Harry Truman and the Imperial Presidency

0:00I've been urged, and I must say with the offeror rather pretty penny, to title my talk The Little Louse. However, I do not consider that an objective historical approach to the subject. My title will be Harry S. Truman and the subtitle will be The Little Louse. You know, when the leaders of the Mises Institute planned this conference, I can't imagine that they were so prescient and so far-seeing as to realize that by the time the conference took place, everybody in the country would be talking about nothing else than the American presidency.

0:51about the qualifications of the high office, whether the present occupant of that office has ruined it beyond repair, and how previous incumbents have filled that office so wonderfully and so on, and that's all that the country is talking about. In fact, a few days ago I saw an article by someone on abolishing the presidency, written by some right-wing radical who is, I'm sure, now on the run, right in the hills of North Carolina.

1:40Now, I know that there are some people here, especially among our younger members, who believe that Bill Clinton must be the worst president we have ever had. And that is understandable in their youthful enthusiasm and exuberance to feel that way about Bill Clinton, and one admires them for it. However, maturity brings a certain perspective, and history should bring a certain perspective. so that what we have to consider are the other possible claimants to the distinction of being the worst American president. And tonight, I'll be speaking about Harry Truman, and I will present his qualifications for that possible distinction.

2:41Now I'm not saying that Harry Truman is absolutely the worst president, however there is an embarrassment of riches as far as qualifications go. I remember that Bill Kaufman some time back said that about James Buchanan, who was generally despised president and condemned, that at least there's this to be said about Buchanan. He caused the deaths of 620,000 fewer Americans than his successor. So that as far as Truman goes, one could say that there's this to be said for him. He was not his predecessor. That was the best point that could be made on behalf of Harry Truman, I believe.

3:32But when Truman left office in January of 1953, he was really universally despised. His approval ratings were the lowest of any president, lower than when Nixon resigned, As a matter of fact. And now, of course, Truman is beloved. As Murray used to say, you know, just trust any president who's beloved. The Republicans, just as much as the Democrats, love Truman. And as a friend of mine used to say in situations like this, we do be spared nothing. Harry Truman. I'm of an age where I remember the way people felt about Harry Truman.

4:21Once in a while now you see these polls by historians about who were our truly greatest presidents and who were near great presidents and it goes on down to the lowest and poor Nixon is always the worst, although he really wasn't that bad from the leftist point of view. He solidified the welfare state and many other things. It was a liberal Republican basically, but they talk about the greatest presidents, and what has to be said about this was all said by Bob Higgs in a very good article in the free market, oh I think a couple of years ago, on these polls, because the polls had just come out. There's nothing objective about these polls. Historians like everyone else have their own personal point of view.

5:09They have their own values and it's what's surprising about the fact that the Roosevelt was a great president or Wilson was a great president or the Truman was a neo-grade president. These are their values. These are their political values. This is what you can expect as Bob Hicks said from left liberal historians who worship as he says state power and they commend the presidents who have expanded state power. These historians belong to what H.L. Mencken used to call the herd of historians, you know, like a parliament of owls and a pride of lions, a herd of historians. He was talking about the historians who so enthusiastically supported the American war effort in World War I, but it goes for every generation.

5:58Mr. Godfrey earlier today was talking about the Clinton-Rossiter and people who extol American statism at every point in the power of the presidency. So that we have to come to our own conclusion about who were good presidents, who were great presidents, if any, who were really bad presidents on the basis of our views and values, of course Informed by Knowledge about what these men did. So let's deal with Harry Truman. And the fact of the matter is that Truman has left a legacy that continues to damage our country to this very day. The first thing to deal with would be the Cold War.

6:46Now Truman famously was in charge of America when we entered the Cold War. It lasted for 40 years. It changed our country beyond imagination. And everything that we see in the country, the denigration of states' rights, the power of the presidency, the immense federal Leviathan, the world empire, the national security apparatus, the great power of the security police, these all have to do with the This is a 40 year ongoing war. Now, a lot of research has been done on the origins of the Cold War in recent years, especially with the release of Soviet archives, and it's interesting to note, before the Second World War ended, already the American military leaders were making up plans, detailed plans, by the creation of a global American network of bases. They were going to make sure that America was the world hegemonic power.

7:53The Atlantic and the Pacific were going to be American ponds, all of the Western Hemisphere of course. And bases and transit rights were arranged for from North Africa across the Middle East, across India to Saigon to Manila. They had no intention of going back to the position of America between the wars Truman in 1947 announced the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine had to do with Greece and Turkey. There were allegedly tremendous threats to the ruling governments in Greece and Turkey that the Communists were going to take over, that it would bring Communist power to the East and Mediterranean, or all kinds of other things.

8:51In a speech to Congress, President Truman said that our policy, this is the Truman Doctrine, And from now on, we'll be to go anywhere in the world, any place on the globe, where freedom-loving people are threatened by internal subversion or foreign aggression. So this was the exact opposite of Washington's farewell address and the exact opposite of the traditional American foreign policy of defending America. Of defending America first and this being the concern of foreign policy, defending freedom at home. Now, we were going to defend freedom anywhere in the world. Now, the ironic thing is that, as far as Greece is concerned, for instance, Stalin did not support the Greek communist uprising, the Greek communist movement, and they announced a provisional government.

9:44They were not allowed into the communist common form, which was the association of communist parties, and this provisional government was not recognized by any communist state. In other words, Stalin was in fact living up to the agreement he made with Churchill that he should have the rest of the Balkans and Western influence would be predominant in Greece. When Truman presented to select leaders of the Senate, presented his plan, the former isolationist, now interventionist senator, Republican senator from Michigan, Arthur Vandenberg said, Friedenberg said, you know, if you want to sell this program of globalism, you're going to have to scare the hell out of the American people.

10:31Those are his famous words. And that's what Truman did, Truman and his associates did. They painted this vision of a power, an immense military and political power, that was willing to engage in a wide-scale war that was on the point of dominating the whole world. The crucial year was 1948, and you have to realize the Constellation of Forces at the time. This was the Republican 80th Congress. Still, there existed the shreds of the old right in America, led by Bob Taft and a few other people.

11:21The idea that, well, maybe the situation has to be different, maybe we shouldn't join the U.N. and try to cede who are keeping the peace, however, this open-ended commitment all over the world, basically to the status quo all over the world, America can't involve itself in that, that would be the end of the kind of government we are. So there was still an element of that in the Congress and in the press and among the people. So that had to be changed and 1948 was the turning point. The communists consolidated their control in Czechoslovakia and that was made to seem as if some tremendously freedom-loving liberal society had succumbed to terrible communist infiltration.

12:14In fact, as George Marshall himself said at the time, the Czechs had basically been under communist control since the middle of the war, when the Czech leaders made their peace with Stalin and were willing to bring Stalin into central Europe to defend against the Germans even after the war. So the communists were simply consolidating their position there. And then, Lucius Clay, who was the head of our army in Greece, issued a statement saying that he felt that war might break out with tremendous suddenness. Now this statement was kept secret, but it was passed around among influential congressmen and senators and began to shift opinion.

12:59Afterwards, a big biography of Clay was written and his biographer asked him, why did you say something like that? Anyway, that was the only statement you made at the time. A very extraordinary statement. To be the only state, you didn't back it up, you didn't second it, you didn't give more details. And he said, they asked me in Washington, I have the quote here, they asked me in Washington to send them a quote like that because they were having trouble pushing in the appropriations for the Marshall Plan, pushing through the peacetime draft, pushing through universal military training, all the programs that Truman wanted, and they wanted some statement about the imminence of war. So this is one indication, and there's much more evidence, that this Soviet threat was enormously overrated.

13:49For instance, they had intelligence reports from senior military people saying, Look, the Soviet Union you think is on the point of invading Western Europe, how is it that they're tearing up hundreds of miles of railroad track in East Germany for shipment to Russia for reparations? If they were on the point of attacking or if they had in mind to attack Western Europe, of course they would need those railroad tracks, but they're tearing them up to send them back. And I have a quote here also from a senior American who was connected with NATO in the early 1950s and he said there is no doubt that they constantly exaggerated the Soviet threat in order to get appropriations. In light of the recent information that has come out about the Soviet Union, you know that Senator Moynihan has released information that the CIA had about how unbelievably backward the Soviet Union was.

14:48I was talking to my friend, Professor Yuri Maltsev, about this, who of course is quite familiar with the whole situation there. For 40 years, we were fighting a paper tiger. We were building up this idea of the Soviet Union as a tremendous possible threat to Western Europe and so on. Well, they had nuclear weapons. Okay, if it came to that, we could blast each other off the map. But if they tried any other kind of war with their low level of communication and transportation, with everything going wrong constantly, and this is what Moynihan showed was what the CIA was saying through the 1970s and 1980s and you can imagine then what it was in the late 1940s and 1950s so this Cold War which has cost trillions and trillions of dollars which has changed our country forever and not in a good direction I don't think was something initiated by Truman and got out of control after a while

16:21and the Nazi Fifth Column and Apologies for Hitler and so on. They're talking about, for heaven's sake, patriotic Americans, maybe more patriotic than some of the people on the other side, who had the interest of America at heart. In the same way, at the time we're talking about, there were people with the interest of our country, our old republic at heart, who said, no, look, let's have wits about us, let's be calm about this. This is not a titanic final struggle between one world force and another. As Senator Taft said in 1948, if you have proof that this is an impending attack from the Soviet Union, give it to us. Otherwise, all I see is that the Soviet Union has consolidated its control over the area that Roosevelt gave to them at Yalta.

17:11So, we have that to talk about in regard to President Truman. Now, there's the episode of what happens at the time of the Korean War. Now, you know that Secretary of State Atchison had, in a speech a few weeks before, explicitly put Korea outside of the American defense perimeter, Well, the communists saw that they had their chance and they invaded. And then what happened was that President Truman, calling it a police action, some of the more mature people in the audience probably remember that, idiotically calling this war a police action, engaged America in the war.

18:00Of course, even Wilson and Roosevelt went to Congress to ask for declarations of war. The President asserted the position, which nobody had asserted before 1950, no individual of the U.S. government, no organ of the U.S. government, that the President has the right to engage America in war on his own. This is now the universally accepted point of view. It's accepted by so-called conservative leaders as well. I don't have to tell you that. You know it. There's a Senator from Arizona, Senator John McCain, who's always referred to as a respected Senator from Arizona.

18:48You have to be very wary when the media call a Republican respected. Okay? You should have figured yourself the fix is in here. And McCain is one of the leaders of this point of view. I saw him once on this Sunday morning politics program, and he was maintaining the president as commander-in-chief as a right to send American troops into war. Now, you know, by the way, that whole concept of commander-in-chief, it's totally clear that what was meant by commander-in-chief, Congress, of course, has the power to declare war, according to Article 4, Section 8. Commander-in-Chief meant that once war is declared, now you don't want to have dozens and dozens of congressmen trying to run the war, the president is the one who runs the war, who manages the war, who deploys the troops, once war is declared.

19:43But now McCain maintained that his position as Commander-in-Chief means that he has the right to send troops anywhere in the world at any time. And George Will asked him, are you saying that in 1917 Wilson, simply on his own, could have sent an American expeditionary force to fight in France? And McCain said yes. And you could see how the startled look on George Will's face. Here's a senator sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, who is saying things which are obviously false. That the President has a constitutional authority to send troops anywhere in the world and to any war whenever he wants. And wouldn't it have been odd if the founding fathers who try to limit power gave the President this power, right?

20:33To send troops anywhere in the world anytime he wanted. But now that has become the standard policy in America. Truman is also responsible, as Peter Bauer just pointed out in an article in The Spectator, for the introduction of the idea of foreign aid. This was point four of his State of the Union address in 1949. And he said, what we have to do is send a few hundred million dollars to the poorer countries to get them up to snuff in technology and to spur economic development. And then there's going to be perpetual economic well-being in all of these terribly poor countries.

21:22Well, how many hundreds of billions of dollars later? And beyond simply the waste of American dollars, which is bad enough, all of this foreign aid is government-to-government grants, you understand. So naturally what foreign aid has done over these decades is prop up governments everywhere in the world. People have the idea when they hear about foreign aid somehow it means that you're helping people to these poor starving people in Africa. What it is is grants from the American government to other governments for them to use for their programs. What foreign aid has done is to bankroll the world, the plundering world political class in dozens and dozens of countries.

22:14All of these corrupt regimes, all of these crooks, all of these kleptocrats have been financed by foreign aid. This is something that Harry Truman has left us. Harry Truman was the one who initiated the special relationship of the United States with Israel. Franklin Roosevelt was friendly and sensitive to Jewish issues, but was not a Zionist. Harry Truman was and supported the creation of the State of Israel.

23:06This was against the advice of all of his secretaries of state. Against the advice, for instance, of George Marshall, who said, why are we doing this? George Washington and no special favoring of one foreign nation over another. You get into trouble like that. It simply did not make any sense. We were making enemies of the whole Arab and Muslim world. And that was what many conservatives, almost all conservatives at the time thought. It's what many American conservative Jews at the time thought also, that is conservative in the sense of politically conservative. And Henry Regnery, the great old right publisher in Chicago, published the work of Alfred Lilienthal, which was then condensed in Reader's Digest.

23:56If you can imagine some anti-Zionist work now being published in Reader's Digest or by a conservative publisher. The sort of thing that is impossible now. Well, the whole story about the American recognition of the state of Israel can be read, for instance, in a number of books. Lilienthal has a good book, but a totally objective work is by Evan M. Wilson called Decision on Palestine, put out by the Hoover Institution Press. So, as late as 1979, even the Hoover Press was able to put out works that were critical of Israel. Now, we have all the evidence we need about how Truman came to this decision.

24:45His own diaries, what other people said, and so on. He was very much influenced by Clark Clifford. The Washington Insider, who just a few days ago went to his Just Reward and is no doubt concocting shady deals where he is now, how much you give me to get you out of the third circle into the fifth circle, and so on. Clark Clifford, in so many words, and I can give you all the references that you need I told Truman that this would be tremendously valuable politically. It was 1948. The election was coming up. It was going to be very tough. It looked as if Truman was going to lose.

25:34So he needed important support from Zionists. By the way, the British Prime Minister at the time, Clement Atlee, said just that. The American decision was decided by political considerations having to do with Zionist support. It was partially because of political considerations and partially because of sentiment. Truman was sentimentally very favorable to the Zionist cause. We are told by one of his biographers, once the chief rabbi of Palestine came to Truman and said, God put you in your mother's womb so that you could be the instrument to bring about the rebirth of Israel after 2000 years.

26:27That's kind of ethnocentric, I think. Whereupon, according to his biographer, quote, great tears started rolling down Harry Truman's cheeks. The man was such a softy. Now, of course, as I say, there's an embarrassment to riches. A lot of things are going for here. In 1946 there was a big railroad strike in America, and Truman went to Congress and asked for the authority to draft strikers into the Army.

27:12And he got a huge overwhelming vote in the House. In the Senate, however, Bob Taft said, now wait a minute, hold on a second, what are you talking about? about Drafting Strikers into the Army and Taft got support from some left-wingers like Claude Pepper, for instance, of Florida, and the Senate overwhelmingly defeated Truman's proposal. But this is just one example of Truman's tremendous high-handedness. Another example you can read about has to do with price controls and Murray Rothbard's Making Economic Sense That's a collection of Murray's economic journalism. And I don't know if you've seen it or not, but I tell you honestly, you can hear Murray talking.

28:00Because these are solid articles, but they're not in any kind of scholarly form. They are journalism and it's Murray talking directly. So Murray says the first political tract he ever wrote was a study of price controls in the meat industry because they got rid of other price controls but there were still price controls on meat and there were terrible shortages of meat. Truman said that what he was considering doing was nationalizing the meat packing plants of Chicago. Then, however, he realized that it was the farmers who were hoarding the meat, so he was considering sending out the army and the National Guard to seize livestock on American farms.

28:50I mean, talk about the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine. However, he thought that that was politically impractical. Right to start a civil war over his crummy price controls. So he got rid of the price controls and then by some miracle, meat came to be in plentiful supply. It's amazing how those things happen. Now, the worst thing that happened in the domestic front in his time was in 1952. Again, it was a strike and this is an example of what Mises said, How one government intervention leads to a worse one in order to try to undo the damage of the first intervention.

29:38The original government intervention was the Wagner Act and the other laws legalizing coercive trade unionism and making the labor unions into the great power in the country that could hold up the country to ransom with the strike threat. Well, the steel workers are struck and now Truman, what Truman did was seize the steel mills. He issued a proclamation and the next day the American flag was flying from steel mills all around the country. I have to get the exact quote here because this is very important. He did this of course as President of the United States, Commander in Chief and all of that. In a press conference on April 18, Truman was asked if it is proper under your inherent powers to seize the steel mills, can you, in your opinion, seize the newspapers and the radio stations?

30:48In the New York Times reported, Mr. Truman replied that under similar circumstances, the President had to do whatever he believed was best for the country. Listen to this guy. This is still from the Times. The President refused to elaborate, but White House sources said the President's point was they had power in an emergency to take over, quote, any portion of the business community acting to jeopardize all the people, unquote. Now the case went very quickly to the Supreme Court. By six to three, they voted against Truman. But if two justices had voted on the other side, you understand, the English went through some very nasty constitutional struggles in the 17th century because, as they said, under these kings, Charles I and James II and the Stuart kings in general, there is nothing a man can call his own because of the power that they claim to have.

31:55There is no law that keeps them in check, and that's exactly what Truman was claiming. There are many other things that definitely, in my opinion, do rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. There was a remarkably corrupt administration where he brought the ways of the Kansas City Pendergast Machine to Washington, Nuremberg Trials, the phony show trials that Senator Taft objected to and was vilified at the time. But that's the reason why Taft and that Carillion are on the Capitol grounds, because even John Kennedy said he was a man of courage for standing up to all of this abuse at the time of the Nuremberg Trials.

32:48There was something called Operation Keelhaul, sometimes called the last secret of the war. Truman was in charge of the country and we sent back forcibly hundreds of thousands of Soviet, and sometimes there were never even Soviet subjects, POWs who had been caught by the Germans. Many of them decided to fight on the German side against Stalin. and the ones who were in American captivity were forcibly sent back, many thousands of them, to the NKVD, the secret police and the gulag. There were terrible scenes, shameful scenes on American soil that you can read about in Julius Epstein's book, Operation Keelhaul.

33:33American soldiers had orders to shoot, to kill. The poor Russians committed suicide, sometimes not to be sent back, and that was all under Truman. And then finally we reach the first great act of his administration, and that is the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I cannot understand or hardly even believe that it is people who call themselves conservatives who defend that today in America. At the time, and for years afterwards, it was the best conservatives, the deepest conservatives, was John Utley's mother, Frieda Utley. I was a great conservative journalist who deplored such acts of barbarism.

34:26You know, military leaders in the U.S. deplored these acts. I have a quotation from Admiral Leahy, who was the head of the Navy, who said that we're using the methods of the Dark Ages, this kind of barbarism, attacking women and children. Eisenhower was against it, Hap Arnold of the Air Force said Japan was already defeated. Much could be said about these bombings. A few things are certain. One is that about 200,000 people were exterminated in the two bombings, or maybe more. Another is that there were some possible alternatives.

35:11But the most important thing is that what was the background of the whole business and the reason the Japanese were refusing to surrender even though they were very interested in surrendering, sending out feelers to surrender, but still reluctant to surrender because we were insisting on unconditional surrender. Now the Nuremberg trials were beginning to get into operation. The Japanese thought that unconditional surrender certainly meant that they would get rid of the emperor, probably put him on trial, maybe hang him in front of his palace. Since they believed that he was divine, the direct descendant of the goddess of the sun, this is not something that they were willing to accept.

35:57Now, in fact, that was not our policy to even do away with the Hirohito. But this was not communicated to the Japanese. Everybody in the U.S. government told Truman to tell the Japanese what they were going to be doing with the Hirohito. They can keep Hirohito. In the end, of course, they kept Hirohito as the input. But Secretary of State Burns, for whatever reason, decided that we were not going to tell the Japanese that, and they were not told that. Now, even if the Japanese had refused to surrender, as far as I'm concerned, I agree with the Catholic philosopher, G.E.M. Anscombe, when Truman was given an honorary degree at Oxford, two years later she protested. She said, if the Nazis wipe out the villages in Poland or Czechoslovakia, how's that different from the Allies bombing innocent civilians and killing them from the air?

36:56So that it's mass murder, and I just don't find that acceptable or in any sense necessary. But if you wanted to insist on Japanese surrender, then the thing would have been to do away with this unrealistic, unconditional surrender and tell them the condition, which is that the emperor would stay. It's interesting to note that the Republican leaders got together, Taft, Hoover and others, and in May of 1945, they said they had to end the war very quickly. The Communists were making big gains in Asia. Maybe we should let the Japanese keep Korea for most parts of their empire. And this brings to mind a very interesting point.

37:46How do wars end in general? By negotiations and your give and take and their compromises. Supposing the Japanese had been allowed to keep part of their empire. Not only the emperor, but even part of their empire. You know, the other side likes to engage in this conjectural history. If we had not gotten into the Second World War, then Hitler would have conquered the world and killed everybody. Well, I suggest that if we had not smashed Japan in the way we did, if we had allowed Japan to remain a power in the Far East, it's possible that the Chinese Communists would not have come to power in China. And that would have been 30 or 40 million less people killed, as the numbers are starting to tell us, from Mao's China.

38:35So this is maybe something to consider. These people in government, they get paid for this for heaven's sake, they seem only able to think of one thing at a time, smash Japan, then we'll see what happens. Or smash Germany, then we'll see what happens. They're supposed to be able to, like Metternich or Bismarck or Disraeli, deal with a bit of complexity and nuance. Okay, well, this is pretty much the record. As far as these bombings go, what comes to mind is this saving private Ryan, you know, showing the horrors of war.

39:20I would say that if Spielberg was serious about it, really serious about it, And then let him show something of the hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese children who were killed by the bombings, hundreds of thousands. Let them show them burning in the buildings, the old people dying terrible deaths in one city after another, and not this meretricious thing of a couple of Americans getting their heads blown off. The government is always worried about children and saving our children and so on. What this brings to mind is something which I'm sure you've heard before. You've heard many times, no doubt, how people like us who believe in the free market, well the free market, what is the free market? The free market is really a terrible inhuman kind of arrangement How does the U.S. government treat people like garbage?

40:47We libertarians of course understand that we are not humane, we are not compassionate. It's the leftists and the liberals that are the ones who are humane and compassionate. But you'd better not get in their way. Now, finally, I suggest that this treatment of Truman puts a near-great president like Truman in a certain perspective, and also Bill Clinton in a certain perspective. I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis's great little books, The Screwtape Letters, I don't know Scrutape proposes a toast. Scrutape is a devil who is sending out messages to other devils on earth to attempt to tempt people and get souls damned.

41:48Scrutape is one of the major devils. There's a great dinner that's being arranged in the lower reaches of hell. And he proposes a toast, and he complains that they're not getting the type of damn souls that they used to. They used to get models and exemplars of ruthlessness and cruelty and power lust. And now, well, what he seems to be saying is now all they're getting are people with adolescents who can't keep their high school lusts under control. So, in view of the better, more grandiose examples of wrongdoing that we're aware of tonight and through other presentations, I suggest that we keep our abhorrence, our loathing for the presidents who really deserve it.

42:53On the other hand, Bill Clinton is the only president we have now. Thank you very much.