the basic Constitution is sufficiently flexible and sufficiently open to differing but sensible interpretations, so that a good president can succeed in doing (constitutionally) what has to be done - sometimes with a little bit of stretching, of course.

  And it’s equally interesting that only two of the amendments have been truly bad. The Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment, speaks for itself. You can’t prohibit something the largest part of the population wants and enjoys; all you do is make people go underground to get what they want, and you create a whole army of gangsters to supply the need. And I’ve made it clear in many of my public statements and conversations with people, and in this book, that I consider the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting the presidential term, equally stupid and mean-spirited. Someday they’ll repeal that one, too.

  The Constitution has often been called “a bundle of compromises,” but what if it is? That’s all any government is, a bundle of compromises, and when it ceases to be a bundle of compromises, it becomes a dictatorship or goes to pot the way the Fourth French Republic did in 1958, with everybody thinking differently and pushing so hard to get his own way that nothing ever got done, and they had to drag old Charles de Gaulle in as president again for a while to see if he could sew the country back together. A series of compromises is just what they did in the Constitutional Convention; it’s a discussion of every approach to a matter or a problem that’s before a legislative body, or any other body that has to pass on things, and see if you can find an answer or a solution. The ablest men present at the time have to guess how the thing they’re trying to do will affect both the present and the future, and it often takes a compromise to meet that situation. Nobody can predict the future; if you could, you’d be Isaiah or some other prophet. So what’s often needed is an accommodation without surrendering the main principle of what’s trying to be done.

  Some of our “normalcy” presidents, like that fellow Harding who coined the word, used the normalcy excuse at every turn and more or less thrived on the limitations of the Constitution by doing nothing, by just sitting back and saying, “Well, the Constitution prohibits me from doing this or that.” You’ll find that in times of so-called normalcy, people just don’t pay attention to what goes on in government, and they get away with sleeping on the job for a while. And then Harding was succeeded by another man, Coolidge, who was equally indifferent to what his powers were and what he could do in that Oval Office. But fortunately people finally get tired of that sort of thing just as they get tired of a man who exercises too much power, and then there’s a change and maybe another change and, sooner or later, we get someone who tries to get some things accomplished.

  A lot of us had to stretch the Constitution at times. Jackson was a great believer in the Constitution, for example, when he made a statement that the three branches of the government were equally powerful - meaning that, under the Constitution, one branch couldn’t override or overrule any other. Yet, when the Chief Justice made a decision he didn’t like, he said, “Now let him enforce it. I’m president of the United States. How can he enforce it?” Old Jackson also knew how to meet the situation when he was having his trouble with the United States Bank; he just vetoed the bank’s charter and put the bank out of business. The same thing happened in a bigger and much more serious way under Lincoln during the War Between the States, when he suspended the right of habeas corpus and everything else of that kind. All those things certainly stretched the Constitution, but they were absolutely necessary at the time to save the republic.

  Lincoln stretched the Constitution further than any other president because, of course, it was the only time in our history that our country was in danger of being split in half, but the truth of the matter is that that kind of thing has gone on continually. We all had to stretch the Constitution when the time came to do it. Theodore Roosevelt did what he had to do in 1907, when he was having his troubles with the depression and with Wall Street. He pumped money into banks that were failing and did a lot of other things to help business along, like canceling an antitrust action against United States Steel when it was acquiring the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, even though he was usually so vocal about antitrust matters, because otherwise the Tennessee company would sink. And when Wilson came along, he met a financial situation that was equally bad, so what he did was set up the Federal Reserve Board and based our currency on production in the country so that it could expand and contract to meet all possible situations. Wilson did far more extreme things than that as well; he was the greatest constitutional lawyer ever to sit in the White House, but he did what he had to do when the First World War started up. And I’m sure most people are familiar with all the great laws and programs that Franklin Roosevelt put through in the first part of his administration, things that were again necessary to help and perhaps even save our people and our country.

  I’ll go into more detail about some of those things in the next few chapters on our greatest presidents, but the point is that, when these men did these things, they weren’t stretching the Constitution until it cracked. They were stretching it in exactly the way it was meant to be stretched when it was first put together, because the Constitution is an expanding document designed to meet each new situa
tion as it comes along. It’s also an enabling document all the way through - to enable a president to do what’s necessary to do. It’s the greatest document of government ever written because it’s an outline of government and only an outline, and it can continue to help every new president meet and deal with every new problem if he (or she) reads it and studies it and recognizes the fact that the implied things in the Constitution are of much greater use to a republic than those that are set down on paper as limitations to what can be done.

  For instance, the most important implication is the power of the president. It’s implied very clearly that the president must meet emergencies when they come up, and every good president has used all reasonable and sensible means at hand to do just that. In the same way, that the Constitution establishes the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch, it also gives those branches certain powers and certain duties to perform. There are a great many powers assigned to the Congress, and a great many assigned to the courts, and even more powers and duties assigned to the president of the United States for the operation of the government and the country. Any president who really wants to lead the country can do it under the Constitution, and he won’t have to infringe in any way on the things that 1imit his power in the Constitution. He has plenty of power if he wants to use it.

  There have been very few of the great presidents who haven’t understood that and didn’t follow through on what the Constitution provides and allows. A great many of the other kind of presidents just sat there and let Congress do as it pleased and felt they were only the executive who enforces the laws passed by other people. But as I’ve said before, a president has just as much right to decide what’s constitutional as the Congress does or the Supreme Court does, when it comes to that, and that’s what all the great presidents have done. In other words, when an emergency arises, it’s necessary for men to meet that emergency by the practical method of sitting down and debating and taking measures.

  I don’t think any of the presidents ever considered the Constitution a burden. Some of them were kind of like a spirited horse when you put a bridle on him, but none of them ever tried to sidestep the Constitution and throw it out. We met the emergencies in periods when we were in trouble. I guess some presidents do get out of line. Sometimes they become a runaway horse, which I think is educational for those of us who follow them. But then a bridle is there in the form of the Constitution. The men who were sitting in that Constitutional Convention were completely familiar with all the pitfalls of totalitarian government and all other kinds of government; there wasn’t a single member of that Convention, all sixty-one of them, who didn’t have an idea of government and how government should be set up. And the result is that the Constitution lets us go as far as necessary but not too far. The idea of freedom of action within sensible limits has always been the basis of our constitutional approach to things. There’s always a way to correct things without a bloodletting revolution, and that’s the reason we’ve continued to work and to govern as we have. Everything’s attainable under the Constitution. Everybody has the opportunity at some time or another to better himself, and perhaps even better his country, and that’s the objective in the long run. The Constitution should be applied constantly, but let me put it this way: It should be applied constantly in an improved manner.

  Sometimes, of course, some of us have found the courts’ interpretation of the Constitution a burden, when the courts overstepped their limitations, such as when Franklin Roosevelt did the great things he had to do in his administration and the courts called a great many of them unconstitutional. But as in Roosevelt’s case, when a court came along that could really analyze the situation, they found that the Constitution implied that the measures Roosevelt suggested ought to be done because the American people needed those things, and they were done in the long run. It’s often said that the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution with an ear to the ground or an ear to public opinion. I think that’s correct to some extent, but they can’t interpret it out of existence, and usually when they interpret it too much, the next court will set it aside.

  Obviously, a strong leader is necessary in times of emergency or need, and that’s always been the big question with each president in times like that: whether he’ll want to run the government for the welfare and benefit of all the people or whether he’ll want to confine it to a groove and not let it run at all. But that’s been our lucky situation, to have strong people around who were willing and able to handle each emergency as it arose. Whether it’ll continue or not, we’ve got to wait and see, but I’m an optimist and have confidence in our strength and future, despite the fact that some people who are mediocre or worse get into power and impede our progress for a while.

  Which brings us full circle back to Jefferson and his Louisiana Purchase and the fact that it was most certainly not in violation of the Constitution. Jefferson, in fact, brought up himself the question of whether or not the purchase was constitutional because he respected the document so much, and there are letters written by Jefferson to various people in which Jefferson comments admiringly on Washington’s abilities as an administrator at the Constitutional Conventions because he was able to get a document like the Constitution out of it. But Jefferson wasn’t about to let a foreign power gain strength and grow stronger and stronger on our borders. He had no intention of going beyond the limitations of the Constitution to the point of injuring it. His objective was to protect the United States, and eventually the Congress came in and agreed with him on the way he handled it.

  Perhaps, as some historians say, Napoleon’s principal motive was that he hated Britain and wanted to put a thorn in the side of the British. There were a great many lawsuits against the French government after he did it, but I don’t think they would have stood up in court. I think he was mostly afraid that the British were just going to come down from the north and take all that territory anyway, and they probably would have done just that if the United States hadn’t stepped in and bought it. In any case, it’s certain that Jefferson didn’t care in the least about Napoleon’s motives. He jumped at the opportunity and didn’t wait for legal maneuvering. The legal maneuvering was done afterwards because what he did was right.

  There are certain circumstances where it’s absolutely essential to move quickly. Roosevelt had the same kind of difficulties at times, and I had some of the same difficulties, and Lincoln had more difficulties than either one of us. That’s why I always try to explain things when people say, as I’ve mentioned, that there’s no point in having a Constitution if some presidents think nothing about breaking it. You don’t break it at all. The provisions of the Constitution were never overstepped by Jefferson. The objective in a thing like that is to meet the situation with which you’re faced, and then apply the Constitution to the program after it’s over if you can’t do it beforehand. The enabling legislation in the purchase of Louisiana was the appropriation of funds immediately for the purchase, and Jefferson had no problem getting that done. He just insisted that the money be given to him quickly, and as he wrote about the matter, “the less said about the Constitutional difficulty the better.” After the fact, of course, everybody could see how good all that territory was for the welfare of the country. There wasn’t any argument about it after it was all over.

  You just have to move quickly sometimes to meet certain circumstances. The same thing happened when Roosevelt traded some of our obsolete destroyers for naval bases; there was plenty of noise about it until people realized what a good thing he’d done. That was the same as the Louisiana Purchase.

  The chunk of territory that Jefferson acquired for those three cents an acre was almost too big to be believed; it stretched from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain on the east to Texas and the Rockies on the west, and from Canada on the north down to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. It’s true that Napoleon had gotten hold of it from Spain by promising that he was going to hand one of the members of the
Spanish royal family one of those little Italian kingdoms, and he never paid off on his promise at that, but it was still the greatest bargain in the history of the United States. In time, no less than fifteen additional states or parts of states came out of it: pieces or all of Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, of course, Minnesota, my own state of Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. It was mostly those good old Federalists who opposed it and yelled that it was unconstitutional, but the treaty between France and the United States was completed on April 30, 1803, signed a few days later, and finally ratified on October 21. The American flag went up over New Orleans, signaling our control of the territory, on December 20.