Leaders Are Not Alone: The Role of Advisors and Bureaucracies

Abstract

President Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read, “the buck stops here.”¹ He referred to its meaning in his farewell address in January 1953, saying that the “greatest part of the President’s job is to make decisions—big ones and small ones, dozens of them almost every day. … The President—whoever he is—has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”²