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February 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 2
Where The Buck Stops
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
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.
Things have changed since those days. The first “war President,” James Madison, had an Army of a few thousand men, a Navy composed of a handful of cruisers and patrol craft, and a War Department whose entire personnel could have convened in one room. Today, by contrast, there are the immense Pentagon apparatus, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and all the rest—an almost incomprehensibly complex array of planners and doers. But the authority remains undiluted. The President still has to say Yes or No. He can neither ignore nor delegate his power; he can only use it.
To see what American Presidents have done with this authority in times of war, Professor Ernest R. May of Harvard has assembled and edited a most enlightening book, The Ultimate Decision , in which a number of writers trace the growth and explore the significance of this charter of authority from 1812 to the present day, and in which Mr. May examines the profound underlying question: Has the job of commander in chief become too great, too complex, and too terrible a job for any one man?
Different war Presidents made their own contributions to the steady expansion of the scope of the Executive’s war powers. Some, like McKinley, were reluctant to use these powers and proceeded with great caution; others, like Lincoln, reached out unhesitatingly to use all of the authority they could get, setting precedents of far-reaching importance. But in the main all of them simply followed the rule the Constitution itself had laid down. As Marcus Cunliffe remarks in his perceptive chapter on Madison’s experience: “In war, the President’s powers grow almost despite himself.” The game was set up that way, and that was the only way to play it.