Charles S. Murphy Oral History Interview, July 24, 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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

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MORRISSEY: With your permission, Mr. Murphy, I would like to ask about some of the people that worked with you when you worked for President Truman. Could you tell me how David Lloyd, for example, came to be a member of the White House staff?

MURPHY: I can. In the 1948 campaign, President Truman and his immediate staff had gone off on the campaign train. I was in Washington doing as well as I could operating a home base to provide material for the President to use in speeches and getting this material from various sources, and doing the best I could to translate it into speeches or early drafts of speeches. One of the sources we used was the Research Division of the Democratic National Committee which had been established earlier in 1948 primarily for this purpose and at the

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insistence of President Truman, who in turn had been urged to do it by Clark Clifford and me. David Lloyd was a member of that group, the Research Division in the Democratic National Committee. Prior to that time I had not known him. The head of that division at that time was William L. Batt, Jr., from Philadelphia. It was about a half a dozen people. They sent us a good many speech drafts.

In the circumstances that I was in and very badly needing help, I asked Bill Batt to send over to work with me directly full time the best speechwriter they had. He sent David Lloyd. That’s the way he first came and he stayed with us throughout the campaign and after that was attached to the White House staff. As I remember, he was appointed and carried on the payroll of one of the departments at one time, but actually worked at the White

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House from then on as long as President Truman stayed.

MORRISSEY: Why did you think that the Research Division should be established?

MURPHY: So that we would have the kind of material that the President could use in his campaign and to help with writing speeches. They did a very good job. This was, so far as I know, the real beginning of the technique that has been developed more fully since then of doing a fairly thorough research job on all the places that a candidate expects to visit, what the local interests are, the nature of the geography, the nature of the industry. We had in that campaign, a folder, a briefing paper on almost every town where the President stopped, large and small, and this technique was carried on and developed further.

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In 1950 the President made a trip on a train for about ten days out to the Grand Coulee Dam and back. The pressures were not as intense then, of course, as they were in a political campaign; we had more time to prepare for that and it was perhaps the best briefing job that was done. This was not done by the Democratic National Committee at that time, because this was not a political trip. They assigned different subject matter fields to different staff members or different members of this Research Division in the national committee. I don’t remember now what they were but they broke it down trying to be as helpful as they could to the President in the campaign, and it was a great help, and something of this kind has been done, I think, by every presidential candidate since then.

MORRISSEY: What kind of work did David Lloyd do as

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a member of the White House staff?

MURPHY: Well, he did pretty much every kind of work that I did, I guess, which was generally working on program and policy matters in a staff capacity for the President, as distinguished from the administration of programs which primarily was under John Steelman. John Steelman was his chief staff assistant in connection with the administration of existing programs, but developing new programs, legislative proposals, speeches, messages to Congress, things of that kind, most of this staff work was coordinated in our office and Dave Lloyd helped with this generally, as did David Bell.

MORRISSEY: How would you decide which member of your staff would be responsible for different chores?

MURPHY: I don’t know that there was any well-defined

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method for doing this. David Bell tended to get the assignments relating more directly to the Bureau of the Budget or budgetary matters because this was his background. Both of these men were quite able economists in fact, and had some professional training in that field. I don’t believe, certainly at this time, I can give you any standard views for determining which of those two got assignments.

MORRISSEY: Could you tell me how Richard Neustadt came to be a member of the White House staff?

MURPHY: Neustadt was in the Bureau of the Budget and worked with us a great deal on assignment from the Bureau of the Budget. It is my recollection that he rather badly wanted to join us on the White House staff and this had a lot to do with it. I thought it was

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true then, I still do, that if a man wants to work with you there’s a better chance of him turning out well than if otherwise, and this did not turn out well. Dick did some beautiful work for us, not altogether as consistently and not nearly so rapidly as Bell and Lloyd, but some extremely fine work he did.

MORRISSEY: Was there any particular kind of work that Neustadt would focus on?

MURPHY: He wrote the Democratic platform in 1952. He wrote the first draft--perhaps it’s not quite accurate to say the first draft. It is traditional for the President to make available, an incumbent President of that political party, to make available a draft of a suggested platform as a starting point in the convention, and Neustadt did most of the

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drafting on the version that was sent from the White House to the convention in 1952. He did an excellent job which was, to a very considerable extent, a clarification, expression of the policies of the President at that time, and did not involve a great deal of developing new policies.

MORRISSEY: How did it happen that he was the one to get this job?

MURPHY: Because he was--I made the assignment to him. One, because he was available and not so pressed with work, I think, as other people; and second, because I thought that if he had time he would do a good job and the assignment was made a good long time in advance; he spent right much time on it. I don’t mean to say that this is the only thing he did. It just happens to be the one that I recall at the moment.

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MORRISSEY: How did Kenneth Hechler come to be a member of the White House staff?

MURPHY: My memory is not real clear about this. I talked to him on the telephone today, by the way. My memory is very clear about some of the things that happened with Hechler while he was there. My memory is not real clear as to how he first came. He was by 1950, if I remember rightly, the man that we looked to for the type of research relating to points to be visited by the President that had been done originally by the Research Division of the National Committee. He did an excellent job and a most thorough one. This involved a lot of what I suppose you might call "original research,"^{the kind of thing, more or less, you’re doing now--get on the telephone, call people who lived there and talk to them, until he knew all about the town. In 1952 President Truman did a lot of}

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campaigning and Hechler did the same kind of thing for him in 1952. I just don’t remember at the moment how he first came to the White House staff. He had been a teacher of political science at Princeton University where he had inaugurated some novel practices, brought his classes in a party to Washington from time to time, would call on the telephone with a loud speaker hookup, some public official in Washington and carry on a conversation with him for the benefit of his classes from time to time. I don’t think he was with us in 1948. Do you happen to recall?

MORRISSEY: I think you’re right.

MURPHY: I just don’t remember.

MORRISSEY: In addition to these campaign chores, were there any other particular chores that he would be responsible for?

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MURPHY: Yes, there would have been and this would have been primarily in the research field. We had a very considerable amount of on-going research all the time of various kinds.

MORRISSEY: Did George Elsey work with any special kind of problems?

MURPHY: George worked with every kind of problem. He was there before I was. When I first got there he was assistant to Clark Clifford who had just been made Special Counsel to the President. Clifford had been Naval Aide; George Elsey went there as a naval officer, and was still in uniform when I first went there in 1947. He was first assigned to what they call the Map Room, I believe, while President Roosevelt was still living. This was a room in the White House--it was covered with maps that the President used in keeping up with the progress of the war.

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Elsey sort of, by the process of what would be osmosis, gradually shifted over to the position of general assistant to Clark Clifford and did a prodigious amount of work. Almost anything and everything that Clifford was called on to do, Elsey helped with. Clifford’s work, of course, was the same kind of work that I helped with when I first went there and as long as I stayed there. In the 1948 campaign Elsey’s particular assignment as you will find out more fully from him, was the whistlestops.

I remember--if this kind of thing is of interest--very shortly after I went there the Congress completed action on a bill and sent it to the President, having to do with portal-to-portal pay. I don’t remember the provisions or the purposes of the bill now very clearly, although I was quite familiar with it at the time; I had worked on the bill some on the Hill before

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I left up there. Just after I went to the White House, Congress completed action on it and sent it down. It was the kind of bill that presented a very close question for the President as to whether to sign it or not, and a bill of rather considerable importance. This was my initiation to the process of getting the comments of the various departments, the legislative clearance operation of the Bureau of the Budget, its recommendations to the President and how this works out. Right in the midst of this, Clifford got sick. I asked Elsey about how this worked and almost all these comments coming in from various departments with a recommendation to the Bureau of the Budget, and I asked whose final recommendation was the President likely to get, who was likely to be the man who made the final recommendation. He thought about

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it for a minute and said, "If I’m not mistaken, you’re likely to be."

This was something that took me aback very considerably, so he and I got ourselves into an automobile at that point and went out to the hospital to look for Clifford. We got out there and Clifford had a fairly high fever and was not really in any condition to talk about this in a very earnest and serious way.

I took Elsey on home with me and we spent a good part of the evening talking about how a new fellow grappled with a thing of this kind, and if I’ve got these two things put together right and I think I have, we tried something then that, so far as I know, was never tried before or since, and this is to make legislative history at this point in the legislative process.

There were some points in the bill that

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were of some importance that were not altogether clear, the language was somewhat ambiguous, so the President signed the bill and at the same time sent to Congress a message saying that he signed it with the understanding that it meant so-and-so. This was an effort to establish that meaning so that the courts would construe it that way. This construction was one that did not please all members of Congress and all of their constituents, so this at first irritated them and then in a short time they began trying to make countervailing legislative history, a rebuttal, as it were. That is as far as I followed the matter then, I think. It certainly is as far as I can follow it in my memory now. I don’t know which way the courts decided. I may have seen one case since then where the President did something of the same kind, but that was, as far as I

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know, the first time it was ever tried.

MORRISSEY: How did Donald Hansen come to be a member of the White House staff?

MURPHY: I think we’d go back, I believe, to Steve [Stephen J.] Spingarn. I believe Steve Spingarn came first and Donald Hansen was, in a sense, a replacement for him, if I remember correctly. Spingarn was an assistant general counsel in the Treasury Department. I had known him more or less for some years. Working on some interdepartmental committee, I don’t remember the subject matter, I remember a meeting they had in what was then the R.F.C. Building. Spingarn was very generous with his recommendations as to how this matter should be handled by the President and it seemed to me that he was so helpful that it might be a good idea to give him a chance to

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do it full time. So I did arrange to get him transferred to the White House staff where he worked for several years. He also was a prodigious worker and developed something of a tendency toward specialization, and one of the things that he handled was loyalty and security matters. We had right much of that. It came to my office--sort of a miscellaneous item that had to go somewhere and they turned it over to us.

We had a loyalty board for White House employees and presidential appointees, as I recall, and we had a general supervisory function for the program in the Government and how it operated, whether the President needed to change it and so on, and some of the toughest cases just automatically came up to the President, came up through this machinery and we had to make recommendations to him on

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that. So, that was one of the jobs that Spingarn did while he was there. The President appointed him a member of the Federal Trade Commission and that left a vacancy and it seemed to us that there was enough work of the kind that he tended to specialize in to warrant getting a replacement and so we went to the Treasury Department and looked for a good man. I don’t think I knew Don Hansen, but had had some experience in this work and was highly recommended as an excellent man.

MORRISSEY: What were the responsibilities of Charles Irelan?

MURPHY: Charlie didn’t stay there very long. I don’t have a clear enough concept of this in my mind to answer that very clearly. I brought Charlie in, that I know. I do remember very well where I first knew him but it’s a

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little beside the point. During the war, I was a member of the local War Price and Rationing Board in Silver Spring and he was the chairman. I worked with him very closely night after night and Sunday after Sunday, and he was a fine person, very able public servant. I found him, if I remember, several years later in the Lands Division of the Department of Justice, and thought it would be good to have him over at the White House and got him over there and he had not been very long there before there was a movement generated outside, I had literally nothing to do with it, to appoint him United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. I don’t remember just how long he was on the White House staff. I think probably not long enough to develop any particular field of work.

MORRISSEY: Are there any other staff members similar

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to the ones we’ve already talked about that we should include in this discussion?

MURPHY: I don’t think of any. You’re going to see Dave Stowe you said. Donald Dawson you should talk to, Marty [Martin L.] Friedman, who was Dawson’s assistant, and Milton Kayle who nominally worked for Steelman, I think, but worked a great deal with us directly. Some other people who were on Steelman’s staff that you should talk to--Harold Enarson, do you have this name? Harold Stein. I don’t know what you’ll get from Harold Stein; you’ll get a different viewpoint though. Phil McGuire of the Steelman staff; John Houston, who is here in Washington, I think.

MORRISSEY: Did Friedman, Dawson and Kayle work on your side of the White House or on the Steelman side?

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MURPHY: Physically, the offices were on my side, Dawson and Friedman; I don’t remember where Kayle’s office was.

MORRISSEY: You say "physically," they worked on your side?

MURPHY: In the West Wing of the White House.

MORRISSEY: Organizationally, did they work the type of problems you were concerned with?

MURPHY: No, organizationally, they were in between. Dawson reported mainly directly to the President. His work was overlooked some in some particular cases by Matt Connelly and in other cases by John Steelman. I hardly ever interfered with it at all.

Dawson did a great deal to systematize that personnel operation in the White House. I think he ran it very capably, and I think

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the record will show quite successfully, in the sense of screening out people who should have been screened out.

You may recall the so-called scandals in the latter part of the Truman administration when various and sundry presidential appointees got the Administration into trouble. I think you’ll find that almost all, and perhaps all of those people were appointed before President Truman became President--most of them were Roosevelt appointees. The few that weren’t, I think, were early Truman appointees who had not been screened through the Dawson operation. Of course, the military aides were there, the correspondence secretary and the press secretary.

MORRISSEY: Did Mr. [William] Hassett and then later Mrs. [Joseph] Short work under your jurisdiction?

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MURPHY: No, they reported directly to the President. They cooperated rather closely.

MORRISSEY: Could you tell me something about this cooperation?

MURPHY: Well, Mr. Hassett was there long before I was, of course. His work and the way he handled it was quite largely personalized and I did not get very often or very much into the correspondence work that he did. Now, the other way around, he was one of the staff members who usually was called in to review drafts of presidential speeches and messages to Congress. This group included, from time to time, but fairly regularly, Hassett, the Press Secretary (Charlie Ross and later Joe Short), Steelman, the Special Counsel and whoever he wanted to bring, and more or less, Matt Connelly. By and large these sessions

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were limited to, well, I suppose two extremes, major policy questions discussed without reference to language; small matters as to language. Not a great deal of writing was done in these sessions usually. That was done directly with the President by the Special Counsel. These were sort of review sessions and carried on with a great deal of good humor and a considerable amount of argument, which the President would allow to go on as long as he thought it was productive; and then he would decide.

We would have fairly long arguments about very minor points occasionally and it, more often than not, tended to be the Special Counsel and his people who had worked on the draft defending it against change. If someone got a word changed, why, the President would give them credit for a great victory, "You ought

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to be happy there, you got a word changed." Bill Hassett, oh, I don’t think he undertook to make a great many changes in this kind of thing, but his style was different; his overall reactions, judgments were very good and very valuable.

Charlie Ross, I’d say the same thing about. Charlie made, I think, more suggestions and contributions in terms of specific language and he had one hobby that he rode so much that we all got to be sensitive to it and that is, don’t use the word "presently," when you mean to say "now." He insisted "presently" does not mean that; it means in the near future and to this day if I see the word "presently" used when it means "now," I flinch a little bit and a good many people do this.

Oh, I think as we worked there longer and worked together longer there was more and

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more of a tendency for these review sessions to become more a formality and less controversial. We found out more about what the President wanted to say, how he wanted to say it, what the problems were likely to be with anybody else, so we were able to take care of most of the problems before we got there and, I think, on the other side, there was growing and developing a sense of confidence in the work that was turned out. They didn’t feel that there was such a great need to watch it so closely.

MORRISSEY: When there were differences of opinion among members of the White House staff about some policy being made, would these differences be thrashed out in the presence of Mr. Truman, or would they be resolved before they were brought to his attention?

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MURPHY: Usually in his presence, and with relatively little argument and he made the decisions himself, usually rather promptly. He just didn’t have much argument around him and that was all. There was, I think, an extraordinary amount of good feeling among the members of the White House staff. Considering the nature of the work, the nature of the place, and the possibilities for discord, there was just remarkably little. There was some, but the nature and history of "palace politics" being what it is, that it was not worse, I think, is a remarkable thing and mostly due to the character of the President as a personality; he was very gentle but very firm.

MORRISSEY: Many people have commented on the informal way the White House operated during the Truman Presidency. Yet the issues dealt with

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were varied and complex. Why were the procedures informal if the issues were so complex?

MURPHY: Well, my more limited observation these days is, the procedures there now are just about as informal as they were then, which is a good thing and I’m glad this is the case. I don’t know, I never thought about this particularly. It occurs to me that the more complex the issues, the more likely they are to be dealt with successfully if they are dealt with informally. Formality can foul up the simplest issue, I think, and you see this publicly demonstrated from time to time in the United States Senate where they spend more time frequently on parliamentary maneuvers, parliamentary questions, than they do on substantive issues because they get tangled up in formalities.

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I think it’s necessary to get in small and informal groups ordinarily to get to the heart of things. In Cabinet meetings, then and now, so far as I know, not very much is done; there’s too big a crowd to do anything except be told.

I think working with the President, any President, if the work is to be most productive and accomplished with dispatch, you’ve got to get to the heart of the matter, right to the bare facts. You just don’t do that where you’ve got more than two people, and if you’ve got more than three, you’re really handicapped. You may make it with three if you know the third man.

The President hears the most surprising things from everybody, and you might ponder a while as to why this is true. This is the case, not that it’s related directly to the work, but most anybody would come in--perfect

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stranger--and lay bare his innermost secrets to the President of the United States. I don’t know why this happens, but it does. I may have told you this before, that it seemed to me that it developed that one of my jobs was to go to the President after everybody else had given up and see if he would change his mind. Did we go into that?

MORRISSEY: No, we haven’t.

MURPHY: This never was written down anywhere. He was extremely tolerant so far as I was concerned and so there were various occasions when the staff and some department heads, including, I think, on one or two occasions, the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who just felt that the President ought to change his mind but they had run out of their rope so far as they were concerned in talking to him, and so they would

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ask me from time to time if I’d go back and try it one more time. I would go and occasionally I’d persuade him to change his mind, for the time being; and he would do what it was we thought he should do, but more often than not, when this happened, the same thing would crop up again in maybe a different form--maybe the same form a little bit later and we found out he really thought what he’d thought to start with; he may have taken the action, he may have signed the paper, but he really didn’t agree. I can’t at the moment recall a specific example of this kind.

MORRISSEY: How did Mr. Truman envision the relationship between the President and his Cabinet?

MURPHY: Well, he looked on them as his advisers; he did not regard the Cabinet as a corporate body that made decisions as a Cabinet. He,

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of course, looked on the members of the Cabinet as the heads of operating agencies who had to make decisions within their fields and operating agencies and as advisers to him on policy and matters. I did not attend Cabinet meetings regularly. The only White House staff member who regularly attended Cabinet meetings was--well, there were two, I guess, John Steelman and Matt Connelly. Matt Connelly was sort of ad hoc secretary to the Cabinet, to the extent they had one. I don’t think that President Truman regarded Cabinet meetings as a place where decisions were made or where policies were discussed in any depth.

MORRISSEY: What were the responsibilities of Joseph Feeney and Charles Maylon?

MURPHY: Legislative liaison, Feeney with the Senate and Maylon with the House of Representatives.

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We did not have on the White House staff an organized legislative liaison operation at all most of the time. The Cabinet men had some feeling that we should have and finally these two people were appointed for this purpose, one for the Senate side and one for the House side. They did not do a comprehensive job.

I think the prevailing theory in the Truman administration was that the best way to handle legislative matters usually was to let the departments and agencies that had the expertness, the responsibility, the information, to work with the Congress. I think this was reasonably successful. I think, basically, it’s probably still right. Now there was some legislation, some very important legislation, that did not fall within the normal jurisdiction of any agency or department and some other arrangements had to be made.

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One that I remember was passed before I went to the White House but I saw something of it at the other end of the Avenue, was the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Now this was handled for the Administration in the White House, the OCDM, OWMR- -Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, I guess it was in those days, and at that time, either Fred Vinson or John Snyder probably was the head of the office. There continued to be some legislation that had to be handled primarily from the White House, but usually, it would fall normally into the field of a department and when it was not clear that it fell in the field of some department we would undertake to assign it to some department and this has worked quite well. It was my experience that when the White House had to get into legislative matters and working with the Congress, lobbying with

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members of Congress, the best, quickest and most effective way to do this was to get the President to do it personally.

I understand that this Administration has quite an effective legislative liaison operation in the White House. It involves some several staff members. We did not have that kind of thing. President Truman was very good about this. He did quite a lot of it and quite a lot of it at my request or on my recommendation. If we needed a particular call made to the Hill, why, I could typically go in and get him to do this and get the whole transaction completed within three or four, not more than five minutes. He was awfully quick; he had tremendous background--almost everything that was going on. You didn’t have to start way back and bring him up. You just had to give him the latest word ordinarily,

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the latest information, and the President, when he tries to call someone on the phone, usually has no trouble reaching them in a hurry if it’s at all possible, so this happened quite frequently.

MORRISSEY: Did Les Biffle have any involvement in liaison between the Hill and the White House?

MURPHY: Some and I would say occasionally quite important, but not on any regular basis. Usually, if at all, I’d say on a rather personal basis. The President would ask him to help with something where he might help...but President Truman handled these matters with Congress pretty much on the merits, the theory was that the best way to get something done was to get it done on the merits. I don’t mean to say he was not aware of political considerations because he was and understood

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them, but they never were overriding. He just flatly refused to do anything for political reasons that he didn’t think ought to be done anyway. We learned that one way to make him skittish of a proposition was to put it up to him on a political basis. He’d be suspicious right away. This was not the best way to get him to agree to anything, which I expect would surprise a good many people. If you wanted to get him to agree with you about a matter down there, you subordinated the political angles.

MORRISSEY: Would members of the press come in search of news to White House staff members?

MURPHY: Yes, they would; they would continue this to the extent that they found that they were getting anywhere. But they would, pretty soon, learn they might as well leave some White House

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staff members alone and this included me. The general rule was that they were supposed to get their news through the Press Secretary and this was followed, I would say, rather uniformly in the Truman administration. There was not much news, other than that, from the White House staff.

MORRISSEY: Could you comment on the ways in which your procedures as Special Counsel were similar to the procedures of your predecessor and also in what ways were they different?

MURPHY: Well, they were generally quite similar, I would say. The principal difference that occurs to me offhand is that I undertook to get and use more staff. Clifford had only one assistant who was tagged directly as his assistant. That was George Elsey. I was, to a considerable extent, Clifford’s assistant;

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this was by mutual consent. When I first went there I asked the President if I was to report directly to him and he said, "Yes." This was my charter from then on, but I had the background in legislation so the work in the legislative field tended to drift to me--working with Clifford and a considerable extent under his supervision, although I always had this charter to go to the President anytime I wanted to. I enjoyed working with Clifford; it was a very pleasant relationship so far as I was concerned. Then when he left I continued to be personally involved in this same legislative part of the work because that was my background and interest. I had very definitely the feeling that the work at the White House was important enough to justify getting all the help I could, provided they were good enough to be really helpful.

I had a rule of thumb that I didn’t want

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an assistant unless he was smarter than I was or else he wouldn’t do any good, but when I got a chance at one who seemed to me to be smarter than I was, I did the best I could to get him in. I did right well, I think. This policy, if it was a policy, of recruiting personnel never was fully recognized or endorsed by anyone else. They just sort of let me do it a man at a time. That’s the principal difference that occurs to me. I had more people to help me--although Clifford did rely a great deal on George Elsey.

I think I had something more of a tendency to organize things in channels--to establish channels, regularize them with the Bureau of the Budget and the departments. My recollection is that it was after Clifford left that we established the procedure for having the Bureau of the Budget ask each of the departments and

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agencies in the fall to send in their recommendations for the State of the Union message, the Economic Report, and the Budget message. Before that, the White House, I think, had requested directly, material for the State of the Union message and had forgotten the others. We set up, in a little staff there, a fairly regularized procedure for coordinating the Budget message, the State of the Union message, and the Economic Report. I would have been in that Economic Report thing, I expect, from the beginning. That law was passed in 1946 and probably the first report was in 1947. I don’t remember working on it with Clifford.

I do remember some of the sessions with the Council of Economic Advisers after Clifford left. My version of this is this--and it’s substantially true, as a matter of

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fact. The chairman of the Council in those early days was Dr. Edwin Nourse, who was, even then, a rather elderly gentleman and a very distinguished economist with a distinguished record. He was appointed largely at the recommendation of Charlie Ross.

Some of us on the White House staff thought that we had a special responsibility for helping the President with any communication that went to Congress over his name. This relationship between the White House staff and the Council of Economic Advisers and the President had to evolve and it centered around the writing of this, what we called the President’s part of the Economic Report, the part that was covered with his signature.

Dr. Nourse was a little jealous, or at any rate, not very enthusiastic about having us participate in this work. As a consequence, there was right much tension back and forth

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when we’d sit down to work on a draft. We found out, after about the second or third time around, how we could get this done. We’d wait until the last day, we’d be in no hurry about getting started, then we’d start it maybe in the afternoon and we’d just sort of coast and we found out along about midnight that Dr. Nourse would begin to agree to anything. So we’d do most of the work after midnight.

Leon Keyserling, was then a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and our views tended to coincide more with Leon’s than they did with those of Dr. Nourse. The third member of the Council was Dr. John Clark, a very fine, very able man, as a matter of fact, who had none of this feeling of resentment of wanting to keep us out. I think he rather enjoyed the whole business. We had very interesting experiences that way, then later before we left there, Leon Keyserling got

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to be chairman of the Council. We never had any substantial policy differences with him. Leon, I think, is one of the ablest people I ever saw and has a better concept of the big picture, the meaning of economics, the place of economics in national politics, better than anybody. But Leon has, oh, I suppose, turgid is the word for his prose. He was very amenable to changes but it took a lot of changes in his language, and so while this was a somewhat laborious process after Dr. Nourse left, it never generated the sort of tensions that we had with Dr. Nourse. Oh, I don’t know, there’s a very definite, distinct difference between Clifford and me so far as personality is concerned. He is one of the most impressive people when he undertakes to be I ever saw in my life. He is pretty much--was then and I’m sure still is--in a small group, just pretty much overwhelming,

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in a perfectly nice way--most impressive. That’s about all that occurs to me.

MORRISSEY: I think we’re running out of time and running out of tape, too, so this would be a good place to stop.