George M. Elsey Oral History Interview, July 7, 1970

Oral History Interview with
George M. Elsey

July 7, 1970
Jerry N. Hess

[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional Elsey Oral History Transcripts | List of Subjects Discussed]

[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional Elsey Oral History Transcripts | List of Subjects Discussed]

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HESS: All right, Mr. Elsey, to begin with this morning let's discuss foreign aid and foreign affairs. And for our first question let's just compare the way that the White House staff is used and is instrumental in the establishment of foreign policy today, and the way that it was in Mr. Truman's administration.

ELSEY: The first point to bear in mind is that the White House staff is very much larger now than it was in the Truman administration, and particularly in this matter of foreign affairs. As every reader of the press, and every observer of the White House scene knows, Dr. [Henry A.] Kissinger has a large staff, thirty to forty professionals, working for him in the field of foreign policy. In the closing days of the Johnson administration, Dr. Walt Rostow had the comparable job, and in the Kennedy administration and early Johnson days, it was McGeorge Bundy. There was no operation, no group, in any way resembling this in the Truman administration.

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As I think we've said in earlier interviews, the White House staff was a very small group throughout most of the Truman administration. It did grow slowly through the seven years, but it was a fraction in numbers of what today's White House staff is.

There were no "experts" on foreign affairs in the White House. There were a few of us on the White House staff who dealt on a pretty regular basis with the Department of State and the Department of Defense. I was one of them, but we did not purport to be foreign policy makers or foreign policy experts. The President looked to the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the advice, the opinions, the information, and the recommendations that he needed in formulating foreign policy decisions. The National Security Council was organized as a result of passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the NSC from the time it was created and through the remaining years of the Truman administration, was the focus of the major foreign policy discussions within the administration.

Dean Acheson's book tells, books tell as well as any single source that I can think of, of the relationship

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between Mr. Truman and his Secretary of State, and the Department of State in those days. There was no--nothing in any way that compares with the, say, the last ten years in the White House structure, whereby foreign policy matters flowed through a large White House staff, were sifted, pulled apart, examined, put back together again, before being presented to the President. Nothing like that.

I can recall a couple of years ago I was asked by an interviewer, whose full biography at that time I did not know, how I accounted for the golden age of the State Department. And I asked him what he meant by the golden age of the State Department and he said he was referring to that period of '46, '47, '48, when such fundamental matters as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall plan, the Berlin airlift, many very critical, crucial decisions were made. Why couldn't the State Department be as innovative and brave and decisive today as it was then? He asked the question in 1968 and my answer was: "Because in those days there was no Walt Rostow." I was referring to the fact that there was a sizeable staff of people at the White

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House who tended then, and I believe the tendency still exists, to smother, to blanket, the State Department. My answer was not very tactful because the man who was asking me the question was an alumnus of the Rostow staff at the White House, and he didn't think there was anything funny about the answer. I didn't intend to be funny, but I do think that when the President is--any President, is surrounded by a large White House staff which figures, which assumes, that it knows more than the responsible department of Government about the area of responsibility of that department, the department is bound to suffer. The President doesn't get the best thinking that the department is capable of, and as a result he may not always come out with the best decisions. But these are generalizations, and perhaps the generalizations will have more meaning if we move on, Jerry, to specific points.

HESS: One point that I would like to cover deals with the fact that you mentioned that the State Department was in charge of foreign policy during that time. Wasn't the State Department against the recognition of the State of Israel? Weren't there elements, major elements,

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within the State Department against the recognition of the State of Israel and weren't they overruled by Mr. Truman and his advisers?

ELSEY: Yes, there were foreign service officers who had very serious questions about the recognition of the State of Israel. Not just in the State Department. A number of people in the Department of Defense felt the same way. James Forrestal was particularly concerned about American policy as regards the Palestinian problem because, having been Secretary of the Navy, he was much concerned about the availability of Middle Eastern oil, for not only at our military establishment, but for our industrial economy, and he was pretty jittery about any actions which would so disturb the Middle East that it might cut off access of the United States to oil in the Arab countries.

So, it's not just the Department of State, there were a number of people both in and out of Government who questioned the advisability of the United States' recognition of an independent Israel.

It was a tough question, views were strongly and sharply held in the Congress, in the press, in the

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executive branch and throughout the United States. The President took all the factors into account. When he decided to recognize Israel, the critics who had taken the opposite position, of course, cried politics. Regardless of what decision he might have made, those that didn't like the decision would have cried politics, because it was a question in which there never has been a unanimity of opinion in this country.

HESS: On that matter, who do you think were the President's principal advisers? Who were the most important people to advise him to go ahead with the recognition of the State of Israel?

ELSEY: I'm not sure that I can name any two, three, or four individuals, and I'm not sure that it would serve any purpose even if I were to name individuals , because as I said a few moments ago, the question of Israel, whether or not there should be an independent Israel, whether it should be recognized by the United States, those were matters that had been in the forefront of public debate for a number of years. And the President, as a former member of the Senate, as a, briefly, Vice President, and then as President since April of '45, was

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fully conscious of the divergent opinions. He had heard from Zionist leaders, he had heard from Arab groups, pro-Arab groups, he just took advice and counsel and listened patiently, and I suppose at times impatiently, to conflicting points of view, and made up his mind on the basis of, I suppose hundreds of conversations over a period of many years. I don't, I really can't put my finger on a name and say, "This is the man who advised Harry Truman and whose advice was accepted."

HESS: Do you recall what recommendation Dave Niles, the man who was in charge of such matters, perhaps in charge of Jewish matters, gave in this matter?

ELSEY: Dave Niles was a most secretive individual who slunk rather furtively around the corridors of the White House and the Executive Office Building and Dave Niles rarely, if ever, confided to his White House colleagues as to what he said to the President or what his recommendations were. Part of the influence that Niles liked to have people feel he had on the President was his, was this secretiveness. I don't believe he saw the President nearly as often as Niles would lead his

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friends on the outside to believe that he saw him. Niles had many Zionist friends, but he did try to maintain contacts with, at least for a number of years, with non-Zionists as well. I suppose Dave Niles was a--well, I shouldn't say I suppose, I'm confident that he would have urged the recognition of Israel, but you tend to discount the recommendations of a man whose position is so well-known.

Dave Niles had been regarded for many years in the Roosevelt administration, and on into the Truman administration, as a representative of, or spokesman for, I should say rather than of, spokesman for various minority groups in the United States and as the Zionist clamor grew louder and louder, David Niles, who was Jewish, was just expected to be setting forth their point of view. Well, when you know what position a man is going to present, it doesn't have any particularly outstanding merit or weight. You don't give it any special treatment.

HESS: Do you recall what recommendations Clark Clifford gave to the President in this matter?

ELSEY: I think it's best to ask Mr. Clifford on that. If

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you haven't already talked to him about it, I'd go ahead and ask him.

HESS: We will, but now we are asking his principal assistant.

ELSEY: I was not privileged with Clifford' s conversations with the President on this subject.

HESS: Did Eddie Jacobson play any part in the President's recognition of the State of Israel?

ELSEY: I'll answer that the same way that I did, or at least a part of my answer, about Dave Niles.

Eddie Jacobson was very well-known as an ardent Zionist, an ardent proponent of the recognition of the State of Israel. He was a longtime friend of the President's. The President had known him since World War I and, as we all know, the two had briefly been business partners. The President liked Jacobson, he respected him, and he also was the President of the whole United States and not just the President of--not just the representative of one group that had very strong views. I'm sure he listened to Eddie Jacobson, but because Jacobson's position was so well-known, and one might almost say was an extreme position, I don't

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think it had any special, or undue, influence on the President. The President had, obviously had, to take a much broader look at an issue as critical as this, and not just listen to somebody whom he had known for thirty or more years.

HESS: All right. Let's go back in time just a bit. In our last interview you mentioned Admiral Leahy, and in the book, White House Sailor by Commander William Rigdon, Commander Rigdon quoted a letter from Admiral Wilson Brown to you. And in the letter it states, more or less, that Leahy favored Russian entry into the war, and then after the war, after the difficulties began to arise with Russia, Admiral Leahy said he had not been in favor of Russia's entry into the fighting. Do you recall anything at all about that matter?

ELSEY: I recently had occasion to look at Commander Rigdon's book again, and will have to confess that I do--was surprised at seeing a reference to a letter from Admiral Brown to me. I do not now at this date, recall such a letter. I'm sure if Bill Rigdon cites it, quotes it, that there was such a letter. Indeed, the chances are that the Admiral dictated it to Bill and Bill transcribed

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it, so I'm not attempting to deny the letter, it's just that I don't recall it. As for those views of Admiral Leahy, I think we're talking about a Leahy attitude on the Soviet entry into the war against Japan not the war against Germany.

HESS: The Asian war.

ELSEY: The Asian war. Admiral Leahy was a pretty crusty and salty old fellow. I don't think Admiral Leahy ever really trusted anybody other than the United States, and had it been possible, he would have liked to have fought all wars without allies because he knew that you invariably had difficulties and difference of opinion with allies, and frequently your differences--the fact that you have been allies during a war, led to great problems after a war.

I think that Admiral Brown is right in saying that--in raising, in being perplexed at this, Leahy's postwar assertions that he had not favored the entry of Russia into the war against Japan. I think Brown is right in being perplexed because he'd never heard, and I don't remember ever having heard Admiral Leahy say, while the war was still on, that he did not want

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the Russians to enter the war against Japan. He may privately have hoped that in some fashion the war could end without their getting into it, but I don't recall, and obviously neither did Admiral Brown recall, that he ever took a stand against their being involved in the war.

Actually, it wouldn't have done any good for us to have said one way or the other, "We don't want the Russians in the war against Japan." If the Russians wanted to get in they would get in regardless of what our views were. The Russians would act in their own self-interest, and if they thought their self-interest would be served by their declaring war against Japan, they would do it, regardless of whether we wanted them to or not. Conversely if they thought their self-interest would not be served by their entering the Far Eastern war, they wouldn't have entered it regardless of how much pressure we might have tried to put on to induce them to enter. And I think Admiral Leahy was enough of a realist during the war to know that. I suspect, in whatever he wrote and said after the war was a bit of wishful thinking. Just sort of wishing that

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they hadn't gotten in, but knowing perfectly well that there wasn't anything that we could do about it one way or another.

HESS: Do you recall anything about the nature of the relationship between Admirals Brown and Leahy? Anything of interest in that line of thought?

ELSEY: Well, first of all we should recognize the fact that the two men had known one another for very, very many years. They had been naval colleagues. Admiral Leahy was the senior by About five years. Leahy graduated from the Academy in '97 and then Brown in 1902, I believe, maybe the class of '01, I think it was 1902. And having been Regular naval officers, lifelong naval officers, their relationship was colored a bit by the fact that one was five years senior to the other, and Admiral Brown accorded Admiral Leahy the kind of respect and deferential treatment that he had all his life, all his professional life, accorded his senior officer. They had mutual respect for one another. During the period that Leahy, for example, was Chief of Naval Operations, he had recommended the appointment of Admiral Brown as superintendent of the Naval Academy, that every time

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that Leahy had a senior, or responsible -position in the Navy Department, he had recommended Brown for promotion, or for a post of responsibility in the Navy. So, the two men had much respect for one another's ability.

I think there was a bit of, I'm not quite sure what phrase to use, a little bit of protocol problem at times during the war. Admiral Brown had served twice before as a Naval Aide to the President and in those peacetime years, the Naval Aides to the President, just like a Military Aide to the President, had a very intimate, very personal relationship with the Commander in Chief. There had been no post comparable to Admiral Leahy's prior to the war.

When Admiral Leahy became Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief in the summer of 1942, that was a brand new position without any precedent whatsoever. Leahy being a senior officer, being in fact the senior officer of the total United States military establishment, naturally felt that he outranked all other military personnel, whatever their position, and that he should be accorded a position closest to the President, and this is a little bit contrary to the feelings of "Pa"

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[Edwin M.] Watson and Admiral Brown, who through their long experience as military naval aides to the President, sort of felt that they should be closest to the President. This was never a serious matter. It sometimes caused a bit of elbowing, or jockeying for position, when somebody was going to take a photograph, but to those of us who were very junior officers, we were just mildly amused at this hanky-panky on the part of such senior "old men," as they seemed to us at the time. But that's pretty superficial and I don't mean to exaggerate or stress, or overstress, or emphasize it, but it has been exaggerated in my opinion by some people who write about that period, and who try to imply that Leahy and Brown didn't get along, or that Leahy and "Pa" Watson didn't get along. It's too superficial to dwell on and I've dwelled on it really longer than it merits, but just to try to put it in what I think was the proper light.

HESS: On the subject of the Yalta Conference, did you have any duties dealing with that conference?

ELSEY: I was on the staff of Admiral Brown, the Naval Aide at that time, and had, at Admiral Brown's request, prepared some background papers, some briefing memorandas,

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some factual or historical synopses of points that were to be discussed at Yalta. But that was all. I did not go to the Yalta Conference.

During the Yalta Conference I was on duty in the Map Room as one of the regular duty officers there. I had no other responsibility other than some of the background, or preparatory work and serving in the Map Room during the conference. The Map Room officers who were assigned to the trip, to the team, and who did go were Lt. Robert W. Bogue, USNR, and Captain Henry W. Putnam, U.S. Army, those were the two Map Room officers. Commander Rigdon went along as the Assistant to the Naval Aide, and Warrant Officer Albert Cornelius accompanied the group to serve as cipher officer and extra clerical staff for the White House group.

HESS: After Mr. Roosevelt died and Mr. Truman became President, his first major conference was the Potsdam Conference. I do believe that you went along on that trip. Is that correct?

ELSEY: That's correct.

HESS: What do you recall of those days, and what were your

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duties?

ELSEY: Because of the change of administration, the fact that President Truman was new to the office, and as he himself has testified in writing and orally on numerous occasions, he had very little background in many of these matters. He had not been informed as a Senator, and had not been informed on these matters by President Roosevelt during the brief time that he, Mr. Truman, was Vice President. He had an enormous amount of homework to do to catch up on the political, military and diplomatic questions that were to be discussed at Potsdam. Also he had inherited a Secretary of State, in whom he had little confidence, and whom he intended to replace by Mr. Justice [James F.] Byrnes. He had other new White House staff and advisers, so my principal work preparatory to the Potsdam Conference, was comparable to what I had done for Yalta, but in a much greater scale. Numerous papers, some just two or three pages, some much longer, summarizing the topics that we anticipated would be discussed at Potsdam and on which the Map Room or other White House files had extensive background data. Of course the State Department was preparing papers and

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the Joint Chiefs of Staff were too, but some of these topics were more completely covered in White House files than anyplace else and we wanted to be certain that all of that data was in the President's hands.

I suggested some matters to Admiral Brown, who concurred. Admiral Brown, however, had left the White House before we had gotten very far on this, his successor was Captain James K. Vardaman, USNR, and so I reviewed these matters with Vardaman. He told me to go full speed ahead. Admiral Leahy and Harry Hopkins also suggested topics that they thought I should prepare background briefing papers on.

In the material which you and I recently looked at at the National Archives, Jerry, and which has now been sent out to Independence, I think we found lists of these background papers, copies of them, and occasional notes from Leahy, Hopkins, and others about the matters that should be covered, and that's pretty extensively handled in my material that is there in the Truman Library.

As for the conference itself, I don't believe there is really anything that I can add to what is really pretty well documented and pretty well publicized. The hour by hour chronology of what the President and his staff did

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is covered by the log of the trip, prepared as usual by Commander Rigdon, and points of view of participants of the conference have been handled in such books as those of Mr. Justice Byrnes, Admiral Leahy and others; Stimson and so on.

While at Potsdam my role was that of one of the Map Room officers. As you will recall from our earlier discussions, that the Map Room staff had special cryptographic equipment and we would communicate, on the President's behalf, back to the White House using our own ciphers, our own codes, and Government agencies in Washington that had anything of a security nature to send to the President, their only channel was through the Map Room in Washington, and those of the itinerant Map Room staff either on ship when we were enroute, or on the ground when we were there in Germany. So, those of us who were there, were busy pretty much of the day and night handling the traffic, reports from military commanders on events in the Far East, reports from the civilian staff at the White House and from Government agencies, congressional leaders, and others, matters that needed the President's attention, or matters that the President in turn wanted to comment on or refer back to Washington.

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A great deal of our traffic at that time related to such matters as the Potsdam ultimatum. You may recall that about the 27th of July a statement was issued, from Potsdam, calling on the Japanese to surrender. The text of this document was a lengthy one and there were various changes. It bounced back and forth between Washington and Germany, changes were made, words were added, phrases were deleted. We spent a lot of time on sending drafts of that, and commentaries on it back and forth.

Another item that we handled in the Map Room was recognizing, and of course knowing its significance, were reports that came from Washington about the success of the first atom bomb, the one exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16th. The reports that came through us, the President used to brief, or mention, the bomb to Stalin. The circumstances of that conversation have been widely reported in various books. It was through us that the President gave the authorization back to the War Department to drop the first bomb, the one on Hiroshima. I recall vividly because he wrote it out in longhand and handed it to me for transmission, that he gave authority for the first bomb to be dropped, at

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the discretion of the military commanders on the scene, because they--weather and other factors had to be taken into account. But in no circumstance did he want the bomb to be dropped until after he had left Potsdam. He wanted to be away from the Russians and on his way home before the actual dropping of the first bomb. You may recall that the bomb was dropped a couple of days after we left Potsdam. We were actually in the Atlantic on the U.S.S. Augusta when word came to us of the Hiroshima drop.

HESS: August the 6th, I believe.

ELSEY: I think that that's about right, yes. But these are--this is the kind of traffic that we were handling back and forth. There was also some extremely high-level, and very secret traffic, which we were getting from Washington, and the President of course, was receiving almost instantly, relating to the peace talks that were going on--some of the peace moves that were being made by the Japanese behind the scenes and that in which the Russians and others were involved. So, it was a busy time, but I simply cite these to show you the kinds of things we were handling. The facts, the

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substance of the messages, their impact, can best be evaluated by reference to the scholarly works that have been published regarding the surrender of Japan, for example, and the memoirs of the principals of the time.

HESS: As a personal opinion, do you think that the atomic bomb should have been dropped on Japan?

ELSEY: I have never had any reason to disagree with the summary of this subject that appears in Henry Stimson's memoirs. Stimson went into the whole question at great length, published an article a year or two after the war, and that chapter, that article, was reprinted verbatim in his memoirs, On Active Service in Peace and War. The point of view, Stimson there summarized the pros and cons and gave the reasons why he believed it was the right recommendation to make to the President that the bomb be used, and why he believed the President made the right decision in authorizing the dropping of the bomb. I agree with that position.

While we knew that the Japanese were having troubles, we knew that various peace talks, or peace feelers, were under way, there was absolutely no assurance that

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those who were for peace in Japan would succeed. In fact, evidence and past history would lead us to believe that they probably would not have succeeded. We were losing tragically large numbers of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen in the Pacific. We had been through those bitter struggles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. We knew the ferocity which the Japanese would defend every square yard of territory that they held. We had seen the effects of the Kamikaze raids. We were proceeding with plans for the invasion of Japan in the fall, and the casualty estimates which the Army and Navy were making were heartsickening. Not only would Americans have lost their lives in great numbers, so would the Japanese; the Japanese civilians as well as Japanese military. And while the bomb was a horrible thing, the number of lives lost by the dropping of those two bombs, was a fraction of the number of lives that would have been lost had the war proceeded to go on to the mainland of Japan. Yes, I think that all facts considered, I have no reason to question, have never had any reason to question, the correctness of that decision. It was a tough decision, and it was a hard one, and nobody likes to authorize that kind of action.

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HESS: Shortly after V-J Day, lend-lease was terminated and some people, some of these recipient countries, thought it was terminated too abruptly. What is your view, and did you have any dealings with that?

ELSEY: As to the dealings, no. Absolutely none. Nor did I know of anyone on the White House staff who had any dealings with, or on, that subject.

I suspect it was too abrupt. As we review now, in retrospect, the decision, I'm sure it was a mistake. But one has to remember the mood of the country and the mood of the Congress. The Congress and the country were hell-bent to get out of Europe, get home, get the war over with. We had the same sort of a reaction after World War I, it was intensified after World War II. It was a mistake.

HESS: Did the White House staff play any role in the formulation of postwar policy towards Germany and Japan?

ELSEY: A bare minimum.

The State Department early in the war had established some postwar planning groups; groups that concerned themselves with occupied Europe, with an international

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organization which, as we know, in due course came into being and is called the United Nations.

The military, in great detail planned, made plans for the occupation of the captured zones, because it was to be their job to govern, to administer them. So planning for the postwar occupied territories, had gone on for two or three years before the war came to an end.

Since in the case of Germany, other countries were involved too, there was a commission. I think it was the EAC, the European Advisory Commission, meeting more or less regularly in London, consisting of ourselves, the British, and the Russians, so that all three countries consulted with one another on their plans for the occupation of Germany. And it was at the meetings of the EAC in London where the decisions on the zones for occupation were decided, and these recommendations were in due course, ratified by their governments. The White House staff had had general awareness, but that's about all, of these plans.

The one area where the White House, where the President was particularly involved in postwar plans for Germany, was in the question of which zone in Germany the United States would occupy. This was a matter that interested

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President Roosevelt personally very much, so much that he engaged in a long haggling with Churchill over which zone. The arguments related as to which zone of Germany would be occupied by the United States and which zone would be occupied by Britain. I don't recall that we ever, the two governments, ever much concerned themselves with what the Russians were going to occupy. It had been agreed that they would have the area which they subsequently took over, so that was that. But FDR wanted the Americans to be in the northern zone of Germany and the British in the southern, because this would give access to ports for us and we would be able to move our men and supplies in and out more quickly. The British argued, successfully and with much logic, that this would mean a crossing of the lines of communication between us and the British, and it would cause all sorts of logistic problems.

The British argument, and Britain was supported by General Eisenhower, won out just on the question of logistics and lines of communication and ease of maintenance of troops. But this was not a matter in which White House staff per se was involved. This was

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more of a FDR's own personal concern and he was beaten down.

HESS: Do you know if it was seen at that time, that placing Berlin in the Russian sector without actually having adequate overland routes, corridors, to Berlin would subsequently turn into a problem?

ELSEY: This was not foreseen at all. It was not foreseen by anybody, at least anybody on the U.S.-British side. The Russians may have been smart enough to have foreseen the implications of Berlin being a tripartite city inside the Russian zone, but it was not noted by Ambassador [John G.] Winant, or by any of the staff of the U.S.-British, it was never called to the attention of the President. Later on at the time when the Russians clamped down on the access and really caused trouble, when the Berlin airlift had to be established, this was in 1948, there was a great deal of mad scrambling through the records by State, by the Army, by just about everybody who had had anything to do with it or had any access to any documents, and there was just no evidence that could ever be found that anyone had had the foresight to see the implications of the placing of Berlin, and the

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lack of a written guarantee by the Russians that the British, the French, and the U.S. would have unrestricted access to Berlin.

Now, I just mentioned the word "French" for the first time, and before that I had been talking about the tripartite zone. In the discussions of '43, '44, everything was on the basis of three countries occupying Germany: Russia, Britain and the United States.

[Charles] De Gaulle began to be pretty noisy, pretty clamorous, and pretty insistent that the French should have a role also and I do not recall now the dates. To placate the French, Britain and the United States carved out of their respective sectors, a portion, a fourth area of occupancy for which the French would be given responsibility, similarly Berlin. The British and American sectors each gave up a portion of their zones to create a fourth sector for France. This was not part of the original planning, but came into being, oh, I guess in the fall of '44 or early '45 as the war was coming to an end, as France had been largely liberated, and as the French under De Gaulle were beginning to assert their postwar intentions and aspirations pretty vigorously.

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HESS: On the subject of the Truman Doctrine

ELSEY: Excuse me, if I--let me interrupt and back up again on this question of Berlin. One reason why I am fairly dogmatic on the question of nobody really having the foresight and for that reason it was impossible to pin the blame on anybody for Berlin. In '48 there was a certain amount of partisan, in fact there was a lot of partisan argument over this. Some people were trying to blame General Eisenhower for not having seen to it that unrestricted access to Berlin was guaranteed. This was completely unfair. General Eisenhower had had no responsibility for deciding these matters on postwar occupancy of Germany. It was not a Democratic or a Republican issue. Some people tried to make it one, but that was stretching pretty far and there was no basis, no pretext for it.

HESS: On the subject of the Truman Doctrine, could you tell me a little about the background of the decisions to aid Greece and Turkey?

ELSEY: Well, Jerry, so much has been written on that I don't know that there is anything I could add. The most recent

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book I have read was Dean Acheson's, the second volume of his memoirs. Numerous other studies of foreign policy papers have been written.

The basic facts are pretty clear. The British, with very little warning to us, simply told our Government that they were not going to be able to stay, maintain their presence in the Eastern Mediterranean in the force in which they had before, for budgetary, political reasons at home, and they were going to have to get out. And they hoped that we would be able to replace them because if we didn't they very much feared that Russian influence would prevail and that indigenous, or Communist forces, supported by the Russians, would almost certainly cause Greece and Turkey to collapse and fall behind the Iron Curtain. And we responded. We accepted and agreed with the British evaluation of what would probably be the outcome if they pulled out and we did not move in in a massive way to give military and economic help and we did.

HESS: Do you know how the President arrived at the decision to act with such vigor on this problem as he did? Why did he take a hold of this with the vigor that he did?

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ELSEY: Time was of the essence. The British gave us very short notice, and the President was very well informed of what the Soviets were up to in the Eastern Europe. He had no illusions whatsoever about their interests, their activities, and what they were up to in Poland, Hungary, Romania, their zone of Austria, Bulgaria. He knew, our whole Government knew that they were trying to subvert the governments of Greece and Turkey and I think he accepted without question the assessment of the British and our own State Department and military departments of what would happen if he didn't act, and if you were going to act, you had to act fast because the time was then. It was not something you could sit around and debate for weeks or months.

HESS: Did the White House staff think that there were any particular foreign leaders that were the most important in developing such a plan?

ELSEY: Well, I don't think so. Let's go all the way back to the subject we opened this discussion with: The White House staff.

There was no group of White House staff members

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who were regarded as foreign policy experts or who were expected to be foreign policy experts, and there was no--the White House staff simply didn't have the role, the function, the knowledge, the responsibility, the resources, or anything else, to make such assessments as to who the principal foreign leaders were that should be consulted at a time like this. That was the responsibility of the Department of State. And the President dealt directly with the Secretary and the Under Secretary of State on matters of this sort, not through the White House staff.

The White House staff got into the act on the Truman Doctrine, as it did on various other key foreign policy measures of that sort, when the President was at the point of, or approaching the point of making a speech, or sending a message to the Congress, or preparing to recommend legislation, when a foreign policy matter was going to be--foreign policy decision was going to be promulgated by the President orally or in writing, that's when the President's staff got into the picture. Then was the time for them to do their stuff, or to use 1970 language, do their "thing," I suppose I should

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say. Their thing being casting a State Department paper, or draft, in the language and in the form, the President would adopt as his own.

HESS: The following is a quote from the book United States Foreign Policy 1945-55, by William Reitzel, Morton A. Kaplan and Constance G. Coblenz:

What's your reaction to that quote?

ELSEY: We had already by this time experienced a number of vetoes by the Soviet Union in the U.N. Putting it in the U.N. would have been totally fruitless. The U.N. would not have acted, could not have acted.

The people who criticized Truman and his administration for not acting in the Greek-Turkish matter through the United Nations, I think were still laboring under

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the illusion that the United Nations would be able to solve all kinds of postwar problems. They were forgetting, or overlooking the fact that the whole premise on which the United Nations was organized, and in which we had invested such high hopes, was that the big powers would be able to act in concert, would be able to act together, would see eye-to-eye on the necessity of maintaining peace, stability, and orderly relations among nations. But as we very quickly came to realize, this was not a realistic premise, not a realistic assumption, it was not the basis on which the Soviet Union intended to behave after World War II. We had been perhaps naive in ever thinking that so idealistic a premise would prevail, but we had been completely educated, our illusions swept away by Soviet action in that first two years after the war in Europe had ended.

You see the war in Europe had ended in May of '45, it was by now February or March of 1947. We had had two years of seeing the Soviets in their actions in Poland and in the other Eastern European countries that we've just mentioned. We'd seen what they had tried to do in Iran and elsewhere and so if President Truman had simply said to the U.N., "Here, this is your

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problem to save Greece and Turkey," it would have resulted in no action at all. We would have in effect been watching from the sidelines as Greece and Turkey slipped behind the Iron Curtain. I think people who criticized at that point, most of them I think probably were well-intentioned, perhaps too idealistic and too naive in thinking that the U.N. really had any power in a situation of this sort.

Now the President did recognize that there was an enormous amount of faith, hope, in the American public, in the United Nations. He did make some references to the United Nations in the Greek-Turkish message.

I recall--this is an instance where the White House staff was involved. I can recall very late in the day, very late in the game, we were practically in the last hour when any changes could be made in the message, I was so concerned about this U.N. point and foresaw criticism that I talked with Clifford about it, and called Carlisle Humelsine, who was then the executive secretary of the Department and begged, urged (you can use whatever verb you want), that Humelsine get over to us a few sentences on the United Nations that we could have

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in the address that would help placate the critics that we were certain we would be having because we were going a non-U.N. route. I think in my folder on the drafts of the Truman Doctrine speech, you will find the language that Humelsine provided, by phone, and that we did squeeze into the message on this point.

But the President did the only thing that would have been effective, and that would have been to go the non-U.N. route. The critics who disliked this, I don't disparage them at all, I just think that perhaps they were a little naive in indulging in wishful thinking and believing that the U.N. could have been effective.

Now let's jump a moment, three years ahead. Why did we go the U.N. route in Korea in June of 1950? Why were we able to get the U.N. sanction to act in Korea? Why do I say we couldn't have got it in 1947? The circumstances were different. In 1947 the Russians were on hand monitoring every action of the U.N. jumping on everything they didn't like. You recall that three years later in June of 1950 the Russians were boycotting sessions of the U.N. Security Council and boycotting the U.N. for reasons of their own. And the action of

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endorsement that the United States got for resistance to Communist aggression in Korea came at a time, and only because, the Russians were boycotting the U.N. The Russians were asleep at the switch; had they been smart, Johnny-on-the-spot, they would have returned overnight to the U.N. in June of 1950, and would have put sand in the gears and kept the U.N. from acting to endorse resistance to the Communist aggression to South Korea. That's not the point you're talking about, but I think it's pertinent to show why the U.S. Government went one route in '47 and went another route in 1950.

HESS: Also on the Korean matter, is there any significance to the fact that Mr. Truman did not try to get legislative approval for the action from Congress on the Korean matter, such as a Senate resolution? Was this discussed?

ELSEY: It was discussed from time to time in the first few days after the June 25th initial assault, and in fact a draft resolution was even prepared in the Department of Defense and sent over to the White House, but

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the President, and my recollection on this is probably not as complete as it ought to be, my recollection is that the President was talked out of a resolution by congressional leadership who did not think it advisable for him to send such a resolution, or for one to be introduced on behalf of the administration. The timing never seemed to be right. So we dragged on week, after week, after week, without one and then it really was too late.

In retrospect I think it was unfortunate that there was not a resolution authorizing U.S. action in the very early days of the Korean episode. In other words, it ought to have been within the first week or ten days. By the time the question was seriously addressed, and the implications of not having a congressional resolution on the books were faced, it was just too late. I think it's unfortunate.

HESS: Were there any particular problems

ELSEY: I believe, incidentally, on that point, in those folders that we sent out to Independence not long ago, you'll find some notes on this, and probably, I'm certain, even the text of the resolution that was drafted

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over in the Department of Defense.

I talked with Marx Leva, who was then the General Counsel of the Department, numerous times on this and I think you'll probably find Marx's draft and notes of mine on this subject in my folders that are now in the Truman Library.

HESS: Were there any particular problems that arose in the administration of the Truman Doctrine? Anything that the White House staff had to monitor or keep their eye on?

ELSEY: No, the execution of the Truman Doctrine, in if by that we mean military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, this was completely a matter of the responsibility of the departments, not the White House staff. We did not monitor, could not monitor, that, or subsequently the Marshall plan, or any other major government program, be it domestic or foreign. We weren't that kind of a staff. We weren't that big, we didn't have that capability, nor was it thought at that time to be the responsibility of the White House staff. Any monitoring was done by the agencies and the President's general

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staff assistants in this area, namely the Bureau of the Budget.

HESS: What is your evaluation on how well the program worked; the success of the Truman Doctrine?

ELSEY: Well, the proof of this, as in every other pudding, is in the eating. It did preserve the independence of Greece and Turkey, it kept the Soviet influence in the Mediterranean, it minimized it. I doubt very much that Yugoslavia would have been able to pull out of the direct Soviet orbit had it not been for the aid to Greece and Turkey. If those two countries had succumbed, I suspect that Yugoslavia would not have been able to pull away and reassert its independence.

We're being terribly speculative now, but Italy went through a number of crises in '47, '48 and '49 when the Communists came very close to gaining control of Italy. What the effects of a fall of Greece and Turkey might have been on the Italian electorate and the position of Italy, again it's impossible for us to know. But the fact that the United States was willing and furthermore was capable of making a very strong stand in opposition

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to any further spread of Communist hegemony undoubtedly had an impact on the Western European countries. I don't believe we would have had a successful Marshall plan or NATO if the Soviets had started to roll over additional countries in Europe. Now we could not do, and never have been able, to do anything about those countries which they liberated from Nazi armies and in which they established themselves firmly, but what we were able to do through the stand initially taken in Greece and Turkey, was prevent their extending their influence over those countries that they had not conquered or captured from the Nazis and maintained their military presence.

HESS: On the subject of the Marshall plan, where, or with whom did the idea for the Marshall plan originate?

ELSEY: Well, you best consider that subject by reading the-by referring to the numerous histories and memoirs that have been written about it, and by participants in it, certainly not the White House staff.

HESS: Could you tell me about William Clayton's participation in that?

ELSEY: No, I don't think I can. I simply don't know.

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HESS: Do you know of any particular European leaders who were notified on the contents of what Mr. Acheson's speech in Cleveland, Mississippi was going to be; and Mr. Marshall's at Harvard?

ELSEY: No, I have no knowledge. Again, one must turn to the records of the Department of State, and the writings of the State Department officials and others, who have since written about the Marshall plan and the whole European Recovery effort. The President was kept informed by oral briefings and by occasional memoranda from. the Department of the developments in this regard, but he was not an active participant in the sense of day by day involvement. He was necessarily aware and he was obviously in favor of this kind of planning, and this kind of exercise, and obviously in favor of the policy projected by General Marshall at Harvard, alluded to by Dean Acheson, and projected by General Marshall. But the White House staff itself was not involved, did not play a role in the planning, shaping, developing, writing or anything else, of the Marshall plan.

HESS: Did the White House staff play any particular role in the passage of the act setting up the Economic

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Cooperation Administration?

ELSEY: No. No.

HESS: Who handled most of that?

ELSEY: The Department of State. You know, only the role of the White House, the White House staff was involved in the President's message to Congress in the--I guess it was December, about the 20th of December or so, 1947, in which the President recommended the adoption by the Congress of legislation for the Marshall plan, the European Recovery Program. You may recall that shortly after the Marshall speech and the initial favorable European reaction, several committees were set up. One, for example, under Averell Harriman. There were other committees to study various aspects of the proposed European Recovery Program and when these commissions, or committee reports, were submitted to the President, and the whole subject was thoroughly thrashed out by the Department of State and other departments that were concerned (Agriculture for example had a big stake in this), then the President's message went to the Hill. So the White House staff was involved in the final

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drafting and shaping of the President's message, but here again as I have said a number of other times in this series of discussions, we were the carpenters. The planks would be prepared, we would take the lumber, if you will, that came from the department concerned and hammer the planks into the message or the legislation that the President proposed, but the responsibility for all the preparatory work and the basic substance of the programs came from the responsible departments, not from the White House staff.

HESS: Do you know why Paul Hoffman was appointed as the first administrator?

ELSEY: I have no special insight on that, a very capable man with a high reputation. The fact that he was a Republican, prominent Republican, was obviously a very great asset. There was nothing partisan about the European Recovery Program or the Marshall plan. If it had ever been tagged with a partisan label it would have immediately lost much of its effectiveness , and would have greatly--its chances of support from Congress would have been greatly impaired. So, it was a very fortunate thing, which President Truman was among the first to

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recognize, that it was called the Marshall plan, and was enunciated by as distinguished and non-political a figure as General Marshall, and that the key figures, many of the key figures, in shaping the program and in advocating it on the hill, and then putting it into practice were either Republicans, or if Democrats, they were not a particularly controversial kind of Democrat. They were men whose activities in this field would be regarded as above party politics. It was the only possible way to make it work. The only possible chance of success was to keep it in this posture.

The best politics in a situation like this is to play no politics, because if you start letting party politics get into it, you just wreck everything.

HESS: The support that Senator [Arthur H.] Vandenberg lent to the Marshall plan was one of the reasons for its success. Is that right?

ELSEY: Oh, of course, since Senator Vandenberg was a figure of towering strength in American foreign policy through all of this period; Marshall plan, and Truman Doctrine.

The success or whatever success American foreign

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policy had in that period was due to the fact that the Republican leadership on the Hill was a highly responsible leadership, and the Democrats in the minority in the 80th Congress were also behaving responsibly in the foreign policy field. As we know, President Truman made a great point in 1948 campaigning about the "Do nothing, good for nothing, 80th Republican Congress." That was fine for election purposes and campaign purposes, but of course, not at all justified in terms of the foreign policy actions taken by that Congress.

HESS: Why the divergence? Why did the Congress act so forward-looking, so favorably, on the administration's requests on foreign policy and not on domestic policy?

ELSEY: I suppose--well, we could talk all day on this and lots of people have, and lots of people will.

Responsible leaders on the Hill were well enough informed as to the magnitude and nature of the Communist efforts so that they recognized the kinds of measures the administration was proposing were indeed necessary to the--in the national interest, in the national security.

We, at that point, Republicans and Democrats alike, for the most part, had a unanimity of opinion as to the

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nature of the threats and challenges to the United States from abroad. This of course, was not universally true, there were those of the Henry Wallace frame of mind who disagreed as to the seriousness, or nature, or even existence, of a Communist threat, but as we know from the support he was later able to muster, Henry Wallace was supported by only a relatively few people.

I think it was the common perspective, the consensus, by Republican leadership, in the Congress, and out of the Congress. A man like Governor Dewey of New York, for example, and his principal foreign policy adviser, John Foster Dulles, they understood and agreed with the assessment of the international situation held by the Truman administration, and hence there was not disagreements on these major foreign policy initiatives and matters that we were talking about.

There were not universal agreements on foreign policy matters. You've already cited Israel and certainly there was sharp controversy on Israel, but the sharp controversy on Israel really was not so much Republican versus Democrat, but disagreements all over the place. There were just as many Democrats against

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Israel as there were for and ditto Republicans. It wasn't a partisan issue, per se.

On domestic matters, here again it's in the nature of the beast in the American political scene, that parties will take sides on domestic issues and lock horns over them. The Republicans, having won control of the Congress in November 1946, and having been out of office for a number of years, naturally were very, very eager to bring their party back to power, and were trying to take the necessary actions on the Hill and create the kind of a record that would appeal to the electorate and result in a total across the board Republican victory in November 1948. This is a part of the normal American political process that I don't think should surprise us. Furthermore, there were valid, honest differences of opinion on matters.

There were very sharp differences of opinion on the matter of organized labor. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed by the Congress over President Truman's veto as a result of widespread opinion that organized labor had needed its wings clipped a bit. So there were--there are lots of reasons why there were differences of opinion on domestic matters. We had the kind of consensus on the

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international scene which we unfortunately, all too rarely, had since then.

HESS: Was it difficult to obtain the support of Senator Vandenberg?

ELSEY: No. No, not that I am aware of. Again this was not a matter that the White House staff per se was involved in. The President, President Truman, maintained a close working relationship with Senator Vandenberg, he consulted him, he saw to it that he was informed. He sought, and he satisfied himself that the Department of State was keeping Senator Vandenberg well informed. The Senator's requests for information and consultation were honored fully and promptly.

Senator Vandenberg, you will recall, had made a, what for him was regarded as quite a turn around, some time before Truman became President. try recollection, I may be wrong, is that sometime in January, what-January '45, that he made a declaration of conscience, that kind of speech on the floor of the Senate, about the necessity of the United States working in an internationalist frame of mind, rather than an isolationist frame of mind after the war.

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Senator Vandenberg was a--I don't mean to say was a pushover and completely easy to get along with at all times, but Senator Vandenberg was of a mind to cooperate with the executive branch when he believed the executive branch was on the right track, and fortunately most of the time he and the State Department did see eye-to-eye on the things that counted.

HESS: How would you evaluate the success or failure of the Marshall plan, something similar to the Truman Doctrine?

ELSEY: Oh, I think overwhelmingly successful. It was ended sooner than expected, and at less cost to the United States than expected, and the industrial renascence of Western Europe is proof of the success of the Marshall plan.

HESS: On the subject of point 4, I think we pretty well covered it when you were answering the questionnaire of John E. Hopkins on speeches, and we brought up the name of Benjamin Hardy.

ELSEY: Yes.

HESS: And we talked quite a bit about point 4, but one thing

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that I have noticed in Dean Acheson's book, Present at the Creation, which has been out now just for a little while, he speaks of the fact that he did not know anything about this and he says, in Present at the Creation on page 254:

Isn't it a little unusual that a Secretary of State would not be informed on something of this nature? Or the man who was to be the Secretary of State.

ELSEY: Oh, I don't think that that's so unusual. After all there are lots of other problems commanding his attention. He had not known very long he was going to be Secretary of State, he had an awful lot of other matters to attend to. There was no particular reason for the President to have "cleared," if you will, the text of his inaugural address with all his current or prospective Cabinet members. The President took great pride in his inaugural address. This was probably to be his only inaugural address, and he was not eager to have it scooped or leaked or printed, or alluded to,

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in advance. And copies had not been scattered about town. No, it doesn't--I don't find it surprising.

HESS: All right, one question on the general strategy of containment. George F. Kennan, writing in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, 1947, the famous article by "X", "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," proposed the strategy of containment. Did this particular article, when this came out, did this make any impact on the White House staff or the people who paid particular attention to foreign affairs on the White House staff?

ELSEY: We were all, of course, aware of the public attention, comments in newspapers, editorial writers, columnists, others about the article, but I can't speak for others. I was not surprised by anything I saw in that article because Kennan's views were already well-known.

Kennan is an exceedingly able, articulate, and literate man who had written, spoken, extensively within the executive branch, and what he said there were the views that he was known to have had and indeed were largely shared by the administration. It wasn't as though he was proposing something brand new, a new course. As I recall it, my reaction was, "Fine, this is

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exactly what our foreign policy is, the way we're going." This is just simply expressing publicly what, in a somewhat blunter fashion than was normal, what the . . .

HESS: You did not see it as anything new?

ELSEY: No.

HESS: All right, concerning Central and South America. Although Mr. Truman took trips to both Brazil and Mexico during his administration, Latin America played only a minor role in foreign policy matters. Was this an oversight or was this a natural development of things?

ELSEY: Well, I'm not sure that I would agree that it played really a minor role in foreign policy. What do we mean by foreign policy? A minor role perhaps in terms of foreign crises. There wasn't a war there, there wasn't a Marshall plan for Central and South America.

HESS: Should there have been?

ELSEY: No. The Marshall plan was to help a highly industrialized intricate economy get back on its feet. South America did not have a highly industrialized,

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intricate economy comparable to that of Western Europe. The Marshall plan could not have been imposed on South America, there was not the basis to accept it. It was not the--there weren't the roads, the factories, the distribution system, the technology, the skilled labor, the entrepreneurs, etc. , etc. , etc. One could no more impose a Marshall plan on Central America than you could pick up Detroit and put it down in the middle of a Brazilian jungle. The basis for it wasn't there.

Now, as I say, their foreign policy--I'm afraid your question implies foreign crises rather than foreign policy. There was interest, there was attention. Point 4 for example was very largely directed to the kinds of problems that Central and South America have. Point 4 was a response to the needs of the economies of that type as distinct from the Western European or Japanese economy. There were some crises during the Truman administration. [Juan] Peron, the Peron problem in Argentina commanded a great deal of attention.

But there's another point that I have to make about Central and South America. There has been too great a tendency on the part of too many people to think that the United States can run the rest of the world, or knows what's

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best for the rest of the world, or ought to make its presence very much felt in the other parts of the world. This feeling, this tendency, has caused us a hell of a lot of trouble. The South Americans do not want now, and they make it very apparent now, they do not want to be dominated by the colossus of the North. They don't want the "gringos" telling them what to do or how to do it. They didn't want it there in the '40s, or the '50s or the '60s any more than they want it here in the '70s. And when people say, "Oh, we ought to have been doing more for South America," I think perhaps it would be well to take time to go ask the South Americans whether indeed they wanted us there.

South American governments are, as they develop, are urging us to get out. They are expropriating American investments there. They are pressuring us in various ways to, using a current jargon phrase, to lower our profile, so I think the question is a little bit confused when one says we weren't in South America the way we were in other parts of the world. Why should we have been there? Who wanted us there? What good could we have done if we had been there and weren't we doing the kinds of things that were the most effective,

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namely the technical assistance, the educational assistance, the investment through international banks and so on, to improve the roads, the highways, water, public health facilities ... we've invested a great deal of money in the infrastructure of South America largely through international agencies which I think is the right way to do it, more so than bilaterally where you immediately arouse this hostility to too much Yankeeism.

HESS: One other question on this subject: Was there ever a plan during the Truman administration for the recognition of Red China?

ELSEY: Certainly not to my recollection. I think it most unlikely that there was ever a plan. You recall that there was a great deal of political turmoil over the question of who lost China. Why was China lost? I think the question itself was a little bit phony because China was never ours to lose. We never had it therefore we couldn't lose it. But be that as it may, there was a lot of concern in the United States over the fact that Chiang Kai-shek was forced out of mainland China by Communist forces and had to retreat to Formosa. The entry of the Chinese into the war in Korea in December 1950

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certainly ruled out any thought, or any possibility of recognition. Then the Truman Administration ended before, I think, there was any serious thought of the recognition of Red China. I'm sure the question was examined. Questions of this sort are constantly being thought about. Would any useful purpose be served by our recognition of China and I suspect that the answer was always overwhelmingly in the negative, no, not--surely there was no--could not have been the circumstances being what they were, any serious plans for the recognition of Red China.