Hopkins, John E. Papers

The papers of John E. Hopkins consist of tape recorded interviews with eight former Harry S. Truman administration officials, transcripts or notes of interviews, and Hopkins's correspondence with interviewees and other Truman administration officials.

Size: Less than one linear foot (about 250 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: John E. Hopkins has donated to the U.S. government his copyright interest in all writings in this collection. Documents created by U.S. government employees in the course of their official duties are also in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents, or their heirs.
Processed by: Elizabeth Carrington (2005) as part of the Truman Library Internship Program.
Supervising Archivists: Randy Sowell and David Clark.

John E. Hopkins, a historian from Kalamazoo, Michigan, created these interviews and correspondence as research materials during the preparation of his doctoral dissertation, entitled “An Investigation of the Speech and Statement Preparation Process During the Presidential Administration of Harry S. Truman, 1945-1953.” (Ohio University, 1970). Hopkins was the son of William J. Hopkins, who served as Executive Clerk at the White House during the Truman administration, and who was one of the officials interviewed for the project.

The John E. Hopkins Papers are comprised of tape recorded interviews with eight former Harry S. Truman administration officials, transcripts and notes of interviews, and Hopkins’s correspondence with interviewees and other Truman administration personnel. The collection is comprised of one series, a Subject File, arranged alphabetically by subject.

The recorded interviews and transcripts within the collection include interviews done with David Bell, Donald Dawson, George Elsey, William Hopkins, Frederick Lawton, Charles Murphy, Samuel Rosenman, and John R. Steelman. Hopkins also took notes of an interview with Clark Clifford which apparently was not recorded. The interviews cover each interviewee’s experience, both formal and informal, in journalism and speechmaking, their role in the speech and statement preparation process during the Truman administration, and any related memory of the general speechmaking process during the Truman presidency.

Also included in the collection are correspondence with the interviewees and other members of Truman’s White House staff, including Eben Ayers, Richard Neustadt, Mrs. Joseph Short, David Stowe and Harry Vaughan. Most of the correspondence relates to an initial interview questionnaire sent out by Hopkins during his research, through which he narrowed his number of interviewees down in order to perform personal interviews.