January 2011

Benjamin Franklin was the most cosmopolitan spirit of his age. The self-made republican, the tallow-chandler’s son, the many-sided tradesman, and the universal genius moved with grace and honor among the powdered heads of Europe, quipping with royalty and corresponding at once easily and profoundly with the greatest intellects of the day.

Where the Buck Stops Failure of a President The Meaning of Victory

When Harry Truman was President of the United States, he kept on his desk a little sign which announced: “The Buck Stops Here.” This was his salty way of acknowledging the constitutional provision which makes the President the commander in chief of the country’s armed forces and hence vests in him the terrible responsibility for making the life-or-death decisions that have to be made in time of crisis. Elaborate machinery has been set up to inform and guide the President, but the final answers still have to come from him. He can never pass the buck. It comes to the end of the line on his own blotter.

The founding fathers gave the President this power with some misgivings, sensing that this grant of authority was one of the key sections of the Constitution. The simple fact was that the responsibility had to be lodged somewhere. To divide it between Congress and President seemed clearly impractical, and to vest it in the legislature seemed, in the light of past experience, to risk putting too much power in the hands of a soldier. To give the power to the President seemed safest.

One American President usually gets omitted from the list of chief executives who have led their countrymen in time of war. Jefferson Davis was also a war President; and if he was not President of the United States, he was at least President of an American nation whose constitution, as far as war powers were concerned, was almost identical with that of the United States. Is it possible to shed any light on the general question of how a President must act in time of war by examining his experience?

Davis was no man to let any scrap of presidential authority go unused. He was commander in chief, and he worked at it day and night, in season and out of season; his trouble, as a matter of fact, may have been that he worked at it too much, concerning himself with masses of detail that clerks might have handled and reducing his Secretary of War to a limited and subordinate position. But in any event, no one in the Confederacy was ever in the least doubt about who was running things.