SOME CONSTITUTIONAL LAWYERS say that Jefferson stretched the Constitution until it cracked. And some people say that there’s no point in having a Constitution if you’re going to break it the way Jefferson did. I don’t agree with these viewpoints at all because, as I see it, the Constitution wasn’t broken by Jefferson because he never overstepped its provisions - though he certainly stretched it. You don’t break the Constitution if you’re a good president, as Jefferson certainly was. You just don’t break it. But you do stretch it when necessary because the Constitution is a document built for stretching when emergencies or opportunities demand that it be stretched. And it’s been stretched time and again by our best presidents.

The thing some people tend to forget is that our Constitution isn’t just a revolutionary doctrine, something no other government in the history of the world had done up to that time; it’s also an evolutionary document. If you’ll read the preamble to the Constitution, you’ll see that it’s a document that’s flexible enough to make the country run no matter whether the population is 3 million or 300 million. The Constitution, and we’re lucky that it’s the case, was arranged so that it could meet the changes in conditions as time went on.

I’m one of the greatest believers in the Constitution in the country, I guess, and one of the greatest admirers of what it says and the way in which it says it. I think it’s far and away the best government document that’s ever been put together by any bunch of men. It says things simply and beautifully; it’s written in plain language, and it states exactly what’s meant and isn’t tangled up with any legal verbiage or any Latin inserts. And when you read it, you can understand it. I admire the Constitution so much that, when they asked me one time to go down and dedicate a monument to Patrick Henry, I wouldn’t do it because Patrick Henry was one of the bitterest opponents of the Constitution of the United States. Maybe that was going overboard, because he certainly said and did some good things, but I just said I wouldn’t go down there because there wouldn’t be any United States if old Pat Henry had had his way.

On the other hand, I’ve been going around giving a lot of talks to youngsters, trying to get them to understand what they have and what they have to do to keep it. I think the people who wrote the Constitution were interpreting the wishes of the people themselves, and not trying to lure the people toward their ideas. The Constitution was conceived on a high intellectual basis, but it was written in such a way that people could understand it and argue with parts of it if they felt like it. That’s the difference between our country and a lot of other countries.

But I’m a liberal constructionist of the Constitution rather than a strict constructionist. Some people label the two schools of thought “strict constructionists” and “loose constructionists,” but I won’t use that second term because I don’t believe there’s anything loose or unformed or unsupported by logic about the way we interpret the statements in the Constitution. I think the right term is “liberal constructionists,” using liberal in the sense of not being excessively rigid and immovable in interpreting those statements. And I’m a liberal constructionist because it seems obvious to me that a president should interpret what it says in context with the needs and events of his own times, and not necessarily in context with things as they were in 1789. And I’m also a liberal constructionist because I believe that change is always good if the change being contemplated is a necessary change or one that will better existing conditions.

I’m sure the men who put together the Constitution realized that parts of it would have to be changed as the country grew and changed, and that’s the reason, of course, that the Constitution is set up so that it can be amended. Which isn’t to say that I believe it should be amended casually or lightly, and fortunately, most of the lawmakers of this country have tended to have that same viewpoint.

You really ought to stop and read the whole Constitution yourself, and read it more than once, because the more you read it, the more informed you become about our theories of government and about what makes this country tick. But just in case you haven’t read it recently or at all, let me remind you that the Constitution has a Preamble that makes it clear in the first seven words that it’s everybody’s document and not the document of a small aristocracy; those seven words, of course, are “We the people of the United States . . .” Then there are seven articles, the first three of which set up the government of the United States and separate it into its three branches. The first article sets up the legislative branch and gives Congress its powers to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” and puts the purse strings in the hands of the elected branch of the government; the second establishes the executive branch and the fact that the government will be headed by a president and a vice president; and the third sets up the judicial branch and assures all Americans of the right of trial by jury and other legal protections, and sets up courts that can check the legality of laws passed by the Congress. And then it occurred to somebody, and I believe Jefferson was the moving man in the thing, that the protection of the individual from his government had been overlooked - and that an individual must be protected against the encroachment of a government on his rights or we just have the same old go-round that they had in the monarchies in Europe. It’s the fifth article that allows the Constitution to be amended, and Jefferson and his people pushed to get the first ten amendments passed because they’re all amendments for the protection of the people from the government being set up, so people can’t be persecuted and unduly prosecuted by their government.

The First Amendment, as most people know, guarantees freedom of speech, worship, press, and assembly. The Second guarantees the right to bear arms by state militias and the like. The Third prohibits the quartering of soldiers in homes without permission. The Fourth protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The Fifth, one of the best-known amendments, allows a person to refuse to testify against himself, and protects against double jeopardy and incarceration without indictment. The Sixth provides for an impartial and speedy trial in criminal matters (though unfortunately “speedy” is a relative word), and the Seventh provides for the right of trial by jury in common-law matters. The Eighth prohibits excessive bail, fines, and “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Ninth makes it clear that the fact that the Constitution states some specific rights held by the people doesn’t mean that they’re denied or don’t have other rights not specifically named. And the Tenth states that rights not granted to the federal government as needed for the operation of the country, are reserved to the states.

The first ten amendments became law in 1791. And just to give you the complete picture, the Eleventh prohibits suits against a state by foreigners or residents of a different state; the Twelfth was the one set up after that mess between Jefferson and Burr and requires that a president have a majority of electoral votes to be elected; and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth were those especially important amendments that came after the Civil War and abolished slavery and guaranteed civil rights to all Americans. The Sixteenth enabled Congress to collect an income tax; the Seventeenth provided for popular election of senators rather than through state legislatures; the Eighteenth was that dumb one, the Prohibition Amendment; and the Nineteenth allowed women to vote as of 1920, and about time. The Twentieth moved up the opening of Congress to January 3 and the inauguration of the president to January 20 so that presidents and other legislators who were no longer in office wouldn’t be around for four months, as they’d been previously, and have all that opportunity to push through bad last-minute laws; the Twenty-first was the sensible one that got rid of Prohibition; the Twenty-second provides that no one can be elected president more than twice; the Twenty-third allows residents of Washington, D.C., to vote for president, finally eliminating in 1961 the antiquated law that prohibited them from doing that; and the Twenty-fourth, passed in 1964, at last eliminated the poll tax and other types of discrimination against “poor people,” which should never have been law in the first place.

I don’t know whether or not you’re aware of the fact that there have been somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 amendments to the Constitution introduced since Washington’s time, and it’s interesting that only the twenty-four I’ve described have actually been accepted to date.29 That’s because the basic Constitution is sufficiently flexible and sufficiently open to differing but sensible interpretations, so that a good president can succeed in doing (constitutionally) what has to be done - sometimes with a little bit of stretching, of course.

And it’s equally interesting that only two of the amendments have been truly bad. The Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment, speaks for itself. You can’t prohibit something the largest part of the population wants and enjoys; all you do is make people go underground to get what they want, and you create a whole army of gangsters to supply the need. And I’ve made it clear in many of my public statements and conversations with people, and in this book, that I consider the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting the presidential term, equally stupid and mean-spirited. Someday they’ll repeal that one, too.

The Constitution has often been called “a bundle of compromises,” but what if it is? That’s all any government is, a bundle of compromises, and when it ceases to be a bundle of compromises, it becomes a dictatorship or goes to pot the way the Fourth French Republic did in 1958, with everybody thinking differently and pushing so hard to get his own way that nothing ever got done, and they had to drag old Charles de Gaulle in as president again for a while to see if he could sew the country back together. A series of compromises is just what they did in the Constitutional Convention; it’s a discussion of every approach to a matter or a problem that’s before a legislative body, or any other body that has to pass on things, and see if you can find an answer or a solution. The ablest men present at the time have to guess how the thing they’re trying to do will affect both the present and the future, and it often takes a compromise to meet that situation. Nobody can predict the future; if you could, you’d be Isaiah or some other prophet. So what’s often needed is an accommodation without surrendering the main principle of what’s trying to be done.

Some of our “normalcy” presidents, like that fellow Harding who coined the word, used the normalcy excuse at every turn and more or less thrived on the limitations of the Constitution by doing nothing, by just sitting back and saying, “Well, the Constitution prohibits me from doing this or that.” You’ll find that in times of so-called normalcy, people just don’t pay attention to what goes on in government, and they get away with sleeping on the job for a while. And then Harding was succeeded by another man, Coolidge, who was equally indifferent to what his powers were and what he could do in that Oval Office. But fortunately people finally get tired of that sort of thing just as they get tired of a man who exercises too much power, and then there’s a change and maybe another change and, sooner or later, we get someone who tries to get some things accomplished.

A lot of us had to stretch the Constitution at times. Jackson was a great believer in the Constitution, for example, when he made a statement that the three branches of the government were equally powerful - meaning that, under the Constitution, one branch couldn’t override or overrule any other. Yet, when the Chief Justice made a decision he didn’t like, he said, “Now let him enforce it. I’m president of the United States. How can he enforce it?” Old Jackson also knew how to meet the situation when he was having his trouble with the United States Bank; he just vetoed the bank’s charter and put the bank out of business. The same thing happened in a bigger and much more serious way under Lincoln during the War Between the States, when he suspended the right of habeas corpus and everything else of that kind. All those things certainly stretched the Constitution, but they were absolutely necessary at the time to save the republic.

Lincoln stretched the Constitution further than any other president because, of course, it was the only time in our history that our country was in danger of being split in half, but the truth of the matter is that that kind of thing has gone on continually. We all had to stretch the Constitution when the time came to do it. Theodore Roosevelt did what he had to do in 1907, when he was having his troubles with the depression and with Wall Street. He pumped money into banks that were failing and did a lot of other things to help business along, like canceling an antitrust action against United States Steel when it was acquiring the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, even though he was usually so vocal about antitrust matters, because otherwise the Tennessee company would sink. And when Wilson came along, he met a financial situation that was equally bad, so what he did was set up the Federal Reserve Board and based our currency on production in the country so that it could expand and contract to meet all possible situations. Wilson did far more extreme things than that as well; he was the greatest constitutional lawyer ever to sit in the White House, but he did what he had to do when the First World War started up. And I’m sure most people are familiar with all the great laws and programs that Franklin Roosevelt put through in the first part of his administration, things that were again necessary to help and perhaps even save our people and our country.

I’ll go into more detail about some of those things in the next few chapters on our greatest presidents, but the point is that, when these men did these things, they weren’t stretching the Constitution until it cracked. They were stretching it in exactly the way it was meant to be stretched when it was first put together, because the Constitution is an expanding document designed to meet each new situation as it comes along. It’s also an enabling document all the way through - to enable a president to do what’s necessary to do. It’s the greatest document of government ever written because it’s an outline of government and only an outline, and it can continue to help every new president meet and deal with every new problem if he (or she) reads it and studies it and recognizes the fact that the implied things in the Constitution are of much greater use to a republic than those that are set down on paper as limitations to what can be done.

For instance, the most important implication is the power of the president. It’s implied very clearly that the president must meet emergencies when they come up, and every good president has used all reasonable and sensible means at hand to do just that. In the same way, that the Constitution establishes the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch, it also gives those branches certain powers and certain duties to perform. There are a great many powers assigned to the Congress, and a great many assigned to the courts, and even more powers and duties assigned to the president of the United States for the operation of the government and the country. Any president who really wants to lead the country can do it under the Constitution, and he won’t have to infringe in any way on the things that limit his power in the Constitution. He has plenty of power if he wants to use it.

There have been very few of the great presidents who haven’t understood that and didn’t follow through on what the Constitution provides and allows. A great many of the other kind of presidents just sat there and let Congress do as it pleased and felt they were only the executive who enforces the laws passed by other people. But as I’ve said before, a president has just as much right to decide what’s constitutional as the Congress does or the Supreme Court does, when it comes to that, and that’s what all the great presidents have done. In other words, when an emergency arises, it’s necessary for men to meet that emergency by the practical method of sitting down and debating and taking measures.

I don’t think any of the presidents ever considered the Constitution a burden. Some of them were kind of like a spirited horse when you put a bridle on him, but none of them ever tried to sidestep the Constitution and throw it out. We met the emergencies in periods when we were in trouble. I guess some presidents do get out of line. Sometimes they become a runaway horse, which I think is educational for those of us who follow them. But then a bridle is there in the form of the Constitution. The men who were sitting in that Constitutional Convention were completely familiar with all the pitfalls of totalitarian government and all other kinds of government; there wasn’t a single member of that Convention, all sixty-one of them, who didn’t have an idea of government and how government should be set up. And the result is that the Constitution lets us go as far as necessary but not too far. The idea of freedom of action within sensible limits has always been the basis of our constitutional approach to things. There’s always a way to correct things without a bloodletting revolution, and that’s the reason we’ve continued to work and to govern as we have. Everything’s attainable under the Constitution. Everybody has the opportunity at some time or another to better himself, and perhaps even better his country, and that’s the objective in the long run. The Constitution should be applied constantly, but let me put it this way: It should be applied constantly in an improved manner.

Sometimes, of course, some of us have found the courts’ interpretation of the Constitution a burden, when the courts overstepped their limitations, such as when Franklin Roosevelt did the great things he had to do in his administration and the courts called a great many of them unconstitutional. But as in Roosevelt’s case, when a court came along that could really analyze the situation, they found that the Constitution implied that the measures Roosevelt suggested ought to be done because the American people needed those things, and they were done in the long run. It’s often said that the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution with an ear to the ground or an ear to public opinion. I think that’s correct to some extent, but they can’t interpret it out of existence, and usually when they interpret it too much, the next court will set it aside.

Obviously, a strong leader is necessary in times of emergency or need, and that’s always been the big question with each president in times like that: whether he’ll want to run the government for the welfare and benefit of all the people or whether he’ll want to confine it to a groove and not let it run at all. But that’s been our lucky situation, to have strong people around who were willing and able to handle each emergency as it arose. Whether it’ll continue or not, we’ve got to wait and see, but I’m an optimist and have confidence in our strength and future, despite the fact that some people who are mediocre or worse get into power and impede our progress for a while.

Which brings us full circle back to Jefferson and his Louisiana Purchase and the fact that it was most certainly not in violation of the Constitution. Jefferson, in fact, brought up himself the question of whether or not the purchase was constitutional because he respected the document so much, and there are letters written by Jefferson to various people in which Jefferson comments admiringly on Washington’s abilities as an administrator at the Constitutional Conventions because he was able to get a document like the Constitution out of it. But Jefferson wasn’t about to let a foreign power gain strength and grow stronger and stronger on our borders. He had no intention of going beyond the limitations of the Constitution to the point of injuring it. His objective was to protect the United States, and eventually the Congress came in and agreed with him on the way he handled it.

Perhaps, as some historians say, Napoleon’s principal motive was that he hated Britain and wanted to put a thorn in the side of the British. There were a great many lawsuits against the French government after he did it, but I don’t think they would have stood up in court. I think he was mostly afraid that the British were just going to come down from the north and take all that territory anyway, and they probably would have done just that if the United States hadn’t stepped in and bought it. In any case, it’s certain that Jefferson didn’t care in the least about Napoleon’s motives. He jumped at the opportunity and didn’t wait for legal maneuvering. The legal maneuvering was done afterwards because what he did was right.

There are certain circumstances where it’s absolutely essential to move quickly. Roosevelt had the same kind of difficulties at times, and I had some of the same difficulties, and Lincoln had more difficulties than either one of us. That’s why I always try to explain things when people say, as I’ve mentioned, that there’s no point in having a Constitution if some presidents think nothing about breaking it. You don’t break it at all. The provisions of the Constitution were never overstepped by Jefferson. The objective in a thing like that is to meet the situation with which you’re faced, and then apply the Constitution to the program after it’s over if you can’t do it beforehand. The enabling legislation in the purchase of Louisiana was the appropriation of funds immediately for the purchase, and Jefferson had no problem getting that done. He just insisted that the money be given to him quickly, and as he wrote about the matter, “the less said about the Constitutional difficulty the better.” After the fact, of course, everybody could see how good all that territory was for the welfare of the country. There wasn’t any argument about it after it was all over.

You just have to move quickly sometimes to meet certain circumstances. The same thing happened when Roosevelt traded some of our obsolete destroyers for naval bases; there was plenty of noise about it until people realized what a good thing he’d done. That was the same as the Louisiana Purchase.

The chunk of territory that Jefferson acquired for those three cents an acre was almost too big to be believed; it stretched from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain on the east to Texas and the Rockies on the west, and from Canada on the north down to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. It’s true that Napoleon had gotten hold of it from Spain by promising that he was going to hand one of the members of the Spanish royal family one of those little Italian kingdoms, and he never paid off on his promise at that, but it was still the greatest bargain in the history of the United States. In time, no less than fifteen additional states or parts of states came out of it: pieces or all of Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, of course, Minnesota, my own state of Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. It was mostly those good old Federalists who opposed it and yelled that it was unconstitutional, but the treaty between France and the United States was completed on April 30, 1803, signed a few days later, and finally ratified on October 21. The American flag went up over New Orleans, signaling our control of the territory, on December 20.

And then Jefferson did that third important thing I wanted to mention, which was to send Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest and come back with a full report on all the good things we had there for ourselves. I don’t think many people realize or remember that Lewis was Jefferson’s personal secretary and close friend and was chosen by Jefferson because he felt that the expedition was so important that he wanted somebody especially good to head it. Lewis in turn picked his friend William Clark to join him on the expedition, which they hoped would take them as far as the Pacific Ocean, and the body of men set out on a dangerous and difficult trip that lasted two and a half years, from May 1804 to September 1806, and covered 8,000 miles. They ended up back in St. Louis with a tremendous amount of valuable information about the areas they visited and the Indians who lived there, and they confirmed that an overland route was possible, opening the door to considerable additional exploration and settling of the lands by Americans. Lewis went on to become governor of the territory in 1807, but had a sudden and tragic end two years later; he was on his way from his headquarters in St. Louis to Washington to arrange for publication of the important journals of his expedition when he stopped at an isolated inn on the Natchez Trace, and he was found dead there the next morning, just thirty-five years of age. It’s still debated as to whether it was a suicide or whether he was murdered. Clark was appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs, negotiating a number of important treaties, and then was governor of the Missouri Territory from 1813 to 1821, resuming his duties as superintendent of Indian Affairs until his death at the age of sixty-eight in 1838.

Jefferson was a very social sort of man, and when he left the presidency on March 3, 1809, he went back to Monticello and spent the rest of his life there, keeping busy by entertaining visitors and neighbors and corresponding with friends around the country. He hurried back there because most of his interests were centered in his home, and during the eight years he was president, he stayed in Washington only when it was necessary for him to be there. At all other times, he went quickly back to Virginia and relaxed in his lovely big house.

He was a very genial man, and a good man to have around in any company. He knew how to make people enjoy themselves. In fact, he was too much that way for the simple reason that the friends he entertained, while he was president and after he left the presidency, ate him out of house and home, and he lost all of his properties except Monticello because he couldn’t keep up with the expense of running things. His house was a kind of hotel, and when he left the White House, he was nearly $25,000 in debt. His indebtedness increased rather than decreased in the years that followed because there were no presidential pensions in those days, and his only income was from selling tobacco and flour and a few other items grown and manufactured at Monticello. He also had a tremendous number of family connections to whom he kept giving money because he felt responsible for them, and in one way or another, I guess he was. He was a good farmer after he left the White House, and he’d been a good farmer in his earlier days, growing just about everything that grows on a farm and being very successful at it; but he was so liberal that anything he accumulated soon disappeared to the people who were begging him to take care of them or expecting him to entertain them. But he managed to get along, and he enjoyed the last seventeen years of his life as a private citizen.

He was just a good human being, and he liked people, and he liked to associate with people, and he liked to get along with people, and he liked to discuss all questions with anybody who was willing to discuss them with him. He talked to visitors and friends on any subject they wanted to bring up, and this gave him constant enjoyment because he knew all the most intelligent people in Virginia and New York and Massachusetts, and in France and England, too, for that matter. Sometimes, of course, he had to make some pretty strong sacrifices to keep up his way of life. In 1815, for example, when we were at war with the British again and they burned down the Capitol, the fire wiped out the Library of Congress at the same time, and Jefferson agreed to sell the government his beloved collection of books to start up a new Library of Congress. It must have hurt his heart to do that - he’d accumulated 6,500 books by that time, and it took eleven big wagons to get the collection to Washington - but he needed the $23,950 he got for his books. There’s a sad postscript to that, too; there are only about a third of those books still in the Library of Congress because there was another fire there in 1851, and two-thirds of Jefferson’s collection was destroyed. Still, he remained a happy and gregarious man for the remainder of his life.

His heavy correspondence also accomplished another good thing: It renewed his relationship with John Adams, and they ended up friends. I hope I’ve made it clear that I don’t believe Adams was a bad sort of man. I don’t think there was anything underhanded about John Adams; I think he was an honorable and upright man and an outstanding character of his time. But his political ideas were not in agreement with those of Jefferson - in which I believe, of course - and because of this I don’t think he was a very effective president. As I’ve said, his idea of government, like Alexander Hamilton’s, was that the country should be run by a special coterie of people who, in those days, were considered better than the general run of the population - that the welfare of the country was best served by people who had a situation in the world above the ordinary run of the population because the upper classes knew more about what was good for the people than the people themselves knew. Jefferson didn’t agree with this at all, of course; he trusted the people.

I suppose much of the reason for Adams’ viewpoint stems from the fact that he spent so much of his time abroad as a diplomat and foreign officer for the United States; he spent most of the ten years from 1778 to 1788 in France, Holland, and England, before becoming Washington’s vice president in 1789 and president himself in 1796. His son, John Quincy Adams, in fact, was raised principally out of this country. They were in contact mostly with Europeans whose ideas were very different from the ideas of the people who were growing up and developing in the Colonies; and while Jefferson and others were inaugurating some of the great policies and beliefs that were included in the Constitution, Adams was acquiring notions that were not very proper notions in Jefferson’s opinion, and in mine. And I think that, while Adams was a strong advocate of freedom from England, and did everything he could to help free the country from England, he still had those views in the back of his head when he entered the White House. Well, anyway, he wasn’t president long enough to bring many of his programs into operation. People got tired of him before he had a chance to have a second term.

As I’ve mentioned, he was so disappointed at not being reelected that he left the White House at midnight so that he wouldn’t have to ride in the same carriage with Jefferson to Jefferson’s inauguration, and he also left in that bad-mannered way because he felt betrayed by many members of the Congress. There’s no doubt that he was. Every president is. But the difference is that that was just the start of it, and people hadn’t yet learned to understand it as a fact of life.

I’m sure that Jefferson was as outraged by Adams’ behavior as I was by Eisenhower’s, and I’m sure Adams never really got over the fact that Jefferson had clearly been a better president than he’d been. I don’t think, incidentally, that Jefferson was ahead of his time in doing a better job than his predecessor. I think the work Washington had done was simply carried on by Jefferson after he became president. Adams hadn’t made any real approach to the Constitution, hadn’t really tried to understand and use it, so - as though Adams had never even been there - Jefferson was just carrying on the firm and stable government that Washington had created. Jefferson kept the government running.

But the smoldering anger between the two men was all smoothed over by their long correspondence, and Jefferson and Adams became the best of friends. When Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1826, at about six o’clock in the evening, he was nearly ninety-one, making him the president with the longest life thus far. His final thoughts were on the United States and on Jefferson; his last words were, “The country is saved, and Jefferson lives.” But that was also a final irony in the lives of the two men, because Jefferson was already dead. He died five hours before Adams, at twelve-fifty p.m., aged eighty-three. He willed the only thing he had left, Monticello, to his daughter Patsy, but his indebtedness had now climbed to a total of $107,274, and Patsy had to sell the house and auction off his furniture to pay his debts. Monticello was later bought by a naval officer named Uriah P. Levy and bequeathed by him to “the people of the United States.” Even that generous act didn’t help because a battle developed over the terms of his will, and it wasn’t until 1923 that the mansion was renovated and refurnished and opened to the public.