Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  As I’ve mentioned, Mrs. Truman never had any ambition to be glamorous or a great hostess, but we had to throw many a party ourselves when I was president, for the same important reason, so that certain things could be accomplished or discussed that might otherwise not happen. A White House dinner is rarely purely social. Discussions take place in the Red Room and the Green Room and the East Room at all those functions. They’re bound to. Whenever men of different interests are associated socially, they always discuss eventually what’s going on, in the hope that something will happen or be said for their benefit. That goes on at the White House just as at any other social function. When there’s a social event at the White House, at least when Roosevelt was there and when I was there, the president would usually sit around; if it was a dinner, the president would sit at the table and talk for fifteen or twenty minutes with the men who were at the function. Then he would leave, and it was time for the rest of the men to have their own conversations. At that point, the guests were available to each other and could discuss anything they wanted to discuss. The guests were often foreign dignitaries, and in instances where heads of foreign states were there, the leading senators and representatives, and the chairmen of various committees, were always at these functions, so quite a lot got said and done.

  Other parties in Washington are also often important because things frequently got worked out by senators and representatives and other members of the United States government at those times. Those functions are sometimes very interesting and entertaining, and when I was in the Senate, I used to attend them frequently and had a good time there.

  The president usually doesn’t attend these parties, because, when there’s going to be a party or a dinner that includes the president, nobody could put on that function except the president himself, and he usually puts on enough of those on his own hook. But fortunately, there’s always been some rich dowager in Washington who likes to hold dinners and parties and functions of that kind, so there are plenty of those as well. Evelyn Walsh McLean, the lady who owned the Hope Diamond, was the most outstanding hostess when I was president, and Gwendolyn Cafritz has now taken over since Evelyn died. The McLean parties were great parties, and I think one of the most important contributions to the development of our bipartisan foreign policy before, during, and after the war was Evelyn Walsh McLean’s entertainments during that period.

  I guess the First Lady in recent times who can best be compared to Dolley Madison is Eleanor Roosevelt, who, because of Franklin Roosevelt’s physical disability, acted for him in many instances in matters that he would have handled himself under ordinary circumstances. She was a great lady, and she was exceedingly well thought of in both foreign affairs and domestic affairs, and I think she is more nearly analogous to Dolley Madison than any other First Lady who’s ever been in the White House.

  In policy matters, I think First Ladies have always had a great deal of influence, anyway, though I don’t think presidents ever paid much attention to them on matters of appointments. But they had influence in policy matters because they looked into various matters for the president and made reports and discussed things with him. Franklin Roosevelt always discussed his policy matters with Mrs. Roosevelt, and in a great many instances, as everybody knows, she made foreign trips and trips all over the United States and furnished him with information on which he could rely completely. She was a Roosevelt before she was married, of course, I believe a sixth cousin of her husband and the niece of Teddy Roosevelt, and she was always interested in public affairs and very knowledgeable. Yes, a great lady, and I miss her. I would also like to have known Dolley Madison.

  JAMES MONROE, OUR fifth president, didn’t have any of the problems that Madison had, at least as far as his physical appearance and personality were concerned. Unlike Madison, our smallest president, Monroe was one of our biggest in size; he was over six feet tall and had big broad shoulders and big muscles that showed even when he was fully dressed. He was an outdoors type who preferred hunting and riding his horse to other kinds of pastimes, and I’d say, judging from portraits I’ve seen, that he was a particularly good-looking man, with plenty of wavy hair and a dimple in his chin and other attributes that might have made him a movie star instead of a politician if he’d lived 150 years later than he did.

  But he had plenty of other kinds of troubles. He was sent by Washington as minister to France but got into so much difficulty there that Washington called him home and almost dropped him like a hot potato. He was sent by Jefferson as minister to Britain and did such a generally poor job there that, when he worked out a trade treaty with the British, Jefferson refused to okay it and wouldn’t even send it on to Congress for study. Monroe was personally against slavery, but when Congress reached agreement to ban slavery in states being formed out of the Louisiana Purchase, he got so flustered over the question of whether or not Congress had the constitutional right to order such a ban that he decided to veto the whole tremendously important bill, actually preparing his veto message before he was talked out of it. In general, his principal problem was that he wasn’t the brainiest man alive, and some history books I’ve read recently, fair-minded books, don’t give him much space and dismiss him pretty fast with descriptions like “a commonplace man” and “neither his talents nor his achievements measured up to those of his predecessors” and even “one of our most dull-minded Chief Executives.”

  Like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison before him, Monroe was a Virginian, born on April 28, 1758, in Westmoreland County, and was a direct descendant of King Edward III. The first Monroe to come to this country didn’t come voluntarily; he was Monroe’s great-grandfather, Andrew Monroe, who was an officer in Charles the First’s army when King Charles went up against Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Preston in 1648, and he was captured in that battle and exiled to Virginia. By the time James Monroe was born, the family was pretty rich, with a large plantation and about 100 slaves, and when Monroe’s father, Spence Monroe, died in 1774, James inherited everything, even though he had an older sister and three younger brothers. (That was because of that ridiculous business of primogeniture, that medieval law under which a man’s land and other properties descended automatically to his oldest son on the theory that all property owners were knights holding their land under military control at the king’s pleasure and the oldest son was best equipped for any necessary military action. As I’ve mentioned, Jefferson finally got rid of that one.) Monroe was only sixteen at the time, of course, and the estate was controlled by his uncle, Joseph Jones, for a while, but he grew up in luxury and went on to study law under Jefferson.

  I’m sure you’ve gathered from what I’ve already said that his career prior to the presidency was distinguished but not in the class of the presidents who preceded him. He joined the Continental Army as a lieutenant at the age of eighteen and fought in a number of major battles, and he was promoted to captain and cited for bravery when he led an assault and captured a pair of cannons at the Battle of Trenton and was wounded and nearly died. In addition to his military service, he served in the Virginia Assembly and in the Continental Congress, but then left politics for a while and practiced law in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and then took that beating when he ran for United States Congress against Madison and was appointed senator with the help of his friend Patrick Henry.

  It was in 1794 that Washington sent him to France, choosing him mostly because, like Jefferson, he was known for his enthusiasm for that country, but he messed up by overdoing things. Washington insisted on absolute neutrality by the United States in the war between England and France, but, instead, Monroe began to praise France and condemn England so loudly that Washington’s secretary of state at that time, Edmund Randolph, reprimanded Monroe publicly. Then Monroe went to work in France to get Thomas Paine out of that French prison, which was all right, I suppose, especially since Monroe was under the mistaken impression that Paine was dying, but Paine immediately went to work as a free man at his chosen mission
of attacking Washington all over the place. And then John Jay came up with a treaty with England, which Washington favored, despite a lot of flaws, because we just weren’t equipped for any new fighting with the former mother country or anyone else, and which Monroe was expected to back while going to work as a soothing influence with France. Instead, Monroe spoke long and loud against the treaty, calling it “the most shameful transaction I have ever known,” and Washington, in disgust, told him to come on home.

  The same kind of thing happened when Jefferson sent Monroe to England in 1803. I suppose Jefferson should have known better in view of Monroe’s much-expressed hostility toward England, and in view of his poor performance in France, but Jefferson’s main interest was to get England to stop pressing American seamen into the British navy, and perhaps he thought that big, strong-looking James Monroe was just the tough fellow who could do it. Monroe didn’t succeed at all, of course. Instead, he put together that trade agreement that didn’t say a word about the impressment problem, and Jefferson tossed it into the trash can.

  In 1807, Monroe came back to the United States and ran successfully for governor of Virginia the next year. He made Madison angry as the devil by opposing him for the presidential nomination in 1808, but went back to Virginia after Madison got eighty-three votes to his three and was reelected governor of Virginia in 1811. But then Madison, who wasn’t a man to hold a grudge for very long and was now ready to forgive and forget, offered him the position of secretary of state, hoping that Monroe’s experience in Europe, despite the failures, might help prevent the war that was threatening with England. Monroe resigned as governor and took the job immediately. The War of 1812 wasn’t prevented, but Monroe served as Madison’s secretary of state from 1811 to 1817, and after the war got underway, as I mentioned earlier, served simultaneously as Madison’s secretary of war in 1814 and 1815, and did well enough in both jobs so that both Madison and Jefferson urged the other political powers and the public to make Monroe president when Madison left office in 1817.

  It didn’t look like a shoo-in at first. Monroe had a strong opponent for the nomination in his party, a man from Georgia named William H. Crawford, who’d served as secretary of war in Madison’s cabinet for most of the final two years of Madison’s administration, and then became, briefly, Madison’s secretary of the treasury. A lot of the leaders of the party were also beginning to feel that it was time to end what was being called “the Virginia dynasty” by choosing a candidate from some other state. And then a need was being felt for a particularly strong candidate because the Federalists were putting up a very strong man, Rufus King of New York, a senator who had also been minister to Britain, working in that post from 1796 to 1803. But Monroe beat Crawford for the nomination sixty-five to fifty-four, and then, with Daniel D. Tompkins, the governor of New York, as his running mate, received 183 electoral votes to King’s thirty-four.

  There were nineteen states involved at that point in our history and Monroe took sixteen of them: Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. King took only Connecticut, Delaware, and Massachusetts.

  And he did even better when he ran for a second term in 1820. John Quincy Adams had followed his father into politics on the Federalist side, and he was now Monroe’s opponent when Monroe ran for reelection, but Monroe annihilated him with the greatest of ease. There were twenty-four states involved this time, and Monroe beat Adams for electoral votes in every single one of the twenty-four, getting 231 votes to one lonely vote for Adams. In fact, the only elector who voted against Monroe was William Plumer, the governor of New Hampshire, and I’ve read somewhere that the only reason Plumer voted as he did was because he was a traditionalist and wanted Washington to remain the only president elected unanimously by the Electoral College. (On the other hand, I’ve also read somewhere that that wasn’t the reason at all, and that Plumer voted the way he did because he felt that Monroe was nothing more than a good-looking sap. But what does it matter? The point is that Monroe swept into office as though he had run unopposed.) Adams then became Monroe’s secretary of state.

  As far as Monroe’s accomplishments as president are concerned, well, there were several, of course, as there nearly always are even with mediocre presidents.

  One of the most important, naturally, was the Monroe Doctrine, the message that warned foreign powers not to attempt to establish new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, making it clear that we wouldn’t tolerate Russia’s plan to move down from Alaska into Oregon, and Spain’s and France’s thoughts about recapturing some of their own former territories. As I’ve mentioned, this wasn’t a separate pronouncement but just part of Monroe’s regular message to Congress in 1823, and it shouldn’t be credited solely to Monroe because John Quincy Adams wrote a lot of it and convinced Monroe to come out with it. And it didn’t have very sharp teeth because we weren’t really strong enough yet to do much about it if any of the other nations decided to challenge our viewpoint. At least it made our viewpoint clear, which was that the Western Hemisphere was no longer open territory for European colonization, and that we’d consider any move on the part of a European nation to involve itself in Western Hemisphere affairs as an act unfriendly to the United States. And it did a world of good toward making European rulers understand that the United States was a country that was separate and independent from all others, and a country that was increasing in power, strength, and determination.

  Monroe’s other major accomplishment was the Missouri Compromise. This wasn’t really Monroe’s personal accomplishment, either; this was, in fact, the one that he practically vetoed, but at least it got passed during his administration.

  The difficulty began to show itself mostly because Alabama, which until then had been part of Georgia, and the area that became my home state of Missouri, wanted to be given statehood. Nearly everybody liked the idea of getting more states into the Union, but the problem was that the admission of those two states was opposed by legislators from free states because admission of Missouri and Alabama would tip the scales in favor of proslavery forces. Up to that point, you see, there were more antislavery men than proslavery men in the House because, the number of members of the House from each state depended on the population in that state, and the biggest population centers were in the North, and the same was true of the Senate, even though senators were set at two from each state regardless of population, since the last state admitted to the Union at that point, Illinois, which came in 1818, was a free state and that made it eleven free states and ten slavery states. But Alabama got its land grant from Georgia on condition that it remain a slavery area, and a majority of the people in Missouri had slaves or favored slavery, so the admission of Missouri and Alabama would make it, in the Senate at least, two more proslavery men than antislavery men.

  A lot of bitter arguments started up, and a number of proposals were put forth, but none of them worked. A member of the House from New York, James Tallmadge, suggested doing nothing about the slaves already in Missouri but banning additional slaves from being brought in and freeing the children of slaves when they reached the age of twenty-five, which would, after the passage of a lot of years, end slavery there, but neither side in the Senate liked that one enough, and it was turned down. Then another man from New York, John W. Taylor, proposed barring slavery entirely in the whole area of the Louisiana Purchase, but the proslavery people managed to get that shot down. Then antislavery people tried to get a plain and simple law passed requiring that new states be admitted only if they banned slavery entirely, which would have been great, but the other side defeated this by pointing out that, since all previous states had been admitted without this prohibition, Congress didn’t have the power to make different rules for new states.

  This went on and on for a couple of years until Henry Clay, who was beginning to be known as the Great Compromiser, managed to get both
sides to agree to the Missouri Compromise, which let Missouri come in as a slave state but simultaneously allowed Maine, which until then had been part of Massachusetts, to come in as a free state. Alabama came in as a slavery state, but it was agreed that all future states carved out of the Louisiana Purchase above the southern boundary of Missouri must be free states. None of this was wonderful, but it increased our population and structure and strengthened the country. And perhaps it did a little, though just a little, to move toward the eventual end of slavery. It’s such a shame that the thing was allowed to develop in the Western Hemisphere in the first place, but a lot of southerners wanted it because slavery provided free labor for them, and a lot of New Englanders did, too, because they were the importers of slaves and sold the slaves to the South, and it finally brought on the Civil War. There were always people opposed to slavery, of course, but just not enough of them in those days.

  To sum things up, I consider Monroe a pretty minor president - in spite of the Monroe Doctrine. That’s the only important thing he ever did more or less on his own, when you really got down to it.

  Monroe was another man who was entirely destitute when he came out of the presidency in 1825. His wife, the former Elizabeth Kortright of New York, whom he married in 1786, when he was twenty-eight, and she wasn’t quite eighteen, was a beautiful woman but sickly most of her life, and they didn’t have very much time together after he left office. There hasn’t been too much written about the nature of her illness, but I think it must have been some kind of epilepsy that kept her from functioning at social gatherings most of the time while her husband was president, and she was so sick when he left office that he had to stay on in the White House for three weeks because she couldn’t travel. In 1826, she had a sudden and violent attack and fell into a fireplace and nearly burned to death. They were living in their estate, Oak Hill, in Loudoun County, Virginia, at that time, but Monroe was $75,000 in debt and he kept begging Congress for repayment of money he said he had spent on his duties as president, but it took a long time to come through, and even then, he ended up getting only part of the amount he requested.