A Letter to Harry S. Truman

November 17, 1952

My dear Mr. President:

I want to begin by congratulating you on the fine sportsmanship and patriotic sense of responsibility which prompted you to offer the President-elect an airplane to go to Korea and to invite him to sit in with you in the formulation of the new budget and other problems of the transition period. But this won’t meet the real difficulty that the transition raises, and I am taking the liberty of suggesting another course on your part that I believe will. You now have the opportunity, in fact, to set a history-making precedent that would control all your successors.

The dilemma that now confronts both you and Mr. Eisenhower is inherent in our present inflexible provisions for the transfer of power. Mere consultation, even with the best will on both sides, cannot solve it. You are now put by law in the absurd position of having to prepare a budget for a period—1953–54—in which you will be out of office and for which you cannot reasonably be held responsible. Mr. Eisenhower or his representative, on his side, will be confronted with a document as big as a telephone book, implementing scores of previous policies and made up of thousands of different items. Mr. Eisenhower could not possibly make informed decisions on these without consultation with department heads and bureau heads of his own choosing. It is unfair to ask him to take even an implied responsibility for this budget.

This is not your fault. The predicament, throughout our history, has been built into the provisions for the Presidential and Congressional succession. Prior to the passage of the Twentieth Amendment, the Presidential succession did not take place until the March 4 after the election. I need not tell you what the appalling costs sometimes were of this four-month interregnum. It was in the four months between the election and inauguration of Lincoln that seven states seceded from the Union and set up the Confederacy. Even if Buchanan, the outgoing President, “had been a man of great strength and ability,” as the historian James Truslow Adams put it, “it would have been almost impossible to strike out [on] a policy of his own, when he had only four months to serve and knew nothing of the policy of the man who would soon have to take up the reins.”

The cost of the interregnum period after Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover is still fresh in the minds of those of us who lived through it. The deterioration of business confidence between the election in November 1932 and the inauguration in March 1933 was rapid and profound. Roosevelt could not act because he was not yet in office; Hoover could not lead because he lacked public support. The country paid a needless and tragic price in mounting insolvencies, bank closings, and unemployment.

An attempt to solve this problem for the future was made in the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933. Unfortunately, the amendment did not abolish the four-month interregnum; it merely reduced it to two and a half. So once more we are faced with a period of uncertainty. You now have legal power without a popular mandate, and Mr. Eisenhower now has a popular mandate without legal power. Action is frustrated. Policy must mark time.

There is one clear solution, and to you has come the opportunity to be the first President to propose it. This is to offer to resign now and turn your office over to the President-elect, either immediately or on the first day he is ready to assume it.

No further tampering with the Constitution would be necessary. You could simply call an immediate special session of Congress and ask it to make the appropriate changes in the Presidential succession law. Congress might simply add a provision, say, that the outgoing President could appoint the President-elect to some office in which the latter would ex-officio succeed to the Presidency on the resignation of the incumbent President and Vice President.

It need hardly be said that such a revised law should impose no economic penalties on resignation. It should provide that the salary of any President who resigned in this way would be continued until Jan. 20, just as if he had remained in office.

The new law should also, preferably, give each outgoing congressman or senator the same right of immediate resignation in favor of his elected successor, under similar salary provisions. The date of transfer of office for congressmen and senators could then be any time between the day after election and Jan. 3, and for Presidents any time between the day after election and Jan. 20. The actual date of transfer, within this period, could vary in each case, depending purely on the mutual wish or convenience of the two parties directly concerned.

There would be nothing obligatory about such resignations. But once legal provision were made for them, and the precedent set, both outgoing congressmen and outgoing Presidents, we may be confident, would be eager to take advantage of it. Nobody likes the label or the status of a lame duck.

The change would be in accordance with the tradition of virtually every democratic government of Europe, and of every parliamentary government of the British Commonwealth, including our neighbor Canada. In such governments the executive does not attempt to carry on a day after he has lost an election or a vote of confidence. But the change here proposed would be more flexible.

The formal inauguration ceremony, of course, could still take place on Jan. 20, whether or not the office had actually changed hands prior to that date. It is not unusual, in democratic practice no less than in coronations, for a formal ceremony to take place after the actual fact that it solemnizes.

If you call a special session now, Mr. President, it may still be possible to reduce the present interregnum period by six or seven weeks. But much more importantly, you have the opportunity to set a permanent milestone in American history, and to avert the possibility of any future two-month paralysis of government which could have consequences as grave as that of 1860–61 or of 1932–33.