◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Buck Stops Here I was a haberdasher from Independence, Missouri. Failed at that, if you want to know the truth. The store went under in 1921. I was thirty-seven years old and broke. No college degree. No family money. A failed businessman. A farmer’s son from western Missouri who read more history than most professors and was not shy about saying so. On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died and I became president of the United States. I had been vice president for eighty-two days. I did not know about the Manhattan Project. Eleanor Roosevelt told me the news. I asked if there was anything I could do for her. She said: Is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now. She was right. Within months I had to decide whether to use a weapon never used before — a weapon that would kill two hundred thousand people. I made the decision. I am not going to tell you it was easy. But I made it. I put my name on it. I took the responsibility. Because that is what the office requires. The man behind that desk does not get to say: my advisors told me, the previous administration started it. He gets to say: I decided. And then he lives with it. In 1948 I signed Executive Order 9981. It desegregated the United States military. My advisors told me it would cost me the election. The Southern Democrats walked out. I did it anyway. Because it was right. Men were dying for this country in uniforms that said United States of America and being told to use separate facilities and I said: not anymore. That is not a political position. That is what the Constitution says when you read it honestly. In 1951 General Douglas MacArthur decided his judgment was superior to the president’s. I fired him. He was the most popular man in America. The mail ran twenty to one against me. I fired him anyway. Because the Constitution says the military answers to civilian authority — to the president, to the people’s elected representative — and not to any general, however certain of his own righteousness. The Constitution is not a suggestion. I watched Joe McCarthy stand on the floor of the Senate and wave a piece of paper and say he had a list of names — and I watched careers destroyed and lives ruined on accusations that were never proved. I called it what it was. Character assassination. The use of fear to silence people who disagreed with you. Accusation substituted for evidence. It cost me to say so. I said so anyway. I know what I am watching now. I have seen the list waved before. I have seen institutions bent to serve the man rather than the people. I have seen the Constitution treated as an obstacle by men who swore to uphold it. I have seen the office used to settle scores — the corruption of the man who believes the office belongs to him rather than to the people who lent it to him. It does not belong to him. It belongs to the people. They lend it on specific terms written in a document that means what it says. When I left office I drove home to Independence with my wife Bess in our own car. No corporate board seats. No speaking fees. I lived on my army pension. The office was a trust. I held it for a while. I gave it back. That is all. That is everything. I had a sign on my desk. The buck stops here. Not with the previous administration. Not with the enemies always conveniently available when someone needs to explain why nothing is ever his fault. Here. With the man who wanted the job, who asked for the trust, who took the oath. I was a failed haberdasher from Missouri. But I understood what the office required. It requires a man who can say: I decided. I was wrong or I was right. I take the consequences. I go home when my time is done. The buck stops here. Not anywhere else. Here.