Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.
Oral History Interview with
George M. Elsey
Washington, DC
March 9, 1965
Carol Hoffecker and Charles T. Morrissey
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MISS HOFFECKER: When you first went into Government work, you were in the Navy, weren't you?
ELSEY: Yes, that's right.
HOFFECKER: In World War II?
ELSEY: Right.
HOFFECKER: And that's how you got to know Mr. Clifford?
ELSEY: Correct. I was at the White House at the time of President Roosevelt's death and when Vice President Truman became President. A few weeks after that, when Mr. Truman began assembling his own staff, one of the first men to join him was Clark Clifford, who was then a Naval Reserve officer. Mr. Truman had known him in the prewar days, Mr. Clifford being a prominent attorney in St. Louis. Clifford came to the White House to be Assistant Naval Aide to President Truman and within a year he was serving as Naval Aide and then as Special Counsel to the President. As Special Counsel to the President, from the time he assumed that position until
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he left the White House in early 1950, he was the President's principal assistant in the matter of speeches, messages to Congress, and pronouncements of that sort.
HOFFECKER: And you became an assistant to Mr. Clifford?
ELSEY: Right.
HOFFECKER: I see. Were Mr. Clifford's assistants divided up into different areas? For example, were you in charge of one particular area and other people in charge of others?
ELSEY: In the first place, the assistants were not plural; they were singular.
HOFFECKER: There was only one?
ELSEY: Yes.
HOFFECKER: How about Mr. Murphy?
ELSEY: Mr. Murphy came to the White House in '47 as an Administrative Assistant to President Truman, concerned principally with legislative matters, helping the Administration put together its legislative proposals and then push for their enactment. Mr. Murphy came to
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the White House from many years of service on the Hill. He'd been in the legislative section of the Senate. While Mr. Murphy worked closely with Clifford, in fact the whole White House staff worked closely together, he was not an assistant to Clifford. He succeeded Clifford as Special Counsel when Clifford resigned in 1950.
HOFFECKER: Did you yourself work on speechwriting tasks? Mr. Clifford's role, from what I've gathered from others, was advising the President particularly on the domestic issues, but in the realm of foreign affairs did he tend to give the President advice on how various foreign policy statements would affect public opinion, as opposed to the State Department's point of view of our foreign policy and how it affects other countries?
ELSEY: Well, let me comment on the beginning of your statement there. Things don't break down into neat little packages, neat little compartments. You don't draw a distinction between domestic and foreign. The White House staff in those days was very much smaller than it is today. At the time, people said it was large because it was larger than Roosevelt's staff. But the point to remember is that as the functions of Government increased, as the place of the United States in world affairs has vastly altered in the
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last generation, the White House staff has correspondingly grown. Hoover's was bigger than Coolidge's and FDR's was bigger than Hoover's and Truman's was bigger than Roosevelt's and so on, right up to the present, where Johnson's is bigger than his predecessors. And whoever succeeds Mr. Johnson is going to have a White House staff that causes people of that time to say, "My goodness, how could it have ever grown so much?"
But to get back to the Truman period, it was a small group. We did not have neat little compartments, little boxes, one person being assigned or one group of people being assigned to one area of work and another group to another. You coped with the problems and the chores as they came up and it might one day be concerned with a veto on a major matter of domestic legislation and the next day a speech that the President was going to make to a group of visiting dignitaries from another country. In between times you were working on two messages that were going to the Congress the next week, and there probably would be an acceptance speech of an honorary degree from some college thrown in there too. At that point, Clifford and I, and the people that we would borrow from time to time from the Bureau of the
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Budget or other Government agencies, did what had to be done. There wasn't a matter of one group being domestic and another group being foreign and another group being political, another group concerned with Capitol Hill relations. Today, as you know, the White House staff being larger, the problems of the Presidency being much bigger, there is a degree of organization and specialization which simply was nonexistent in the Truman time.
Now, you had another part of your question there. Did Mr. Clifford tend to advise the President on let's say, the domestic implications of a foreign policy matter, whereas the State Department would be concerned with perhaps the international repercussions? Well, that's doing the State Department something of an injustice. I don't think that the Department has ever been oblivious to domestic concerns or domestic reactions. After all, the most articulate expression of domestic opinion is the Congress, and most certainly the State Department is never oblivious to what the Senate and the House think. It can't be; it can't afford to be, and the Secretary of State and the Under Secretary and the various assistants, in many ways, their feet were much closer to a much hotter fire because they
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are the ones then and now who testify, who have the cross-examination, who have to go up and defend the administration policies. So to think that the State Department lives in something of an ivory tower and is concerned only about what London or Paris or Moscow think is, as I say, not doing it full justice. It is true that the White House staff in the Truman administration would sometimes feel that the State Department had not fully taken into account some of the domestic considerations, that we might want to alter, or propose to alter, some draft language. In fact, we frequently did. This was because of just a different point of view, a different interpretation possibly of the significance of some domestic concern. It was not that we were suddenly adding an ingredient that the State Department hadn't even thought of at all. I suppose Israel would be a good example, where the White House--probably that's the best example--where the White House was more sensitive to the domestic political implications of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations than the Department, and an area of argument sometimes ensued.
HOFFECKER: Why was the White House staff more sensitive to this? Was this because the Zionists were putting greater
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pressure on the White House staff? Or because the White House staff was more concerned with Mr. Truman's political future?
ELSEY: Well, the President, of course, is a political leader. He's not President if he isn't a political leader, or he doesn't stay President very long if he's not a political leader, and a President has to be concerned with the domestic political implications of international matters, and there were very, very strong emotions in many areas in the United States, particularly the large cities of the East, on the independence of Israel. This is not solely a partisan matter. Republicans and Democrats alike were concerned. The parties were jockeying for position in this matter, and particularly as the '48 election approached. And if you didn't have your fingertips sand papered to the sensitivities of a matter of this sort, it would be easy for domestic political quarrelling to break out in such a fashion that it could have serious international repercussions. I mean if you get one party out-promising another party, this can cause hell overseas.
HOFFECKER: In other words, if Mr. Truman hadn't taken a strong stand in favor of Israel, Mr. Dewey certainly would
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have, as he did, and this would have been disruptive of American political life in general? I see your point there.
How about the Vinson mission. Did that start as an idea in the White House staff?
ELSEY: No, I don't think that did start as an idea in the White House staff. That started principally as an idea from some friends and associates who were not on the White House staff. It was, from my personal point of view, a grandstand public relations gesture that was not very well thought through. It didn't make sense then and it has never made sense since.
HOFFECKER: Do you think the President would agree with you on that statement? I mean, that it was a grandstand political gesture, or public relations gesture? Obviously, he wouldn't agree that it didn't make sense or he wouldn't have done it. Did he see it in terms of public relations or did he see it entirely in terms of easing the tensions between the United States and Russia?
ELSEY: I think he was willing to give these friends who were urging it their day in court. They felt very
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keenly and very strongly about it and he thought the idea was at least worth exploring and he was unwilling to reject out of hand an idea which was presented to him with much cogency and much fervor.
HOFFECKER: Was the idea presented in terms of American foreign relations or President Truman's political image?
ELSEY: It was presented in terms of American foreign relations.
HOFFECKER: When you were preparing speeches did you make use of the public opinion mail that the White House received or the public opinion polls, or any other sources of information for reaching public opinion?
ELSEY: No.
HOFFECKER: How did you arrive at a notion of what public opinion was, and how it would react to a statement?
ELSEY: Well, the President's job is to lead public opinion, not to be a blind follower. The President can't sit around when he's faced with a crisis like the -- well, to use an example, the January, February, March '47
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period, when the United States Government on very short notice was confronted with the fact that the British were going to pull out of Greece. You can't sit around and wait for public opinion to tell you what to do. In the first place, there isn't any public opinion. The public doesn't know anything about it; they haven't heard about it. You must decide what you're going to do and do it, and attempt to educate the public to the reasons for your action. Of course, you watch with interest to what the public response is after that, but you don't allow yourself to decide what you're going to do on the basis of public opinion polls.
HOFFECKER: The reason I asked was, taking that as an example, the Greek-Turkish Aid bill, in the Joseph Jones book he makes a big point of the fact that in the preparation of the President's speech there was an effort to avoid talking much about Britain, because there was a lot of anti-British feeling in the country, and to avoid talking about Turkey because our aid there was going to be primarily military, and American public opinion probably wouldn't accept military aid at that point, and to make a big point about how the United Nations can't handle the situation because public opinion would
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probably favor the United States nations handling it if it were at all possible--these sort of things . . . how did they know about that?
ELSEY: They didn't, and neither did Mr. Jones then and neither does Mr. Jones now. Mr. Jones has written a whole book about something that was done in a matter of a very few days. You don't sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all these points. You don't have the time. You've got a job. You've got fifteen or twenty minutes to present your case to the Congress or over the radio to the public, as it was primarily then, and soon of course to become TV, and you don't sit around thinking of all the things you can't or shouldn't do. You try to state what has to be done and what you propose to do in simple, cogent terms. And somebody else can later sit around for days and weeks and lie on the psychoanalytic couch and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting but quite irrelevant.
HOFFECKER: When you people in the White House staff think about public opinion are you likely to think of it as being synonymous with the opinion of Congress, since
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that's the first major barrier from your point of view?
ELSEY: I think it's awfully hard to generalize on something of that sort. It depends on what the subject is, what the timing is, whether you have a legislative problem on your hands in which case you think of Congress. If it is not immediately a legislative problem, of course, your mind is not much on Congress as such. Public opinion of course takes every conceivable form. It takes polls and editorials and mail and the opinions of your staff and your Cabinet members so far as the President is concerned rather than paying much attention to what the Gallup Poll says, let's say on an agriculture question or labor question. The President is going to care very much more what his Secretary of Agriculture and his Secretary of Labor tell him than he is about a poll that appears on page one of the paper.
As for mail, you mentioned mail at the White House, it was a matter of minor interest, but never more than minor interest as to how the mail ran. The press likes to ask about it and the Press Secretary would usually have some figures--"Well, the mail is running even on this, or three to one in favor of what the President said"--these would be general comments, but they didn't
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mean very much. If you get five thousand telegrams, all with identical wording, you know that it doesn't mean very much. Well, somebody felt keenly, some organization felt keenly, some organization put a lot of time and effort, but you already knew what that organization felt anyway. So, you don't bother to do anything with the 5,000 telegrams except take note of them, and so on.
HOFFECKER: Did you personally ever read any of the mail that would come into the White House?
ELSEY: Yes, but it was very much the exception rather than the rule, if we're speaking of general mail from the general public. If we're speaking of letters from important individuals, obviously from governmental officials, Governors, mayors, from members of Congress, from leaders of national organizations, that kind of mail, of course, is read and handled with dispatch and with as much sensitivity as is possible. The volume of mail coming in now is so great that no senior person on the White House staff could even begin to look at more than the tiniest fraction of one percent. The very interesting item, the human interest letter that
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is winnowed out of the bottom and passes through a dozen layers of staff screening before it finally reaches a newspaper, this is just fishing for a human interest story. It's not anything that determines or guides or has any bearing on public policy or the presidential action.
HOFFECKER: In assessing President Truman's leadership in foreign affairs, I was wondering why the fireside chat technique that President Roosevelt had used was not very frequently used by President Truman?
ELSEY: Have you done any counts?
HOFFECKER: No, I haven't counted up how many fireside chats FDR had as compared with Truman.
ELSEY: Well, my impression is--I haven't either, I probably knew at the time but that was a long time ago and I don't remember -- my impression is that President Truman was probably on television and radio more than President Roosevelt was. Charlie, do you know?
MORRISSEY: I'm hesitant to inject myself in this. The same question was asked of John Kennedy, and his response was, to whomever asked the question, "Have you counted the
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number of speeches that were so-called fireside chats that FDR gave?" And Kennedy gave whatever the answer was, and it's a very, very small number.
ELSEY: I think the point is that fireside chats were an innovation. Radio was still--there was no television--not common; it had been a very unusual business for a President to take to the air, and the very fact that the President would make a so-called fireside chat once in three or four or six months, that was a major event. By the time of Truman, and of course with increasing frequency, we have come to have a President on the radio or television or recordings of the voice coming along in some cases almost every day.
HOFFECKER: That's true, and that can be cheapening the President's coin in a way.
ELSEY: Yes, yes it can. I think there is one observation of course, about President Truman, that President Truman's radio delivery, his television manner was perhaps not quite as dramatic or effective as President Roosevelt's. The formal read speech was not Mr. Truman's most effective way of getting a point across. He was far better face to face before an audience speaking with a fair amount of
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extemporaneous comment and expression, even when he had, as of course he most of the time had to, read a speech. The points that his audience remembered were where he was most effective in putting himself across. The phrases that were remembered were the extemporaneous ones at the beginning or the ending of a speech or injected into the middle of it. This is the difference between the two men. So, A, I would say that Mr. Truman was on the radio and television probably more than you realize, and B, FDR was on less than you realize. But as to why he didn't develop the fireside technique, this was simply not his best medium, not his style.
HOFFECKER: I notice in reading President Truman's speeches that there is a great emphasis on spiritual and moral qualities--that he's forever bringing these into his addresses. For example, in a number of his speeches I noticed that he said that God Almighty had intended for the United States in 1920 to become involved in world affairs and by not doing so we had, in a sense, added to pressures that led to World War II--statements of this sort. Were these statements put in Mr. Truman's speeches because they were Mr. Truman's personal opinions?
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ELSEY: I think I would answer that by saying, how many speeches of how many other Presidents have you read, and wouldn't you find this from George Washington to the present? I think you would.
HOFFECKER: I'm not saying that this is bad or good. All I'm saying is that it seems to me that of the Presidents that I'm familiar with, Truman mentioned moral and spiritual and particularly religious ideas more frequently than any that I am familiar with.
ELSEY: This could be. We would have to make a check of that point too, I suppose, to find out whether the frequency is greater or less. As to Mr. Truman in this matter, I would say that he led and the staff followed. The staff did not deliberately compose phrases or paragraphs of this sort, and inject them. This was very much a part of President Truman's own personal belief and feeling. Many of these phrases and sentences were added by him in longhand very near the final draft of a speech. In cases perhaps where the staff would have made references of this sort, it was only because we knew this was the way the President felt and if we didn't at least have something like this he would do it on his own. But this
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is genuine insofar as the man himself is concerned. One could find long before he had ever had a staff helping him in matters, references of this sort, back in his early campaign speeches, in his senatorial days in the '30s and '40s, so this is A, a reflection of Mr. Truman's own beliefs and, B, I think most national leaders in the United States have similar expressions of thought, although perhaps as you point out not with the frequency or fervor perhaps that Mr. Truman showed. Just as a purely personal reference, I recall one occasion when a former college professor of mine was visiting in Washington and he berated me on the point that there was so little of the spiritual or moral in President Truman and President Truman's speeches, and because I was conscious of what you have brought out here, I pulled out the last eight or ten major national addresses of the President and marked them and sent them to this professor, who shall remain nameless, although I think Charlie knows who he is.
HOFFECKER: President Truman was once quoted as saying that he thought it was awfully easy to demagogue on public issues and that he personally always tried to avoid
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this. My own reading of his speeches tends to make me feel that he really did avoid it, particularly in foreign affairs, but not so much in domestic issues. I won't say that he demagogued like Cleon, but I think that one cannot say that he abstained altogether. I wondered if he saw a great difference here between domestic and foreign issues on how they could be treated by the President in speeches?
ELSEY: Yes, I think he saw a distinction and observed the distinction. He was very conscious of the fact that--well, he used to say over and over again that politics should stop at the water's edge. That was not an original phrase of his; I don't suppose anybody knows who first coined it, but he believed this very keenly. He tried to practice it. He had tremendous respect and admiration for Senator Vandenberg and many other Republican congressional leaders as well as Republican national figures who were not in Congress. He knew that the only possible way for the United States to have any effective foreign relations was to have a single foreign policy and a united nation in dealing abroad, so he did try to avoid partisan arguments. You can't always succeed, of course, but you can make an effort. But in domestic matters,
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partisan politics or sharpening the issues and finding them out was the whole lifeblood of everything he believed and lived. So he did approach foreign and domestic affairs very differently.
HOFFECKER: How about when the MacArthur dispute arose? Did he see that as having partisan implications?
ELSEY: Well, it was perfectly obvious that it would have partisan implications. It was bound to. You couldn't avoid partisan implications in something of that sort. Even if they weren't there they would immediately be created. But this was just a price that had to be paid. He regarded it as military defiance of the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, military defiance of the national policy as expressed by the Commander-in-Chief and as agreed to by the National Security Council. This simply couldn't be tolerated, couldn't be allowed to go along any more. He had tried various remedial measures, including going practically half way around the world for a face to face discussion with General MacArthur. The fact that there were going to be bitter fights as a result of it could be deplored, but this could not alter the fact that what had to be done had to be done and had to be done cleanly and decisively and fast.
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HOFFECKER: Well, when bipartisanship broke down, as I think that this issue demonstrates that it did, did the President then change his attitude toward how he should address the public on foreign matters? You said that the reason that he was so very careful earlier was because he wanted to preserve bipartisanship. Now, once bipartisanship is gone, did this change his attitude toward how he could address the public?
ELSEY: Well, I don't think the MacArthur firing destroyed bipartisanship in foreign affairs.
HOFFECKER: No, I think it just pointed to the fact that it was already destroyed, myself.
ELSEY: Well, perhaps in some areas, but no bipartisanship across the board on all matters of foreign policy on a particular issue. Yes, I suppose there never was perfect bipartisanship one hundred percent and on all foreign policy. That's too much to be hoped. But there was no breaking down of general, national agreement and bipartisan agreement on the matter of foreign aid, of carrying the Marshall plan through to completion, of the development of what was to become NATO, which was then in the process of negotiation and formation, of the
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necessity of opposition to Soviet pressures, of Berlin--we can carry on a dozen or more major areas of extreme national significance where the national unity and the bipartisan approach did not break down either over the MacArthur firing or subsequently. There were arguments of emphasis, but the bipartisan approach didn't break over the MacArthur firing.
HOFFECKER: Mr. Goldman in his book says that Mr. Benjamin Hardy of the Public Affairs Division of the State Department gave you the idea which became point four and that you told Mr. Clifford about it and got the idea put into President Truman's inaugural address. Would you like to comment on that?
ELSEY: Eric Goldman had the story right.
HOFFECKER: Why was the point four put in the inaugural address when it wasn't as yet really worked out in much depth yet?
ELSEY: Well, it was an objective; it was a goal; it was something the President said he was going to work for and believed the United States should work for. Are you implying that nothing should be in an inaugural
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address until it has been fully developed?
HOFFECKER: No, I'm not implying that but some people have argued that way. I don't take any stand on it; I'm just asking.
ELSEY: Obviously inaugural addresses would not say anything if they consisted solely of accomplished facts and programs that have already been fully developed; there would be little inspiration or little meaning, or little significance. I think the point here is that there is not, I suspect what is meant here, is that there still was some disagreement in the Department of State over the enunciation of this program. There were some people who felt that it was premature, they didn't quite know the full implications of it and they would have liked to have slept on it a little longer. This is all that is meant, and I suppose if the Constitution hadn't fixed January 20 as the date for the inauguration, they could have had their way, but here was a date. This gets back to something we were saying at the beginning. The White House staff does what has to be done and sometimes what has to be done is determined by the calendar, determined by fixed events over which
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you don't have any control and the President doesn't have any control and what was required and what was necessary here was what the President wanted, was a far-reaching, broad, expression of the aim and intentions of his administration in the field of foreign affairs. And he believed very, very keenly in what we called point four, I'll call point four, or used to call point four, and this was a natural, logical, evolutionary step.
HOFFECKER: From the Marshall plan to this.
MORRISSEY: Do you recall when the phrase Fair Deal gained currency as a label for Truman's legislative programs? Was that in response to that 1949 inaugural address?
ELSEY: No, I think that was the 1949 State of the Union.
MORRISSEY: It was 1949?
ELSEY: My recollection is, offhand, that it was the 1949 State of the Union. And that was a phrase, Charlie, of the President himself, no one else. That was put in in longhand by him one night when he was working over a draft. That was not coined by any staff member. Clifford and I saw it first the next morning in the
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President's longhand when he sent the draft back for us to look at.
MORRISSEY: And the press picked it up as a headline phrase?
ELSEY: The press picked it up. Yes, I don't think there was any consciousness on our part that this sentence was his, the paragraph was his, but that those two words would suddenly emerge as a phrase.
MORRISSEY: It's curious that the same could be said about the phrase, New Deal, in the 1932 acceptance speech.
HOFFECKER: I think I've asked just about everything Charlie, if you want to ask some more questions you go ahead.
MORRISSEY: Just out of curiosity, somewhere in the 1948 campaign, someone shouted to the President from the crowd, "Give 'em hell, Harry." Do you recall where that happened?
ELSEY: I certainly don't recall where it first happened. Here again was something that the press picked up. As the campaign went on, this became a phrase that you just heard hundreds and thousands of times, over and over and over. It began to be a refrain. No, I'm
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sorry, I can't say; I don't know where it was first used.
The "whistlestop," you know the origin of that, I'm sure. The crack on the whistlestop.
MORRISSEY: Senator Taft?
ELSEY: Senator Taft used that.
MORRISSEY: I think Mr. Truman has said himself that Mrs. Truman occasionally read over some of his speech drafts. Do you have any recollections of this?
ELSEY: I'm certain that Mrs. Truman must have. He said so and I've heard her comment also, but this would have only been in the family living quarters. She did not participate in meetings in the office nor did the staff meet with her. This would have just been in the privacy of their own sitting room, the President and Mrs. Truman. She had helped him and worked with him in his Senate years and did, I say I'm certain, I never witnessed it, but just because of the fact that they both commented on it so many times in my hearing, I just accepted it as a fact, of course. In the earliest days of the Truman administration, '46 and '47, when I was still in naval
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uniform and Assistant Naval Aide, I used to spend a number of weekends with them on the yacht Williamsburg either in Chesapeake Bay or in the lower reaches of the Potomac. And, Mrs. Truman -- of course, one was in very close and intimate contact all the time--and Mrs. Truman certainly did read documents, read papers, look over things with the President. As to what she might actually have said, what literary phrases or words or editing can be ascribed to her pen, this I'm simply unable to comment on. I just plain don't know.
MORRISSEY: Many of us who have done research at the Truman Library have read the transcripts of these whistlestop speeches. I've often been curious to know the mechanics of how these transcripts were produced. Who would go out and take down the words, and how would they be taken down, and how would they be typed up, and how reliable would the transcript version be to the actual spoken version that the President delivered?
ELSEY: Well, you know the name, Jack Romagna. Of course, you've heard of Jack. Jack Romagna went with the President on all these trips, and Jack had, simply because of the volume of business on the whistlestop campaigns, had
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at least one and sometimes a couple of assistants, and they took down in shorthand what the President said, not from the crowd but from the car. They would be just inside the presidential car, so they were within three or four feet of him. And not only did they hear his voice, but, of course, it was amplified so that there was no question of their hearing it all. I think they're quite reliable. I never had any reason to question the accuracy. There may have been an occasional word, an occasional phrase, a misspelling, but these were very, very minor. I can recall, for no reason at all, that we were in Texas arid there was a Big Bend (Big Bend of the Rio Grande), National Park and Jack Romagna, who was born in London, his transcription came out "Big Ben," which aroused the ribald comments from the press and the correspondents who twitted Jack about his nationality and his lack of Texas knowledge and so on. But that was the kind of mistake that was so minor that--a proofreader's error you could practically call it. No, I think they're reliable. It would be a very, very rare occasion when some phrase, some sentence that Jack might feel simply had not turned out to be a sentence and he would call it to the attention of Charlie Ross, the Press Secretary, and they might straighten it out just to get
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the grammar right, but this was a minor and very infrequent occurrence. As for censorship, rewriting, editing, no.
MORRISSEY: I was wondering if Commander Bill Rigdon got involved at all in the transcribing process?
ELSEY: Oh, I don't think that Bill went on any of the whistlestops. See, this was political, and he was a naval officer, and I don't recall Rigdon, the Naval Aide, having been on any of the campaign trips as such; other trips of the President, yes, but not campaign trips. Now, the only military people in evidence were the Army Signal Corps and they simply went along for communications reasons. They maintained the radio car, the communications car between the train and the White House. This was essential. The President as President had to be in contact with the White House. The Army Signal Corps had a special car in the train and military personnel were on the train, but they were there for part of the official governmental process.
MORRISSEY: Shortly after the 1948 election, Life magazine ran an article by Jay Franklin on the '48 campaign which Mr. Truman and some others took exception to, in December
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of '48 and January of '49. Do you recall any of the details about why Mr. Truman was somewhat critical of this article?
ELSEY: I don't remember criticisms of the article. I remember that Jay Franklin Carter did write an article for Life. I don't now recall particularly what he said in the article. I thought it was more of a commentary on the campaign than anything else, but he made some statements to the press and took some other positions which did arouse some reaction from the White House.
MORRISSEY: I was wondering if it was the propriety more than the content of what he wrote that bothered some people in the White House?
ELSEY: I doubt if it was the article so much as the fact that he had some pretty exaggerated ideas about his own importance, and he began making some statements on foreign affairs implying that he was an intimate of the President and an advisor, a high-level advisor to the President on foreign affairs, and that he shortly expected a major post in the Administration. This was the sort of thing that got people upset about him, more, I think, than the article.
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HOFFECKER: How about the train of thought in the article, that President Truman...
ELSEY: You'll have to refresh me on what he said in the article.
HOFFECKER: He made a big point of the fact that President Truman had said in Eugene, Oregon, "I like old Joe; he's not such a bad guy. It's those people in the Politburo that are always keeping him from keeping his agreements." Then he referred to the Vinson mission, and to the Wallace speech right before Wallace was fired in '47, and said that all these things put together--showed that President Truman was more willing to get along with the Soviet Union than were some of the people in the State Department, particularly his military-type advisers, like Marshall and Leahy and so forth, who had urged upon him an anti-Soviet policy with which the President was not in full agreement.
ELSEY: Well, I amend my earlier comments then. If this is what he said in that Life magazine article, yes. This is what upset people. I did not recall that the piece in Life got into the foreign policy matter. My recollection, obviously erroneous, was that the Life
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piece dealt more with just the campaign and the aspects of the campaign, whistlestopping and so on. No, it was the fact that he took it upon himself to be a spokesman and an interpreter of the President's views and an erroneous interpreter of the President's view with further implications which he was quite free in scattering around Washington, that he was soon going to be a major administration figure. This was what required him to be slapped down, as he was.
MORRISSEY: I assume that that quip the President made in Eugene about "I like old Joe," was strictly extemporaneous--something he threw off in a light vein.
ELSEY: Yes, off-the-cuff, completely extemporaneous. I'm certain that he has wished many times he'd never said it. It has to be understood for what it was--that just on the purely personal level of the Potsdam Conference, Stalin had behaved well and had been agreeable and it had been possible at that meeting to discuss matters with him without hating him. He was not discussing U.S. or USSR relations or Soviet policy when he was making a comment of that sort.
HOFFECKER: Do you think that President Truman really
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believed that Stalin was more agreeable than Molotov or Vishinsky?
ELSEY: No, I don't think he had any illusions on that score.
HOFFECKER: Do you think that he might have said this because he thought that Stalin would be flattered by it and might be more willing to be agreeable?
ELSEY: I don't think he thought about it, as Charlie says. I don't recall--I was not on that trip--that was in the spring of '48 prior to
MORRISSEY: June of '48.
ELSEY: June of '48, yes, prior to the actual campaign trips. I think it just came out in the course of some remarks he was making. I don't believe that it was the result of deep thought or analysis at all. We try to read too much into many of these things. We try to ponder why they were said. Well, that doesn't do any good because they are not the result of lots of deliberation, discussion, thinking and so on.
HOFFECKER: The only reason I brought that up was because,
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when I was talking to Admiral Dennison, he said that one time he had asked President Truman why he didn't make more off-the-cuff statements on foreign policy because it seemed that his off-the-cuff statements were more effective than his written speeches given his delivery style. And the President told Admiral Dennison that it was because every word that the President utters about foreign affairs is part of the public record and therefore he has to be extremely careful about what he says. If he really believed that he had to be extremely careful you'd think that he would be extremely careful all the time.
ELSEY: Well, when you consider, of course, that a President is under pressure and under scrutiny and under the microscope twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it's just not possible to weigh every word, every sentence all the time. I think this is why Mr. Truman didn't let himself go all the time on foreign affairs extemporaneously, and no President does. And even today, the presidential press conferences consist of prepared statements which you may comment on. But you don't stand up in front of a microphone and begin thinking at that point about what you're going to say
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on foreign affairs. And Mr. Truman did have something of a quick temper and snapped back, sometimes too fast, in press conferences on domestic as well as foreign matters. Sometimes the implications were horrendous. In December of 1950 there was a great concern over the use of the atomic bomb in Korea. He was asked the question and he made an answer. The answer was interpreted as having far more significance than he intended it to have. This resulted, among other things, in the British Prime Minister climbing on an airplane and coming to Washington in a hurry because the British were so alarmed about the possibility that the United States might start using atomic weapons in Korea. This was all caused in a matter of seconds in a press conference. This is the problem, of course, that every President faces.
MORRISSEY: George, you once remarked to me in conversation that of all those whistlestop speeches in the '48 campaign there was only once when the President went out without any preparation from yourself and I think you said that was in Enfield, Connecticut. Does this ring any bells?
ELSEY: Yes, I recall the problem that we made an unscheduled
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stop that none of us knew about or knew was going to happen and it was up there on the Massachusetts-Connecticut line. Was Enfield the name of the town?
MORRISSEY: As I recall your telling the story. My memory might be wrong or we might both have the name of the town wrong.
ELSEY: This was in the period from mid-September through to the election. We had done at least some preparation for every whistlestop speech and every appearance, which didn't mean a full text, as you know. This meant notes and outline--of course, a major speech is a full text--so that the President was at least armed or prepared with something. He didn't go out there completely at the mercy of the audience and the passions of the moment. This was a great difference between the Truman campaign and the Dewey campaign. Dewey went out and just said the same, what from our point of view we regarded as platitudes, over and over and over again. The press got tired of them and stopped carrying them. His campaign appeared to lack steam and lack vigor. The number of press accompanying Truman grew rather than shrank because they knew he would have something to say, and he did.
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MORRISSEY: When you were riding that train, how much attention did you pay to what Dewey was saying?
ELSEY: Practically none, because we had very little way of knowing. The kinds of newspapers you pick up in the small towns or even in a good-sized city would maybe have a headline or a few sentences about the content. Most of the political reporting would be about where he was, where he was going, or something of that sort, very little about the content of his speeches. What we learned about them came rather from Washington, from the Democratic National Committee. They were the ones who had the text, had the chance to see what was being said. Of course, there weren't texts for most of Dewey's small town appearances.
Miss Hoffecker has asked another question here, "Were security restrictions an important deterrent in explaining foreign policy to the public?" I don't recall this having been a problem. Obviously there are some things you don't talk about; you don't explain the disposition of your military forces. There are lots of things you don't talk about, but with foreign policy and foreign policy speeches you're not much hampered by security restrictions. You usually don't get into the
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areas where security is extremely tight. You're obviously not talking about an intelligence matter or details of military matters when you're making a foreign policy speech. I thought a little bit about--after seeing your question here -- I simply can't recall its having been a problem to us.
HOFFECKER: That's very interesting, thank you.
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