Charles S. Murphy Oral History Interview, May 2, 1963

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened May 1971
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

MORRISSEY: Talking about the first western trip in 1948, where did the idea of going on this trip originate?

MURPHY: This was a trip in June, 1948 and frankly I don’t know where the idea originated. I would be inclined to think that it originated with the President himself, but as well as I can recall, it came to me as a decision already made and I feel sure that Matt Connelly was involved in working up the plan and making the decision.

MORRISSEY: Why was the decision made to take this

[2]

trip?

MURPHY: Well, I think it was a practice trip or shakedown cruise for campaigning in the fall, among other things, and I believe the President had this in mind when the trip was planned. I know it’s what the trip turned out to be. He got together the special train with the staff people who were pretty much the same people he would take with him on a campaign train. This trip lasted about two weeks as I recall.

MORRISSEY: Could you enumerate who some of these staff people were that went on the train?

MURPHY: Well, the ones that I worked with particularly would have been Clark Clifford; I don’t think George Elsey made this trip; Matt Connelly was there, of course; Bill Simmons, I remember very definitely; and the military and naval

[3]

aides made this trip, General Vaughan and the man who was then the new Naval Aide, Bob Dennison. Bob Dennison now, of course, is just retiring as Commander in Chief of the Atlantic and so on. On this trip, Bob Dennison was having some kind of trouble with his back and spent a large part of the trip in his berth in the Pullman car.

MORRISSEY: You say these were the people you worked with; what kind of work did you do on the train?

MURPHY: I started out without any very definite assignment. The trip developed so that by the end of the trip, I was particularly tagged with the job of helping with outlines for speeches. Clifford was the man principally responsible for helping the President with material for his speeches and I was helping Clifford. We started out from Washington with some drafts

[4]

and we worked on other drafts as we went along.

MORRISSEY: Was there any opposition among people close to the President about the idea of making this trip?

MURPHY: Not to my knowledge.

MORRISSEY: The reason I ask, some people have pointed out that Congress was in its last two weeks of the regular session at that time, and some thought it was not an opportune moment for the President to go out to the West Coast and come back.

MURPHY: I don’t remember ever hearing any of that kind of discussion among the President’s staff. That point of view was expressed by Senator Taft on the floor of the Senate while the trip was going on, and this is the way the expression "whistlestop" originated. Senator

[5]

Taft was complaining about, as he said, the President, while Congress was in session, going out and making speeches at every whistlestop in the country. Senator Taft said this when we were in the Pacific Northwest, as I recall, and when we went on from there down to California, the President picked this up and used it, I think in Los Angeles with great good effect.

I find this memorandum that I’d spoken to you about before, about a page that deals with this trip, as a matter of fact.

MORRISSEY: May I ask for the record, is there a heading on that memo that you’re leafing through?

MURPHY: It’s entitled, "Some Aspects of the Preparation of President Truman’s Speeches for the 1948 Campaign," dated December 6, 1948

[6]

and it is something I dictated from memory in December 1948. It’s never been revised or edited in any substantial fashion. Would you care to have me read this report now? There’s no reason why I should, I can just turn the memorandum over to you.

MORRISSEY: Right. I think that would be easier.

MURPHY: It does in the memorandum. It says, "In the speech at Los Angeles where he had been greeted by almost a million people on the streets, the President referred to Senator Taft’s statement and mentioned a number of whistlestops including Los Angeles. From that time on the term was frequently used to designate the stops other than those where the President was scheduled to make major speeches."

MORRISSEY: Do you recall, a moment ago you said that you assisted in preparing outlines for the

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President. Did the President speak from these outlines or did he speak from a more thoroughly prepared draft?

MURPHY: On this trip he developed the practice of speaking from these outlines. The first one that I remember that we prepared we worked on at Sun Valley, Idaho, and it was for use, I think, at Butte, Montana. It was used at Butte, Montana and it turned out extremely well and from that time on it was a technique which was frequently used, got to be generally used for the whistlestops and occasionally used for major speeches, although there continued to be a number of more formal speeches where the President had a complete text.

MORRISSEY: Why do you think at this time and at this point on the trip the President decided to use this technique?

MURPHY: Well literally, I think it was because we

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suggested it to him. We suggested it to him because we were searching for some method that would facilitate his saying what he had to say, so that he could come through; and I think eventually in the campaign a regular pattern developed so far as the whistlestop speeches were concerned and it was that we undertook to have available at every stop, an outline that the President could use which would make sense grammatically if he did nothing but read it, that would be the bare bones of the speech. He could depart from it readily whenever he wished to and return to it. Frequently, although these outlines were prepared, he used them not at all. Sometimes he would use them to begin with and then he would leave it and never return to it. Occasionally he would go out and then he would turn to the outline and make another one. But on the average, I would

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say, it turned out extremely well and it did serve the purpose of being a prompter or reminder of some of the points that the President might wish to cover.

As you can well imagine, his time on these trips was more than fully occupied. He didn’t have time between stops to sit and think about what he would say at the next stop, because between stops, he had to do other things, to talk with other people. And sometimes when he was suddenly called on to go out on the back platform and make a speech, something would occur to him readily that he would like to say. If nothing occurred to him readily, he could open his book; he could look and see what notes he had and this would remind him of something he would like to say.

MORRISSEY: Would you say from your observations that the President would decide to deviate

[10]

from the prepared remarks in front of him on the basis of the size of the crowd or the enthusiasm of the crowd?

MURPHY: Frequently, yes. One of his favorite means for getting into a speech was to talk about the crowd some. It worked very well, almost always.

MORRISSEY: Would there be anything else that would prompt him to deviate from the prepared remarks?

MURPHY: Well, there obviously was something; I don’t know that I know what it was.

MORRISSEY: From a speechwriter’s viewpoint, what’s your sensation when the President gets out before a large crowd and ignores the remarks that you have poured many hours and much sweat into?

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MURPHY: I expect I enjoyed his extemporaneous speeches as much as anybody else. More often than not, I was glad for him to depart from the prepared text or prepared outline. There were occasions when there were particular reasons why it seemed to me it would have been important to use a prepared text or outline when he did not, but there is one particular case, that I think is referred to in this same memorandum, although I haven’t read it lately, and this was the speech he made in St. Louis on the Saturday night before the election in 1948. We had a prepared draft of the speech for that occasion. We had his typical speech conference on the train in connection with this draft, where it was generally agreed that it was not a very good speech, and so this was discarded. The staff went off to prepare another draft in line with his request and instruction. The second draft

[12]

turned out to be rather a good speech. We went over this with the President; he expressed his appreciation for it and put it in his notebook from which he spoke when he made speeches. This was perhaps the preceding day.

On Saturday afternoon as we were going into St. Louis, the President sat by himself and made notes in his notebook for an hour or more I suppose. When he finally delivered this speech, he didn’t look at the draft that had been prepared for him and he didn’t look at his own notes. It was, I suppose, the best political speech that he made in that campaign or any other time, and it was tremendously exciting and set the crowd wild. He made no use at all of either draft that had been prepared for him; and as I say, he didn’t look at his own notes; I’m sure he knew what they were. This is one occasion when it certainly was a fine thing for him to depart from and not use the draft.

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MORRISSEY: You speak about a typical speech session on the train. What would go on during such a session?

MURPHY: Well, the President would call in such members of his staff as were available that worked on speeches with him and go over a draft and revise it and give instructions for changing it. The members of the staff usually involved would have been Clifford, who was then Special Counsel; Charlie Ross who was his Press Secretary; and me. Later, during the campaign, the crowd necessarily thinned out because everybody was heavily involved. I was not on the train during most of the campaign trips. On later train trips after I became Special Counsel, I frequently would have the speech conferences with him about 6 o’clock in the morning when no one else was available--just the two of us. But by that time we had had a

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lot more experience working together and working for him and we had learned a great deal about what he would say and how he would like to have it said and we were able actually to use and re-use a good bit of the material that we got from him.

This, by the way, during the campaign in ‘48 and afterward, was a regular part of the technique of preparing his whistlestop speeches--to get the transcript of what he actually said in other whistlestop speeches and put into later ones. So in this sense, I suppose he did more in writing his own whistlestop speeches than anyone else because this was a standard technique, a kind of a, I suppose you might call it, an editing job.

MORRISSEY: Was there any likelihood that this technique you speak of would cause a lot of spontaneity in a subsequent whistlestop speech

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if the President had taken, one he had made before as his guide?

MURPHY: This was something of a problem, but I think in cases such as this he would not usually literally read the text, but he would scan it and cover the same ground again in his own words, which by and large would be the same words. The amount of spontaneity that was present, I think, depended on many things including how fresh he felt or how tired he was.

MORRISSEY: Was there any fear on the part of the staff members that the President speaking extemporaneously about foreign affairs might over-state or misstate a delicate situation in American diplomacy?

MURPHY: No, seriously. We joked from time to time and teased him from time to time about

[16]

some of the things he’d said extemporaneously, but with very few exceptions, I think he knew quite well what he was saying extemporaneously and why. I would hazard a guess that if he had it to do over again, he would change very few of them. He was particularly careful in connection with foreign affairs while he was in the White House and since, and has been extremely careful not to say anything that would cause any serious problems.

I don’t think we ever had any serious fear that he would say anything that would be actually dangerous. He had a reputation of being very plain-spoken and outspoken, as he was in a sense, but the reputation sometimes gives a picture that’s not at all the actual picture. He’s a very straightforward man--always has been, but not nearly so--what is the word--certainly not in any sense "irresponsible" in his public speeches.

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MORRISSEY: Did the comment about "Uncle Joe Stalin" cause any discomfort on the part of members of the President’s party on this trip?

MURPHY: I don’t think it did at the time. I have no clear recollection. There was one thing that happened on this trip in June 1948 that might be of interest. The President spoke at the commencement exercises at the University of California in Berkeley. Before the commencement exercises, which were held in their outdoor stadium in the afternoon, there was a luncheon for the President in some wooded glen--it seems to be a traditional thing out there, and the alumni come back, the president of the university was there and President Truman was to speak at this luncheon; it was a box lunch affair out under the trees. The president of the university, whose name I know but it escapes me at the moment...

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MORRISSEY: [Robert Gordon] Sproul.

MURPHY: Sproul--introduced President Truman somewhat along the following lines:

"It is very difficult for me to introduce this man, because if I said anything good about him I wouldn’t believe it; and if I said anything bad about him it wouldn’t be polite."

And then went on to add that he was going a few weeks later as a delegate to the Republican National Convention.

It seems to me that President Truman was put in the most difficult position by this introduction. I actually cringed. I didn’t see how anyone could repair the situation, but he got up and did the most beautiful job. He didn’t take any particular exception; he rather laughed about it and said if President Sproul would come by the White House to see him on the way to the Republican Convention, he could tell him what he ought to do when he got up

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there. Well, this was certainly very reassuring to me, and I think from that day on, I never worried about the President being able to take care of himself. Incidentally, I got the top of my head blistered at the graduation exercises that afternoon because I went out in the California sunshine without a hat.

MORRISSEY: Is there any truth in the reports that the President made some remark about California sunshine being superior to Florida sunshine on this trip?

MURPHY: There is some basis somewhere for that story. I don’t identify it; I don’t have it straight, but this is a matter that I’ve heard of before.

MORRISSEY: Did you have anything to do with determining the itinerary for this trip?

MURPHY: No.

[20]

MORRISSEY: What happened in Omaha?

MURPHY: Well, the President went there to attend the convention of the 35th Division, is it? He was to make the speech, as I recall, a major farm speech in a large auditorium which is some miles outside of Omaha in the evening. During the day, he marched in the parade, he rode all over Omaha several times and anyone who lived in Omaha who wanted to see the President of the United States that day could do so by just looking up. One of the results was that when night came everybody in Omaha had seen him already and they had no particular need to go out some miles to this auditorium to see the President. The crowd in the auditorium was not very large--several thousand people, but it was an extremely large auditorium--must have held ten or fifteen thousand, and it was not full. The speech went fairly well. I’m told by people who heard it on the radio that it

[21]

sounded good and sounded like it was received rather enthusiastically, but it happened that a very large part of the audience was seated on the stage near the same microphone the President was using to speak. So their applause was picked up by the microphone. There were some press photographers present, some of them took some pictures which showed up the empty seats much more conspicuously than they showed up the relatively few people who were there, and the publicity that came out of this was rather discouraging.

MORRISSEY: Were there troubles in Nebraska with splits in the Democratic Party there?

MURPHY: I don’t know.

MORRISSEY: This trip, incidentally, was billed as a non-political trip and...

MURPHY: The President referred to it many times

[22]

since then as his non-political campaign trip. This kind of reference began, at least as early as December 1948, how much before that I don’t know.

MORRISSEY: There were criticisms, of course, from the opposition that this was not a non-political trip and therefore it should not be financed from the President’s travel budget. Did these criticisms register in any way on the speech-writers along on the trip, did it bother anybody?

MURPHY: I don’t think so.

MORRISSEY: What was the source of the confusion at Carey, Idaho, at an airport dedication?

MURPHY: I don’t know. This happened after--must have been after Omaha, which was rather discouraging. We went to Sun Valley, Idaho to spend the night in the lodge there. This was a beautiful place. The next morning, the

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reporters, members of the staff, and others in the party were in the dining room at breakfast and it was quite an elaborate breakfast consisting of about six or eight courses. After about the third course, word came around that the President was leaving right then and that anybody that was going with him on the rest of the trip had to leave right then. So no one finished his breakfast or his coffee. The crowd got out in considerable disarray, and with somewhat irritable feelings all around, I guess. We left there in automobiles and drove across the desert to--we finally picked up the train at a town called Idaho Falls, as I remember it, but the motorcade stopped at a small town, Carey, where the President was to dedicate an airport. I literally knew nothing about it until the motorcade stopped and the people in the car with me knowing about it. We didn’t know why the stop was being made. When he did

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stop, someone brought a microphone to him in the car that he was in. He got up and made a little talk dedicating the airport and said something nice about dedicating it to a native son who had been killed in the war. This apparently created some kind of consternation; someone came up to the car and whispered something to him and it was rather an embarrassing situation and it developed later on that the airport was being dedicated instead to a young lady who had been killed in a civil aircraft accident. Who was responsible for making the engagement or for failing to brief the President, I did not know then; I do not know now. This was an extremely disconcerting experience for him.

We went on up the highway to Idaho Falls where he was scheduled to make a talk and had an outline and something in his mind that he was prepared to say. His car stopped at the

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place where a crowd of several thousand people was gathered, including, as I remember, a considerable number of Boy Scouts; he made his talk; it was a very nice little talk, maybe ten or fifteen minutes; he sat down in his car to drive on to the train which was some distance away but in the same town, and when he got to the train, discovered that this was the place where he was supposed to make his talk and there was another crowd there waiting. This was a complete surprise to him and he did not have in mind anything particular to say because he hadn’t expected to be called on to say anything. He made a speech to that crowd, but at this point, he decided that his staff work was not what it should be, and he called the staff in to meet with him around the table in the dining room on the train. He called the meeting, I’m sure, for the purpose of dressing the staff down, but when the time came for him

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to do that, he couldn’t quite manage to scold us. He did give us all definite assignments as to what he wanted us to do at the various places along the way as the trip proceeded, and he finally got through with everybody but Clifford and me and he looked at us, and I think for want of something else that we should do at each stop, he told us to go out and mingle with the crowd and see what the reaction was. So that was our assignment from then on and it was a most interesting one. Then, and later, a very typical reaction that you would hear from among people in the crowd was, "Why he’s a nice man, I like him. He’s not at all like what they say about him in the papers." And this you would hear time after time.

MORRISSEY: Do you have any comment about the reporters on the train and the press coverage of this trip?

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MURPHY: No I don’t have any particular recollections about it. By and large, my recollections of the reporters as people is rather pleasant and they were friendly and I think almost all of them liked President Truman and he liked almost all of them.

MORRISSEY: Tell me about the President’s visit to Butte.

MURPHY: I don’t remember a great deal about this. It was at night. I recall I stayed on the train to work and did not go to the place where he spoke. It was in the high school football stadium, I believe. There was some kind of a torchlight parade in connection with this; I’m reasonably sure this was the first time he spoke from one of these outlines that we talked about earlier and the people who did go with him to the stadium came back very

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enthusiastic and said things went extremely well; and this sticks in my mind as a kind of a turning point on the trip where things had been going rather badly before that. This is the point where they turned and were on the upgrade from then on.

MORRISSEY: Where was it that the President began to lambaste the 80th Congress as the worst?

MURPHY: I think it was in Washington State. I think he stopped on this trip in Spokane, and if I remember, he said that the newspaper published there was the second worst in the United States and it was about there that I think he began talking about the 80th Congress.

MORRISSEY: Was this spontaneous or...

MURPHY: To the best of my recollection, this was spontaneous. It was elaborated on from time to time after that, fresh trimmings were added.

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MORRISSEY: From standing in the crowds and getting your reactions to what the President was saying, would you say that this went over big with the crowd?

MURPHY: Yes, I would.

MORRISSEY: Very successful?

MURPHY: I think it was, I think it was. I think this view the President had of the 80th Congress may have grown in part from the material that we gathered for him to use in connection with his talks because this material did have a tendency to point out, pick up, list the shortcomings of the 80th Congress and when you got this story all collected in one place, it was quite an impressive story. So it might furnish a good basis for a judgment like this, particularly as to domestic legislation, and that is the part of the congressional activity that

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this material emphasized because the record of the 80th Congress in the field of foreign affairs was good.

MORRISSEY: Do you have any specific recollections of the visits to Seattle or Portland on the way down to Berkeley? Anything outstanding come to mind?

MURPHY: Not anything of significance, no. As well as I remember, in and around Seattle, the President did right much traveling by motorcar and Clifford and I stayed in the hotel room and worked, which is not a very exciting recollection. When he first reached one of those cities in Washington (I’m not sure whether it was Seattle or Spokane), some group arranged to take him off the train very promptly to go and meet with a labor convention. This, I take it is documented somewhere else better

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than I can do it from recollection.

MORRISSEY: President Truman was a very good friend of Governor Wallgren...

MURPHY: He was.

MORRISSEY: ...of Washington. Do you recall any incidents or anecdotes about this visit of the President to Governor Wallgren’s state and also to his home, I believe?

MURPHY: Here’s the story I’ve heard President Truman tell a good many times--I think it happened when I was not present--I think it happened on this trip. Governor Waligren was an excellent billiard shot and took the President who knew this quite well, together with some member of his party who did not know it in, and this other member of the party was sort of led on to believe that

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Governor Waligren knew nothing about playing billiards until all of a sudden he was given an exhibition by a man who was really an expert. I don’t remember anything else. Governor Wallgren, of course, had a great collection of humorous stories that he told in accent with dialect, but I don’t connect any of them with this trip particularly.

MORRISSEY: Did the President meet Governor Warren in California?

MURPHY: Yes, he did, and I’m sure it was on this same trip. The first stop the train made in California, Governor Warren came to the train to greet the President of the United States--welcome him. President Truman thought that was fitting and proper and very nice and he had then and has had ever since a very high regard for Governor Warren and, I believe, was

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relatively free about saying so at that time. And Governor Warren, I think, was criticized by some people for meeting President Truman then.

MORRISSEY: Was the Berkeley speech the work of the staff as a whole, or was there any one or two people who did most of the work on it?

MURPHY: My recollection would be that it was largely about foreign policy and in this case would have normally originated, in considerable part, in the State Department, and would have been worked over by the staff generally with the President.

MORRISSEY: Was it unusual for speeches on foreign policy to originate with State Department people?

MURPHY: It was. It was usual for first drafts of speeches in any subject matter field to

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originate in the department that was primarily concerned with the subject matter.

MORRISSEY: From Berkeley the President went to Los Angeles.

MURPHY: That is right. Spent the night in San Francisco and went to Los Angeles.

MORRISSEY: When was the decision made to make speeches on the way home from Los Angeles? Was that made during the trip?

MURPHY: I have no recollection of that; I don’t remember that he did make speeches on the way home.

I remember when we were coming across Arizona on the way home, an old friend who was with the President in the Army during the war, I guess, a man named [Vic H.] Housholder, rode across a large part of Arizona with us--in the train talking to General Vaughan--General Vaughan

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looked out and made some derogatory remark about the look of the country outside. It was virtually desert with a tuft of grass here and there and Housholder took offense at it and said it was good land and Vaughan asked him what it was good for, and he said it was good for growing cattle. Vaughan scoffed at that and "Cattle couldn’t live out there."

And Householder said, "Oh yes they could."

And Vaughan says, "Well, how much land would it take for one cow out there?"

Housholder says, "About two sections."

This was what--two square miles?

I actually don’t remember any speeches on the way home from Los Angeles. I remember the speech in Los Angeles made in the Ambassador Hotel in the dining room or ball room at a luncheon, I think. This again is a speech that was made from an outline and I remember working

[36]

on this particular outline with Clifford, on the train from San Francisco to Los Angeles and I recall that we took turns working on it from time to time. He would do a section and I would do a section and so on. By this time, we were covering rather familiar ground. This was sort of a composite or re-hash, as I recall, of things the President had said earlier on the trip.

MORRISSEY: Was there any difficulty in California-, at least involving yourself, in getting the various Democrats together in united support of Mr. Truman.

MURPHY: I would not have gotten into that kind of problem. I was kept in the back room.

MORRISSEY: What was Oscar Chapman’s function on this trip?

MURPHY: I don’t remember any in connection with this

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trip particularly. From time to time, he operated as an advance man for a trip in the western part of the country, and he might have done so for this trip, although I have no actual recollection of it.

MORRISSEY: I assume then you think the trip was very successful?

MURPHY: I think it was very successful and served admirably a very necessary purpose. I think if we had not had an opportunity to learn the lessons we learned on that trip, that the campaign trips would have been--would have gone much less smoothly.

MORRISSEY: I think we can stop there. Thank you very much, Mr. Murphy.

MURPHY: All right, sir.