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
July 17, 1969
Jerry N. Hess
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HESS: Mr. Elsey, to begin this afternoon, would you tell me about the organization of the White House staff and about some of the duties of some of the various people who served on the staff during the Truman administration?
ELSEY: Before we get to specific individuals, Jerry, and specific jobs, I'd like to make some general comments. First, the White House staff in the Truman administration was never a static institution. It never had a table of organization and precise duties. It varied from, not from month to month, that would be an exaggeration, but certainly, from year to year, and what I would tell you about the Truman White House staff in 1945 would be very different from what I would tell you about the Truman staff in 1951 or '52. So, time, the calendar, is a factor here in considering the size of the staff, the individuals on the staff, the nature of their duties. Indeed even President Truman's own concept of what his staff was for and what he wanted it to do. A second point that is very important especially now, when we're
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in the late 1960s, looking back over twenty years, we have to be careful not to judge the Truman staff by the kind of a White House staff which more recent Presidents have had. The White House staff now is a big institution. I don't know the current number on President Nixon's staff, but it seems that, in the last week, I've seen announcements of three new people being added to the Nixon White House staff. It was a big place in the Johnson administration; not quite so big in the Kennedy administration, and the Eisenhower staff seemed large to those of us who had been there with Truman. But it seems small when you look back on it from the current time. So, when we discuss the White House, the Truman White House staff, please bear in mind that it was a small group. Don't expect that it was structured, organized, clearly defined, to the way we have, and political scientists, scholars, writers, and others have come to expect White House staffs to be organized.
Well, with those general remarks out of the way, okay, fire away.
HESS: Beginning with the Brownlow Commission, can you tell me about the organization of the White House staff as
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far as the Administrative Assistants are concerned?
ELSEY: Well, I don't know that I need to go all the way back to the Brownlow Commission, and the Administrative Assistants as FDR appointed them and initiated the idea. But, by the time that President Truman took office, in April of '45, it was a well-established practice to have three, four, or five men on the staff bearing the title of Administrative Assistant to the President. Their duties varied. Their duties varied with the individual concerned, with the problems of the moment. James Forrestal, for example, had come down from New York to be an Administrative Assistant to FDR prior to going over to the Navy Department. Most of the Administrative Assistants in the war years, and this held true into the Truman administration, were there for fairly brief periods. There might have been a specific ad hoc task the President wanted done and this was a convenient title and a convenient rank, position, to utilize for that purpose. Administrative Assistants were not expected to have line responsibilities of any sort. The only Administrative Assistant of the late Roosevelt and early Truman period who had a pretty sharply defined function, and who stayed for a long period was
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David K. Niles. Dave Niles continued to do for Truman, what he had for FDR, be an adviser on civil rights, minority problems, relations with Jewish, Negro, and other racial or religious interests. He's an exception to the practice of Administrative Assistants that I've just mentioned.
I don't believe that at any time Truman ever had on board the full six Administrative Assistants authorized by law. The number went up and down, three, four, five, perhaps he had six for a brief period, but I don't happen to recall when it was. I was named an Administrative Assistant in August of 1949 and remained one for a little over two years. During that period of time, I worked on speeches, legislative matters, relations with State Department, National Security Council in particular, and the many, many questions pertaining to defense matters that arose with the outbreak of the Korean war in January 1950. It was, as a matter of fact, my involvement, my concentration on foreign matters, after the outbreak of the Korean war, that led to my transferring from the immediate White House staff to that of Averell
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Harriman in December '51 when Harriman became Director for Mutual Security. But that's another story and not relevant here. I'm sure you have available from congressional directories and the Government Manual, the names and tenure of the individuals who served as Administrative Assistants. Names that come quickly to mind are David Lloyd, David Bell, Dick Neustadt, Charlie Murphy, who came to the White House in the spring of '47 as Administrative Assistant, remained there for three years at which point he became Special Counsel to the President succeeding Clifford. At any given point in time, if you took just a slice of time, and tried to analyze what these men were doing, you'd find quite a different picture from what you would find at, say, six months after that date. The workload ebbed and flowed with the problems of the Administration, with whether or not an election was in the offing, whether the Congress was 80th, Republican dominated, or 81st, Democratic controlled.
HESS: What was the relationship between the Administrative Assistants and the Special Counsel?
ELSEY: Well, this too varied from time to time. Sam Rosenman,
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who had been brought down from New York by Roosevelt in the middle of the war to assist on speech matters and congressional relations, had no particular relationship with Administrative Assistants as I recall it. Nor did Clark Clifford who succeeded Rosenman for the first year or so that he was Special Counsel. But as Clifford's experience in the Government grew, as his knowledge and prestige, and general expertise, broadened, President Truman began to assign more and more major substantive problems to Clifford to study and advise on, and Clifford needed help, and needed more assistance, and began scouting around. He turned to Charlie Murphy in the spring of '47, when Murphy came to the White House from the Senate Legislative Drafting Service. Because of Murphy's long association on the Hill and intimate knowledge of congressional procedures, Clifford found Murphy's advice invaluable and the two of them established a very warm cooperative, effective partnership. Officially and theoretically, at any rate, Administrative Assistants reported directly to the President and were not subordinate to the Special Counsel to the President. As a matter of practice, however, it developed that, beginning with Clifford and Murphy's relationship, one or more of the
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Administrative Assistants were clustered around the Special Counsel and tended, if not to work directly for him, to take his advice and guidance and follow his leadership as they went about their daily tasks and chores. After Clifford left the White House in February of 1950 to enter the private practice of law and Murphy succeeded him, Murphy followed the same practice that Clifford had of being the primus inter pares amongst some of the White House staff members. And being the practical, if not the officially designated leader of a team of two or three of the Administrative Assistant.
HESS: What was the relationship between the Special Counsel and Dr. Steelman, The assistant to the President?
ELSEY: This has always been a tough area to define. John Steelman was the incredibly energetic and capable and busy, all around workhorse of the White House staff. It's very easy to overlook the enormous volume of business that the President of the United States has to do in his capacity as Chief Executive, as chief administrator, as chief bureaucrat, if you want to call him that, of the executive branch of the
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Government. The public at large tends to think of the President in his more dramatic, flashy roles, in foreign policy as commander in chief, as a political leader and he is all of those things as we know. But, in addition, he is the head of a department, of a branch of the Government, consisting of many departments, of multiple independent agencies, a couple of million civil servants, and so on and so forth; and the sheer volume of paper work and administrative problems, personnel assignments, so on so forth, all this comes to the White House in a steady stream and an unremitting stream. Well, John Steelman was the man who coped for the President with this area of the President's job. Steelman had a bigger staff than the Special Counsel or anyone else because the sheer volume of work required it. Steelman, if I have to make a generalization, I'm sure I can be challenged on this by others, but as I look back on it, Steelman's job was that of an administrator of the normal, ongoing, every day work of the White House. The Special Counsel in contrast, was more of a trouble-shooter for the President, and speechwriter, drafter of very special bills that had to go to the
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Hill. He would move from hot spot to hot spot, from crisis to crisis, with and for and on behalf of the President. Now, this doesn't mean that John Steelman never became involved in crisis situations. Because of his long background in Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service; because of his acknowledged reputation as an expert in labor matters, in all major strike situations or other threatened strike situations where labor management problems came to the foremost, John Steelman was very much on the spot. In fact he was the man to whom the President principally looked at times of that sort. But that's an exception to the generalization I've been making about Steelman's normal role and is due less to the job that he held than to his personal background experience and field of expert knowledge. It became a practice, and unfortunate practice in my eyes, amongst some of the White House correspondents and writers of the time, to tend to elevate the Special Counsel over the Steelman role and to think the Special Counsel, because he was front and center in crisis times, was somehow more important than the Steelman job, which was carried out in Steelman's East Wing group
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of offices. That was not the way I saw it then, nor the way I see it now. Each was absolutely essential to the President and Mr. Truman could not have survived in the White House without someone doing what John Steelman did so very well for him. The Steelman role, of course, evolved. Here again, of what I'm speaking about was I suppose, the period '48, '49, '50, '51, in the very early, the first couple of Truman years, the Steelman role was evolving from what had been the job of Jimmy Byrnes during then, was as "Assistant President," as Byrnes loved to be called, moving on into the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Looking back on it very quickly, it seemed to me that the sequence went from Byrnes to Fred Vinson, who left when he became Chief Justice, then John Snyder, who held it briefly until he became Secretary of the Treasury, then John Steelman. The first, oh say, eighteen months of the Truman administration that was a war of demobilization, if you will, exercise. The comments I have been making about John Steelman were after the war was well behind us when we were moving into the peacetime period. Now Steelman had, once the Korean War broke out, and by the winter of '50-'51 when wage and prices began to get
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out of hand again, Steelman had a major role in all matters relating to economic stabilization and the President relied on him very, very heavily in that area. Steelman as I recall it, again I would have to go back and look at some records myself, at the very end of the Truman administration, he was serving as Chairman of the National Security Resources Board in addition to being The Assistant to the President.
HESS: If an organizational chart had been drawn up of the White House staff, would one or the other of those gentlemen have been rated somewhat higher or were they considered to be equal?
ELSEY: Oh, they were always considered to be equal. They would not have been rated higher and nobody tried to rate them higher. If anyone had, why, President Truman would have seen to that in a hurry. Their salaries were the same, for whatever that is worth. Their salaries were the highest on the White House staff, next ranking after them were the three secretaries to the President; the Appointments Secretary, the Press Secretary, and the Correspondence Secretary. The third rank after that were the Administrative Assistants to the President.
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HESS: Do you know how Dr. Steelman obtained the title The Assistant to the President?
ELSEY: No, I don't really recall how that came about. Probably, if I had to make a stab in the dark, it was to differentiate the role from that of--well certainly to differentiate it from the Administrative Assistants to the President, and there had been, from time to time, a few people called Special Assistant to the President and those were special in the sense that ordinarily they were very temporary for specific spot jobs. The antecedent the did cause a certain amount of amusement by people who thought that Steelman was trying to make something more of his job than it was. But I didn't see it this way, and certainly John Steelman never tried to do what Justice Byrnes, as I've earlier said, tried so assiduously to do in his informal conversations with the press, namely to foster the idea that he was "Assistant President." Byrnes loved that. Steelman certainly never tried to give anybody that impression and, in fact, very vigorously and actively stepped on the idea whenever anyone tried to use such a phrase.
HESS: I'd like to ask some questions about some of the
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people who worked on the White House staff at the same time that you did. Several of them we have mentioned this afternoon already, but if you could just give me a brief rundown on their responsibilities, perhaps how effective they were in carrying out those duties; their relationship with other members of the staff; perhaps their relationship with the President; and also if you worked with them on any particular project that comes to mind, you might mention that.
Let's start with the first Special Counsel to the President, Samuel I. Rosenman.
ELSEY: I became acquainted with Judge Rosenman when he came to Washington for President Roosevelt. This was during the war. I was then in naval uniform on duty in the White House Map Room. I saw Judge Rosenman many times; provided at his request, and of course, with the authorization of my commanding officer, information for Judge Rosenman that I'd obtained at his request from the War and Navy Departments. He, as we've said earlier, came to Washington primarily to help FDR on speeches and messages to Congress. He frequently wanted background information on military events or military happenings to help him better understand, how to phrase, how to
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write some of the material he was working on for President Roosevelt, so that by the time that President Truman came into office in April 1945, I already knew the Judge quite well. I had no particular--well put it this way, I had no occasion to work with him on messages to the Congress during the Roosevelt period. Among the first jobs that he began doing for President Truman, were some questions on the postwar organization of the military departments and Judge Rosenman pulled together reports and solicited information from people both within and without the Government on what the most effective postwar organization of the Army and the Navy and Air Force ought to be. This is when I began really a close association with Judge Rosenman on substantive matters and I commented, both orally and in memorandum form, on some of the material he had pertaining to postwar organization of the military. This was all still in rather a preliminary form and quite far removed from what was ultimately to emerge as the National Security Act in 1947.
Judge Rosenman left Washington in the winter of '45-'46 at which time President Truman announced that he would not appoint a successor that he, President
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Truman, regarded the Special Counsel as a wartime job only. However, within a matter of a very few months he found that the role of chief of staff for speeches and messages, was so essential that it really had to be recreated, and at that point President Truman named Clifford to the job. But I think I've departed from your line of questioning so, let's get back to it.
HESS: That's quite all right. One question comparing the two men. Was there any difference, was there any significant difference in the way the two men carried out their role of Special Counsel, Mr. Clifford and Mr. Rosenman?
ELSEY: No. I'd say basically not. In each case it was, both Rosenman and Clifford, were the principal staff members on whom the President relied for--both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman--relied for their major speeches, their major addresses. And the problems of drafting a major presidential address, an important address, are pretty much the same from year to year, President to President, and there's not much--there are only a limited number of ways you can go about doing it. I
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would say that the Rosenman and Clifford patterns were pretty much the same. Bear in mind that the term Special Counsel is completely--in those days--was completely misleading. Counsel implies lawyer, legal advice, a legal adviser. Neither Rosenman nor Clifford served as a legal adviser to the President.
HESS: How did that title come into being?
ELSEY: The Attorney General of the United States is the only official of the executive branch that can render legal advice to the President of the United States.
The title simply happened to fit the individual. Judge Rosenman was a lawyer in New York, he had been a member of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. When he came to Washington to help FDR during the war, he naturally wanted some kind of a title that reflected his profession of which, of course, he was naturally proud. He didn't think it would be right to be called an Administrative Assistant to the President. He wasn't going to be a Secretary to the President. And so a title was concocted, frankly, that would reflect Sam Rosenman as an individual. Because there had never been a Special Counsel to the President and so he
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dreamed up what he--the title he wanted. And it was a perfectly acceptable and understandable to all concerned. And it was because it was really thought to be a special title for one man in one situation that President Truman, when Rosenman left, said there would never be another one. But, as we said just a few moments ago, the need for somebody to fill that role was so essential that President Truman had to have somebody to do that kind of work for him. He didn't see anybody on the White House staff (we're now up to the spring of 1946), who could fill the role for him quite as well as he thought Clark Clifford could do. Clifford, at the moment, was serving as Naval Aide to the President. He had been a Naval Reserve officer in World War II and had come to the White House in the spring of 1945 as Assistant Naval Aide, brought there by James K. Vardaman, a Missouri acquaintance of President Truman and also a Naval Reserve officer. Clifford, for the first year or so at the White House, was in naval uniform and was serving very efficiently and effectively as Naval Aide. But, he had shown that his abilities and talents were far beyond that, through some writing that he had done,
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and some speeches he had drafted. And so, President Truman thought that Clifford could fill the role that Rosenman had filled admirably. He asked Clifford, thereupon, to take that job, or to assume this new task. Well, obviously, he couldn't do it as a Naval Aide so he had to be something else, and it just came naturally, since he too was a lawyer, to resurrect the title Rosenman had held. It didn't seem to bother anyone particularly. The President had to eat his own words and recreate the position that he had, such a few weeks before, said would not be recreated. This was a minor matter that didn't bother anyone. So, Clifford became Special Counsel mostly because he too was a lawyer. Had he been something else, he might have chosen some other title. When Clifford left, Murphy was the obvious fellow to continue that kind of work for President Truman. He too, was a lawyer so he became Special Counsel. Well, as you know, Jerry, by the time you've had three guys in Washington holding a job with a particular title, it's imbedded almost as firmly as if it were an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And so, of course, we've had Special Counsels to the President ever since. And the job has
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varied enormously in later years and it is become, now, quite different from what it was back in the Truman period, but that again is not relevant to our story today.
HESS: What had been the nature of the relationship between Judge Rosenman and President Truman?
ELSEY: I'm not quite sure how to answer that. President Truman found Judge Rosenman, of course, of invaluable assistance to him. Rosenman had been on President Roosevelt's staff when Roosevelt was Governor of New York and, although he had never been a full-time staff member of Roosevelt until the mid-war period, he had remained in such close touch with the President, had visited Washington so often, had spent so many hours, and days, and at times weeks, in Washington helping the President on matters, President Roosevelt that is, that he was an encyclopedia of knowledge on governmental matters, and as President Truman was first to express, and express it frequently and eloquently, there were vast areas of the Federal Government that he knew darned little about even though he had been a Senator for ten years. He did not know the details of many programs
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administered by executive branch departments that had not been matters of concern to him in the Senate. So, Rosenman was just of incalculable value to President Truman in the early months of the Presidency. He was all the more valuable because Harry Hopkins, who had been the other senior, intimate friend and adviser of President Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins' health was deteriorating at a very rapid rate, and Hopkins was simply not around, or not available, not physically capable of helping President Truman very much, though he would have been willing to do so and wanted to do so. So Rosenman was someone that President Truman used, needed, respected, and valued. Rosenman, however, wanted to go home; go back to New York. He'd come here for what he thought was a brief and temporary assignment for a long valued friend, and he felt that he had done his duty, as indeed he had. So, he requested a release and returned to New York and, in due course, President Truman reluctantly let him go back to New York. However, the two remained on the closest of good terms throughout the Truman administration and many, many times President Truman would call him or invite him down. Judge Rosenman came back to Washington in the 1948 campaign, for example,
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and I can recall a number of occasions when he worked on speeches for President Truman in the '48 campaign. He gave some very useful help and advice on the Truman acceptance speech at the Philadelphia Democratic convention in July '48. He traveled on some, not very many, but some of the campaign trips in the fall of '48 whenever President Truman was in New York during the campaign, of course, Rosenman was with him. And both before and after the '48 campaign, Truman made a point of spending a little time with Judge Rosenman many times when he was in New York City.
HESS: One of the matters that Judge Rosenman worked on before he left the White House was the 21 points message of September the 6th, 1945. Do you recall who in the White House may have helped the Judge on that particular message?
ELSEY: I can't help you much on that. In July and the early part of August I was with President Truman on the trip to the Potsdam Conference and was plunged, by the Japanese surrender and many other military events, attendant on the ending of the war, for the next few weeks after returning from Potsdam I was so tied up with military
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and naval matters with Commodore Vardaman and Captain-Captain as he was then--Captain Clifford, that I had no connection and no involvement with those domestic matters at all. I am inclined to think that that was pretty much Sam Rosenman on his own relying on contacts, general counsels, advisers that he knew through his long association with Washington, in the various executive branch departments. I don't really think there was anybody in the White House staff who was around at that point who was able to help Judge Rosenman. The Truman staff, by and large, was too new to be on top of matters of this sort, and the extent to which Judge Rosenman worked with Fred Vinson in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, I simply am unable to answer. He may have to some extent but I don't know.
HESS: All right.
Moving on to our next man, Mr. Clifford. How would you evaluate Mr. Clifford as a political adviser?
ELSEY: That's not fair, you're asking me to write a book.
To start with, I think the greatest value and virtue that Clifford had as a political adviser was
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his ability to take a long view of things. He tried not to think about tomorrow morning's headlines or what the radio commentator, or Drew Pearsons, might say next week or so, but what effect it would have on the President, his administration, and the position of the United States over a very much longer time span. It seems to me, and I don't want to be unfair to others, that sometimes other people on the staff were too much concerned by the pressures of the moment or the phone calls they'd just had or this, that, or the other letter or telegram or press conference that someone possibly quite unfriendly to Truman, had held. Clifford was conscious of these things, of course, and tried to take them into account, but didn't let them throw him off balance and throw him off stride. Now, as to the effect, impact, of his advice, I think it would be hard to put your finger on particular pieces of advice that Clifford himself would be willing to say were his. He regarded his relationship with the President as being a very private, very confidential one. He would speak with the utmost candor to the President. Sometimes his advice prevailed, sometimes it did not. But he would not be one to let you know either way whether his advice had been taken
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or whether he had been overruled. Whatever came out of the President's Oval Office was it, that was the decision and he was, of course, completely loyal and darned effective in carrying out the President's wishes. He's been given a lot of credit for some of the strategy of the 1948 campaign and I think he deserves a lot of the credit, but we're now back to the generalization that I made at the beginning. Partly because he was able to separate out what he thought were truly important policies, subjects, areas of long term interest, as distinct from the very short time, and at times even trivial matters of concern, focus on them, help the President to keep his mind on the bigger and longer range issues. It's not as--that sounds axiomatic, one presumably should always do that, but I can assure you when you're at the White House, subject to the intense pressures that comes from all sources in the White House, it's a heck of a lot easier said than done, to keep your eye on the big issue and forget the little ones.
HESS: As you have mentioned, when Mr. Clifford left, Charles S. Murphy became the President's Special Counsel. I
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have asked you to compare Clifford with his predecessor Rosenman, so, could you perhaps compare and contrast the way that Charles Murphy and Clark Clifford carried out the duties. Was there any noticeable difference?
ELSEY: I'm not aware of any difference in substance. The two men are quite different in personality and Charlie Murphy is a very modest, a very quiet man, almost shy and retiring. He was not as readily accessible to the press as Clifford became in the last couple of years of his holding office; nor was Murphy then, as articulate in dealing with newspaper correspondents as Clifford had been. I think the press tended to underestimate Charlie's significance and his role at the White House. But I know from observing at the time, and from what I've seen and heard from both President Truman and others closely associated with President Truman, that he held Charlie Murphy in the same high esteem that he had held Clifford and relied on him just as he had relied on Clifford. It's very hard to compare effectiveness or impact, or role of men, as you know, of course, because again, the times have changed. I suppose one might say that Clifford had a greater impact on the
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Truman administration than Murphy. I'm not sure that's so but I suspect it might be. The reason, if I had to ascribe a reason for it, I'd say that it was because Clifford moved into that position when the Truman administration was still young, not completely formed. There were lots of policies and matters that President Truman had not yet had time to think out. He still had a long way to go in shaping up his Cabinet and making his principal appointments in the way he wanted to. Clifford was on hand at a formative stage in the Truman administration. By the time Charlie Murphy became Special Counsel in February of 1950, the Truman administration pattern was pretty set. The election was behind, the program, the Truman program, the Fair Deal, had a clear identity. Truman knew who he was, what he was, what he stood for and what he was fighting for. And so Murphy was on stage at a different period. I suspect, perhaps for this reason, as well as the difference in personalities of the two men, one might say that Murphy had less of an impact. But, I repeat what I said, that in terms of intelligence, advice, steady counseling and guidance, he was just as good as Clifford and certainly, for his time, the period he occupied, President Truman held him in
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the same esteem that he had Clifford in an earlier age.
HESS: How would you evaluate Mr. Murphy as a political adviser?
ELSEY: Well, Murphy didn't have--we're back to this calendar again. President Truman never ran for office while Charlie Murphy was Special Counsel. Charlie had, of course, been on hand during the 1948 campaign and he had worked intimately with Clifford, with the Democratic committee, with other people on the White House staff, with congressional leaders, and I think that had, in some senses Charlie perhaps possessed some attributes that Clifford didn't in that he knew the congressional picture a heck of a lot better than Clifford did. He was a little better in assessing and sizing up how Congress would react to measures than Clifford, just because of his many years of experience there and because he knew so many of the Senators and senior members of the House on a personal basis.
HESS: The following question we've touched on many times, but just how would you rate the three men that held that position: Judge Rosenman, Clark Clifford and Mr. Murphy, in terms of their effectiveness, their political perception,
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their speechwriting and their all around help to President Truman?
ELSEY: I don't think I could make any differentiation between those, among those three, in those regards.
HESS: All right.
The next category of White House staff members was Secretary to the President. The first one was Matthew J. Connelly. What comes to mind when you think of Mr. Connelly?
ELSEY: Before I answer that specific question I'll make a generalization about the Secretaries to the President. You recall that I said that the Administrative Assistants did not have sharply defined roles, those varied from time to time, they were constantly shifting. The Administrative Assistants were generalists who were hurled into whatever the breach at the moment was. Similarly, the Special Counsels had to be generalists capable of dealing with any problem that faced the President. The Secretaries to the President in contrast to the Special Counsel, the Administrative Assistants, various special assistants from time to
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time, had pretty sharply, clearly defined, areas of responsibility in the Truman administration. Matt Connelly, whose name has been mentioned first, was throughout the administration the Appointments Secretary. The Appointments Secretary is in itself a descriptive title, but descriptive only of the tip of the iceberg. It's true that Matthew Connelly was the fellow who arranged the President's schedule and who received requests from public and political figures for appointments with the President and who, in consultation with the President, worked out the daily and the weekly programs. But the real job, the significant one that Connelly held, was his relationships with the Democratic National Committee. Connelly was, at all times, the link between the President in his capacity as head of the political party and of the national committee of that party. So, Matt had that role throughout.
HESS: How effective was he in his role as political liaison and, perhaps, political adviser. Was it more liaison than advice?
ELSEY: I really can't answer that because I don't know.
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Matt was pretty closemouthed and it's understandable and proper that he should have been. He was the link between the President and the various, or the successive chairmen of the national committee and he simply didn't open up and gossip to others on the White House staff on matters of concern to the President in his political role. Now, you may find this hard to understand. How could we be involved in a presidential campaign, for example, without staff members, such as myself, without dealing with Connelly all the time? Well, I'll try to explain it this way. Connelly would deal with the committee on patronage matters, on where, and when, and how, the President should put in an appearance to be of maximum effectiveness to others on the Democratic ticket, the junior members of the staff, such as myself, were in effect, told after such decisions had been made. Matt would work with the President and the committee on an itinerary for a presidential swing. We would be given the itinerary after those decisions had been made, and our job then was to produce the kinds of speeches and the kinds of statements that would be effective, under the circumstances. So, that is how it happens that I can be as ignorant as I am on the details and the day by day manner in which
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Matt Connelly worked with the President on political matters. I would give you a more illuminating answer if I knew how to do so.
HESS: The next Secretary to the President was William D. Hassett, the Correspondence Secretary.
ELSEY: Bill Hassett had been at the White House for quite some time when I first became acquainted with him in the early war years. He was then Assistant Press Secretary under Steve Early, FDR's longtime Press Secretary. Most of the Truman period, however, he was as you said, a Correspondence Secretary. This meant that he had general supervision over all those parts of the civil service staff in the White House that handled the voluminous mail from the public at large. He was responsible for the procedures for the handling of public mail, and, the more significant substantive letters from persons whose correspondence should be seen by the President himself. Bill was responsible for the, shall we say, the more formal authorial flourishes that came from the White House, proclamations, letters of greeting to national organizations at the time of their conventions, statements by the President issued in his capacity let's
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say as the head of state, the formal utterances of the President that were quite apart from his political activities. There's a big volume of this, if one doubts it, he simply has to look at the Presidential Papers to find out just how many, what a flow there is of formal kind, stiff or stilted if you will, prose that has to come out of the White House while the President fills his role as head of state. Hassett had a facile pen, he had a fine background, he could quote Latin phrases and many other things with the greatest of ease and it was a delight to listen to him speak and it was usually a pleasure to read what he had to say. The President found him enormously entertaining as a conversationalist and enjoyed Bill Hassett very much. It was an important role. It was a role that Bill Hassett handled so smoothly that one could really be almost unaware that it existed in the White House.
HESS: The next office is the White House Press Office. The first gentleman was press adviser to the President and he was there for just a short time after Mr. Truman took over, was J. Leonard Reinsch. Do you remember Mr. Reinsch?
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ELSEY: Mr. Reinsch, as you say, was there such a few weeks, that while I do recall him, I'm not able to be very specific about his duties. It was a standby, an interim appointment. Steve Early had been the Press Secretary for many years and left a very firm, sharp mark on the office of Press Secretary. He, however, had resigned a few weeks before Roosevelt died. Jonathan Daniels was Steve Early's successor and there was a little confusion in the minds of a great many people as to whether Jonathan Daniels was going to continue to function in the early Truman period as Press Secretary or whether Reinsch was to be the Press Secretary. And so, I can't put any very sharp or precise evaluation of his performance or even a definition of what he did. Reinsch, however, did come back from time to time and he was always available at times of major presidential speaking tours to advise on matters of radio, and radio presentation, the best techniques and approaches for radio speeches, and, subsequently, television. So he remained on good terms with the President. He was very much in evidence and help to the Democratic committee in the '48 campaign. But he was never a full-time staff member after the very early, and very hectic inauguration of
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the Truman Presidency in the spring of '45.
HESS: In the middle of May, Charles G. Ross became Press Secretary.
ELSEY: Ross was an ideal choice for this job. First of all, he had known President Truman nearly all his life. They had been, as is well known, schoolboy acquaintances and then friends. Charlie Ross was a well-known newspaperman with many honors and awards to his credit. He was respected by the White House press corps as one of themselves, and as one of the better members of their craft or profession. So, he filled all that was needed, friendship and complete trust of the President and had the respect of the press. Charlie Ross, because he was so well-known to the President and Mrs. Truman, had an ability to speak frankly and candidly to the President in a way that really no one else around the White House did, especially in the early days. He had a great knack for bringing the President up short when he thought it was necessary. But his personality was so warm, and so kindly, that he could chide or even admonish the President, if you will, in a way that certainly no one else could do. The President relied on Charlie very much and
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it was a terrible personal tragedy to the President when Ross dropped dead of a heart attack in his White House office in December of 1950.
HESS: Did Mr. Ross help on speechwriting chores?
ELSEY: Not really in speechwriting. In the final stages of editing or polishing of a speech, yes. Because of his fine instinct for the English language, because of his concern over style, Charlie Ross would--the President always wanted Charlie to take a look at the last draft or two of a speech and, usually, in the sessions in the Cabinet Room when the President would read the speech aloud, just to get the sound of it, and to clear up any phrases that were awkward or wouldn't sound right coming from his lips, Charlie Ross was always there and Charlie would frequently be the one to strike out what he thought was clumsy language and suggest phrases that would be appropriate to a man from Missouri. But in terms of the writing, the putting together of speeches, doing the drafting, no. This is not to say he couldn't have done it, and it certainly isn't to say he wouldn't willingly have done it. But the Press Secretary is just too damn busy to have time to do that.
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HESS: Shortly after his death, Joseph Short was appointed Press Secretary. Did he carry out the job in any different manner?
ELSEY: Joe was a younger man than Charlie Ross and, while the President was acquainted with him prior to Joe's being named Press Secretary, it was not my feeling that they had the same--well, they obviously didn't have the same kind of a Personal relationship. Short also had the great virtue of being a widely known and widely respected member of the Washington press corps. This is essential. The Press Secretary in my view, simply has to be someone who is known, respected, and trusted by the White House press. Short certainly had those qualities.
HESS: Charlie Ross' Assistant Press Secretary was Eben Ayers. What do you recall of Mr. Ayers?
ELSEY: Ayers served as an understudy for Ross, substituting for him when Ross was not available or otherwise occupied. Ayers handled an awful lot of the calls and the interviews, the quick questions that the White House press in those days were popping in asking. Usually the chore of, the task, of putting some of the short statements for the
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President into form for the press was handled by Ayers. After Ross died and Short became Press Secretary, Short felt the need of having some assistants who had been more recently involved in affairs of the executive branch than Eben and he pulled in Roger Tubby from the State Department and Irving Perlmeter from the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Eben, at that point, became I think one of the Special Assistants and did a good deal of research and personal writing for President Truman for the balance of the term. He helped organize some of the President's early papers, the pre-White House and even pre-Senate papers, or records, and documents. And did quite a bit of preparatory work for the President looking towards the day of the establishment of the Truman Library in Missouri.
HESS: And upon the death of Joe Short on September the 18th, 1952, Irving Perlmeter and Roger Tubby became Acting Press Secretaries during the campaign. Were you active in the '52 campaign?
ELSEY: Not at all. In 1952 I was associated with Averell Harriman.
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