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Where the Buck Stops

Page 47

by Harry Truman


  As I mentioned earlier, Wilson decided to go personally to the Paris Peace Conference, the first time a president in office ever went to Europe, but he made the serious error of not including any Republicans or any senators from either party in his delegation. This was an especially major mistake because his personal popularity had eroded during the war, and the Republicans managed to regain control of both the House and the Senate in the 1918 elections. So when Wilson got back to the United States, he discovered that the acceptance of the treaty worked out at the Paris Peace Conference, which included the plan to work out the League of Nations, wasn’t going to be as easy to sell to some resentful and irritated Washington legislators, and some segments of the general public, as he thought it was going to be.

  Then Wilson made another tactical error. Some senators and congressmen just didn’t like the idea of an association of nations because they had prejudices against some other countries and didn’t care to join together with them on anything, and some legislators had objections to other aspects of the treaty; and in particular one very influential Republican, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and a very conservative fellow who later headed the group of Republicans pushing Harding’s nomination, and had quite a number of objections to the League and to other things in the treaty. But none of the complaints about the treaty were really all that major, and Wilson could unquestionably have mustered up the necessary two-thirds majority to get the treaty through if he were willing to add some language to “guarantee the United States’ sovereignty.” But he wasn’t, and the Senate became just as intransigent and childish and refused to ratify the treaty.

  That was when Wilson decided to take his cause to the people and went off on a speaking tour that took him 8,000 miles around the country and all the way to the West Coast, and that brought about his collapse from exhaustion on September 25, 1919, and a stroke on October 2 that paralyzed his left side and made him an invalid for the rest of his administration and the rest of his life.

  Wilson was able, after a while, to walk with a cane and to speak, though somewhat unclearly, and he spent the last year of his second term mostly in bed and in a wheelchair, so much out of things that Edith Wilson checked every item of government and decided which matters to bring to his attention and which ones to skip. He left office on March 3, 1921, staying on in Washington and opening a law office in partnership with a man named Bainbridge Colby, who served as secretary of state during Wilson’s final year in office, but he was now almost totally blind and so sick that he did little more than have occasional conferences with Colby and others in his house on S Street. And on February 1, 1924, he told his wife, “I’m a broken piece of machinery,” and two days later, aged sixty-seven, he called out for Edith Wilson, lapsed into a coma, and died. It was a sad ending for a very fine man.

  The United States never joined the League of Nations, though Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920 for proposing the League and for his other work. Warren Gamaliel Harding was elected president on November 2, 1920, and in his bumbling way let a lot of the good things advocated or achieved by Wilson go out the window, and Franklin Roosevelt had to put them back when he became president. The League of Nations continued until 1940, at which time it was down to a skeleton staff, and then it disappeared entirely.

  PRESIDENTS OF THE caliber of Jefferson and Lincoln don’t tend to reappear, but we had one in the nineteen thirties when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took over. He was a great, great president. He had the ability to make people believe he was right and go along with the things he wanted to do, and he was also very daring in his actions. He surrounded himself with people who were knowledgeable historically about the things that had happened before their time and understood how to use past experiences in current circumstances, and he knew how to make the thinkers of the country work for him. That’s always necessary for the head of a government. He must know how to stop the overly radical thinkers before they take over, and he must know how to make use of what they can contribute and use it for the benefit of all the people and not for just a few. And Franklin Roosevelt certainly did.

  People are always asking me what I thought of Roosevelt as a person, aside from his presidential abilities. Well, I’m sorry to have to disappoint people who love gossip and are hoping that I’ll have something unpleasant to say, but I liked him. I liked him a lot. He was a very easy person to like because he was a very, very pleasant man and a great conversationalist, with marvelous flashes of humor in almost everything he said, and he had a personality that made people feel close to him. For those reasons, as well as for my tremendous admiration for him as our president, I was very fond of him. And when he died so suddenly and so quickly on April 12, 1945, just sixty-three years of age, I felt truly overwhelming sorrow - not just because he had done so many wonderful things in his administration and I wanted to see him complete his fourth term and finish the job, but as though I’d lost a close relative or my closest friend.

  He had defects, of course, both as chief executive and as a human being; every president does. It’s a difficult thing to talk about defects I saw in Franklin Roosevelt, and particularly difficult for a successor to try to say that something better could have been done under this set of circumstances or that because nobody - remember this - nobody, not even the vice president, knows all the facts on which a president makes his decisions. And if other decisions come to mind that might have been better, they’re Monday-morning decisions, made after the fact. I think Roosevelt did the very best he could do under each set of circumstances and made the right decision at each moment it had to be made.

  But I’ll try to talk a little about defects in order to make this a balanced account. For one thing, he was a first-rate executive, never afraid to make those decisions he made, but he wasn’t a good administrator because he just wasn’t able to delegate authority to anybody else. He wanted to be in a position where he could say yes or no to everything without anyone’s ever arguing with him or questioning him, and of course you can’t do that in our system of checks and balances. And I was always of the opinion that he ought to have restraints, as every president should have, and I sometimes argued with him myself when he wanted to go too far or when he set out to do something strictly on his own and without the agreement or help of others.

  For example, I didn’t disagree at all with his proposal that he be allowed to add a Supreme Court justice, up to a maximum of six, for each present justice who was at least seventy years of age and had served for at least ten years. Under Roosevelt’s plan, each of those older judges could either choose to retire at full pay and be replaced by a new man, or elect to stay on in the job with Roosevelt having the right to appoint new men, up to that maximum of six, who would be assistant justices but would have full voting rights to counterbalance the remaining people. Some good people on both sides of the aisle did oppose Roosevelt’s plan, and in some cases violently, including George W. Norris and my friend Bennett Clark and Roosevelt’s own vice president at the time, John Nance Garner; but the problem was that many of the justices had been appointed by the long string of Republican presidents who preceded Roosevelt - Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover - and something just had to be done because ultraconservative justices like George Sutherland, James McReynolds, Pierce Butler, and Willis Van Devanter kept shooting down everything Roosevelt tried to accomplish. I also felt, as Roosevelt did, that many of the justices were much more concerned with the interests of big business than with the needs of the average man and woman suffering from the terrible depression, and I knew from my studies of history that the Supreme Court had varied from five to ten members over the years and didn’t think there was anything magical about the number nine. I expressed my feelings very bluntly at the time. “The cry is that the President wants to pack the Court,” I said. “I say the Court is packed now, and has been for fifty years, against progressive legislation.”

  But I didn’t
agree at all with Roosevelt’s obvious feeling that he had become so popular and so powerful that he could go ahead and push through anything, even an unprecedented plan like that one, without help and without bothering to try to convince people opposed to the plan that he was right. There was no question about his popularity and his strength when he began to talk about his Supreme Court plans early in 1937. He had just beaten old Alf Landon by winning forty-six states to Landon’s two, Maine and Vermont, racking up 523 electoral votes to Landon’s eight, and the House had 334 Democrats to eighty-nine Republicans and the Senate had seventy-five Democrats to a mere seventeen Republicans. But there was much stronger general opposition to the plan than Roosevelt estimated, and more resentment at what was considered his high-handedness than he realized, and arguments kept on and kept on from February to July. And then the man who was doing the principal pushing for Roosevelt, Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson of Arkansas, the Senate majority leader, died of a heart attack, and the bill vanished along with Joe Robinson. And the United States lost a bill that might have been very helpful to the American people because Roosevelt’s ego misinformed him and made him believe he could win on his own.

  I guess that was his principal defect, that growing ego of his, which probably wasn’t too minuscule to start with, though perhaps it was his only flaw. It was also his ego, I think, that prevented him from even listening when, in the months between the day of Herbert Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 election and the day Roosevelt actually entered the White House, Hoover suggested that he and Roosevelt get together and close the banks jointly for a brief period. I think there should have been more consideration given Hoover when FDR took over, and more help accepted from him because he was bound to have observed and learned some things that Roosevelt just didn’t know when he first entered the Oval Office; but the campaign had been a pretty rough one, and so many people were blaming Hoover for the depression as though he’d caused it all by himself, calling cardboard shanties Hoovervilles and empty pockets Hoover flags and things like that, that Roosevelt decided that he was smarter than Hoover in every way, and Hoover just didn’t know what he was talking about when he suggested closing the banks.

  But the bank closings were an absolute necessity; people in every state in the union were pulling out their savings and closing their accounts and sticking their few dollars under their mattresses, and more than half the national banks in the country were either out of business or refusing to allow withdrawals. And ego or no ego, Roosevelt finally had to close the banks himself so that government auditors could go in and see which of the banks still in business were solvent and safe and which weren’t. The delay actually increased the problem - not a serious increase, but it would have been better if it had been done when Hoover suggested it be done instead of a little later on. After the auditors’ examinations, the banks that were determined to be okay were allowed to reopen, and that made people feel better and a bit confident and helped to a certain extent. And in time the Roosevelt administration passed banking acts in 1933 and 1935 that prohibited banks from selling stocks and bonds, and then set up the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and that helped a lot more.

  And as a final example, it was also Franklin’s ego, I suppose, that caused him to run for a third term, and then a fourth term. Generally speaking, I’m against more than two terms for a president and always have been because I think that two terms are usually enough. But the reason I’m also against that Twenty-second Amendment, and the reason I think it’s as bad in its way as that idiotic Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment, and testified to that effect to the House of Representatives and to Congress, is that a president is like any other executive and shouldn’t be required by statute to step down at a time when events are such that it would be better if he continued to stay on the job a while longer. And I wasn’t against Roosevelt’s decision to run for a third term because, in that instance, I thought it was a good idea; we were in a situation of another world war, and it was good that the situation was being met by someone who had been on the ground for years and was continually familiar with what was going on.

  I’m certain it wasn’t his original intention to try to stay on for more than two terms. In fact, I’ve been told that he’d already signed a contract to become chief roving editor for Collier’s at the end of his second term. I think he would have been a good one. And he obviously had every intention of going through with it, since he’d signed a legal document. So I think it’s silly when people ask me what happened that made him change his mind and decide to go on for a third term. The thing that happened was that he was anxious to see the free world win the Second World War. That’s all it was. That’s all he had in mind. A contract with a magazine meant nothing when he became committed to Churchill and France and all the other countries that were anxious to escape the Nazi control of that part of the world. And the only thing I’ll say about the charges that he plotted to bring us into the war is that they’re ridiculous in the extreme, I think he did everything he possibly could to keep us out of the war - until he realized, just as Wilson did, that our entry into the war was inevitable and unavoidable. We just had to pitch in and help, and that’s why there are monuments to Wilson in London, Paris, and Rome, and monuments to Roosevelt being put up everywhere as I write this. There’s one for Roosevelt in London right now; I was there just a short time after it was unveiled. And there’s a monument to both Wilson and Roosevelt in Paris, and a street in Nice named Woodrow Wilson Boulevard. The two men are in the same great class.

  Don’t forget that Roosevelt sent men over to talk to Hitler about stopping the slaughter, and Churchill also tried. Roosevelt and Churchill were alike in many ways, particularly when they worked together during the war; I believe Roosevelt’s support made Churchill great and Churchill’s support made Roosevelt great, so it was a mutual proposition, and each had influence on the other that was very helpful in the end to the welfare of the world. I don’t think the early effort with Hitler was blindness or failure to recognize Hitler for what he was. I think it was a desperate effort to avoid what eventually came about. I think both Roosevelt and Churchill were desperately anxious to prevent a Second World War. Well, they didn’t succeed, and we won the war, so why argue about it?

  But in a way, I was also a little bit concerned about Roosevelt’s decision to run for a third term, and then a fourth, because I thought there might have been a partially wrong reason involved: that he wasn’t doing it only because he felt it was best to keep the same experienced man in place, but that he might also have felt that he was the only possible man who could lead our country to victory in the war. I think he began to feel that way more and more the longer he stayed in office, and it isn’t hard to understand; it was natural for him to feel that the majority of the people were behind him in view of his unprecedented four terms. And they were. But part of the reason the people were backing him was that we had an emergency that had to be met, and they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find another man who could meet it. That happens whenever a strong president is in office. But the president himself should be realistic enough and objective enough to realize that no chief executive, no matter how good he is, is irreplaceable, and that our country will always survive, and eventually flourish, despite changes in management. In Franklin Roosevelt’s case, of course, the day came when he was no longer there, and thank heavens, even if I do say it myself, we made it all right.

  But that slightly swollen ego of his was just about his only fault, and let’s not forget for a minute that he was the man who restored the economic health of this country and saved the free world by winning the Second World War. So don’t ever ask me, as someone once did, if it’s true that he wasn’t a great originator of ideas or a philosopher like Jefferson or others of similar standing. I can’t even judge whether or not he was a great philosopher in the Jefferson tradition because I’m not one myself. But Roosevelt was the man who brought about the recovery from the terrible de
pression we had in 1929 and 1930 and 1931, and he was the man who persisted in the manner that won the Second World War. Isn’t that enough to make us think of him almost as a god? It certainly is in my book.

  And don’t think that I agree for a second with the people who say that the good things Roosevelt accomplished during his administration were counterbalanced by his one terrible mistake of helping the Russians and even kowtowing to them. I don’t think our policy toward the Russians in his administration or mine was a mistake at all.

  I don’t want to give you the impression that I loved Stalin and some of the other Russians with whom I dealt; I didn’t and I don’t. I place a lot of the blame on Stalin for the Second World War, and particularly the length of the war and part of the terrible total of losses in the war, because he made a deal with Hitler. Any talk on Hitler’s part about making a deal with England was just pretense, and very transparent pretense at that, because I don’t think he liked England. All those Continental countries have always been afraid of England. And I don’t see how Churchill, all by himself, on that little island across the English Channel, could have done other than what he did do - try to talk some sense to Hitler even though he realized that Hitler was a lunatic, and then fight like hell, when it became necessary to fight. But if Stalin hadn’t made that deal and had stayed with his friends, if a big, strong country like Russia had showed strength instead of cowardice, Hitler might still have been controlled. But Stalin didn’t have the sense to stay with his friends. At the time we’re talking about, France had folded up, Holland, Belgium, all Western Europe had folded up, and Stalin then folded up too and made a deal with Hitler. He went and met this guy and made a deal with him, and then, as soon as the time became right for Hitler to knock Stalin’s ears down, Hitler went back on the deal. You can almost be glad and say that it served Stalin right, except for the fact that it wasn’t anything to be glad about because we were affected so much by the fact that he made the deal in the first place.

 

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