[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Notice Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the Lowry oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened October, 1969 [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
April 23, 1969 by Jerry N. Hess HESS: Mr. Lowry, would you tell me a little bit about your background. Where were you born, where were you educated, and what positions have you held? LOWRY: I was born in Columbus, Kansas on the 17th of February, 1913. I went to high school there at the consolidated county high school; went to the University of Illinois, and took a doctor's degree in English literature, and taught in the university for seven years. While on the faculty, as a younger member of the faculty, I joined with others in starting Accent, a quarterly of new literature which ran for twenty years. When the war came, I made many efforts to get into the armed services, but needed physical waivers, and for one year I was a writer in the domestic branch, writer's division, of the Office of War Information in Washington, waiting to go on active duty in the Navy, which happened in November, 1943. I went to Quonset Point to be trained as an air combat intelligence officer. I got out of the Navy on points in April, 1946, having worked in the OWI right along with experienced newspaper and magazine people, though I had never been a journalist. And still being so steamed up about national and international affairs as I was, I decided to get a couple of years newspaper experience, and with the recommendations of some people I knew, I met some publishers, one of whom was James M. Cox who was candidate by the Democratic Party for President in 1920 and defeated by Harding. He was three times Governor of Ohio. He had seven newspapers and several radio and T.V. stations. His home seat was Dayton, Ohio, the Dayton Daily News. I saw Governor Cox and worked for a year as associate editor writing editorials on the Dayton Daily News. And in the course of that year I talked him into the idea of setting up a full Washington bureau for all his papers. And I went to Washington in 1947 to be chief of the Washington bureau of the James M. Cox newspapers, which included: Dayton and Springfield, Ohio; Atlanta, Georgia; and, Miami Florida. I wrote on politics for all of those papers. I had men under me who were stringers to write on Ohio news, Florida news, and Georgia news. And I maintained that position until the end of the Truman administration, after which, I became associate director of the International Press Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and I stayed there with my family for about a year with an overall connection of about a year and a half. At the end of that time, I went into the Ford Foundation in their education division, as director of education, until 1957 when we secured permission from the board for a new program, a program for the humanities and the arts. As the program director and a vice president, I have been in charge of that aspect of the Foundation's work since. HESS: What do you recall of the Commodity Credit Corporation question in 1948? LOWRY: This, of course, was a question which was a benchmark, a high water mark, in my five years as a political correspondent, and a significant landmark in the Truman administration. It started with a letter from the farm editor of the Dayton Daily News, Jesse Garrison, who in July wrote to me in Washington and said he did not understand a certain phenomenon, which was that the farmers, particularly the corn farmers in Ohio, were beginning to mutter about two things: One, they were going to have a bumper crop which should have been O.K.; but two, they did not know where they were going to find adequate storage for this. This was already July and long before the corn, as you know, matures. "Something," Mr. Garrison wrote, "has changed about the grain storage program. Will you find out what it is, and if you think it merits a story, write a piece, or give me the facts so I can write it." I went up to the Hill and began to go through the Congressional Records for debate on the Commodity Credit Corporation, and I couldn't find a very meaningful story there, although I could date it. I got the hearings of the House Banking and Currency Committee, which was chaired then by one of the Truman administration's most inveterate enemies, the Honorable Jesse Wolcott of Michigan, and as you know, under a Republican controlled House. And in the course of that hearing, I found that an amendment to the charter of the Commodity Credit Corporation specified that if the farmer could not get his grain of any kind, not just corn, into "approved storage," by legal definition as approved, then he could not qualify for the current level of support prices for that grain as fixed in legislation for the given year. And at the same time there were indications that the temporary storage bins, the great metal bins that were added all across the Middle West, by the CCC, that that program had been cut in its appropriation for building such bins or placing them. And at the very end of the hearings on the last day, there was a question, Mr. Wolcott asking a question, saying, "Mr. Slaughter, have you anything more to contribute?" But there was nothing in the printed hearings that Mr. Slaughter had contributed. At this point, after his question, there was the normal statement that Mr. Slaughter's comments were made in executive session. I could not immediately identify Mr. Slaughter, but I thought I could. You may remember that in 1946, Mr. Truman had helped (they thought and he was accused of helping) to defeat Roger Slaughter, a Kansas City Congressman, Democrat, who was a political opponent of Mr. Truman's, for re-election. The seat was then held by a Republican. Slaughter, I found, had come back to Washington as a lobbyist. And I tried to find out for what, and found that under the Lobby Registration Act of 1946, Roger Slaughter was not registered as a lobbyist. But tracking through my friends in the Agriculture Department, both then and earlier friends in the Agriculture Department, people who were now out, I found that Roger Slaughter was acting in behalf of four principal grain exchanges, the North American Export Grain Association in New York, in Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Chicago, Boards of Trade or grain exchanges, they have different titles, and that Slaughter had been invited by Wolcott on the request of these grain exchanges and particularly those three in the Middle West, Kansas City Minneapolis, and Chicago, to appear, as an expert witness for them in the Commodity Credit Corporation hearings. There thus developed two stories. I knew which one was the more important. The more important was, would there be enough grain storage in the fall of 1948, and if there were not, would it redound to the disfavor of the Republican Party, since this was obviously a deal, very tightly controlled by the House Banking and Currency Committee with a very tight rule from the Rules Committee when the charter went on the floor for debate, and there was hardly any debate. This was why I hadn't found much on it. I looked back in the record, and I found in the Agricultural Department that an official of the Commodity Credit Corporation had made a mild demurral, a short, very effective statement about what the effects of this had been. And that was all, just kind of a protest for the file, but no political reaction, no enlistment of the White House into this situation at all. I could not prove what this meant: Was it to drive down the price of grain, if you took away the support prices so that the grain exchanges could buy huge quantities of grain at a low rate and hold them and hope they would go up, this was obviously a potential; was it to drive down the price of grain in order to export it more cheaply abroad and make a bigger profit for grain export? Why was the North American Export Grain Association a party to this? And here is where I did and had to do some real gumshoeing as a reporter. I found in the files of an official in the Department of Agriculture a copy of a telegram sent by the North American Export Grain Association to Roger Slaughter saying, that for every bushel of grain that the North American Export Grain Association, which was a combination of exporters, could export below the support price, Roger Slaughter would be paid a fee on each bushel, a very tiny one, like one tenth of a mill on every bushel, but when you added it all it was a very big one. And this was at least one of the missing links, then, the motivation. The other being, what about the sheer ability to buy grain cheaper in the grain exchanges in the Middle West and storing it. Well, obviously, Mr. Wolcott and the Committee, knowingly or unknowingly, were in the hands of speculators and the farmers were going to pay for it. Now I knew, without being a lawyer, that the Lobby Registration Act of 1946 was written so loosely that you could drive a truck through it, and that Mr. Slaughter might or might not be brought to justice. That was not the issue. The issue was, what was the 80th Congress thinking about in connection with the farm situation, and the farmer's stake in the society to do this. Well, on the 12th of August, I broke a story in our papers, but primarily, of course, in the Dayton Daily News, an eight column banner headline, CONGRESS ACTS TO FORCE DOWN FARMERS' PRICE AT BEHEST OF GRAIN LOBBY. And that blowing up out of the West was an issue in which the 80th Congress was deeply implicated which could change the balance of power in the vote in the 1948 election, in the Middle West, and improve drastically the chances of the President to be re-elected. And so on and so on. Everybody thought , because I quoted the telegram from the North American Export Grain Association to Slaughter verbatim in my text, everybody thought I had that in my possession. I didn't. I stuck my publisher's neck out with that. I knew the telegram existed, and that if anybody ever took any action, that a copy of it could be found, but I really stuck his neck out. He could have been sued. But that was not -- I want to make this plain -- it was often thought of as a story about catching a lobbyist, and it wasn't. It was not the issue. The issue was the difference between the Fair Deal attitude towards the farmer, and the attitude or rather the indifferent and calloused attitude of people like Jesse Wolcott and what this might do on the Middle West. And having grown up in the Middle West, lived in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio, I knew, you know, what it could do. When that story was air mailed, special delivery back to me in Washington, I took two copies to Clark Clifford at the White House. HESS: What was his reaction? LOWRY: He started gesturing like this, and he started writing speeches in the air. And he said, "Now, Mac." Clifford and I were friends; I had very good contacts in the White House but Clifford was the best. "Now, Mac, let's think about this." And I said, O.K., but remember, I have two roles to keep separate. I am a reporter covering a story, and that is what I want to do. I recognize the political interest. I am a political correspondent, and I have no objection to that, but I am not a government agent, or an administration agent, I am a reporter." So that he understood, O.K. The first thing that happened was that he sent that article to the Justice Department, and within 48 hours the United States Attorney General had locked up and sealed the files of the North American Export Grain Association, Minneapolis Grain Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Kansas City Board of Trade, and put seals on them saying, you know, you can't open your own files until we have been able to study them and take affidavits and all that. I sweated it out while that was going on, I must say. Nobody knew it. They didn't know it, until one of the men in the Justice Department to whom I talked said, "Oh, by the way, in going over that material today I just read the text of that telegram that the Grain Exchange sent to Roger Slaughter," which made me about five years younger. That was one line of development that started. The other was that this was the 12th of August and Mr. Clifford and I began to write inserts for the President's speech to be made at Dexter, Iowa on the 18th of September. HESS: The National Plowing Match? LOWRY: Right. It was the kick-off. HESS: It was his most important farm message. LOWRY: In that speech the President said, Clifford and I had worked this out (I mean Clifford worked it out, but in terms of the material) anyhow after consultation it read: "The 80th Congress has stuck a pitchfork in the farmers' back, and so on. And explained why, briefly -- because Clifford knew and I knew that the buildup on this was going to come in October, because there wouldn't really be a big, visible dramatic issue until you had those trucks and wagons lined up in October just before the election, and you couldn't get into storage. That was going to be it. If it happened that way. HESS: Who came up with the phrase about the pitchfork, was it Clifford? Do you recall? LOWRY: Yes, I didn't make it that strong. I wrote some stuff for Clifford, but I didn't make it that strong. That was Clifford's, or else, you know, one man who was helping him on that speech was Dave Lloyd. It was probably Clifford, but it could have been Dave Lloyd. How the pitchfork got in there -- what it was a symbol of, was about the Commodity Credit Corporation, it was about the grain storage issue, but the phrase, I think, was probably Clifford's. Anyway, Tom Clark then began to cut records about this issue, and Charlie Brannan. And they were played on radio stations around, you know -- I think Clark's maybe fifty times. I don't know how many times Brannan's played. But the significant thing was that after the Dexter Plowing speech, the Washington corps, minus Lowry, because one of the penalties of developing this issue was that I was stuck feeding it from Washington the whole darn campaign and never did get out on the train with the President. But my friends, Joe Alsop, "Scotty" {James B.} Reston, all these people, laughed themselves sick about this phrase about the farmers. Alsop wrote a column saying, "Hell, a hundred of them flew here in their private planes. That's how much they have got a pitchfork in them. Poor old Truman, he's just not with it. He just doesn't understand. Times have changed. Dewey's in," and so forth. Well, all the way through this campaign, the Cox newspapers were fueling this stuff. I couldn't sell it to one columnist. Do you know what a reporter means by "blacksheeting? I gave my carbons -- when I filed my story, I wasn't looking for exclusives. I gave those carbons to The New York Times, to Minneapolis papers, to the Kansas City papers... HESS: Just hoping that it would get in somewhere? LOWRY: Yes. "What's the matter with Lowry. There's no issue. Truman's beat. Dewey's in. What's all this stuff? I said, "Look, this Commodity Credit Corporation charter was amended. Go out there to the Hill, goddamn it, and read it. It was amended. It's going to have one effect or another in the election in the Middle West. The farmers are either going to get in to storage or they are not, and if they don't, there's going to be hell to pay." Well, a little ear of news began to creep up in the Minneapolis papers, because grain is a pretty good story up there, particularly when their grain exchange was locked up, you know. Now that part of the story they had to print. But the Times didn't even print that. That wouldn't make news in New York. That's the way it was. I sat there all summer, and I wrote a series of articles about this. By this time Slaughter had been indicted in front of Judge -- (Alexander} Holtzoff, in Washington, under the Lobby Registration Act. And there was some interest in this because this was going to be the first real test of that bill, which proved to be a putrid test, because the bill was putrid. But he had been indicted. O.K. that was news. I'd cover that. But in the main covering the attitudes of farmers -- the Secretary of the Senate, Leslie Biffle, was an old boy from Piggott, Arkansas. And Les knew farmers, and he knew issues like this, too. And Les Biffle, I'm sure you have this somewhere in the Truman Library, took two trips that summer in overalls, disguised as a chicken farmer. And Les and I had very good contacts, and when he came back from the fist trip I went out to the Hill to see him and I said, "Les, what about it?" "Lots of people for Truman." He was one of the most laconic men when he was talking even to a friend, that there ever was. Socially, he could get quite talkative, but about politics, very laconic: "Lots of people for Truman." I said, "Well, come on, give." "Lots of people for Truman." O.K. Then I thought about Les' failing and I said, "Les, have you bet any money?" He said, "Yes." And I said, "How much did you bet?" He said, "A thousand dollars." I said, "Your own money?" He said, "Yes." I said, "O.K." He had found that there were a lot of people for Truman. I said, "Les, do you think you found any evidence tied to this issue?" He said, "I sure as hell did. The farmers are mad." Well, this went right straight through the summer. Jesse Garrison out in Ohio had his mouth wide open, because his little query, you know, had turned in to what was obviously a big political issue in '48. The Republicans never got on to it. They made a few statements; Wolcott made a few statements; Dewey one time referred to the agitation about the Commodity Credit Corporation. In October, James B. Reston, who was then chief of the Washington Bureau, New York Times, and an old personal friend of mine, was in Chicago, and he was talking to the two new figures: Paul Douglas and Adlai Stevenson, running for senator and governor, and he came back to Washington, he called me on the phone and he said, "Mac, I want to come over to the office." He came over. He said, "What the hell. Tell me about that grain storage." I said, "What do you care?" I had been trying to blacksheet Bess Furman, who was his agricultural writer. "I have been trying to blacksheet Bess for months. What are you talking about?" He said, "Mac, the Times has missed a big, big story." I said, Well, do tell." He said, "Yes." I said, "How do you know?" He said, "Well, I saw Paul and I saw Adlai and I was talking separately to Paul and I said, "What about it? How does it look?" Paul said, "We're in." He said, "I think this enthusiasm is great, but what do you mean, you're in. It looks to me like we're going the other way." And Douglas said, "No." Reston said, "Why are you in?" He said, "Look, Springfield, Mattoon, Decatur, Bloomington, the trucks and wagons are lined up way after dark trying to get into storage and they can't get into storage." And Reston said, "What does that mean?" And Douglas said, "If they don't get in they don't get price support. And they're mad." And Reston said, "How did this happen?" Douglas said, "Don't you read the newspapers?" He said, "What do you mean?" He said, "It happened because of the House Banking and Currency Committee abortion on the Commodity Credit Corporation bill." Reston said, "Where have I heard that before," because I had been dinging his ear off in Washington, you know, whenever he was there. So, he said, "Well, gee, it's awful late." It was. It was just a few days before the election. At ten o'clock on the night of the election, James M. Cox, over eighty by now, called me. I was in my office in Washington. And he said, "Lowry, the rural areas of Ohio are forty-five percent Truman, fifty-five percent Dewey, which means that Truman has carried Ohio." Ten o'clock at night. And I said, "Governor, great." And Cox said, "Ohio is the mother of Presidents." I said, "You mean, Ohio is the first in?" He said, "What the hell is McGrath doing?" I said, "Well, he's over at the committee headquarters. I've been talking to him. He's happy, but..." He said, "What the hell? Tell him. Tell him that Truman's carried Ohio." I said, "O.K., Governor, but he is not going to come out claiming at ten o'clock at night just on that." He said, "Tell him:" I called him up and I said, "Howard, Governor Cox wants me to say that Truman has carried Ohio." He said, "How the hell does he know?" I said, "Listen, don't be an idiot. Cox has got thirteen districts. He had them since the election of 1910. Cox has got thirteen precincts, not districts, in Ohio that he knows about. He can tell you, Ohio is in. You can claim Ohio O.K. What he wants to know is, are you going to claim the election?" He said, "Mac, I think that would be a little premature." HESS: At ten o'clock at night. LOWRY: I said, Well, Howard, remember that Cox is the guy that put the first extra on the street that said Wilson was elected in 1916 and people thought he had lost his marbles, but," I said, "it was. He knows this subject." He said, "Mac, thank you very much, but I'm not going to do it. But I appreciate it." I said, "I do want to tell you one thing, the grain states look pretty goddamn good." I think he said, "They sure do." He said, "I've got a hell of a big dose of optimism here." Well, I was up all night. Cox got so disgusted when I called him back, he went to bed. At ten o'clock in the morning he called me again. And he said, "Now, look, Mac, this is ridiculous." I said, "I know, Governor. It is." He said, "What's the matter with McGrath?" I said, "He's waiting for Dewey." He said, "Where's Dewey?" I said, "He's in New York at the Biltmore (I think) and he's asleep." He said, "Well, he better not wake up that mean little bastard with this news. He'll claw their eyes out." Well, it was about eleven o'clock in the morning before McGrath... Now, then, goddamn, everybody started to try to get back on the beam. And Arthur Krock, said to Reston, "What is this thing about your friend Lowry. Where is that stuff?" Reston said, "Well, I'll get a file." Then Krock figured out, hell, it had to be Cox out there masterminding this political coup for Truman. It wasn't Cox, you know. I had nothing to do with that. It was the story in the Congress. But he wrote a big column on the 13th of November, no, I remember, it was Armistice Day, the 11th of November, about the "old wizard" in Ohio saying, you know, pulling the string and re-electing a Democrat for President. The Northwestern Miller, which is a trade magazine on the grain exchanges, came out with a piece called "Ballots and Corn Bins," or "Corn Bins and Ballots" or something like that. I think it was in December, 1948 or it may have been the first two issues of '49, January or February, anyhow, it's in the libraries, detailing all of this, and the development of the issue and so on. There are, as you know, two schools of thought about the significance of this issue. One ascribes to the grain storage issue only the comparative ratio of the vote in the rural area, the on-the-farm vote, and compares what the Democrats got in '48 with what they got in the previous elections. That is very wrong in my opinion. The other school of thought to which I belong understands that grain storage and the economic well-being of the farmer, is also a key to the well-being of the merchants and the bankers in the small town in Iowa, and so on. And therefore, as my father, who was a department store owner in a little town in Kansas, how the farmer felt had a hell of a lot to do with how he felt about business, prosperity, how he was going to vote, and so on. Now, if you analyze how that vote in a small town in the Middle West, surrounded by agricultural grain-producing area, changed for Truman, as opposed to '44 and '40, you find a hell of a difference in the states having 101 electoral votes, the Middle Western grain producing area. Mr. Ross, who has written a book about this campaign, belongs to the first school and says that only the on-farm vote ought to be included in this analysis. Maybe because he never lived there, Ross discounts the effect on a small town, because he points out that there is where Truman made his most conspicuous gain. He is inclined to apply that vote to labor, and to the President's great personality injection in the whistlestop campaign. Well, in my judgment the President's great personality injection in the whistlestop campaign had the most to do with the '48 election, far greater than any other issue. But I do not understand how what happened in the small agricultural towns can be ascribed to labor situations. Anyhow, that's the way it is adjudged in that book. Have you checked? HESS: Yes. The Loneliest Campaign, by Irwin Ross. LOWRY: Right. And in that book you will find that Ross went to Clifford to substantiate the story in the article in the Northwestern Miller. He was talking to Clifford many years later and Clifford did say, "Yes, however, the way it started was when Lowry brought over this copy from the Dayton Daily News and this is how we developed it." Mr. Truman wrote me a letter which my wife, in my series of moves, has lost. The only thing from that era I really prize. Mr. Clifford wrote me a letter, and McGrath. This is why I got the Sigma Delta Chi award for national correspondence. As for Slaughter, the proceedings were finally nol-prossed. There were too many loopholes in that Lobby Registration Act. It was later tightened and I think it is still pretty loose. And Slaughter had to go to court twice. I guess that's it. HESS: Do you recall anything else, any of the other events of 1948 that really stand out in your mind? LOWRY: Yes. You know, I had to cover three conventions that year. They were all in Philadelphia, as you know: Progressive, Republican, and Democrat. I saw the convention, the Democratic convention from a very interesting standpoint. Barkley had asked me to do one draft of his speech. HESS: His keynote speech? LOWRY: Yes. And I did. And I talked to a journalist friend of mine, Ned Kenworthy, who is still the Washington Bureau of The New York Times, he wasn't then, and we loved Barkley and we knew his style pretty well, and we put in there that this was no time to have to go back to a mustache cup in the White House. Barkley could hardly see. He took off his glasses and he looked up like that, he was reading this, I was sitting in his office, and he said, I don't think that's dignified. Dignified: When he made that speech and started talking about the spiders that were found in the rafters over in the administration building when the Democrats took over being hungry, talk about not being dignified. He used some parts of my draft, but he threw most of it away and that's how he did most of his speeches, he got several people to help, but he ended up, not totally, but turning them into his own. Now, I was aware that the Democratic committee went with their tails between their legs to Philadelphia, that it was by default that Clark Clifford was going to have as much to do with the strategy, as he had. HESS: Why? LOWRY: Because the pros were ready to throw in the towel. HESS: They weren't going to give him any support, is that right? LOWRY: They were going to give him support. The way you give support when it's all facade. You know all about the flirtations about Eisenhower and so on? HESS: Yes. LOWRY: But it wasn't just that. There was a need for new blood, a need for a new day. Mr. Truman knew exactly what he thought about the attitudes of people like Olin Johnston and Richard Russell and so on. I want you to understand, I don't put those two men in the same category, by any means. Senator Russell is very much respected. He knew that but he was not going to do what he did do in Philadelphia except under the pressure and influence of people like Clifford, and the accidental thing which looked accidental then, but now I know was not accidental at all, of Hubert Humphrey and that speech that came to the vote of Wisconsin, I looked up and they were oozing off the platform. Nobody thought Hubert was going to get that plank in there. Why, they were all wrong. And why were they wrong? Because they were listening to the wrong people. I was checking with McGrath every ten minutes. McGrath stood right behind the platform, not on the platform. I could get around there -- I was very, very close to him, personally, and because of the situation I had. I wasn't in big cities, but hell, all my circulation was under a Democratic publisher. He miscalled every single thing that happened. HESS: McGrath did? LOWRY: Miscalled them. And I finally started writing impressionistic descriptions of what happened as I wrote the Humphrey thing -- not this was all laid on, or this is how they knew it was going to be done. Now, who were "they? Clark may have known, but he wasn't that much of a politician. I think he had his hands on the right strategy, but that it would work he didn't know. And you know, at 2 o'clock in the morning when they brought Truman in finally to the podium and he started in that white suit and sawing the air, and those pigeons flying around -- it was brilliant when he said he was going to call Congress back, brilliant, and I guess that was Clifford, but I never could prove that. I mean, I guess it originally was Clifford. I knew it had his sanction, but I could never prove that. HESS: You know that it had his sanction? LOWRY: Yes. HESS: Did he tell you that? LOWRY: No. Let me amend that. Clark had a way sometimes -- and I don't mean that he was deceitful -- Clark had a way sometimes of letting credit for stories get on the table without taking exception to it. Now, what he did was tacitly accept credit for that in discussions where I was present. I cannot say, now, of course, it is a hell of a lot of years now anyhow, I cannot say that he ever said, "Yes, Mac I approved of that, in advance." But I never could find out who had that idea. HESS: Was it after the election that these meetings were held when Mr. Clifford was sort of accepting the credit? LOWRY: Yes, it was. Let me tell you. One of the most interesting things about it, you see, I was going back to Washington. I want you to understand that I'm not a great political strategist. I was just a guy -- journalism wasn't even my profession. I was just a guy in a particular spot at a particular time, but I had a background in a father who ate and drank history and politics, and it was in my blood. That's why I couldn't go back to my teaching job at the University of Illinois, though it was waiting for me after World War II. And I had a personal excitement covering the Senate of the United States. I would have paid money to sit there in the gallery and to call those people off the floor They were my friends. I'm going to tell you some things about that, because this now has to do with the '52 situation. But anyway, I did know one thing. I knew that Mr. Truman was going to be re-elected, and I knew it because I knew what those people were going to say and do in the Middle West, and I had enough sense because even the pollsters could tell me to realize what the presence of a third party ticket was going to do in the big states, in one or two big states, particularly New York. Now, McGrath and most of the people who were in charge of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia didn't feel that way, did not believe it. It was their professional duty to believe it, they were fond of Truman personally. Les Biffle, you know, he would have cut off his arm if Truman had said, "Cut it off." But they weren't going to do anything foolish. HESS: I heard that Leslie Biffle was sort of booming Mr. Barkley for the presidential spot. LOWRY: Because he thought there was going to be the great likelihood of a Democratic defeat, and that the last crown on Alben Barkley's head was to be at least like the crown on James M. Cox's head, O.K. he was his party's standardbearer, but Les had no illusion that Alben Barkley could be elected, had none. HESS: But he thought less of Mr. Truman's chances, is that right? LOWRY: No, no. He would rather see the honor of going down to defeat on Barkley's head rather than on Truman's. No, he didn't think less of Truman's chances. He didn't think any better of Barkley's chances. McGrath didn't think anything of either of their chances. And it wasn't only Clifford. That was the whole thing that is wrong with the Ross book. It wasn't only Clifford who looked on the other side. I was in Washington again in '49, in January, when Hubert Humphrey came to be sworn in. He and I became fast friends. But I didn't know Humphrey when he got up on that platform to make that speech, just who the hell he was. But Humphrey wasn't the only person in that hall who felt that way. And Humphrey and Clifford were not the only two people who felt that if Mr. Truman made a big slashing attack on the Congress and the Republican Party and had something like the civil rights issue to fuel it, that he had a chance. They were not throwing in the towel to the same extent that the old pros were. Barkley thought the jig was up himself, but he wanted to run. HESS: Do you think President Truman really supported the Humphrey and Andrew J. Biemiller plank, rather than the so-called regular plank on civil rights? LOWRY: No. I think President Truman was told to support it. HESS: The Humphrey-Biemiller plank? By whom? LOWRY: Now, here's where I get in a fog. I am sure by Humphrey and Biemiller. Now, Humphrey already had his contacts with Truman. They didn't depend on Clifford. HESS: Who was his main contact? LOWRY: Labor people and ADA people. It was not through anybody I could identify in the White House. It was the external labor people that both Truman and Humphrey knew. HESS: Do you think that Mr. Truman would pay much attention to the ADA people since they had been trying to get Mr. Eisenhower to run? LOWRY: No. But I think that Mr. Truman had an idea that he didn't like the defeatism of those Southern so-and-so's, even though temperamentally and politically, his sympathies were closer to them than they were to Biemiller's or Humphrey's. And he might have just not really given a damn what any of them thought about it. No, I would have guessed that Truman was for the middle plank, and that Clifford really inherited, and therefore Mr. Truman supported the Humphrey-Biemiller plank. He really fell into that, fell strongly for it. Now, I do say that any discussion that I had with Clark Clifford after that time suggested that he was right along the beam on all these things, on the "Turnip Day. HESS: That Clifford was? LOWRY: Yes. HESS: How important or how accurate do you think that Mr. Clifford's political advice usually was? Just how good a political advisor was Clifford? LOWRY: You know, I never thought Mr. Clifford's political advice meant anything at all until I saw what he did in injecting the grain storage issue into the election, because that's the only tangible evidence I had about something I knew all about. After that, there was the discussion created in the press, didn't wair for Ross, that Clifford was very influential, and after the election, as you know, he was very influential in the White House, as long as he wanted to stay there. Murphy later was more the President's kind of man, I think, but you know, new times make new people. And they appear in strange places. And Clark Clifford -- it is a total accident that a guy who came in as an Assistant Naval Aide, or whatever he came in as, got into this role. He happened to be a lawyer. It was a total accident. He was pretty defeatist too, up to a point. HESS: Did you hear him make any statements like that, that he did not think Mr. Truman would win? LOWRY: After the election? HESS: Before the election. LOWRY: No, but before the convention, he was pretty upset. HESS: What did he say? LOWRY: Well, his main complaint was my complaint, that all the pros of the Democratic National Committee, guys on the Hill, you know, were writing it off. HESS: When did he say this? Did you go in to speak to him, or were you... LOWRY: I went in to speak to him, maybe once a week. We just chewed the fat. HESS: Let's develop this a little bit, your relationship with Mr. Clifford. When did you first meet Mr. Clifford? LOWRY: When did he first work for Truman? When did he become Special Counsel? HESS: He became Special Counsel in 1946, but he went in to the White House about the time of Potsdam, and was Assistant Naval Aide to Jake Vardaman from Potsdam until April of the next year, and then he was Naval Aide. He became Special Counsel after the Samuel Rosenman left, I believe, the 1st of February of 1946, roughly nine months after Mr. Truman had been in; and then there was a period of time when there was no Special Counsel, I believe until July the 1st. But I believe it was July the 1st, a little over a year after Mr. Truman had been in that Clark Clifford took over as Special Counsel, and then he left on, I believe, January the 31st, 1950. He served all the way through 1949 after Mr. Truman had been elected in 1948, and then about the last of January, and then Charles Murphy took over. LOWRY: All right. I first knew Mr. Clifford in July, 1947 and I knew him until he left and Charles Murphy took over. It was not until the spring and the early summer of '48 that I saw him on quite such a regular basis. In that time I saw him quite frequently, and after, starting with July, why, I began to feed those pieces in there. I saw him quite often, and after the election, naturally, all during the campaign, after the election, you know, well, we were just damn close. And I could either get him on the phone, or I could get an appointment set up. So I don't know how to average it, maybe once every two weeks I'd see him. Now, I want to make it clear. I understand what it is to be a reporter, but I also understand what it is to be a historian, I think. I want to make it absolutely clear that, and you well know already, that in lots of conversations that are quite informal, things are taken for granted, where a man who really knows the facts is not saying, "Wait a minute, I can't take credit for that, or I didn't do that." He has no motive in the first place to spill his guts to you, you're still a reporter, even if you're a man that brought an important issue to his attention, I mean, from Clifford's point of view, you're still a reporter. We were not social buddies, we were not friends outside the office, or outside politics, as I was with some of the others who were in office. But I do know the mood that Clifford was in. He was looking around before the convention for something to work with, you know, in desperation. After the convention, between the time of the convention and the time I took him that piece, he was O.K., maybe this was going to work out, you know, in putting together the coalition and the "Turnip Day" thing, and the civil rights thing and so on. I don't know who his helpers were, but he didn't have a hell of a lot of help coming from the regular Democrats or the Democratic National Committee. Well, I'm getting away from things I know, and I'd like to get back to some other things I do know. That '48 campaign. Maybe that's most of what I know. But thinking historically, I would like to say that by an accident I was a witness to one of those strange historical manifestations, the birth of a slogan or an idea. There was a man from Georgia in the State Department in 1950, an ex-newspaperman and a speech that the President of the United States was going to make was circulating as usual through the Department, and it came to him, and I'm not even sure why it came to him, I think maybe he was deputized that week, or whatever, for a guy who outranked him. And he put in there an idea and wrote a couple of paragraphs about something that he had been trying to sell from the States Department for a long time, but he had no podium, the poor bastard, he couldn't get it up anywhere, you know. It just died on the vine. But he got it in there, and it went to the White House along with the other stuff on that draft, and all the other drafts got back, and it started going over desks there, and I know of at least two desks it went over, David Lloyd and Clark Clifford. And it became point 4. HESS: What was the man's name? Benjamin Hardy? LOWRY: Right. You've got all that. Have you talked to him? HESS: He's dead. LOWRY: Oh, is he dead? HESS: Yes, I believe he was killed in an airplane crash back during the Truman administration. LOWRY: Oh gosh, well, he had a short claim to fame. HESS: I believe that was in 1949, too, wasn't it? Because it was in Mr. Truman's inaugural address on January 20th in 1949. LOWRY: Point 4. HESS: It was his fourth point. LOWRY: I beg your pardon, it was '49. It was point 4 in the inaugural. Well, you know who got credit for it? HESS: Who was that? LOWRY: Clark Clifford. HESS: How did he get that credit? LOWRY: I don't know. HESS: Do you remember if George Elsey had any hand in that? LOWRY: George Elsey, but in the White House. But look, do you know how I know about this? HESS: How's that? LOWRY: A long time after George Biggers, who was general manager of the Atlanta Journal, which was one of my papers said, "You know, we hear that old Ben Hardy up there, who was a Georgia boy (was he a Georgia boy) never got any credit for this thing about point 4. HESS: In Eric Goldman's book, The Crucial Decade, he has it down that Benjamin Hardy brought this to George Elsey's attention in the White House about point 4 and then it was written into the inaugural address. LOWRY: I went to see Hardy. I got a copy of the -- and it was fortunate for the man that he kept it -- of the thing that he had added to the text that was circulating, it went back and George Elsey -- was Dave Lloyd still there in '49? HESS: Yes, he was. LOWRY: Dave Lloyd brought it to Clifford's attention. Now, I had to go to Clifford and see if I could get a quote, and I had one hell of a time, even though he was a friend of mine. In the first place, he tried to tell me that old business that the President wrote that. You know, "This was the President's idea." I said, "O.K. Clark. The great thing about Mr. Truman is that he recognizes a good phrase or a good idea when he sees it, you know." "Well, now, maybe it happened that way, Mac." I said, "Well, now look, what is he, a GS-5 or whatever. Let's give the poor old boy some credit, you know." Clifford wanted the credit in this case. And how do I know how much he elaborated on this, but anyway, he did let me -- this could be found in the files of the Atlanta Journal. He did let me say that Mr. Hardy had contributed. May I ask you, where you learned about this? HESS: From Eric Goldman's book, The Crucial Decade. LOWRY: How did he learn about it? HESS: I'm not sure. It may be in a footnote in there. And he may have found out about it by talking to George Elsey, I'm not sure. LOWRY: Well, I tried my best to get credit for Hardy, but outside the Georgia newspapers, I never did see much. HESS: This may be a question that you don't want to answer, but did you feel that there were times when Mr. Clifford, other times than this, that Mr. Clifford tried to take credit that really did not belong to him? LOWRY: I believe that, "tried to take" suggests a positive act initiated by the individual, and I believe that what I noted was Mr. Clifford taking it tacitly. This was the only time that I felt a reluctance on his part to see credit divided. But I've already said in earlier remarks about '48 that it may be that the unfolding of strategy which worked out, he let that appear to be a conscious evolution in his own mind, not by saying so, but just by letting it be assumed, that kind of taking credit. I never felt any duplicity in Clifford, except what you'd expect in a President's Special Counsel, even when he's dealing with a sympathetic person that he can trust. I always respected Clifford when he went off the record. He had nobody to complain about, but still, the President's Special Counsel knows a hell of a lot of things he shouldn't tell Mac Lowry if Mac Lowry is chief of the Washington Bureau. I have great respect for lawyer's ways of chopping an answer and the facts, and Clifford had that to a T, and still has. I've seen Clifford in recent years, and he still had that. I never feel that I've got the most responsive exposition I can get. I've got just what I asked for, and no more. HESS: And nothing more. LOWRY: And nothing more. And that's exactly what Mr. Ross got when he went to Clifford and asked him about Mac Lowry and those stories, that's all he got, was what he had to get and no more. HESS: What other members of the White House staff were you particularly acquainted with? LOWRY: Charles Murphy. HESS: Can you tell me something about your association with Mr. Murphy? LOWRY: Well, it was a frequent kind of thing, again, with very good access, but different from the situation with Clifford, because Murphy and I were kind of like old cronies or old buddies together, you know, and we'd sit and chew the fat, and he didn't know whether I got a piece out of it or not. Nothing that pointed to specific stories or issues, nothing probably that improved my insight into the President's thinking or the evolution of White House policies to any degree comparable to what I got from Clifford. It was a very comfortable relationship, but that's about the way it was. I did, however, through Murphy, always keep a pretty good window on the President's personality. You know when Truman sent everybody out of the room and made that decision about the hydrogen bomb, when was that? Sometime in 1950, wasn't it? HESS: Tell me about that. LOWRY: We were all reporters, you know, he used to take us in the Oval Room only, and the doors would be unlocked and we'd mess in, and then we'd get out again. It would be locked and the Secret Service guys would be there, and if they didn't want us to beat any deadline, the doors were locked and then all of a sudden, here's the handout and you're out for the phone. Only the guys who stayed in the White House all the time, which I didn't do, because I covered the whole thing and went to the Hill, got to the phones, Merriman Smith and all of them. I was terrible impressed by the President and his decision-making thing. This kind of thing, by talking to Murphy, I would get an understanding of not a "who shot Nellie, one, two, three, here's the story," but how it had gone on. What a terrible thing it was for the President. How typical of the man to say, O.K., I heard you all now. I'll let you know. I'll make up my mind all alone." Maybe that was a romantic view, true, but it's my view. HESS: Did you attend very many of the press conferences? LOWRY: Yes. HESS: At first they were held in the Oval Room, I think until about '50, and then they moved them over to the Executive Office Building in the old Indian Treaty Room. LOWRY: Yes, hotter then... HESS: Which one? LOWRY: The Indian Treaty Room, terrible. HESS: That was worse than the Oval Room? LOWRY: Yes, much. HESS: I thought when you moved over there so you would have had more space... LOWRY: More space, but that didn't improve the temperature. HESS: Do you recall anything of any other press conferences that were there? LOWRY: Well, it was meat and drink to me. They were all interesting to me. And that one, NATO, NATO was tremendous. I went that night to some friends who had the Danish Ambassador there. I didn't go in the Embassy circuit, I stayed away from that, but here he was, these were Danish friends, and I said, "What does it mean? He said, "Well, it means that now we will have an inscription on our tombstone." I said, "Is it worth it for the inscription? He said, "Yes, it is." That press conference, that announcement -- I'll tell you, the ones I felt most bitterly were the ones just before and just after the Democratic National Convention in '48. The attitude of the press that Truman was a dead duck, and Truman sort of feeling it and swaggering back at it. It was very moving to me, very moving. I was a sucker for Mr. Truman, not when he took office, and not in '46 and not when I first went there in '47, but the man, I think one of the greatest things that you would want to sense some kind of moral order was that he was able to be elected in his own right, and then how he grew, and how he pushed the idea of the presidency, the limitless power and responsibility of the President, which he had. You see, in your own case, and because my father, I guess, could have been called a haberdasher too, although he had a department store which only included haberdashery, and all about Missouri, and there are a lot of Lowrys and Grahams in Missouri, in Kansas City, and I knew about all this, and all the pictures of Truman in that store, and then to see how he grew and what he did and pushed this concept of the powers of the presidency so far, with a very damned important counterweight like Taft and Vandenberg. It was terribly impressive and I think his place in history is really significant. But let me tell you that one of the strange things about all this, was that it took Mr. Truman a while, even after being elected in '48 to be more than the kind of crony he was to many of those people on Capitol Hill, to have enough vantage point and removal to be "Mr. President," and the most powerful man in the world. As I told you, I would have paid money to be sitting there in the Senate gallery. I had friends on the spectrum all the way from Humphrey on the left to Russell. And even Walter George, although I cannot say Walter George and I really were friends. We felt very easily, and were courteous with one another, as one always was with George, but Russell and I were. As we approached '52, Russell couldn't go to Humphrey's office and Humphrey couldn't go to Russell's office, but they could meet in my house. And my father visited Washington and I took him around, you know, in that place outside the floor where you can call a Senator out, and I would call out people and introduce them, and it was a great thing for my father who always had been fascinated by history and politics. And Senator Russell said to him, "You know, Mr. Lowry, your son just doesn't play the part of a reporter here. He is kind of a nexus that can relate objectively to people in my own party that you would call my political opponents." Russell was getting ready to use his potential candidacy as a weapon on the one hand, also as a way of dealing the South back into the Democratic Party, keeping it in. He asked me to write about three pages of a statement announcing his candidacy, which I did, and he carried it around in his pocket, because he didn't know what was going to be the best time to do it. As a matter of fact, he did it after I left Washington for Europe, and he, you know, naturally, it wasn't my statement, it was his. He edited it. It was shorter than the one I had written. In fact, we wrote two drafts, he and I together, early, very early before he announced it. Now, what he wanted to find out from Hubert was not what the hell Hubert was going to say about civil rights every time he spoke or every time he was asked in the press, was he going to take the podium again, the platform at Chicago, and make the same kind of whoop-de-do he made in Philadelphia. I knew Hubert wasn't, but I couldn't be put in a position where I'm telling one person what another guy's going to do and it's about politics, I don't care how close I am to him. That was not my role as reporter. It's just the way I cannot show the budget of a theatre company that is given to me, to another theatre company, even though both those people are friends. If they want to share it, they share it. But knowing that, I asked Humphrey, Russell, and I needed somebody in between, so I got Thomas C.} Hennings of Missouri and a writer friend, Henry Pringle, a Pulitzer prize biographer of Taft and Roosevelt, whom I had worked for way back in '42 -- he lived in Washington -- to get somebody outside of politics because this was a dinner party: Russell, Hennings, Humphrey, Pringle, my wife, and myself. And Hubert said to Russell, "This is not '48. You know exactly where I'm going to stand, everything I'm going to say, but I'm not going to try to overturn the convention." And Russell said, "Then I can deal the South into the Democratic convention for the nomination, and I can hold it." Now, what happened was, and this was after I was in Switzerland, what happened was, he did and he could and then he went to Libertyville and he decided that Adlai double talked to him, but that came a long time later, not that long, but after the convention. HESS: How great was the danger that the South might leave the Democratic Party at that time? LOWRY: In... HESS: In '52, between '48 and '52. LOWRY: Not very great. I felt more of a threat to that in '48. HESS: As you know, many of the urban centers in the South now are voting Republican, Atlanta...is this really a change that started in '48 or later? LOWRY: Later. Because in '48, there was still no base for a Republican opposition. They hated Truman more than they hated Dewey in Mississippi and places like that. My God, I went to a picnic in the heat of the campaign near Jackson, Mississippi and I almost got lynched. They hated Truman more than they hated Dewey. But they had no base for a Republican operation. They had to do a Dixiecrat or Secessionist, one kind of Democratic Party against another. But you see, you must remember that my own chances to observe all this had a big hiatus between April '52 and October '53, and then I never did really, you know, have that kind of political opportunity since. I've done a hell of a lot of traveling, I still talk politics, but that's it. The thing that happened in the South I believe was happening right there in Atlanta in the forties which was bound to make the entrepreneurial, managerial class, a two party system, bound to make this count. I remember when Jimmy Carmichael, a businessman, won the election on the popular vote and was counted out on the unit vote, you know, and he was a Democrat, but the same kind of people who voted for Jimmy Carmichael would have voted for a Republican if there had been enough of a base of operations and enough of a chance to win. So I believe it happens over a long period of time. You undoubtedly know more than I by far about that. But when Russell said, "I'll deal the Party in, what the hell, that was very big of him. But what did he get, 51 electoral votes or something like that, and if he couldn't do better than that, who could in the south? They had no place to go. Eisenhower, Russell regarded as a shoo-in anyhow, after he beat Taft. Then there's always, "Are you going to be punished, are you going to lose patronage? But I must say, please withdraw me for the '52 thing, because I was sitting in Europe, I know about a lot of the preparations for it. HESS: One question about '52. Who do you think that Mr. Truman wanted to see as standardbearer for the Democratic Party that year? LOWRY: I don't know. HESS: Do you think he supported Adlai Stevenson very early, or at all, before the convention? LOWRY: No. HESS: Why? LOWRY: I don't know. You see, I left too early. Russell and Humphrey and a lot of people were preparing the way for their individual fates and circumstances but I don't know what Truman was thinking about. And yet, the reason I hesitated, and yet I think I wrote speeches very early. Was it January that Lodge came back from NATO? And he was talking about Eisenhower? HESS: I am really not sure. LOWRY: Without their doing it on a privileged tape, have other people talked to you about any conversations authorized by Mr. Truman with General Eisenhower as a Democratic standard bearer? HESS: I've asked the question a few times. LOWRY: Has anybody talked about it? HESS: Yes. LOWRY: There's something in there that I forgot, and I might even have it in my trip file. HESS: One question that we have not covered is, when did you first meet Mr. Truman? LOWRY: It was in June of 1947. HESS: What was the occasion? LOWRY: I had just reported to Washington in my new job as chief of the Washington bureau of the Cox newspapers, and a radio and television advisor to the Atlanta Journal and WFB Atlanta, both of which were owned by my publisher, Governor Cox. Leonard Reinsch had worked with the Democratic National Committee, and therefore with Mr. Truman on mass media problems, arrangements, and Reinsch called my office and said that he was going to be in the White House that afternoon to see somebody else, and if I would go with him he would also find out whether we could go in and at least shake hands with the President. And we went in, and it was arranged, and we went in, and I shook his hand and sat down and talked to him maybe about three or four minutes. He asked me what I had done in newspaper work. I said, "Nothing." I had had one year as an editorial writer, but I had never been a newspaperman up until then. He asked me why Governor Cox sent me to Washington to head that bureau and be a political correspondent, and I said if I ever found out I'd let him know. And later I did find out as much as the Governor would ever say, so I did tell the President one time. The Governor said, "Lowry, I wanted somebody in Washington who knew that the world began before 1914. That's the only explanation I ever got. That was the only explanation his general managers and managing editors ever got. They couldn't figure it. They thought the old man had lost his marbles. But Truman appreciated that kind of thing. He also appreciated the fact that my father was a lifelong Democrat surrounded by Republicans in Kansas. And he appreciated the fact that my editor in Dayton had been old Walter Locke who was a friend of George Norris of Nebraska, you know, and grew up in Nebraska with Norris. So, we had a lot of that, and that was all. Mr. Truman at the White House Correspondents dinners, you know, sometimes he would take his daughter Margaret, and they would sit and talk to one another. Occasionally he talked to the president of the White House Correspondents Association who sat on his other side. This was a very typical thing of the man. You'd think he'd see his daughter all the time, you know. But here she was. They would sit there and talk with such warmth and affection. But even a fairly hard-bitten crew like the Washington Press Corps found this -- she would be the only lady present -- but they found her a very delightful person. But, what I wanted to talk to you about. I've often thought about it in historical contrast, because later, by accident, I was with President Eisenhower and his brother in the White House at the height of the last episode affecting Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and the fight about (Robert T. B.) Stevens and (John G.) Adams in the Pentagon, you know, and everything leading up to McClellan investigating it. And I thought since very much about the terrible contrast between Truman and Eisenhower on this issue, and Truman's not only inability but scorn to try to minimize the political advantage that he might entail. Now, admittedly, it was aimed at him and at the Democrats, so O.K. he's not exactly a hero for fighting back. He would say that. But then the way he did it, and the "no truck" attitude he had toward it for a man from Missouri, World War I soldier and so on, was in such contrast with another Middle Westerner like Eisenhower, who spent his life in the military. I never thought about it until the other day when I was having to tell the story about Eisenhower and when I was there in '54. Joe McCarthy went to Wheeling, West Virginia, February 12, 1950. The Cox newspapers started nailing McCarthy the next day, and from then on, until the time I left Washington in '52. Now again that was no credit to the Cox newspapers. But what was interesting, was who you could get in the Congress to try to hold this whole phenomenon to some bounds of reasonableness and justice and scope. It was a strange collection of people. On the Democratic side, the Northern liberal Truman Democrats were all against Joe but you know how it went. As it went again on the internal security legislation that Senator McCarran brought up where something I could never believe in my life happened, where Estes Kefauver -- he got farther out for the opposition instead of a hell of a lot of other people that I expected to be right up there ahead of him. What I finally decided to do was to go to a collection of senators and congressmen, without regard to Party, six or twelve of them, individually and say, "What about it? And then I'll bring you a transcript of what you say," I could take shorthand -- it was an accident, "and you edit it and I won't print anything you don't want me to edit. And will you do it?" Some of them screamed at me like fishwives, including Robert Taft. He was screaming at Doris Fleeson about ten minutes before he was screaming at me, because I had his transcript right there, and I said, "Senator, all you've got to do is edit it." Well, he finally did edit it. The New York Times picked up the story from the Cox newspapers. This got me over to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and he said "O.K." And then he got mad because the Times didn't pick it up and said I double-crossed him, and I said, "Maybe Taft is more news for the Times than you are, but I'm sorry. I didn't write it for the Times." Christian A. Herter on the Republican side said, "Mac, did I say all that?' I said, "Well, to the best of my stenographic ability." He said, "O.K, if I said it, print it." Even old man Flanders, Ralph Flanders of Vermont. I had a hard time getting much that wasn't just pabulum. And these were not people who were supporting McCarthy, except behind the scenes; Taft was, but not openly. Then there were guys like Howard McGrath. No, wait a minute, not Howard McGrath. Howard McGrath had already gone to the Justice Department by this time. Who took his job as chairman -- oh, McKinney. HESS: Well, first it was William Boyle, Jr., I believe, and then Frank McKinney a little later on before Stephen Mitchell was appointed by Stevenson. LOWRY: Well, the point of this is not about the senators in Congress. I was doing this every week while the largest share of the coverage about McCarthy in the papers of the United States was the wire services, and why? Because neither the Washington reporters nor the publisher of the papers had to take responsibility. They were making McCarthy a hero, just like the criticism you could make now about television with all the violence and the war and everything on it. That's exactly what the press was doing. But if they could say, "Well, that's Associated Press, and that's controlled by a whole big board of publishers, they didn't have to say, Thats what we're doing." And therefore, Smitty on the UP and Jack Bell of the AP were really writing the -- no, not Smitty, he was at the White House, whoever the UP guy was. They were writing the McCarthy story for most of the papers. And this was all that Truman had to talk about, except whatever was in The New York Times. If you send a clipping in from the Dayton Daily News or the Atlanta Journal or whatever, the President of the United States isn't going to say, "Well, O.K., you read all this so-and-so, but here's what I read in the Atlanta Journal." He's not going to do that. And I wasn't that dumb, you know, after all. Now, his staff knew that we were trying to hold it to the record. First it was going to be eighty-six, and then it was going to be thirty-two and you know, all these people's statements and so forth. I saw the man actually dig his grave with a lot of those reporters, not because they thought he was soft on communism, or any such thing, not because they personally really believed in Joe, but because they thought, "Well, hell, the guy is supposed to be a politician and doesn't realize he's a loser in this game." And the record may be wrong, but the record is so vast every day in the press, "Why doesn't he cut his losses," you know. Never. Never. And they then turned around and stuck that red herring thing on him again, you know. The first red herring thing had come up, when, about Hiss? Well, they went back over and over again, they would say: "Mr. President, are you saying this in another red herring," you know, and so on. I guess this must have been about '46 that the other thing had come up. HESS: I think a little later. LOWRY: Early '47 maybe, the [Alger] Hiss thing. HESS: Weren't the accusations of Whittaker Chambers made in August of 1948? LOWRY: Yes, but that was a later chapter in history. I don't know. Anyway, again in '50, '51, they were dragging this up "You mean this is another red herring? And many times, you know, I feel it's like bearbaiting. I knew he got mad. I knew he swore, but never, never, never did he take a chance to ease it, minimize it and so on. And he was consulted, because this I did check out. You remember when Acheson went to the open meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and he made three speeches. He made one on the radio and in the hall; the second one, a general speech about foreign policy; and a pause, and then a third one, and he said, "Now, to clear away a little debris that is gathered around the base of the State Department." Joe McCarthy was sitting not more than twenty feet away. And he left after about the next ten or fifteen minutes. You know how Acheson could tongue lash. Clifford -- I have to take his word for it -- I said, "Now look, how about all this," and this business of saying, "You know, that old Communist Dean Rusk." He was then Assistant Secretary of State, "That old Georgia Communist." I said, "How about all this?" He said this was straight, cleared with the President, Administration policy right down the line. They were worried I don't mean they didn't realize that McCarthy was making hellish inroads, believe me. He was. They were worried. HESS: But they weren't taking vigorous enough action, is that right? LOWRY: They were taking the kind of vigorous action that said "The back of my hand to Joe McCarthy." They were not getting -- because McCarthy hadn't yet called the Baptist ministers Communists. You can rape the Statue of Liberty but don't call Baptists Communists or you'll get Senator McClellan of Arkansas on your neck. But that did it. You know, that's when he had that ex-character, that fraudulent minister that was helping Joe make this charge and Joe aired it. Now, that comes way up to '54, this was after your period. Well, he hasn't done that yet, but anyhow, they weren't helping Truman. They were all battening down the hatches and Truman was giving it back to them every time. And the reporters, the majority of reporters couldn't understand this. They thought he was being very improvident politically. HESS: What is the best way to fight charges like McCarthy was leveling? LOWRY: Well, the best way, of course, would be to find some way of getting it into the courts, or into an investigative process and just wear it out, and I think actually that what happened in the McClellan Committee with the whole business about Major (Irving) Peress and Stevens and so on, could have happened a long time before, if he had had the real backing of the people with seniority in the Congress. You didn't have it. You just had people like Humphrey and Douglas and Kefauver, but you didn't have the real committee chairmen to do it. Everything I've been saying also suggests that I think Mr. Truman was right just to hammer back at it all the time, but you've got to be able to wear it out. I don't even know really what it would have looked like without television too. That's another thing. I think the fact that the McClellan Committee had television to work with in '54 made a big difference in the court of public opinion. McCarthy looked bad. He doesn't look quite that bad in reading a newspaper account of it or listening to it on the radio. HESS: One other point that we should cover. At the end of our first reel we were discussing Mr. Eisenhower as a possible runner on the Democratic ticket. Did you have some things that you wanted to say about that? LOWRY: Well, I said that I think there were conflicting stories about the President's attitude in 1952. I know that there are stories about 1948, but that was wishful thinking on the part of the Democrats. HESS: Do you have any firsthand information about the 1952 situation? LOWRY: No. There were stories that Henry Cabot Lodge was trying to beat Democratic emissaries to the punch when he went to the SHAPE headquarters in Paris. There were stories that Truman had talked to Eisenhower personally about it, but I can't vouch for anything like that. HESS: One other question about the White House staff. Did you receive very much help from the Press Secretaries, Charles Ross, and then later, Joe Short? LOWRY: I received what help I asked for and I got none volunteered. Let me say the reason is this, and I don't blame them, their function was to serve the people who made the White House their beat, the big papers, and the wire services. I could have chosen to stay there and be a White House correspondent for the Cox newspapers, I didn't. So I could go over to the press conferences; I could call up and say, "I want to see so-and-so," I could ask for information on the phone and they'd call back. I didn't have much difficulty, and every now and then, very rarely, like maybe once every two or three months I'd go and have a long talk with Charlie Ross. So, it was adequate. The fact that I had closer contacts with Clifford and Murphy maybe than a lot of reporters had did not wash over into any particular thing with them. I didn't want it to, you know. As a matter of fact, when I say to you now, I had the only group of Democratic newspapers north and south that was left in the country, that's only a shorthand way of saying that the Truman administration given its situation with the press recognized that some papers, at least, were Democratic. It does not mean that I ran a venal propaganda operation for the Democrats. I didn't. I tried to run an objective job, and wasn't asking for favors. HESS: How would you compare Charles Ross with Joseph Short? Did they handle the job in any noticeably different manner? LOWRY: You know, I had not that much dependence on Joe Short to make a fair comparison. I would have just said until you added to your question, I would have just said that I thought Ross handled it better. HESS: Were there any other members of the White House staff that you knew particularly well? Did you know Matthew Connelly? LOWRY: I knew Matthew Connelly, and sometimes talked to him. I would call him on the phone. Those were about specific queries. I could when I was trying to arrange an appointment at the White House call Matthew Connelly. He knew both the Governor and Jim Cox, Jr. He knew where the Cox papers were. I didn't have much reason to use Connelly as a news source. Let's see, who else. I met Dave Lloyd a couple of times. I never met Dave Bell. I don't know how long he was there, '48 or '47, but I never met him. I had nothing to do with Vaughan, no reason I should have. Who else was around? HESS: Oh, there were quite a few. Donald Dawson? LOWRY: Yes. HESS: Dave Stowe, George Elsey we mentioned. Steve Spingarn, Philleo Nash, David Lloyd we've mentioned, David Bell, Dr. John Steelman, The Assistant to the President. LOWRY: Yes, on certain economic stories I had. HESS: Was he very helpful? LOWRY: When I'd call on him, but that was rare. Yes, he was. HESS: Those are the main people. LOWRY: Yes. Well, it was so much more preponderantly Clifford and Murphy. HESS: Well, they were the Special Counsels so they were the principal men. Do you have anything else that comes to mind on Mr. Truman or the Truman administration this morning, after I've used up far more of your time than I really thought that I would. LOWRY: I doubt that much else of what I have would not be contributed by a lot of other people from whom you are collecting oral history. I assume you are well aware of the role that Les Biffle played as a messenger boy, and not just on the Hill, but between the White House and the Hill. Les Biffle could slip into the White House and get back; Les Biffle could get on the phone. Biffle had one of those phones with a red, white and blue string on them, you know. And Biffle did a lot of that for Democratic senators who had great power. Les Biffle didn't have power de jure, but playing the messenger boy role and being able to confirm, extend or withhold the "word" gave him great power. HESS: Did you feel that his influence lessened somewhat after his support of Mr. Barkley at the convention in 1948? LOWRY: Yes. Yes, I did. I did. HESS: Anything else on the administration? LOWRY: I think that's it. HESS: All right, one last question. What is your estimation of Mr. Truman's place in history? About a hundred years from now, a hundred and fifty years from now, how will historians and the general public see Mr. Truman, in your opinion? LOWRY: I think it will be very high. I was talking about that when I was talking about his ability to make very difficult decisions. I had only a kind of an ear cocked on the Roosevelt administration between mid '42 and the death of the President (Roosevelt), so I can't tell you much about that. I've had more than that as a citizen on the last three administrations. And I think Truman was very powerful, almost as if he had a philosophical concept which was beyond his level of cultivation and education about the power of the President. That was his willingness to say, "O.K., nobody can do this but me." What the hell. His Cabinet -- hey talked about cronyism -- what did he care, you know, about his Cabinet, if he liked the guy, didn't like the guy. He knew his weaknesses, the guy's weaknesses, and he knew his own. That's the thing about "The buck stops here," you know, which has been used so tritely, well, it was super abundant. It wasn't necessary. It was absolutely clear how Truman behaved, and when we think, my God, starting with Potsdam and Hiroshima, coming down to NATO, hydrogen bomb, and getting them out of the Dardanelles. Tremendous, how he used it, and at long distance I saw what looked like gravest mistakes, like the thing about Byrnes in '46. But when I got close up there, I was seeing him almost once a week, it looked very different. They always say you can't grow in this job. You've got to be there, because it's damn hard to grow in it. He did. It was obvious. I think it's a very hard place, a very big place, very endearing place too. He made his successor pallid by contrast. I could tell one or two stories about that, but that's not about Truman. HESS: It could show a contrast between the two. LOWRY: Well, Milton Eisenhower, who is a friend of mine, without ever telling me, while I was in Zurich and the country was changing over, got me cleared by the FBI as a potential candidate for administrative assistant to President Eisenhower in the White House, knowing very well that my political sympathies were not with Eisenhower but knowing also that I knew about the country and so forth. And I came back and found it out, and said, "Nix." I was a writer, and in 1954 Eisenhower was asked to make a speech, the 200th anniversary of Columbia University and the theme was going to be "Man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof." And Milton asked me if I would come with him to Washington to meet the President and agree to do a first draft of that speech. I had never thought about doing anything with Eisenhower, I had never even met him. I said, "Will it be totally anonymous?" because I was already in the Ford Foundation, and they said yes, so I cleared it with the president here, [H. Rowan, Jr.] Gaither, went down, went to the Carlton Hotel, didn't have anything to write on, got a menu from room service, I started to make notes, mostly out of quotations from Jefferson, because my interest in doing this speech was my God, that subject had to do with McCarthyism and this was the heyday, this was the height of that Peress, Adams, Stevens whoop-de-do, you know. So I made a lot of notes about that on that menu, and then I just didn't have time to transfer them to a piece of paper so I just carried it over. Went over, met Milton, and we went into the President, he was in the Oval Room, and he had a phone in his ear, and he was screaming over the phone, and he clapped down the phone and said to Milton, "Every son-of-a-bitch thinks I can control McCarthy. I can't do anything more about McCarthy than if he were a wild elephant chained to a tree on the White House lawn." And Milton said, "Ike, I'm not sure. You may be right, but I have a feeling that this is the wrong image," just like that. Anyway, then he introduced me. We went across to the residence and went into the place to eat. And Ike was going on about all this business; and why were they putting the bead on him, and he kept talking about people he didn't have a God's bit of use for in the press who were telling him what to do, like Scotty Reston and Joe Alsop. I had to take issue about Reston because he was a friend of mine. And then Milton said, "Ike, Mac is not with us. He's a Democrat, and in fact when I tried to get him cleared, I did get him cleared, to ask him if he would like to work on your staff, it got him in terrible trouble with a lot of his Democratic senatorial friends on the Hill." (It did. They thought I'd turn-coated while I was in Europe, you know.) But he said, "I do think that he's got a lot of friends, and he's still got a kind of an ear about this week's events, and how maybe you should have behaved yourself." Well, that was a stupid thing to say. Nobody ought to be asked in front of the President of the United States what he would do if he was President. Well, he laughed, so, O.K. Forget that. "Well, what about it?" I said, "I think that the country thinks that you're appeasing McCarthy, and I think they think that that little son-of-a-bitch in Albany is calling the shots." And he said, "What little son-of-a-bitch in Albany?" I said, "There's only one." He said, "Now, Milt, that's like everybody else in the press. I want to tell you, Tom Dewey doesn't even call me." Milton said, "Ike, it's not necessarily inconsistent with what Mac's saying." I said, "No, Mr. President, because it isn't you, it's Herbert Brownell." That's what's happened." Ike said, "Well, I've never heard of such a thing." I thought, "O.K. You got a free ride to Washington on the Ford Foundation." So, we finished lunch and Milton said, "O.K., what about this speech?" Eisenhower said, "I want to speak on 'Man's right to knowledge and the free use thereof'. I want to make a good speech because I was president of Columbia." So, Milton said, "Mac, what have you got in mind?" Well, I had propped my menu up over on a drape over there. So I went down and got that and brought it up. I started reading off these things from Jefferson, many of which, you know, sound goddamn flagrant and radical today, or even then. And it sounded like the kind of thing that you used to hear in 4th of July orations, and so forth. Do you know, he never saw the fact that the spirit of everything that was in what was directly opposite from what he had been saying, and that the whole thing was against McCarthyism, against book-burning, against everything McCarthy stood for. He said, "That's great. Go right ahead. That's just great. Write that speech." I wrote it, they used half of it. They were going to use the whole thing except when they stuck it through the State Department and it had gotten through the Voice of America, and Howland Sargeant chopped off a big chunk of it and put in a lot of stuff about the battle for mens minds, and about the VOA and propaganda and that was also, he said, about a man's right to knowledge. So, it was two speeches. It was about McCarthyism, seen from Jefferson's philosophy, and it was about the battle for international propaganda and so forth. And he didn't turn a hair, never did see how inconsistent it was with what he was doing. And this kind of contrast. I don't see how those things can be so buried in history. We don't know how much the speech about the military-industrial thing, how much is Mac (Malcolm C.) Moos and how much is somebody else, and how much is Dwight Eisenhower. Maybe we'll never know. But it's this kind of thing, I think, that will come out. And if the contrast between Truman and people like Eisenhower comes out, I think he'll have a very big place in history. Even people who were offended by what they thought was his limited personal side after twenty years are beginning to agree, I think. That's about the story. I'm talking about people I know who were put off by what they thought was a little man from Kansas City. "He wasn't like Adlai." Well, the hell he wasn't like Adlai. "He wasn't like Roosevelt," of course he wasn't like Roosevelt. You know, I've been fighting nicotine since a week ago Friday, and I think that's why I am so loquacious. I've never been so unbuttoned as I've been while you've had that thing going on. I don't have much occasion to talk about this anymore. HESS: All for one morning? LOWRY: I think so. HESS: Well, thank you very much for your time. LOWRY: Thank you. [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
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