Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  When his wife died in 1830, aged sixty-two, Monroe had to sell Oak Hill and go to New York and live with one of his two married daughters, Maria Gouverneur. (Maria’s husband, Samuel Gouverneur, was postmaster of New York City and her first cousin, and their wedding in 1820 was the first marriage ceremony ever held at the White House. Monroe’s other daughter, Eliza, who was sixteen years older than her sister and bossed Maria around so much that the two women eventually stopped talking to each other, was married in 1808 to George Hay, the attorney who prosecuted Aaron Burr unsuccessfully when Burr was tried for treason in Richmond, Virginia. When her father and her husband died, she became a Catholic and spent the rest of her life in a convent in France.) Monroe died a year after his wife, on July 4, 1831, the third president to die on Independence Day.

  Before I leave Monroe, I want to say a word or two about how disgraceful it was that the United States ignored Monroe’s poverty to the point where he had to depend on his daughter and his son-in-law for food and shelter. I’m sure it’s clear that I’m not one of Monroe’s greatest admirers, but that’s beside the point. A president’s home life has everything to do with his ability to function as chief executive, and sometimes to serve his country in other ways after he leaves office. And though I’m not saying that the principal reason Monroe wasn’t an outstanding president and didn’t do much after he left the presidency is because his home life was inadequate, there’s certainly no question about the fact that he shouldn’t have been required to live the way he lived during the final years of his life. I think, for example, that every president should have a home provided for him after he leaves office. Some places in which some of the presidents had to live afterwards were pretty terrible, especially by contrast with the lovely White House. The new home needn’t necessarily be in Washington, but wherever the man and his wife want to live. I’ve got mine right here in Missouri, so it makes no difference to me. But every single head of state of every other great country has that prerogative and that benefit, and yet we don’t do it here. In fact, until not so very long ago, there wasn’t even such a thing as a presidential pension. They just turned the presidents out to grass and let them starve to death.

  It’s principally, I suppose, because, in a republic where the people are in control of the government, they assume that the heads of state will be well enough off to take care of themselves and their families, but that hasn’t always been the case. Some presidents, of course, were rich men when they went in there, but not necessarily when they came out. Jefferson died pretty much a pauper, and he was a rich man earlier in life, and Monroe had been a rich man and died a pauper - I think he left something like $6,000 to Maria, which wasn’t big money even in those days, and a little bit of property to Eliza - and several others had the same thing happen to them because they wouldn’t exploit the fact that they’d been president of the United States. Presidents either had to go to work for industry or assume a position of special privilege or they were allowed to die in poverty. Well, I can understand the refusal of that special privilege business because I’ve been offered all sorts of things that I’ve turned down because I knew they were being offered only because they wanted a pet ex-president on hand or on their letterheads, so I’m glad it’s a better situation now for former presidents. But it can be made better yet for future presidents, and much more fair and decent, by making sure they have good homes along with their pensions.

  I’ll go on now to John Quincy Adams. The single really interesting thing about Adams, I’m afraid, is that he was the only son of a president in our history to become president himself.

  And even that happened almost by accident. During the final months of Monroe’s second term, Adams and four other men emerged as possible presidential candidates, the other four being W. H. Crawford, Monroe’s secretary of war and secretary of the treasury, John C. Calhoun, also Monroe’s secretary of war for a period of time, Senator Henry Clay, and the man you already know is one of my favorite people, Andy Jackson. This was before the days of political conventions and strong political parties, and presidential candidates were still being chosen by caucuses of members of Congress, and the congressional caucus selected Crawford. But this time, various state groups objected and put up the other four men as candidates, and it ended with Calhoun’s dropping out, saying he’d prefer to be either Adams’ or Jackson’s vice president if either man won, and with the other four men running against each other without party labels.

  Adams didn’t think very much of his three rivals; he kept a diary most of his life, and he wrote in his diary that Clay was a man whose “morals, public and private, are loose,” Jackson was quarrelsome, and that Crawford was a man of “corrupt character” and the only man in America who has “risen so high . . . upon so slender a basis of service.” But a lot of people liked the other men more than he did, and that’s what I mean when I say that Adams became president almost by accident; this strange election split the votes four ways, naturally, and Adams didn’t get the majority of either the electoral or the popular votes.

  The real winner, in fact, was Jackson, who got ninety-nine electoral votes and 152,901 popular votes, which was 42 percent, to Adams’ eighty-four electoral votes and 114,023 popular votes, which was 32 percent. The other two men split up the remaining votes, Crawford getting forty-one electoral votes and 46,979 popular votes, representing 13 percent, and Clay got thirty-seven electoral votes and 47,217 popular votes, also adding up to 13 percent. That threw the final choice into the House of Representatives, and on the night of January 9, 1825, as they used to say in old-fashioned novels, a mysterious event occurred. Old John Quincy forgot the things he’d said about old Hank Clay in his diary and asked Clay to come over for a friendly powwow. The next day, Clay told his supporters in the House to give their votes to Adams, and Adams became president and Clay became his secretary of state. Andy Jackson didn’t like this much; he said sadly that “the Judas,” meaning Clay, “has closed the contract and will receive thirty pieces of silver.” But I’d prefer to be charitable here and believe that it was Adams’ familiarity with foreign affairs, the fact that he had so much experience in foreign policy because he was in the foreign service almost up to the time he became president, that caused the House of Representatives to choose him over Jackson.

  All in all, it’s pretty clear that Adams’ life was one without a whole lot of joy. His father had been president of the United States, true enough, but was the only president up to John Quincy Adams’ time to fail to get himself elected to a second term. And then John Quincy himself became the second president to have that happen to him. And his early life doesn’t seem to have been all that happy, either, since his father was so busy in politics and in diplomatic service that John Quincy spent a lot of time alone and away from his native land.

  He was born on July 11, 1767, in Braintree, Massachusetts, and was a nervous individual almost from the start, suffering all of his life from terrible headaches and insomnia. He grew up to be an unattractive-looking fellow, five feet seven inches tall and fairly fat at 175 pounds, and he started losing his hair early and ended up with hardly a hair on his head. His appearance, in general, was austere and unbending, and though he was aware of this and tried to behave otherwise when he went into politics and knew it was important to make friends, he couldn’t seem to help himself from behaving as usual; he wrote in letters and in his diary, “I never was and never shall be . . . a popular man . . . I am a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners . . . I am certainly not intentionally repulsive in my manners and deportment. . . but I have no powers of fascination.”

  In 1777, he went with his father to France, and he lived mostly in France and in the Netherlands for the next seven years. Then, in 1781, when he was only fourteen, he went to Russia as secretary to Francis Dana, who was our first minister to that country and hoped to get Russia to recognize us as an independent nation. But the ruler of that country, Catherine II, practically ignored Dana, and Adams left and s
pent the next five months traveling around Europe alone, as he was so often, before returning to this country to study at Harvard. He graduated second in his class of fifty-one men and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He wasn’t dumb by any means, just not a very attractive or happy fellow.

  He became a lawyer after that and then, when he entered public service, served as Washington’s minister to the Netherlands and minister to Prussia, and then as a state senator in Massachusetts in 1802 and a United States senator from 1803 to 1808. Then he was Madison’s minister to Russia from 1809 to 1814, Madison’s minister to England from 1815 to 1817, and finally Monroe’s secretary of state from 1817 to 1825. But his generally unhappy nature kept these appointments from meaning very much to him and prevented him from being any more enthusiastic about himself than he was later on about his opponents for the presidency. He said from time to time that death would have been welcome to him, and he wrote very sadly in his diary in 1812, “I am forty-five years old. Two-thirds of a long life are past, and I have done nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my country or to mankind.”

  His personal life was also full of trouble and tragedy. When he was thirty years old, he was in London and met and married Louisa Catherine Johnson, the beautiful daughter of an Englishwoman and an American who had been a merchant and was now serving as an American consul there. But Catherine had been born in London and had grown up in England and France, and John Adams was at first bitterly (and I don’t mind saying stupidly) angry at his son for marrying a foreigner and refused for a long time to accept Louisa into the family. (Her birth in England, incidentally, made her the only foreign-born First Lady in our history.) And when her father-in-law finally did accept her, she proved to be as unhappy and nervous an individual as her husband. She suffered from insomnia, just as John Quincy did, and fainted quite often. She was also so shy and reclusive that she accepted almost no duties as hostess in the White House, and she even wrote an autobiography dealing with her general unhappiness, which was never published because she never finished it.

  Louisa and John Quincy had three sons, but there was more unhappiness in store for the couple with two of them. Their first son, George Washington Adams, born in 1801, was a brilliant fellow who also went to Harvard and became a lawyer, but he proved to be an erratic young man who got himself and a young woman into trouble when she became pregnant, and he went on buying sprees and got deep in debt. Then he became mentally ill, began to suffer from what would be called paranoia today, and on a boat trip from Boston to New York in 1829, he accused fellow passengers of plots against him. He suddenly disappeared and was found drowned six weeks later, and it isn’t known if he fell overboard or jumped and drowned.

  A second son, John Adams II, born in 1803, was a much more stable man, and also became a lawyer and worked as his father’s secretary when John Quincy became president. He was the apple of his father’s eye and John Quincy said about him, “A more honest soul or more tender heart never breathed on the face of the earth.” But he, too, was in poor health during most of his short life, and he died suddenly in 1834, aged only thirty-one.

  Only the youngest son, Charles Francis Adams, born in 1807, lived a long life, long enough to have a distinguished career. He edited the ten volumes of John Adams’ papers and twelve volumes of John Quincy Adams’ diaries, and wrote many articles and a book or two of his own. (Not all of John Quincy’s diary has been published, incidentally, but it’s now hoped that the rest will be published because the Adams family has turned over the papers of the two Adamses to Harvard University to be indexed and microfilmed. We have a first set, here in the Truman Library, of microfilms of the papers that have been finished, and they’re well worth reading. Unfortunately, though, I understand that there isn’t a word about that meeting with Henry Clay in any of the diaries.) Charles Francis was also Martin Van Buren’s running mate when Van Buren ran unsuccessfully for a second term in 1841, and he was later Lincoln’s and Andrew Johnson’s minister to England from 1861 to 1868. He might even have become the third President Adams, because he was considered a strong candidate in 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant was running for his second term and polled the most votes in the first five ballots at the convention in Cincinnati. But he lost out on the sixth ballot to Horace Greeley, who was beaten by Grant and died shortly afterwards.

  (Now there’s a really sad story, the way Greeley’s life ended. Greeley had a long and successful career as editor and founder of the New York Tribune, and as a reformer who was often ahead of his time, but his try for the presidency seemed to turn his luck around completely. He was the subject of brutal attacks and caricatures in newspapers all around the country during his election campaign, most of them calling him a traitor because he hated war and pleaded for peace at any cost during the Civil War, and also because he advocated amnesty for all southerners after the war. Then his wife died a few days before the election, and he was beaten decisively by that charismatic but incompetent fellow Grant, and the two blows one after the other caused him to become mentally ill. He was totally insane when he died soon after the election on November 29, 1872.)

  Charles Francis Adams lived on for fourteen more years, doing the editing of his father’s writings from 1874 to 1877. He’s also remembered as the man largely responsible for persuading England to stick with the United States during the Civil War and not recognize the Confederacy, which they were close to doing.

  Adams was opposed again by Jackson when he ran for a second term, and this time Jackson was elected overwhelmingly and went on to serve two terms. Jackson got 178 electoral votes to Adams’ eighty-three, and 647,292 popular votes, 56 percent, to Adams’ 507,730 votes, 44 percent. Adams refused to attend Jackson’s inauguration, a sore loser like his father, and then went back to Massachusetts and ran successfully for the House of Representatives, the only former president to serve as a congressman. He served in the House for seventeen years. He died in the Capitol Building, still serving his country. He had had a minor stroke in 1846 while walking with a friend in Boston, and on February 21, 1848, he had a sudden, second, massive stroke at his desk in the House, falling almost into the arms of the congressman next to him, David Fisher of Ohio. He remained in a coma after that and died two days later, and another colleague, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Ohio, said quietly, “Where could death have found him but at the post of duty?”

  He was a conscientious and well-meaning man, and I wish I could say more about his achievements than the couple of things I’m going to put down here. But there are really only two things that can be credited to him and those only in part. One is the Monroe Doctrine, which, as I’ve said, he had such a large hand in thinking out and developing and writing that it should probably be called the John Quincy Adams Doctrine or at least the Monroe-Adams Doctrine. He also had a lot to do with our purchase during Monroe’s administration of the parts of Florida that Jefferson didn’t get in the Louisiana Purchase: Adams negotiated the treaty under which Spain gave us the rest of Florida in return for our writing off $5 million they owed us. And he was also a capable and hard-working member of the House during those seventeen years after he left the White House. But practically nothing was accomplished in his own administration. He was the first president to think hard about improvements within our own country and advocated, among other things, a national university, an astronomical observatory, and countrywide roads that connected with each other. Congress, however, passed none of these things while he was president. So I’ve got to put him down as another minor president, with very good intentions, but no results.

  I realize that some historians won’t agree with this assessment, especially since so much of the history of that period was written by John Adams and John Quincy Adams themselves, and since so many other and later members of the Adams family became historians and wrote extensively about American history. John Quincy’s grandson, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was a railroad executive and president of the Union Pacific Railroad for six years, but also wrote a numb
er of books on history and politics; Brooks Adams, another grandson, wrote a number of good books on history and economics, and as early as 1900 predicted in a book that the United States and Russia would end up as the two strongest world powers; and a third grandson, Henry Adams, became a professor of history at Harvard and the best-known historian of the family. His most famous books are his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, and his study of our country during the time of Jefferson and Madison, which runs nine volumes. And of course a lot of the recent books coming out on the Adamses and related subjects have been written by other New England historians.

  Well, they have a right to their prejudices, but it’s important to take what they have to say and study it and compare it with what actually happened according to other reports. I just don’t think there were any events in Adams’ administration that were very outstanding.

  AND THAT BRINGS me to my personal favorite among our presidents (after Franklin Roosevelt, of course), Andrew Jackson.

  There have been a great many books written about Jackson, and some of them are favorable and some of them aren’t. Despite the books in that second category, he stands out in my mind as one of the seven or eight very great presidents of the United States. Each of the great ones was great for a different reason, but they were all great men, and the main reason I put Jackson in this category is that he knew what was right for the country and for the average man and woman, and he went to work to try to accomplish what was right, even when his action wasn’t very popular.