Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  Wilson met Ellen Louise Axson in April 1883 and became engaged to her in September, but their marriage was postponed until June 24, 1885, so that he could get through Johns Hopkins and get that job teaching at Bryn Mawr, which was just then starting up as a brand-new college for women. The Wilsons were married for twenty-nine years, and they had three daughters: Margaret, born in 1886, who never married, but was first a singer with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, then an advertising executive and stockbroker, and died of uremic poisoning in 1944 in a religious retreat in Pondicherry, India; Jessie, born in 1887, who was a social worker before she married a law professor named Francis B. Sayre, and died in 1933 of complications after an operation for appendicitis; and Eleanor, born in 1889, who married Wilson’s friend William Gibbs McAdoo in 1914, but the couple were divorced twenty years later, and she lived out her life in California and died in 1967.

  The Wilsons had a good marriage, and Ellen Wilson supervised happily the marriage of her two daughters in the White House. But then she came down with Bright’s disease, the official name of which is glomerulonephritis, a kidney ailment that is nearly always fatal, and she died on August 6, 1914, aged only fifty-four. Wilson was prostrated by her death; he told his close friend Colonel Edward Mandell House that he hoped someone would assassinate him, and House believed that his death wish was sincere. But just eight months later, one of Wilson’s cousins, Helen Bones, who took over as White House hostess after Ellen Wilson’s death, introduced Wilson to a forty-three-year-old widow named Edith Boiling Galt, a lively and good-looking woman who was the daughter of a Washington judge and a direct descendant of Pocahontas. Wilson fell in love immediately with Mrs. Galt, and the next month asked her to marry him.

  The press began an immediate and fierce attack on Wilson, saying that Wilson was behaving with extreme disrespect to his late wife in courting a woman so soon after his wife’s death. There was also a typographical error in a Washington Post story that was so pointed, though it was apparently unintentional, that the Post hurried to call back all copies of the edition, but some got out and became collector’s items.35

  Wilson and Mrs. Galt were engaged officially in July, but the furor over their alliance became so severe that Wilson offered to let her out of their engagement if she wished it. She didn’t, and they were married on December 18, 1915. The second marriage was as happy as Wilson’s first, and Wilson’s last word was a calling out of his wife’s name when he died nine years later, on February 1, 1924. The second Mrs. Wilson lived on for thirty-seven years and died at the age of eighty-nine on December 28, 1961 - coincidentally, you’ll notice, Woodrow Wilson’s birthday. She remained active all her life, attending Franklin Roosevelt’s and John F. Kennedy’s inaugurations and other functions, and was still quite a good-looking woman even in old age. My daughter Margaret stood next to her at the Roosevelt inauguration and was quite impressed with her good looks, even though she was already well into her seventies.

  Thinking about it now, many years later, it’s really astonishing that Wilson was able to put through so much reform in so short a period, far more than most other presidents managed to accomplish during their administrations. A leader who has a program that’s worthwhile, as Wilson did, can put his program over, and if it hadn’t been for the First World War, and the things that forced us into that war, I think the Wilson administration would have been considered one of the best we’ve ever had, second perhaps only to Franklin Roosevelt’s. Well, the country was ready for it - I guess that’s the principal reason. The country had all sorts of difficulties and problems at the time, and when Wilson came along, he appealed to the people in a way that no other president had appealed to the people since - well, I’d say since the time of Grover Cleveland, though I suppose that Teddy Roosevelt had a certain amount of appeal in his earliest days. And when a program appealed to the country, why, the Congress went along with it.

  In the beginning, Wilson had practically no trouble at all with the Congress. He had no problem at all in getting along with the various senators and representatives during his first term. But when we became involved in the war, and then when he later made a terrible and exhausting trip around the country to promote the League of Nations and his health broke down as a result of that trip, then the Congress began to figure out who was going to be in next, and you know how Congress is. Their attitude toward him changed so much that it was almost like limiting the term of the president, almost like limiting the period of the Wilson administration. But he still managed to get such a lot done during his eight years, and that’s the incredible thing.

  He also had quite an excellent cabinet. His relationship with his cabinet wasn’t always very cordial because he hated to delegate responsibility. He also had a tremendous number of different men in his cabinet because of constant turnover. I think he was always listening to his people, but then he’d make up his own mind, and it was all too frequently in exactly the direction opposite to the one on which he’d just been advised. But just as frequently, the members of his cabinet ended up influencing his thinking despite his initial reaction against their suggestions, and before they quit because so many of them were first-rate people.

  Bryan, for example, became secretary of state, and Wilson was smart enough to take over all the things that were right in what Bryan wanted to do and put them into effect, and that, of course, is what Wilson did with the Federal Reserve Board and other things. The separation between the two men came about because of the World War. Wilson was in general agreement with Bryan until the time came that it was absolutely necessary for him to meet the situation. Wilson tried hard to keep us out of the war; he took a neutralist position, and so did Bryan. But when the time came that the ugliness of things being done by the Germans forced us into the war, when the sovereignty and the welfare of the United States were in danger, Wilson had to do what he did, and I think he did the right thing.

  Other good people in Wilson’s cabinet were William McAdoo, the fellow who told him to hang in there during the Democratic Convention and became his son-in-law, and who was his secretary of the treasury from 1913 to 1918 and a damn good one. Then Carter Glass took over the job and had a lot to do with helping Wilson set up the Federal Reserve System. And Newton D. Baker was Wilson’s secretary of war, a man who was a pacifist, but was capable of swinging into action when necessary, and managed to get our Army up to 4 million men, the strength needed to enable us to win the war. James C. McReynolds was the attorney general before he left to become a Supreme Court justice, and he was very helpful in pressing antitrust laws against AT&T and the New Haven Railroad and a lot of other companies that were getting to be too greedy. And just to name two more good men, the secretary of the navy was Josephus Daniels, who later became our ambassador to Mexico and a very efficient one, and as you may remember, he was helped out while running the Navy by a bright young assistant secretary named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Wilson also had some people around him who weren’t so good, of course. Like almost everybody in politics, Wilson became involved with some unfortunate associates. The man most people remember is Colonel Edward Mandell House, who was a pretty minor politician in Texas - that “colonel” is a strictly honorary Texas title - until he latched onto Wilson and became Wilson’s closest friend and constant advisor; but Jim Smith, that fellow who ran the New Jersey political machine, was worse. Smith was the worst man ever associated with Wilson, but fortunately, Wilson soon realized that he had to throw Smith over if he was going to do an honest job, and he did throw him over quickly and early in the game.

  I guess House is remembered because he was associated with Wilson for a much longer period, and another not-too-wonderful fellow associated with Wilson for quite a while was George Harvey, or Colonel George Brinton McClellan Harvey to give him his full handle, the editor and publisher of a magazine called North American Review and later editor of Harper’s Weekly and another one he started himself and called Harvey’s Weekly, I suppose in the hope that
people would become confused and buy it thinking they were buying Harper’s. (His “colonel” was another honorary title given a fellow who never got any closer to any army than watching soldiers parade on holidays.) Harvey was one of the first people to suggest to Wilson that he ought to try for the presidency, so we can thank him for that, and House also deserves some thanks because he did some wheeling and dealing at the Democratic Convention and helped Wilson get the nomination, but that’s about it.

  Both men later exploited their positions as special advisors to the president, not for the benefit of President Wilson or the country but to make themselves more and more important and influential, and in the end Wilson had to get rid of them, too. Wilson took on House because he thought he could trust him, and he also became close to Harvey for the same reason. A man in the job of president, as I’ve said before, has to have people he can trust who aren’t part of the cabinet or in other official jobs, special associates who are in a position to give the president information that the president is not able to get in any other way. A president has to have associates like that because he’s got to have information from every direction, and in order to have that information, he’s got to have people who aren’t restricted to information sources within their own official circles. And it isn’t a dangerous thing to have connections of that sort because the president is always in control.

  But when House got to the point where he thought he was greater than the president, where he thought he was the president, why, then Wilson had to pull the rug out from under him and let him go, just like every president has had to do with some of his confidants. And the same thing happened to Harvey. House went around after that telling people that Wilson was “the most prejudiced man I ever knew,” and Harvey launched a whole series of bitter attacks on Wilson in that magazine of his, that Harvey’s Weekly, but nobody paid a whole lot of attention to the two fools.

  I’ve already mentioned the Federal Reserve Board and some of the other things Wilson accomplished while in office, such as the first child labor laws in the country and the antitrust laws that legalized strikes and collective bargaining. But the two most important things accomplished by Wilson, of course, were the winning and ending of the war, and though it didn’t work out in the end, the starting of the League of Nations.

  As I’ve mentioned, Wilson tried hard to keep us out of the war when it first started on July 28, 1914. He appealed constantly to prowar groups to calm down and issued a Neutrality Proclamation giving the reasons our country should stay out of the war; and even when a German submarine sank the Lusitania, which was a British passenger ship, without warning on May 7, 1915, and on which 128 Americans were among the 1,195 men and women who died that day, Wilson still pleaded for neutrality, telling an audience of just-naturalized citizens a few days later, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not have to convince others by force that it is right.” At the same time, however, Wilson protested bitterly to the German government, and for a while German submarines stayed away from American ships. As late as January 1917, Wilson was still hoping to keep the United States out of the war, and that month he made a speech that pleaded with the warring countries to accept “peace without victory.” But the response from the Germans was a contemptuous announcement that they’d stayed away from American shipping long enough, and that, starting February 1, German submarines would sink without warning all ships, including American ships, doing business with the Allies.

  Two days later, Wilson appeared before a joint session of Congress and announced that the United States was breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany. He still hoped to keep our country out of the war, but later that month, a message from Germany to Mexico was intercepted in which Germany promised Mexico that it would return Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to Mexico if Mexico joined Germany in attacking the United States and helped Germany win the war. Wilson didn’t tell Congress about that message at first; he asked only that he be allowed to arm American merchant ships, revealing Germany’s offer to Mexico only when the House gave permission, but the Senate held back. Then, on March 18, German submarines sank three American merchant vessels, and we entered the war two weeks later.

  Our entry into the war turned the tide toward an Allied victory. As I’ve mentioned, Newton Baker got our Army up to 4 million men, and Josephus Daniels got our Navy up to a half million men; in March, 80,000 men were sent overseas, in April, nearly 120,000 more men were sent, in May, nearly 250,000 more men were sent, and by August there were over 1 million Americans in France and 1.75 men there by October.

  Teddy Roosevelt also tried to get into the act, or at least into the newspapers, by announcing that he was eager to command a division in France. But Wilson wouldn’t agree to it because he thought it was a political maneuver, and in all probability, it was. I think Roosevelt might have made a good division commander, but like Wilson, I believe it was a political proposition all the way, and Wilson didn’t have any political generals. The generals who were placed in command of the divisions and all the other units in the First World War were selected on the basis of efficiency and military education and knowledge, not on the basis of being famous or an ex-president.

  By the end of May, the Germans had moved to within fifty miles of Paris, but then the Allies stopped the German advance at Château-Thierry, Americans recaptured Belleau Wood and took Cantigny, and then captured thousands of German prisoners and mountains of German supplies and weaponry at Marne and St.-Mihiel. Late in September, more than a million Americans fought and won in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, terrible battles in which there were 120,000 Americans killed or wounded. More than a third of the total American casualties of the war occurred during that offensive. But it resulted, finally, in making the Germans and the Austrians ask for peace, and as everybody knows, the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. Over 100,000 Americans died, and another 200,000 were wounded in the eighteen months we were in the war, and a conservative estimate of total casualties for all nations, which I saw just after the war ended, counted over 10 million dead and over 20 million wounded.

  Wilson began to plan for the end of the war soon after we were in it, and on January 8, 1918, addressed both houses of Congress with a speech that became known as the Fourteen Points because it named fourteen things that he felt were necessary to achieve lasting peace and a settlement that all nations could accept. The speech was just wonderful; it was idealistic but also practical, and the language was as memorable in its way as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. And it did a lot to hasten the end of the war because it made it clear to the German people, already sickened by the worldwide slaughter and as anxious to see an end of it as the people everywhere else, that the Allies or the United States, didn’t intend to occupy Germany or otherwise behave the way many victorious nations behaved in the past toward nations they conquered.

  The first five points were general: They called for “open covenants, openly arrived at”; complete freedom of the seas for all nations, both in wartime and peace; elimination of all economic barriers between nations; drastic reduction of armaments worldwide to no more than the amount necessary for protection and safety; and settlement of colonial claims based on the desires of the people living in those colonies. Then he dealt with eight specific things: restoration of conquered territories to Russia, restoration of conquered territories to Belgium and maintenance of Belgium as a separate and sovereign nation, France to be given the Alsace-Lorraine territory that Germany had been demanding, Italian borders to be changed to give territories to those nations that had the most people of those nationalities in those territories, division of Austria-Hungary based on nationalities, division of Balkan countries according to principal nationalities, Turkey to control only Turkish people and allow all others to set up separately, and with unlimited access to the Dardanelles for vessels of all nations, and independence and access to the sea for Poland. And Wilson’s fourteenth p
oint was the one I consider the most important of all, a concept that still gives me hope, the establishment of “a general association of nations . . . for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

  Wilson’s first message to Congress, in which he described the things he wanted to try to do for his country, is, I think, one of the greatest and most eloquent documents in the history of this country, but his speech on the fourteen points is even more so because it described what he was trying to do for the world. I believe that that great speech will always live on in the history of the world because, aside from the points that were necessary at the time for the peace of the world, he set out that concept of the League of Nations. And in his concept of an organization like the League of Nations, he was on the right track and brought something to the presidency that no other president had brought before him. I’m glad that it isn’t necessary to say “before him or since,” because Franklin Roosevelt tried to continue the program that Wilson started with his support of the United Nations. And the fact that the League of Nations didn’t work out in the end, or that the United Nations is ineffective in many ways and beset by many other problems, doesn’t diminish the importance of the concept by one iota, because at least it’s a start toward joining nations together to try to deal with injustice in the world.