Where the Buck Stops by Harry Truman

Author:Harry Truman [Harry Truman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography and Autobiography/Presidents and Heads of State
ISBN: 9781612308395
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2015-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT PRESIDENT worth a lot of respectful attention is Thomas Jefferson, This means, of course, that I’m pretty much skipping over John Adams, the president between Washington and Jefferson, but I’m not doing that because I think that Adams was a terrible president. It’s just that he wasn’t very special, whereas Jefferson was special indeed in a lot of ways.

To understand the difference between Adams and Jefferson, you have to understand the differences between two other and very important matters: the development and evolution of our country’s leading political parties and the essential philosophical differences between the two parties. Please forgive me if that sounds sort of stuffy and pedantic, but there’s no other way to put it, and I’ll try not to sound like a boring lecturer while I’m explaining it.

You have to realize, to begin with, that there was no thought at all about political parties when the Constitution was being put together. It was the idea of the people who wrote the Constitution that there would not be any partisan setup in the government because it was unnecessary; the purpose of the government, as they saw it, was to create an organization of the colonies, the states, so that there wouldn’t be any barriers between the states and they could transact business with each other and possibly with the rest of the world. And since it was intended to develop a government with a president and a Congress whose interest, principally, would be trade, there seemed to be no need, or even any likelihood, of differing political parties because everybody would want the same things.

But that was just foolish, or at least naive. The origin of political parties wasn’t contemplated by the makers of the Constitution because they had no experience in free government independent of the British crown. And there was also the fact that, even though we were now an independent country, there was still an underground of perhaps as much as 30 or 35 percent of the population who were Royalists and had wanted to stay with Britain and wouldn’t have minded returning to British rule, so it was much more important to think about the objectives that kept Americans together instead of the things that separated us. Nevertheless, our first leaders should have realized that, even if we all had the same idea of wanting trade and business and plenty of it, the different kinds of people who became our first legislators would have very different ideas about how to run the government that was being set up. But they didn’t realize it, and that was, as I mentioned earlier, the cause of the basic rift between Washington and John Adams and Alexander Hamilton on one side and Jefferson and the people who thought the same way he did on the other side.

Washington’s appointments weren’t political appointments in the sense in which that term is used today, meaning people whose theories of government operation are exactly the same as those of the president who appoints them.

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