Charles S. Murphy Oral History Interview, July 15, 1969

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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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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HESS: Mr. Murphy, what are your recollections of the events leading up to the recognition of the State of Israel?

MURPHY: I do not remember very much about it. I do remember that it was a very active question. I guess Israel actually was recognized when the President was in New York City. I was there in the party at the time and, I would say, on the fringes of what was going on.

You asked also what part did Clark Clifford, Eddie Jacobson and David Niles play in this. As to Eddie Jacobson and David Niles, I have no recollection at all on this matter. Clifford was active in it. Now, just what he did I don’t know, but he was very active in, I suppose, pulling together the pieces at the time when the action was actually taken in New York.

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HESS: What, in your opinion, was the basis of Mr. Clifford’s interest in this particular matter?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t know. It was during the campaign of 1948 and I think that gave an added urgency to his interest, whatever the basis for it was.

HESS: The fact that there was a larger Jewish vote in the United States than there was an Arab vote. Is that right?

MURPHY: That undoubtedly had something to do with it.

HESS: It has been pointed out that the recognition came very shortly after Israel declared themselves a state, just in a period of a very short time, and some diplomatic historians think that the United States acted a little prematurely in this matter.

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MURPHY: I am not expert on this. It’s my impression and recollection that the action was only a matter of hours after Israel declared its independence and that it was prearranged and deliberately done that way. And one of the purposes was to encourage other nations to recognize the new State of Israel. I suppose it would be my view of history, although I’m not a student of this matter, that the action was quite successful in that regard and perhaps had a great deal to do with the fact that Israel was able to declare its independence successfully. Just the promptness with which the action was taken by President Truman, I think, was of extreme importance and a great helpfulness to the new State of Israel.

HESS: In view of the difficulty that the State of Israel is in today, what is your estimation of the effectiveness, the value, of our

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recognition at that time?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t know. I’m certainly not an authority on this subject, or a scholar, but we have had a State of Israel as an independent state since that time and we have the State of Israel as an independent state now. While the fact that it was an election year when the independence of Israel was recognized had something to do with the urgency that was attached to the action, at least by Clark Clifford, I think, it also is true, and is of further importance that it was an action that many people, including President Truman, had felt for a long time was something that should be done as a matter of principle. I know of no backtracking, no weakening, no feeling to the contrary, among those people and certainly not on the part of President Truman, that there should be an independent

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State of Israel. That there should have been and should continue to be in the future.

HESS: Any other thoughts on the State of Israel?

MURPHY: No other thoughts on the State of Israel.

HESS: What do you recall about the development of point 4?

MURPHY: There again I do not recall very much. It first appeared in the President’s inaugural address in 1949, in January. It would be my best recollection that there was something of an informal division of labor among us on the White House staff, and that I was concentrating mainly on the State of the Union message and the Budget message at that time and Clark Clifford and George Elsey were concentrating on the inaugural address and assisting the President with the preparation of that. It is my understanding that the idea of point 4

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came from someone in the Department of State and that it did not come through the regular channels to the President, but came from someone in the Department of State to Elsey and Clifford and that they took it up with the President.

You told me that you expected to talk to George Elsey again and I would urge if you haven’t talked to him about this, that you talk to him about this particular thing. It would be my belief that his memory on this would be better and more complete than that of anyone else.

HESS: Do you recall the name of the gentleman in the Department of State?

MURPHY: I do not.

HESS: Do you recall if it took any special effort to convince Mr. Truman that a provision of this nature on technical assistance should be included

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in the inaugural address and should be undertaken?

MURPHY: I don’t have a clear recollection of this, but on the basis of my knowledge by Mr. Truman’s attitude generally and particularly on point 4, in later years, it would be my belief that he welcomed this suggestion and was enthusiastic about it from the beginning. I know he was enthusiastic about it after that.

HESS: How successful was point 4?

MURPHY: Well, I’m not sure. First place, I think it changed, it evolved into something different from President Truman’s original concept, and from the concept that was expressed in the inaugural address. It was to be technical assistance, not involving very great expenditures of money, and to be primarily, I suppose, a sharing of our know-how and various

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skills, with developing countries. The foreign aid program, as it developed in the years after that, contained a great deal of economic assistance in terms of goods and money, and it came to, I would say, overshadow the point 4 concept very considerably.

So far as I know, I think the point 4 concept, to the extent that it was followed, was what would you say, entirely successful, almost all plus. There are many people that felt that there was not enough attention paid to it and I suppose I share that feeling. The practical problems that we had and that the administrators of foreign aid had after that, I guess, must be taken into account. Here again, I think, is a matter where George Elsey’s views and memories might be particularly helpful because he left the White House staff to work with Averell Harriman who was then the administrator of the foreign aid program.

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HESS: All on point 4?

MURPHY: All on point 4.

HESS: All right. What do you recall of the letter the President wrote to Paul Hume the music critic?

MURPHY: Excuse me. Could I go back to say one thing about point 4?

HESS: You sure may.

MURPHY: You probably picked this up somewhere else, but one of the--the President saw this thing in very specific and concrete terms in a good many places around the world and one of the places that he mentioned frequently was Ethiopia, and the possibilities that they had in Ethiopia to produce great quantities of food with the right kind of guidance and technical assistance. One other thing. He

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was personally very fond of Doctor Bennett who was the administrator of the point 4 program and quite early along in the history of the point 4 program was killed in an airplane accident I believe in Africa and this was a considerable personal blow, personal loss to President Truman. That’s all that I have on point 4.

On the letter to Paul Hume. I don’t have any special or unique recollections about it. If my memory serves me right, it was written the day after Margaret Truman had given a concert at Constitution Hall and she was on tour around the country and had been to a number of different cities and had given concerts in a number of different places. And the President and Mrs. Truman, of course, were very keenly interested in the progress of that tour. And shortly before Margaret got to Washington—now this is something that should be sealed—I think it was

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in Philadelphia, President Truman got an idea from somewhere that the manager of the tour was not dividing the receipts properly with Margaret, and this notion took very firm hold in his mind.

HESS: Who was the manager? Do you recall?

MURPHY: I don’t recall who it was. I don’t recall. But before she got here, the President gave Donald Dawson and me a special assignment. Don and I were Administrative Assistants to the President at that time, and that was to see that the receipts of the concert at Constitution Hall were properly accounted for and Margaret got what she was supposed to get from it. Well, this was something that neither Don nor I had any experience in in the first place, and in the second place, I’m not right sure there was any very good way to do it.

HESS: How did you go about that? Counting heads or …

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No, what we did, actually, was to impound the ticket studs that were collected at the door. Now, we never counted them, but nobody ever found out whether we counted them or not. But Donald Dawson and I got all the ticket stubs that were collected at the door when people came to that concert and took them away with us. And later, we assured the President that, in our best judgment, that the matter was properly handled and that the receipts were all properly accounted for.

Well, the next day, Paul Hume, who was the music critic of the Washington Post wrote a review which was not at all complimentary. President Truman was extremely sensitive about anything that people said about Margaret, and anything that people said about Mrs. Truman. He got up and read the paper early in the morning, and wrote this very sharp letter, and I think went out and mailed it

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before anybody else got up. That was a practice that he followed some times when he really wanted to mail one of these letters, he’d go and mail it before anybody would have a chance to persuade him not to. And this one he did mail. Now, that about completes my recollection on the subject.

It came up from time to time after that and I think, in recent years, the letter was actually made public by Paul Hume. On the whole I think Paul Hume took it in good part. And I must say, I think that it probably helped President Truman’s standing with the people generally throughout the country.

HESS: Did you hear about that letter the next day, the day that he mailed it?

MURPHY: I don’t remember.

HESS: On the subject of Key West, how did staff

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procedures vary when the President went down to Key West?

MURPHY: Well, the situation there was very different from what it was in the White House in Washington. The President’s schedule was very different, and the arrangements for the staff were very different. I think we might start out by referring to the living arrangements down there.

The President stayed in a big white frame house that was normally the quarters for the commanding officer at the naval base. And the naval base was, of course, enclosed with a fence. And nearby, within, oh, a hundred yards or so, as I recall, there was a modest office facility where several rooms were set aside for the use of the President and the White House staff. And they were equipped as offices.

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Now, the first trips that I made down there as an Administrative Assistant to the President, I stayed in the second quarters which was sort of the Administrative Assistant’s headquarters. And then later, after I got to be Special Counsel, I stayed in the main house with the President. Matt Connelly was my regular roommate when I stayed over there. Dr. Steelman stayed there regularly. Clark Clifford, as long as he was on the White House staff. Bill Hassett. Harry Vaughan--General Vaughan--and the Naval Aide used to stay on the Williamsburg. Quite regularly when the President went to Key West the Williamsburg would go too and would be tied up at a dock and they would live on the Williamsburg.

The President ate regularly in the dining room of his quarters, where a table would seat, I suppose, something over a dozen

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people and if he had guests, as he did occasionally, why they would eat there and the rest of the table would be filled up with his White House office staff. They would always have room for those staff people who were staying in the house with him and usually for some of the White House staff people who were staying in other quarters and they would tend to rotate or take turns at eating there.

The President did not have regular staff meetings while he was there. He did most of his work in the morning. He would work on the papers. Of course, the papers would come back and forth in a regular flow in pouches. He would work on the papers, he would get the help and advice of such staff people as he wanted, usually separately on an individual basis. He’d give such assignments as he wanted to give. And, usually in the afternoon, why, the work would taper off and always by dinnertime,

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unless it was some emergency, it was pretty well over with.

The various and sundry recreational activities, fishing and walking and the like. The President did right much walking. There was a swimming beach, I expect more than a half a mile away where he went swimming regularly once and sometimes twice a day. He regularly walked to the swimming beach and back and those members of the staff who were hardy enough walked with him; I usually rode. And if I walked, I usually got there sometime after he did.

Incidentally, you had mentioned I guess, and are aware of, the accounts of these visits that were prepared by Bill Rigdon. I have a set of them. They are very valuable and they have not only a text telling what happened in a somewhat dry manner, I suppose, leaving out some of the spicier parts of the story, but they also have a good many pictures, and basically,

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I think they are quite accurate.

The house or quarters in which the President stayed had a large, extremely nice enclosed porch. It was enclosed with jalousies to be opened or closed as much as you wanted them closed. A very comfortable place and over in a big corner there was a poker table and they fairly regularly had a poker game in the afternoon and again in the evening.

HESS: Was that one of the spicier items that Commander Rigdon would leave out of the log?

MURPHY: I don’t know, I expect he would put that in. I don’t know whether he did or not.

HESS: What were the spicier items?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t know. Well, I don’t remember. I just remember that Commander Rigdon, the fine man that he is, is inclined to be sort of serious and sober sided about life.

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All this has some relationship to the staff work because, you see, the President was during most of the day just living with the members of the staff and there was just no occasion for having a formal staff meeting for the most part, and when he wanted to say anything to any of us we were usually very handy, he would say it and when he wanted us to discuss anything, why, we could discuss it and the matters of Government sometimes intruded on the recreational activities, but not always. The facilities for carrying out the assignments that we received from the President were not nearly as good at Key West as they were in Washington, and the facilities that each of us might have for keeping up our part of the staff work were not nearly as good down there as they were in Washington. Now, obviously, a major part, I would say the largest part of a staff person’s time is not

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spent with the President but is spent with other people--working with them for the President. So, in terms of volume, you spend a lot more time talking to people from the departments and agencies, and people outside the Government, than you do talking to the President if you’re on his staff. There was some gap so far as this is concerned, or some lack of ease of access to these people, perhaps, and largely for this reason, I did not stay in Key West very much.

When the President would go down for an extended time, it was usually my practice to go and stay about a week and then come home, with his permission. In addition to that, why, we had a young and growing family that I wanted to be with, but it was mainly because of the difficulty keeping up with the staff contacts, or contacts outside. Some of the things that we had to do and undertook to do

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by long distance telephone, illustrate some of the difficulties that we had.

I have a few recollections about some of these things that might be of interest. One is that it was on the telephone from Key West that I asked William McChesney Martin if he would accept the President’s appointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and he said he would. At that time, John Snyder was Secretary of the Treasury, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at that time was Tom [Thomas B.] McCabe, a man who had been appointed by President Truman on the recommendation of John Snyder and he was an old personal friend of John Snyder’s. A very fine man, not a banker, but a businessman and the head of Scott Paper Company.

Well, during that period, when there was considerable controversy about monetary policy and interest rates, there was a cooling

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off in the relationship between Snyder and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and it finally got to the point that they were not on speaking terms with each other. And in trying to help the President deal with this problem, I talked from time to time with each of these two gentlemen and each of them would tell me of the very high personal regard that he had for the other and the sadness with which they looked on the situation that had developed.

The chairman, in the course of this--it developed that the chairman of the Reserve Board wished to retire before his term had expired largely because of his unhappiness at this situation that had developed. But he did not want to retire unless he knew who his successor would be and unless it was someone who would be satisfactory to him. At the same time, John Snyder, had a very vital

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interest in the question of who would be the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In effect, I think it was a situation where the new man could not be chosen unless he was acceptable to both of these people.

In talking to the two of them, I discovered that they would both agree to the appointment of Bill Martin who was then an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and I spoke to them about their reasons for their feelings about Bill Martin at some length and eventually I reported this back to the President and talked with him about it and then he, in turn, I’m sure, talked to John Snyder about it at least. Tom McCabe, McCabe was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. And the President decided that he would appoint Bill Martin if Martin would serve and asked me to call him and inquire. And I did call him from Key West and asked if he would accept the appointment and he said he would.

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At that point McCabe was informed of this and he wrote a letter of resignation to the President which was a little bit on the bitter side, which referred to some of the unpleasant aspects of his experience, I was really rather doubtful that Tom McCabe wanted to leave the record in that shape so I took it on myself to go and ask him. I took his letter of resignation and took it back to him and talked to him for awhile and asked him if he didn’t want to write it over and he said he did. He said he did. He took it back and wrote one which was right much more pleasant in tone.

Well, we got into this talking about Key West and then the use of telephones, and one of the other things that I remember had to do with Lamar Caudle who was an Assistant Attorney General in charge of the tax division, I guess.

Just before the President was leaving for Key West on one of his trips down there,

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a member of the staff of a congressional committee, it was the Ways and Means Committee, and although it’s not their usual custom, at that time they were having some kind of an investigation. This was not a permanent staff man, he was an attorney who was working for the committee in connection with that investigation, called me on the phone and said that they had some transcript of a closed hearing that they had had up there involving Lamar Caudle and they had decided that as the President’s staff man I could see what that transcript said so that the President would know about it. Well, I was on the verge of going to Key West. I think I actually was on the way to the plane when I got this call and so couldn’t go see the transcript, but I gathered that there was some urgency about it so I asked David Stowe to go and read this transcript. He was then an Administrative

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Assistant to the President and would be in Washington.

He did go and read the transcript and called me at Key West and told me at length about what he had found there.

Well, the gist of it, as I recall, was that Lamar had been guilty of a number of indiscretions, not very serious, and some stupidity which was kind of serious, I think without any evil intent or motive at all but I think enough to raise rather serious questions about his judgment and discretion, rather than about his integrity. On the basis of that it seemed to me that the President could not keep him in his administration in that position but that the circumstances were such that it would be appropriate to allow him to resign voluntarily.

I talked to the President about that and reported to him on the facts and he agreed

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that this would be an appropriate thing to do and told me to call the Attorney General, who was Howard McGrath, and tell him to get Lamar’s resignation.

Well, I called and asked for the Attorney General and he was not available so I talked to the Deputy Attorney General, who was Peyton Ford. I’m not sure the title was Deputy Attorney General at that time, it may have been The Assistant to the Attorney General, but he was in effect the Deputy Attorney General, and told him that the President wanted Lamar’s resignation.

Well, he hemmed and hawed a little bit about that but he said that he would talk to the Attorney General about it, and then I didn’t hear anything for a day or so, as I recall. Then the Attorney General called and said that he thought that Lamar ought to be allowed to stay on. And the President said no. I don’t remember who McGrath talked to,

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whether he talked to me, I expect he did, and I talked to the President. But at any rate the President said no, he wanted his resignation. And so I reported that back to the Attorney General and they got Lamar to write a letter of resignation and it was in the mail on the way to the President, but all this had taken some three or four, five days. I guess that by this time the President’s patience had given out so he announced, at a press conference at Key West, that he was firing Lamar Caudle. At the time he made the announcement the letter of resignation was in the mail on the way to the President.

HESS: Do you recall any other interesting phone calls made from Key West? Any other bits of business that had to be handled by long distance?

MURPHY: I do not at the moment.

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HESS: What do you recall about the President’s press conferences that he held at Key West? Were they conducted in any different manner than the ones in the Indian Treaty Room and the Oval Office?

MURPHY: Well, they were conducted with right much less formality. For most of them he went to a room in one of the buildings on the base. I don’t remember just which building it was. It was a fairly sizeable room and very sparsely furnished. When he had his press conferences, they tended to be, I think, somewhat shorter than the press conferences he normally held in Washington. Occasionally he had press conferences in the yard or the garden of the house where he lived.

I have a picture which was published at the time in Life magazine and I happened to be standing back of the President with a

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very, very multicolored sports shirt on. That was the uniform down there. Well, this picture appeared in Life magazine and a friend and neighbor of my oldest brother teased me and bugged me so much about that picture and that shirt that I finally sent him the shirt.

The shirt, by the way, was a gift from Admiral Radford who was the President’s host when the President went to Wake Island to meet General MacArthur. He was his host in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor and he presented the President and each member of the staff with a sport shirt. They were laid out on the bed and all of us came and each chose as best we could, one that would match his size and make his choice as to color. I got there late and I had to take one that was too big and not really a very pretty shirt.

HESS: On the subject of colorful garb, I have

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heard that Mr. Truman had a pair of red trousers that he tried to take to Key West one time. Is that right?

MURPHY: I don’t remember anything about any red trousers. But it was a topic of conversation and somewhat of a contest to see who could turn up with the gayest of sport shirts. And President Truman had some very gay sport shirts. I must say he always looked very nice and neat in all of them. Not all of us did but he always looked very nice and neat no matter what he wore.

He went swimming. I don’t know if you have anything on his swimming activities. There was a beach down there where he went quite regularly. There was something of a surf but not very much, he went out and swam in the water and swam always with a side stroke. He lost his glasses out there on one occasion,

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his eyeglasses. There were Secret Service men nearby, of course, so all the Secret Service men and all the rest of us came up and walked around and dove under water, felt around for his eyeglasses and finally one of the Secret Service men found them and he put them back on.

HESS: What was your favorite recreation down in Key West?

MURPHY: Oh, I suppose it was the poker game. I was not much of a fisherman, there were a few fishermen in the crowd. Wallace Graham was a fairly enthusiastic fisherman. Some of the others fished, some of the Secret Service people fished pretty regular. I went out fishing one day, the President would usually go about one day...

HESS: One day each trip.

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MURPHY: One day each trip, yes, fishing. And we went once to Key West during my time, we went on the Williamsburg all the way from Washington on the Williamsburg. That in itself was something of an eventful trip as we went around Cape Hatteras. The Williamsburg was not a very steady boat in a sea and anyone who is subject to seasickness was reasonably sure to get seasick on the Williamsburg if you left Chesapeake Bay. So, up around Cape Hatteras it pitched and tossed quite a lot and almost everyone did get seasick.

HESS: Did the President get seasick?

MURPHY: I think he did, he stayed in his cabin about two days.

HESS: Were you at Key West when Charles Wilson came down to see the President during the steel controversy in 1952?

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MURPHY: I was.

HESS: What do you recall of that?

MURPHY: I don’t have many very clear recollections about it. But I do remember seeing Mr. Wilson there when he arrived and when he left.

HESS: Were you in on any of the discussions that he had with the President at the time that he was down there?

MURPHY: I don’t have any clear recollection of that either. I suppose my answer would be that I participated in some of those discussions, but not all. Mr. Wilson was President Truman’s personal selection for the job he held at that time. When the President decided to create that position, it must have been in the fall of 1950, I guess, after the Korean war started, this was the man he wanted. There’s no question on it, there was no--there might have been a

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second choice if he couldn’t have gotten Charlie Wilson, but Charlie Wilson was his first choice. He had gotten to know him in the course of his work as chairman of the Investigating Committee during World War II and had a very high regard for Mr. Wilson and asked him to take this job. Now, Mr. Wilson was quite a sensitive person, it might be a surprise to some people, and he was at something of a loss in the Federal bureaucracy. He had a very difficult position, there was no question about it. He was brought into a job that overlapped considerably the job that Stuart Symington had at the time.

HESS: National Security Resources Board?

MURPHY: National Security Resources Board. And as a result of that, I think, finally the National Security Resources Board was terminated. But it was an extremely difficult assignment,

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I think, and involved, I suppose, some of the most difficult problems in Federal bureaucracy and governmental relations.

As I say, it just was not Charlie Wilson’s bailiwick. There were a number of things that troubled and hurt his feelings from time to time and it got to be a fairly regular thing for me to go see him from time to time and just sit and listen. I was a good listener and quite sympathetic and he had something to talk about, no question about that, so I would go over and sit sometimes for an hour or more so he could tell me his troubles and his problems. Most of them were things that nothing could be done about, but when things could be done about it, why, I tried to get them done. I think this was something of a relief valve for him. We never got to be intimate but because of this I did know him fairly well and he knew me and I’m sure that

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such feelings as he had, were friendly as far as I was concerned. I would have known him when he came to Key West.

The staff people that President Truman would have been relying on primarily at this time in connection with these problems were John Steelman and me, and at that particular phase, I suppose, mostly John Steelman. My memory is not altogether clear about the sequence of events.

My most intense interest in it and participation in the staff work began at the time that it was decided to seize the steel industry. Before that it had been primarily a labor dispute which was the kind of thing that John Steelman worked on and I expect Dave Stowe must have worked on that. I expect Dave Stowe would remember some of the early parts of that much more clearly than I.

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HESS: In William Rigdon’s logs of that trip, I noticed that Roy Harper and Frank McKinney and Clark Clifford were at Key West during that trip. Did their presence have anything at all to do with Wilson’s visit?

MURPHY: I would be certain it did not. It was purely social.

HESS: In Grant McConnell’s study of the 1952 steel strike, he states in relation to Wilson’s resignation, that some of Wilson’s aides tried to call the President and talk to him by telephone and he says, "The aides even called some of the White House staff to learn if the President would talk to Wilson." Do you recall who they called at that time?

MURPHY: I don’t have any actual recollection of it. I think it would have been likely to be me. I think the man most likely to have made the

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call would have been Charlie Stauffacher. And I was the man he would have been most likely to call.

HESS: But you don’t recall at this late date if he did call you or not. Is that right?

MURPHY: That is right. I think it’s quite likely. Stauffacher had been in the Bureau of the Budget. He had worked with the President and on the White House staff in setting up this office that Charles Wilson was asked to accept and did accept. Then he went from the Bureau of the Budget to work with Charlie Wilson on this staff. Wilson’s chief staff people were General Lucius Clay, and then Charlie Stauffacher, and then on a kind of a part-time basis--I’m terrible about names, I ought not to start out on one that I can’t remember, but the man who is the director of so many corporations in New York, that they brought an antitrust case

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against him, the only one in history. He’s still living up there and in investment banking. [Sidney Weinberg]

But I had known Stauffacher pretty well when he was in the Bureau of the Budget and we continued to work together and communicated quite freely. He left, incidentally, after that was over, General Lucius Clay went to Continental Can Company and Charles Stauffacher went with him where he is now vice president of Continental Can Company--maybe executive vice president.

HESS: Do you recall who drafted Wilson’s letter of resignation?

MURPHY: No.

HESS: Was that drafted in the White House?

MURPHY: No. No, I don’t have any recollection about it.

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HESS: Okay. In your papers at the Truman Library there are indications that you helped to write the Executive order and the messages of April the 8th and 9th regarding the steel strike. Do you recall those?

MURPHY: Yes. That would have been a regular part of my duties to participate in and actually supervise the staff work preparing those documents. I don’t have any independent recollection of the Executive order itself as a document.

I do remember something about the radio and television address and about the message to Congress. The principal people who would have worked with me on those things at that time, I think, that is from the White House staff, would have been David Bell and David Lloyd. I would guess, on the normal division of labors at that time, Bell would have been primarily

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responsible for the message to Congress and Lloyd primarily responsible for the radio and television address, although our working together merged so much that perhaps you couldn’t divide it out.

I do remember that the radio message was written under great pressure of time and in only about, oh, one or two days, I think, from the time to start working on it with the President until he delivered it, which is a very short time for a message or speech of such major consequence about such an important event. And because of that, it was quite late when the finishing touches were put on it, when we got the final draft.

We went over it with the President, oh, the last time as a group, late in the afternoon I think before it was delivered that night and he made some changes and gave it back to us to revise with his changes. When that revision

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was finished, it was, oh, I don’t know, early evening I guess. And I suppose after the President’s dinner hour. I took it to him in this oval study upstairs in the White House and he went over it a time or two and made some marks on his reading copy and asked me some questions and I talked with him about it some and finally he was prepared and ready to go and he looked at his watch and there was, I don’t remember how long, maybe twenty or thirty minutes before the time he was scheduled to go on the air and he said, "Charlie, come on, I’ve got something I want to show you."

We walked downstairs to the East Room where there were two grand pianos. Someone had just sent in a new piano. So he went in and he played the new piano for awhile so I could hear that and then he went and played the old piano for awhile, so I could compare them.

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No, I am so illiterate in this field that this--the sound didn’t mean a great deal for me. But here he was before he was going to make this radio address on this very critical thing, down there showing me how these two pianos sounded. Then he looked at his watch and it must have been ten or fifteen minutes before it was time for him to go on the air and he said, "Well, I guess that we had better go on over."

HESS: On a speech of that nature, just what would be the first step in its preparation?

MURPHY: Well, I suppose the first step would be to talk to the President and listen to the President for awhile.

HESS: You would do this? You would talk to the President?

MURPHY: Well, in this case I think it would have

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been probably three of us, Dave Bell and Dave Lloyd and me. Because in this case, I would have asked one of them to sit down and write the first draft, and I always preferred for the man who had to write the first draft to hear what the President said directly instead of getting it secondhand through me. Because when anything goes secondhand through me it loses a lot, especially if it started with President Truman. And so, that’s the way it would have started and the basic purpose of the speech, from the standpoint of the staff working on it, would have been to explain to the American people what was being done and why, and why it was necessary, and how it had come about. Just a report to the people I think is essentially what the President felt he wanted, and what we tried to help him with.

HESS: Give your personal opinion on this matter.

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Do you think the President should have seized the steel mills as he did in 1952?

MURPHY: Well, I do. I so recommended to him and I thought it was the right recommendation at the time and I think that I would, under the same circumstances make the same recommendation again. This action was taken by the President, I think, largely on the basis of the recommendations made to him by John Steelman and me. We were his staff people that worked on it and this is the report that we came back with and the recommendation we made to him.

Now, there’s something back of what we recommended you understand. I think we were guided and influenced primarily by the attitude and feelings of the Department of Defense and especially the Secretary of Defense, Bob Lovett, and by the Department of Justice, especially the views and attitudes of Philip

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Perlman who was then the Solicitor General and the Acting Attorney General. There must not have been an Attorney General. Phil Penman was Acting Attorney General for a good many months at one period and he is the man that we dealt with primarily on this, so I think this must have been when he was Acting Attorney General.

Basically what we got from the Department of Defense was that the defense of the United States, and the critical needs of war, were so imperative that these steel mills had to be kept in operation, the President just did not have any choice. And the man who stated this most effectively, as far as I was concerned, was Bob Lovett. And given that imperative need, then the question got to be what is the best way to do it.

Here we were guided very largely by the opinion of the Department of Justice as to

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what was the best way to do it, all things considered, and all the legal consequences considered.

We were told by the Department of Justice that they had no reasonable doubt as to the President’s authority to do this under the circumstances, and they had a departmental memorandum that had been prepared on this question some time in the past which had been signed by the then Attorney General Tom Clark, and that was the principal authority that we all relied on most of all; this memorandum that had been signed by Tom Clark as Attorney General. Then when the case got to the Supreme Court, Tom Clark voted the other way. He did.

HESS: As I understand it, the methods by which the Government could have taken over the steel mills were: Number one, seizure under section eighteen of the Universal Military Training

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and Service Act of 1948. Number two, by an act of Congress. Number three, by employing the Taft-Harley Act. Number four, the Defense Production Act of 1950 and, number five, the "inherent powers" of the President. Were all of those possibilities discussed beforehand?

MURPHY: I don’t remember each of these possibilities one by one specifically. All I can say is that all possibilities were discussed beforehand and discussed at length.

HESS: Why was the Department of Commerce chosen as the agency to take the responsibility of the operation of the mills? You mentioned Bob Lovett at the Department of Defense who seemed to be quite interested. Why wasn’t the Department of Defense selected?

MURPHY: Oh, I’m not sure that I have a clear recollection at this point. I think one

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reason is because the President had a great deal of respect for, and confidence in, the Secretary of Commerce, Secretary Sawyer. I don’t mean to imply that he didn’t have respect for, and confidence for, the Secretary of Defense, but he, I guess, thought that that would perhaps be more compatible with the views of the people in the business world and...

HESS: Secretary Sawyer was a rather conservative man.

MURPHY: Sawyer was quite conservative.

HESS: What was his reaction to being selected to do that?

MURPHY: If this is what the President told him to do, he’d do it and do the best he could. And he did a good job. And he had a general counsel, whose name I don’t remember, who had very much the same attitude, but he did

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a good job, too.

HESS: On April the 27th of 1952, the President sent a letter to Charles S. [Caseyj Jones in response to some questions that Mr. Jones had had about the steel strike. And the text of that letter was also released by the President on that date. Do you recall that incident?

MURPHY: I don’t have any recollection of that, no.

HESS: Would you know why the President would select this particular method to voice his views?

MURPHY: No.

HESS: Okay.

MURPHY: No, I could speculate. I would speculate that by that time he thought that it would be

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useful to have some peg to hang it on and some opportunity or occasion to express some views and here was a letter he could answer and that was one way to do it. But this is just speculation.

HESS: Holmes Baldridge stated before Judge Pine on April the 23rd and the 24th that in effect the Executive had unlimited power in an emergency. What was the reaction of the President and the members of the White House staff to that particular statement?

MURPHY: That it was a very unfortunate statement.

HESS: If that was the reaction, wasn’t Mr. Baldridge informed that that was the President’s opinion before he made the same statement the following day on the 24th?

MURPHY: I don’t know. I do know that we were very unhappy with the way that Baldridge was presenting

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the case to the court and we talked to Phil Perlman about it and tried to get him to do something about it and that he found various and sundry reasons why it was extremely difficult to do anything about it, and changes were not made so quickly as some of us wanted them made and thought they should have been made. But, it’s been a long time ago and my memory is not clear.

My recollection is that we thought that Baidridge presented the case very poorly and particularly in this regard where he claimed so much more than was necessary on the facts of that particular case. And...

HESS: Were you surprised when Judge David Pine ruled against the Executive Department?

MURPHY: I was. And more surprised at the decision of the Supreme Court, and still more surprised at Tom Clark’s vote.

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HESS: Why do you think he voted that way?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t know anything more than what’s in his opinion, which I haven’t read for a long time.

HESS: Do you have any other things to add, anything else to add on the ‘52 steel strike?

MURPHY: One thought perhaps. There is an ultimate question the President of the United States must get to in a situation like that as to what he is going to do about the decision of the Supreme Court, as to whether he is going to accept the decision and conform to it or whether he is just going to ignore it. And on this particular thing, I did visit with President Truman just after the decision of the Supreme Court came out and I recommended to him that he conform to that opinion of the Supreme Court. Whether he would have had any thought of doing other

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than that, I don’t know. I really didn’t ask him. In the meantime, since he issued the order seizing the mills, there had been some developments which had made the case for a seizure much weaker than it had appeared to be at the time. The, I think, quite straightforward story we had gotten from the Department of Defense was, that if these strikes were not stopped, we would meet with a great military disaster in Korea. Well, the fact is that the strike was not stopped and we did not meet with a great military disaster. And so the thing that the Department of Defense had said would happen had not happened, which made quite a difference in terms of the justification, legal and otherwise, for the President’s action and for his continued course of action after the decision of the Supreme Court. I suppose it made a difference in the opinion of the Supreme Court. I think it’s quite possible that

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if there had been any kind of military disaster, as the Defense Department had said there would be, that the decision of the Supreme Court might have been different.

HESS: Do you think that President Truman considered not going along with the Supreme Court?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t know. I just said I don’t know whether he considered it or not.

HESS: Could he have held out against them? Could he have issued orders that even though the Supreme Court said this is unconstitutional, I’m not going to give up the steel mills?

MURPHY: Well, that’s a highly difficult question. I would think the answer is yes. I would think he is the commander in chief of the Army and Navy and if he ordered the Army and Navy to run the steel mills, I expect they would have gone and run them. Now, what kind

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of mess it might have been, I can’t tell you.

HESS: That would have upset the balance of power.

MURPHY: If it comes down to an ultimate question of who’s got the military, I expect the President’s got the military.

HESS: Everything on ‘52?

MURPHY: On the steel strike?

HESS: On the steel strike.

All right, moving into the events of the election of 1952, what do you recall of Mr. Truman’s decision not to run for re-election in 1952?

MURPHY: Well, a good bit, first and last. I think I first heard of it at Key West in the...

HESS: What time of year in Key West?

MURPHY: I don’t have a clear recollection. I

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noticed you raised a question whether it was in March of 1951 or November of 1951. I would think it’s more likely it’s in November. If this is a matter of importance, I do have a paper at home that will enable me to pin this down.

HESS: Fine. We would appreciate that because, as I have noted here, Mr. Truman mentions in his Memoirs that it was in March 1951, that’s in Volume II, page 489 and William Rigdon has in his book White House Sailor, page 267, that was on November 19, 1951 when the President told a group of his White House staff members in Key West, and Mr. Rigdon mentions that you were one of those present. Is that correct?

MURPHY: Well, I was one of those present and fairly recently at home I have run across a copy of a longhand note that I wrote the President, at the time, making some comments about that statement he had made to us. And I think I can

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find that and I think it will have a date on it. [The memorandum and letter were the subject of comment again in Interview #7, page 376, and have been appended to the transcript, See Appendicies]

HESS: Good. What was the nature of your comments?

MURPHY: Well, it--I was very sorry that this was what he had decided to do, but he was the boss so if this was what he decided to do, well, God bless him.

HESS: Do you recall if in late ‘51 or early ‘52, if Mr. Truman expressed an opinion as to who he would prefer to see as Democratic standard-bearer that year?

MURPHY: I do.

HESS: Who did he want to see?

MURPHY: Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson.

HESS: Tell me about that.

MURPHY: Well, Fred Vinson was the President’s

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clear choice and only choice really to succeed him. I don’t remember when that first--my recollection about the dates of this sequence of events is not sorted out. I think by referring to different papers I probably could straighten them all out. But I think that very soon after he told us about this in Key West, he invited Fred Vinson to come to Key West. Vinson came and he stayed for about a week.

The principal purpose of the invitation was so President Truman could tell him that he wanted him to be the candidate for the President in 1952. And Vinson came, and he and the President talked about this privately, I am sure. Vinson was very good company, very convivial. I enjoyed some very fine conversations with him at a long breakfast table when there was just the two of us there. But he did not give the President an answer. He

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said that he would think about it, and for some time after that he did not give the President an answer. And on some date after Vinson had come home, whether it was part of this same--whether it was during the period of this same trip of the President to Key West, whether the President had come home and had gone back, I’m not sure. This is one of the things that I need to check. But I got kind of impatient because Vinson had not given the President an answer so I took it on myself to go see him and ask him, when he was going to give him an answer and what he was going to tell him.

Vinson had an apartment out at the Wardman Park, now the Sheraton Park Hotel, and his family was not there. He was there by himself. We sat and talked for awhile and I told him what I wanted to know and he looked at me and said, "Charlie, did the President send you to ask me this question?"

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I said, "No, sir."

He said, "Well, I’m not going to tell you. I’ll tell him."

He didn’t tell me. But he did tell President Truman not long after that and the answer was no. Well, this was quite a surprise for the President I’m sure, it just hadn’t occurred to him that Vinson might say no.

HESS: Why, in your opinion, did the Chief Justice decline?

MURPHY: I don’t know. I expect somewhere he must have said something on this. I don’t know, I don’t remember anything that he actually said.

I suppose that it was his feeling that it sort of eroded the distinction between the Court and the executive branch, and if the Court Chief Justiceship particularly was regarded as a stepping stone to the Presidency, why, that might tend to influence the conduct

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and decisions of members of the Court and so on. Some people have stronger feelings about this than others and that would be my best guess as to his reason, it also may be that Mrs. Vinson didn’t want him to do it. That I don’t know.

HESS: At the time that you were in Key West, when the Chief Justice was there, were you present at any of the meetings when the President may have asked him?

MURPHY: No. I don’t think anyone was.

HESS: How did you come about your information? Did Chief Justice Vinson tell you or did...

MURPHY: No, President Truman.

HESS: President Truman.

MURPHY: Oh, I think it was a fairly open secret among us on the White House staff down there

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that this was why Vinson was being invited to come down. I think the President had told us that he wanted Vinson to succeed him.

HESS: Were there any other of the major Democratic political figures that may have received support from the President, or recognition from the President? Here I’m thinking about Vice President Barkley or Averell Harriman. Did you ever hear the President make any statements about their possible chances for the nomination?

MURPHY: Well, later, but not at that time. As I say, when Vinson said no, this was quite a surprise to President Truman and he just did not have a prepared fallback position or second choice. He just simply didn’t. And so he began looking around.

One of the people that was in the public eye at that time and that he did not know

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very well, but thought well of to the extent he knew him was Adlai Stevenson who was then Governor of Illinois. Some of us on the White House staff thought very highly of Governor Stevenson and we sort of pushed his name forward.

HESS: Who on the White House staff?

MURPHY: Well, David Lloyd and I in particular.

David Lloyd had worked with Stevenson in the Department of State some years earlier when Stevenson made a trip to Europe and Italy.

Dave Lloyd went with him and knew him well personally.

So, I talked to President Truman about Stevenson and asked him if he didn’t think Stevenson was a good man and worth looking over and so forth and so on. And President Truman said, yes, that he would like to talk to him. He said, "See if you can get him down

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here and I’ll talk to him."

Dave Lloyd and I put our heads together about how do you proceed to do this. Since Dave knew the Governor personally, he called him on the phone and asked him if he planned to be in Washington any time soon.

We had found out by that time, if you call from the White House and put that question to almost anyone, the answer was most likely to be yes. And the Governor said yes, he as a matter of fact did expect to be down here within two or three days. And so Dave told him then that the President would like him to come by and see him. I suppose maybe he told him to start with that if he planned to be in Washington soon, the President would like for him to come by for a visit. And so, Stevenson did come within two or three days.

George Ball was practicing law here at that time and prior to that had been a partner

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of Stevenson’s in law practice in Chicago. Dave Lloyd and I knew George Ball. I expect Dave knew him better than I. I think Dave must have said something to Ball about the reasons for our interest in Stevenson’s visit to Washington, but at any rate, Dave Lloyd and I met Stevenson in George Ball’s office late in the afternoon before Stevenson went to see President Truman that evening and we talked to him about this. I remember Stevenson started out by saying, "Now, what is this all about?" And so we undertook to tell him what it was all about. The President was not going to run again, and thought possibly he would be a good candidate and wanted to talk about it. And I don’t remember what his reactions were particularly beyond disbelief and surprise and so forth.

Well, then that meeting broke up and I went then, and briefed the President on that

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meeting with Stevenson, before Stevenson got there that evening. And I’m sure, I hope, that I remembered better at that time, what happened than I do now about that meeting with Stevenson. But then later in the evening Stevenson did go see the President in the Blair House and there was nobody there but the two of them. And they had their conversation.

Well, sometime fairly soon after that, again, the President was in Key West and we on the staff, asked him, "What did Stevenson say?" And he reported that Stevenson said, yes, he would run. And then, somehow, and now I do not remember how, I found out that Stevenson had reported, and was reporting, that he had said no.

And so here we were. Just the two of them had been there, and one says he said yes and the other says he said no. Well, this seemed to be an altogether unsatisfactory situation

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and I thought I should try to straighten it out.

The President was at Key West, and I was with him, and he was going to New York or New York State to make a talk. On the way he was going to stop, or his plane was going to land at least, in Washington. And I came to Washington with him on that plane and Jim Loeb--Dave Lloyd was not available, I think he may have been at Key West--Jim Loeb went with me and we went and had dinner with Stevenson at George Ball’s house. And Stevenson and George Ball, and Jim Loeb and I had dinner and spent the evening after dinner talking about this and then Stevenson insisted that he had said no. And furthermore, he insisted that he did not want to run and...

HESS: All the time the President thinking he was going to run.

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MURPHY: Yes. And in fact, up till that point, he denied that he was willing to run. Well, at any rate, I think that Stevenson made it quite clear at that time that he didn’t want to run and would not, was not willing to run.

I guess, in due course, I went back to Key West and shortly after that I got a long letter from Stevenson written on yellow lined paper with all his views written in his longhand about how he felt about running or not running for the Presidency. That’s in my papers that are sealed in the Truman Library, by the way. I did have some typewritten copies of it made.

I indiscreetly mentioned this letter to someone who was writing a book about President Truman, and he wanted to get a copy of it. I refused to give it to him but that raised a question in my mind as to what I should do with it and shortly before Governor Stevenson

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died I called him on the phone, and asked him what he wanted me to do with this letter and he said send him a copy of it and he’d let me know.

Well, I sent him a copy of it and I never heard from him. And I have just received today, from Carol Evans who used to be his secretary, a request for a copy of this letter to use in connection with the Stevenson papers that they are preparing.

HESS: One point, when did you first become acquainted with Governor Stevenson?

MURPHY: On the President’s non-political campaign trip in June 1948. His first major speech was made in a big amphitheater, I guess you call it, in Chicago at a big Swedish celebration of some kind. And he made the major speech and Governor Stevenson was there and introduced him and did it very eloquently and well.

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HESS: In Cabell Phillips’ book The Truman Presidency on pages 418 and 419, he makes mention of a meeting that was held in the Blair House in March of 1952 at which time the President was speaking of running since he couldn’t get Stevenson to run even though he had said that he was not going to run. That’s on pages 418 and 419, in which he said, "Well, the time was coming to fish or cut bait." And, "Briefly, Truman toyed with the idea of reversing his earlier decision and going for another term himself." Do you recall that meeting?

MURPHY: Well, there were two meetings. It’s true that after Vinson said he would not run and, perhaps, after Stevenson said he would not run, President Truman did review in his own mind and with other people, the question of whether or not he should run. Now, I don’t remember, I think he did not make his public

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announcement at the Jefferson Day Dinner until sometime in April as I recall. I think that was later. But he had one meeting at the Blair House. Mrs. Truman was out of town and this was at dinner, and there were just four of us there, President Truman, Clark Clifford and me and one fourth person--I think it was Fred Vinson, it may have been John Snyder. And this is what we talked about. We had dinner out in the garden, in the yard, in the back, with a glass topped wrought-iron table, and the President didn’t get any particular encouragement at that meeting to run. I don’t remember whether this one was before Stevenson’s refusal or after. But this was the first time I guess.

HESS: What was your view at this time? Did you think that the President should stand by his earlier announcement to the staff and not run or did you think that he should still run

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for President?

MURPHY: I believe at this point I thought that he should not run.

HESS: Why?

MURPHY: Well, at the later meeting, and there was a later meeting, I remember when it came my turn to speak and I spoke and I remember what I said. I was fairly junior in the crowd so I was pretty far down the line and so I didn’t undertake to review the pros and cons completely but rather tried to add something to what the others had said. And I said that I agreed that he should not run and I thought that one of the important reasons that he should not run was that we needed a sort of a turnover in the Administration. That it would clear away a lot of deadwood in his Administration that ought to be cleared out. I thought it would be

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better for a new Democratic President to do it than for a Republican President to do it. Don’t think any of us had any real doubt that President Truman could have won if he had run. Now we might not have been right you understand. But in our own thinking, I don’t think this was an important consideration, we just took for granted that if he ran he would be reelected.

HESS: Do you recall who was at that second meeting? You spoke of yourself as being a junior member of the group.

MURPHY: Most of his senior White House staff was there. Matt Connelly would have been there, John Steelman, Bill Hassett. His press secretary at the time I guess would have been there, Joe Short. Now this was before Joe died I guess. Yes...

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HESS: He died on September the 18th of ‘52.

MURPHY: Yes. It was after Charley Ross died, Joe Short would have been there. And Fred Vinson was there. I think John McCormack was there, I’m not sure. But I remember Fred Vinson as we were coming out sort of shaking his head in wonderment and saying, "That was the frankest meeting I ever heard in my life." He was expressing surprise how many people had told President Truman they thought he ought not run and so forth and how frank they had been about their reasons, which I think was quite different from the popular conception at the time--that the President’s staff, his hangers on, would be urging him to run again, so they could keep their jobs. But I think it was unanimous, there must have been I expect a dozen or more people. Now Frank McKinney might have been there, I don’t

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remember about that.

HESS: Do you recall if anyone advised him to run?

MURPHY: At that time, in that group? No, I think it was unanimous, they advised him not to run. Incidentally I note you quote from Cabell Phillips about the newly minted silver dollars. That again is not quite accurate. They were not newly minted, they were minted in 1884, the year of President Truman’s birth.

HESS: Is that one you have there?

MURPHY: And this is one of them he gave me that night.

HESS: Well, how about that?

MURPHY: And the reason he happened to have them, John Snyder had run across a bunch of these dollars minted in 1884 and he gave them to President Truman and President Truman gave them

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to other people and this just happened to be the time when he had them and gave them out and gave me that one which I’ve carried ever since.

HESS: At least Mr. Phillips is right in saying that they were silver dollars.

MURPHY: Yes. I think that Phillips is that nearly right about a good many things in his book.

HESS: Just what is your general opinion of Phillips’ book?

MURPHY: Oh, I think it’s a good book. I think the...

HESS: Do you find any glaring errors in it?

MURPHY: Oh, I don’t remember any, no. I think it’s a little bit, what would you say, out of balance. I think this is natural.

HESS: In what way?

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MURPHY: Well, he would have learned more about some things than he would about others and necessarily he would write more about the things that he had learned about whether they were the most important or not.

HESS: Do you think that he would write more about certain people than others, if he learned more about certain people?

MURPHY: Well, yes, I think he would and did.

HESS: Who?

MURPHY: Well, you’ll have to read the book.

HESS: I’ve read the book.

MURPHY: All right, then you probably know.

HESS: What do you recall about the convention in Chicago that year?

MURPHY: I went to the convention with President

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Truman when he went. He flew out there. They had started calling the roll, they had taken one and possibly two ballots before he got there. I had been in Chicago once before in my life and maybe twice. But in any case when I had been there, I was in the President’s party. I was working for him at the White House and all I did was keep up with his party. I had never been on a street in Chicago alone. We got to the Blackstone Hotel where he stayed out there, and just immediately after we got there he called me into his bedroom and says, "Charlie, I want you to do something for me."

I said, "Yes, sir."

He said, "Find Averell and tell him I want him to withdraw."

And so here I was with an assignment in the city of Chicago, some two or three million people I guess with no idea where Averell Harriman is nor how to get to him. Didn’t

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know where the convention was or how to get to the convention and the President tells me to go find Averell Harriman and tell him to withdraw. So I start out to find out how do you get to the convention? And not knowing whether Averell was there or not. Well, I did, I got to the convention and I got in. Just fortunately I ran into someone in the convention hall right after I got there that knew Averell and knew where he was. And he was there, he had an office in the convention hall and this person took me to him. And I got there and told him why I had come. He told me that he had already issued a statement withdrawing, and he had. This was before he got the message from President Truman. And he, at the moment, was sitting there waiting for his announcement to be reported on the television. So, I had an opportunity to sit there with Averell Harriman and Marie, his wife, and watch the television

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while they were reading the announcement of his withdrawal, which was a relatively sad occasion I might say.

HESS: What was his reaction when he found out that the President would also like him to withdraw?

MURPHY: I think he was a little peeved. I think he was a little peeved. Now, that is certainly my principal recollection of that convention. I stayed in Chicago as long as President Truman stayed and left when he left. I suppose he must have addressed the convention, I’m sure he did while he was there.

HESS: Do you recall working on his address?

MURPHY: I don’t at the moment have any recollection of working on that one, but if he made one I’m sure I worked on it.

HESS: What do you recall about Vice President Barkley’s

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efforts to obtain the nomination that year?

MURPHY: Shortly before the convention, the President called a number of his White House staff, including me, into his upstairs study on the second floor of the White House and announced to us that he was supporting and going to support Vice President Barkley for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency at the convention, and he would like for us to do likewise. And that was...

HESS: What time was this?

MURPHY: Well, it was shortly before the convention. I think it must have been within...

HESS: A week or so?

MURPHY: Less than that, in my recollection it would have been two or three days before the convention. Well, now after that, Barkley’s

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nomination was very adamantly opposed by organized labor.

HESS: Why?

MURPHY: No, I don’t know why. I think it was because of his age, but at any rate it was a fact that they did oppose his nomination adamantly and directly. They told him, they didn’t go around behind beating the bush, they just told him that they could not support him and they would oppose him and talked to him face to face about it. Well, this was, I think, a very severe blow to him but he finally decided that that being the situation that he would not be a candidate for the nomination and he called President Truman on the phone and told him so. And this was before the President left Washington to go out there. And so that, I think, for all intents and purposes ended the Barkley episode and his support of Barkley. But as

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long as Barkley was an active candidate, a very short period, a few days as I recall, he was supporting Barkley for the nomination. Then after that, it must have been, he got a call from Stevenson who asked him if President Truman would object now to his accepting the nomination. And President Truman says he responded, "Hell, no, that’s what I’ve been trying to get you to do all the time." But at that time, my memory’s not clear, he must have been supporting Harriman. I perhaps would have to think this out but I think the situation after Barkley withdrew might have been that he was supporting Harriman but did not object to Stevenson’s acceptance and did not object to Stevenson being nominated. But at any rate, he did tell me to go find Averell and tell him to withdraw. That I remember clearly.

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HESS: One point I want to clear up in my own mind. We discussed about the confusion that existed between Governor Stevenson and Mr. Truman when Mr. Truman thought that Mr. Stevenson said yes and Mr. Stevenson thought that he had said no. Just what was the President’s reaction when he found out that the Governor did not want to run? At the time that there was some confusion, about the first of the year I trust. Is that right?

MURPHY: Well, I’m sure he was irritated.

HESS: And then after that came the two meetings when the President was reconsidering his withdrawing his withdrawal, so to speak.

MURPHY: Well, now the second of those two meetings, I’m sure would have been after that, I think the first one would have been after that, although it’s possible that the first one

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came between Vinson’s refusal and Stevenson’s.

HESS: And then along in there came...

MURPHY: I don’t know of any way of pinning that one down except to get the Blair House records and see what day that he had three people there for dinner, Clark Clifford and me and one other.

HESS: And then the date of the announcement at the National Guard Armory at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner.

MURPHY: It must have been in April.

HESS: I think it was late in March--March 29th.

MURPHY: Well, maybe so.

HESS: Did the President, during this period of time, try to get Governor Stevenson to change his mind. Was there continued efforts made

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between the last of March and the date of the convention trying to swing Governor Stevenson into line--get him to run?

MURPHY: Not to my recollection. I don’t remember any such instance.

HESS: So, during that period of time was...

MURPHY: I think that when I got this letter from Stevenson that that sort of…

HESS: Cooled it.

MURPHY: The President took that as Stevenson’s signing off and took it at face value, I think.

HESS: All right. One other point about the convention. According to a memorandum in your papers out in the Library, you participated in the drafting of the civil rights plank in the Democratic platform that year.

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Do you recall that?

MURPHY: I remember something about that, yes sir. Well, first, the first draft of the entire Democratic platform was prepared by the White House staff. Dick Neustadt did it. It was, in earlier times, rather traditional that the administration in power would have a first draft prepared so that the platform committee could have a working draft, at least to start with. This was an assignment that I gave to Dick Neustadt a good long time ahead of the convention. He had a long time to work on it and did an excellent job. I think it was a far better document from a literary standpoint, and probably from the standpoint of content, than the one that came out eventually. But what was done with that draft was the thing that you usually do with drafts of that sort, you turn it over to the chairman of the platform

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committee. And what happened after that is what usually happens. They try to set out to make as many changes as they can just for the sake of change so that they won’t have a platform that somebody handed to them.

Parenthetically, I had a very interesting experience along this line at a later convention in 1956. There were several of us around Washington here that had experience in working with matters of this kind including Democratic platforms and so we prepared, at the request of the chairman of the platform committee, or the chairman of the national committee, one or the other, we prepared a first working draft of the platform and that was given by the chairman of the national committee to the chairman of the platform committee. I believe that was John McCormack, who had not become Speaker at that time. Then several of us in this same group went out to the

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convention with no particular assignments, just to be there. We ran into some members of the staff of the platform committee and they were desperately in need of help of somebody to work on the language of the platform and so we volunteered. They gave us the draft, and it was the same draft that we earlier had given to the chairman of the national committee and he had given to the chairman of the platform committee and they gave it back to us and they gave us just one instruction, change the language. So we worked it all over again for three days changing the language.

HESS: Change your own language.

MURPHY: But to get back to the 1952 platform and the civil rights plank, this is one of the planks that received, I guess, more attention than some of the others and I was involved in some discussion and conversations about that

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plank later on and that involved some of the particular language. I don’t remember all the details but my best recollection would be that I would have been called from Chicago by someone who was working on this, possibly Frank McKinney, who was then chairman of the national committee and he would have told me what the problem was and what the words were involved and I would have taken the story to the President and talked with him about it and gotten from him a decision which I would have passed back along to McKinney. And I expect this is the kind of thing you ran across.

HESS: As you will recall in 1948 the civil rights plank caused quite a flap, so to speak.

MURPHY: Well, that’s right.

HESS: Was there anything anticipated, was anything expected to arise at the ‘52 convention of the same nature that did in 1948?

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MURPHY: Well, I suppose so.

HESS: Hubert Humphrey was going to be there.

MURPHY: Well, this was an issue, a very live issue and one about which people feel intensely and one that they like to make very prominent and I guess just in the nature of things it was expected that it would be made prominent. There was a likelihood, a chance, that it would explode on the convention floor, there always was. One year I worked, at some length, on the civil rights platform with Brooks Hays.

HESS: Of Arkansas.

MURPHY: Of Arkansas. I expect that was in 1952. This was in an earlier stage than drafting the language. When I said earlier that Dick Neustadt prepared the first draft of this, that is true; but in working on this he would have had consultations with others of us on the

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White House staff and we would have reviewed and revised and we would have, from time to time, we would have consulted President Truman about this, and I am sure that very serious attention would have been paid to the civil rights plank at that stage as well as later.

HESS: Do you recall any of the President's comments relative to the civil rights plank?

MURPHY: No.

HESS: It's a little bit past 4 and our reel is just about out so shall we knock off for today?

MURPHY: We had better stop.