Charles S. Murphy Oral History Interview, May 21, 1969

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened May, 1971
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[125]

HESS: Mr. Murphy, you mentioned in one of your earlier interviews that the President asked you to mingle with the crowd to test their reactions to his "whistlestop" remarks during the campaign trips. Now I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about that. Did you just listen, or did you actually quiz the people in the crowd?

MURPHY: Mostly just listened. Occasionally, if the people seemed to be receptive, we would carry on casual conversations with them.

HESS: And did you report what you heard to the President?

MURPHY: Yes. When there seemed to be anything that was worthwhile reporting, we did.

[126]

HESS: Do you recall any of his reactions that we may have had, anytime there was something that may have been particularly interesting?

MURPHY: Well, not specifically. I think, in general, his reaction was one of pleasure and gratification that the crowds received him as well as they did. This was somewhat surprising I think to many of us and certainly very pleasing to all of us because the crowds did like President Truman. This was obvious and the feeling seemed to grow as we went along. This was in the trip in June 1948, I think, that I was talking about particularly, but this same pattern continued during the campaign trip in the fall. This pattern of reaction on the part of the crowd came as rather a complete surprise, both to the crowd, I might say, as well as to us. And so I think that this boosted President Truman's spirits and courage and he

[127]

thrived on it then and ever after that and I suppose before as well.

HESS: Who besides yourself would do this--mingle with the crowd like that?

MURPHY: Oh, as I recall, Clark Clifford and George Elsey among our White House staff. Of course, there were Secret Service agents out in the crowd. But Elsey and I had no particular assignment at these stops ordinarily. Other people had assignments to greet official visitors and things of that kind but we did not. Occasionally, we were not able to leave the work that we were doing to get out in the crowd at all. But, it was generally our assignment to get out in the crowd and find out as much as we could about what they were thinking and saying, how they felt, and get the feel of the whole thing.

HESS: On the subject of the Research Division of

[128]

the Democratic National Committee, you referred to that organization in one of your earlier interviews but I would like to enlarge upon that just a little bit. Could you tell me why that organization was set up?

MURPHY: It was set up mainly to provide research material, material for speeches, in the 1948 campaign.

HESS: Do you recall who served on that?

MURPHY: The head of it was William L. Batt, Jr., David Lloyd--there were about six, if I recall, of the people that were brought in at a professional grade. David Lloyd and Kenneth Birkhead and Phil Dreyer and Frank Kelly and John Barriere and Johannes Hoeber.

Now this was done, I think, largely at the urging of the members of the White House staff, Clark Clifford and those of us who

[129]

worked with Clifford on the President’s speeches and material for the President’s speeches. We recognized that in the campaign there would be a great demand for things of that kind having to do with current issues and having to do with the places where the President might go. And we urged the President to get this kind of thing set up at the National Committee and he did. He arranged to have this done, have this set up, I think, about July 1948 and so they did send over memorandums having to do with issues. They sent over background material relating to places where the President was going and they sent over drafts of speeches. Their material was sent to the White House staff.

HESS: What was the relationship between the members of that organization and the regular members of the White House staff? Do you recall? Was it a good working relationship?

[130]

MURPHY: It was a quite good working relationship. They had people that I had not known before I guess. The head of the group, Bill Batt, was a very fine person, a capable fellow. And after the campaign began in September, when the President began to travel in September- -I recall he was on the road most of the time after that until the election, Clifford and Elsey went with him on the train. Now, I did not except for the last ten days swing. I stayed in Washington and operated the home base operation to provide material of this kind for speeches to the group on the train and so I worked with the Research Division quite closely. It turned out to be my responsibility to get the material out to the train. This included, usually, a draft of one major speech a day. And this was a very large undertaking for a small group to do and so the Research Division and its material were quite

[131]

helpful. Their drafts they sent over had to be substantially revised and I needed someone to work with me more closely than that, so I asked Bill Batt to send over the best man he had to work with me full time and he sent Dave Lloyd. And that’s the way Dave Lloyd first came to the White House and he stayed there from then on until the end of President Truman’s administration.

HESS: What was your estimation of Mr. Lloyd’s efficiency when he joined you?

MURPHY: Well, well, when he first joined us, I guess, I didn’t have any, but very quickly I came to have very high regard for his efficiency and ability and that’s why he stayed at the White House. I was not willing to let him go after he once got there.

HESS: Do you recall why some of the other members of the division were hired? Did you know anything

[132]

about these particular men?

MURPHY: No. No, so far as I remember, I didn’t know any of them before that. I’ve known some of them since then. Ken Birkhead has, over the years since then, been a very close friend of mine and John Barriere I’ve kept up with fairly well. Frank Kelly, I saw something of him after that. The other two I’ve lost track of. Phil Dreyer, the last I heard was out in Portland, Oregon, I guess.

HESS: It may have already been covered in Mr. Morrissey’s transcripts, but just what were some of the other duties that you had during the 1948 campaign, first while you were here in town before you joined the train, and then after you joined the train, what did you do besides work on the speeches? Anything particu1ar?

[133]

MURPHY: No. No, that’s all.

HESS: That was a pretty full-time job.

MURPHY: Well, that’s an understatement. I worked at it night and day, every day.

The arrangements were not well organized in the beginning. Part of this was due to a lack of understanding as to who was to be responsible for what in this regard and perhaps some lack of appreciation about the magnitude of the job.

Now the staff at the White House that regularly helped the President with his speeches was not very large. It consisted of Clark Clifford, George Elsey and me. Of course, we got help on the President’s behalf from government departments and agencies that had to do with the subject matter about which he might be speaking. From the State Department on foreign

[134]

policy matters and the Department of Agriculture on farm questions and so on. But the normal pattern of the President’s speeches was such in regular times, you would have a week or two notice ahead of time that he was going to make a speech and he would only make a major speech once a week or so perhaps. So, you would have considerable amount of time for a small number of people to work on it. But it was another matter in the campaign to turn out a major speech every day along with a good many smaller speeches at the same time.

Now, the President brought in, late in the summer of 1948, Dave Noyes and Bill Hillman. He did this without consultation, if that’s the proper word, with the members of the White House staff that worked in this field regularly. I think--and I don’t quarrel with him about this--I think he and perhaps some of his other advisers had some feeling

[135]

that the demands for help in this field during the campaign would be such that the regular White House staff could not handle them, either by reason of lack of capability or otherwise. But when he brought Dave Noyes and Bill Hillman in, he did not tell any of us exactly what functions each of us was to perform and this was very much in the nature of an Alphonse and Gaston act. That is, not wanting to overstep whatever bounds there might be.

My recollection is that the regular White House staff handled the staff work for speeches that the President made on his Labor Day trip. We went for a day, and maybe a day and a night out to Detroit and he spoke at a good many other places in Michigan and some in other states on the way out and back. Then after that, when he started out on his first long campaign trip, his first major speech, I

[136]

think, was to be a farm speech at the plowing contest and that would have been Dexter, Iowa.

HESS: Dexter, Iowa on September 18th.

MURPHY: That’s the speech. All right. Well, now, just because it was part of our regular business, we on the White House staff got up and prepared a speech for Dexter, Iowa and unbeknown to us, why Dave Noyes and Bill Hillman had just come in with a speech for Dexter, Iowa. And so, here’s the President with drafts of two speeches and no staff arrangements set up to resolve what to do with them. And no solution was reached for a long time.

He went, it must have been on the weekend before he started on that trip, he went on the Williamsburg down the Potomac River and he took some people from both crowds along with him.

HESS: Who went?

[137]

MURPHY: Well, I’m sure Clifford would have been there, and I suppose Dave Noyes and Bill Hillman. I didn’t go. The reason I was to stay at home and not go on the campaign trips was that my wife was expecting a baby and the baby was born on the fourth of October. Now, I began to worry about going off and leaving her so I went to the President in September, I guess, and asked if I could stay at home and he said, "Yes." I didn’t stay home as a part of a plan to run this office here, I stayed at home because we were expecting a baby, and he said that I could stay home. Well, also for this reason I didn’t go on this weekend trip down the Potomac at the beginning, but I did arrange to go down there and join them, I think, early Sunday morning when I went over here--and it was the only time I ever flew in an amphibian airplane--and took off at the naval air station and flew down to the lower part of the Potomac

[138]

where the Williamsburg was. This plane landed on the water and we bounced over to the Williamsburg, and somebody took me on a little boat and transferred me over there.

When I got there Sunday morning to see what had happened to that speech, and nothing had. So there it was Sunday morning and nothing had happened to that speech and no procedure had been set up for solving this question. I went around poking at different people to see if we could get some arrangement for doing this and I perhaps talked to the President. Told him he needn’t be unduly sensitive about this, that we were all working for him and we would do what he told us. I don’t remember actually whether I said that, but this might well have been the kind of thing. But we did, during the course of that day, work out an arrangement for completing that speech and my recollection is that the major part of the speech that he used eventually

[139]

was that prepared by the Noyes group--whoever prepared it. I think maybe "Bob" Carr had worked on that speech. At about that time, Dave Noyes and Bill Hillman brought in with them a man named Albert Z. Carr, "Bob" Carr, and he was the one of that group that actually could write. But as a result of this impasse, if that’s the proper word, when the President started out on his campaign trip, my recollection is that he had the completed draft of only one major speech. That is he had not more than two days worth of material when he left here and that was the situation when he started out on that campaign trip in 1948. And so we then had to send him out a major draft each day.

The pattern that evolved was that we would send a draft of a speech from here at night, it would be flown by courier plane that would land wherever that train was before day in the morning and they would put it on

[140]

the train and Clifford would get it and start to work with the President on it on the train until they had what the President wanted, and they usually used it that night.

Elsey was on the train with them and Elsey’s responsibility was to get up some notes, outlines, or texts for the whistlestops so that at the whistlestops the President would have something that he could use if he wanted some written material. And, generally, again the pattern was that they would borrow material, a few facts from the draft of the major speech for that day and talk on the same topic, and used it along with local references, references to matters that were of local interest to the people who might be there. And Elsey did a prodigious job on that, and I have never, never understood how he could do all that.

HESS: Did you think that Clark Clifford may have

[141]

felt that he was somehow outranked by Dave Noyes and Bill Hillman before the meeting on the Wil1iamsburg?

MURPHY: Well, I think he didn’t know. I think he didn’t know whether he was outranked or not. And the same kind of thing had happened, by the way, in connection with the President’s acceptance speech at the national convention, except that time it was Sam Rosenman instead of the others. Sam Rosenman came down and we went and sat down in the Cabinet Room and nobody said who was to do what. The President just couldn’t bear to hurt the feelings of anybody, he never could. And Sam was there to be helpful. Well, Sam was a very wise man and a very able counselor. This was something that probably ought to be closed, for Sam Rosenman it turned out, could not write a speech. Now, Clark Clifford speaks very well for himself, but

[142]

he never had a particular gift for writing speeches for the President, the actual writing of the words. I didn’t either for that matter, but I did more of it than Clifford and certainly far more than Rosenman. Again, we ought to close this, I guess.

HESS: That will be quite all right. Any length of time that you desire.

MURPHY: While we’re on the subject, as the campaign wore on, Rosenman was wanting to be helpful and the President was wanting to get help from Rosenman. Rosenman, I think quite justifiably, deservedly had a good reputation as a speech producer. And so he was assigned five big speeches for the last week of the campaign. The assignment was made some weeks in advance because after I got this operation started here in Washington, I began seeing that assignments

[143]

were made in advance and I got a pipeline started with stuff coming in from a good many different places. And these five speeches were assigned to Sam Rosenman. The next thing I knew, he was beating the bushes down here. All my speechwriters that I had tagged in Washington, Sam Rosenman was trying to get them to write these speeches for him. As it turned out the same people I was already using, Sam Rosenman was calling on to write these speeches. I think they did write them. They went around through Rosenman and came back to me.

HESS: Do you recall which speeches those were?

MURPHY: No, I don’t. I’m not positive about the number but I’m fairly sure, it may have been three, I think it was five. But this kind of thing did happen in connection with the acceptance speech at the national convention. But this kind of thing did happen in connection with the acceptance speech at the national convention. We sat down in the Cabinet Room, I suppose with the President.

[144]

Rosenman, Clifford and I were there and I expect some other members of his staff--Charlie Ross maybe, Matt Connelly--and just talked in general about what he should do and how he should approach it. Then everybody got up and left except Rosenman and Clifford and me and nobody had told us what to do and nobody had told us who outranked whom, and everybody, at least Clifford and Rosenman seemed to be a little reticent, either of them, to take the lead. I was obviously the junior man, so I just--time was pretty short, this must have been the day before he went to Philadelphia--and so I picked up a pencil and got a yellow pad and I began to write. And nobody said very much and I kept on writing and finally Clifford said, "What are you doing?"

And I says, "I’m writing an outline of a speech."

And he said, "Can I look at it?"

[145]

And I said, "Sure." So I handed him what I had written.

And he said, "Well, it’s pretty good," and handed it across the table to Rosenman and Rosenman took it and nodded his head. So, this is the way that first draft was written. I kept on writing and they kept on reading.

The President’s acceptance speech did deal quite a lot with legislative issues. This happened to be the field I was working on at that time. I had gotten to be sort of a specialist on the legislative program, and legislative issues on the President’s staff. So, I guess this came, not the language, but the substance came quite easily for me. It was, of course, revised considerably. I think Rosenman did do the peroration. I think you will find a good final paragraph or two in there, and Rosenman did that.

[146]

When the President spoke, his acceptance speech was made from an outline. He did not have full text. It was, you may recall, a very effective speech and we were, of course, greatly pleased and enthusiastic and regarded it as a great success and I still do, because it was quite a historic thing. We went back after that and counted the number of words that he actually delivered that came from the outline and the number of which were extemporaneous. I don’t remember what the actual count was but he used most of the words in the outline.

HESS: As you will recall, he closed his speech that time by calling for the special session of Congress.

MURPHY: That’s right.

HESS: Do you know where that idea came from?

MURPHY: I do not know where it originated. I have

[147]

looked at this memorandum of June 29, l948. [See Appendix A] I do not know who wrote it. I’m confident that I didn’t because there are some words in there that I wouldn’t have used just that way. It’s not my natural style.

HESS: Would you take a look at the memorandum and point out the words that you say that you would not have used in that manner?

MURPHY: Well, I say that I wouldn’t have, I just don’t think I would have. This says, "the rotten record of the 80th Congress," I don’t think I would have used the word "rotten," I don’t believe that I would have. "The Neanderthal men of the Republican Party," ... "Martin, Halleck, Wolcott, Allen." I don’t think I would have said that about those people. I disagreed with them quite heartily but I knew them personally and they were pretty nice fellows. I just don’t think I would have used that word

[148]

about them.

HESS: How about some of the ideas that may be in the memo. Would you go along with some of the ideas?

MURPHY: Yes, in general I’d go along, I think I’d go along with most of the ideas. And I think it quite possible that I participated in the preparation of it and maybe had a chance to make suggestions but I’m just satisfied in my own mind that I was not the primary author of it in terms of actually putting the words down on paper.

HESS: The book that I have here is Housing Reform During the Truman Administration, by Richard O. Davies. And on page 84, I won’t read it all but he said, "An unsigned memorandum, dated June 29, set forth a plan to revive the party’s enthusiasm. Although the authorship is

[149]

unknown, the arguments were primarily Murphy’s."

MURPHY: Well, this is possible, as I say, but the words, I think, are not mine, and I’m satisfied that I would not have given the President a memorandum of this type without talking with Clifford about it. And I think, too, the Jack [Oscar] Ewing group was meeting at this time and this might have come from there. We might have gotten a draft of this from someone who--Don [J. Donald] Kingsley or some of the others who met up there.

HESS: Where did the original idea for calling Congress back come from?

MURPHY: I don’t know. This, as far as I’m concerned, might have very possibly have originated with me. I’m certain that I was for it as far back as I can remember and I do seem to remember that we had--well we persuaded the

[150]

President to do it, and we talked quite a lot about it before he decided to do it, and I have a fairly distinct recollection that I thought he ought to call them back in session sometime in the fall, maybe September or October. And when he decided to do it, why, he was going to call them back the next week after the convention as I recall. About the...

HESS: "Turnip Day."

MURPHY: No. At first he was going to call them back quicker than that, the next day or the day after tomorrow, something of that kind and we persuaded him to postpone it about two weeks. The "Turnip Day" he put that in--that was entirely original with him. When he said that at the convention, I didn’t know what he was talking about.

HESS: You used the word "persuaded" him to call Congress back awhile ago, did it take much

[151]

persuasion to get him to call the Congress back?

MURPHY: My best recollection is that he was somewhat reluctant to do it.

HESS: Why?

MURPHY: I don’t know. I just don’t remember that clearly. My memory is not real clear about that particular thing and if it turned out to be totally wrong, why, I wouldn’t be surprised, but this is my recollection that he was somewhat reluctant to call them back. But when he decided to call them back he was going to do it right away.

HESS: Was this cleared with the Democratic Party leaders before the announcement was made there in Philadelphia?

MURPHY: I’m satisfied it was not.

[152]

HESS: Why? Why are you so satisfied that it was not?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t know, I just am.

HESS: How important is his eventual victory in ‘48, do you believe this was to call them back?

MURPHY: Well, I would think it probably was significant. No one will ever know what led to his victory in 1948. It was mostly President Truman himself and the kind of man he was and the fact that this got through to enough of that total thing and that I wouldn’t say "created" an image but I would say "revealing an image." So, I think it was important, and the election being so close you could almost say that if any one of these important things had been left out, why, it all might have been different.

[153]

HESS: Awhile ago in talking about Dave Noyes, you mentioned that there was some other advisers who suggested to the President that Mr. Noyes be brought in. Do you know what other advisers those were?

MURPHY: I don’t know. I suppose, I’ve always assumed, I guess, that it was Matt Connelly. Now Bill Hillman and Dave Noyes worked together then and later. Now Bill Hillman, as you recall, was the author of a book which had been published, I think, before that, called Mr. President.

HESS: After.

MURPHY: It was after, well, at any rate, I...

HESS: What do you recall about that book, while we’re on the subject?

MURPHY: My views have changed some over the years

[154]

and the last year, I guess it was, I decided that I thought enough of that book, I went around looking everywhere I could to get a copy for each of my children.

HESS: You say your views have changed. Did you think much of it when it first came out?

MURPHY: Not very much.

HESS: Why?

MURPHY: Well, I suppose--well, first there were some rather unflattering comments by other members of the White House staff and people that I associated with more regularly than I did with Noyes and Hillman and people whose judgment I respected a great deal. I think they had the feeling that this was not an altogether proper thing for a President to do when he was in office and that--proper is

[155]

not quite the right--not altogether in keeping with the great dignity of the office--and that he had permitted Bill Hillman to take advantage of him for commercial reasons. But...

HESS: That book came out in 1952.

MURPHY: ‘52. Well, at this point, I’m glad that it did, as I say. Now I did right much looking around but I got a copy for each of my children.

HESS: Now one question on...

MURPHY: There’s one thing I mentioned earlier I would like to get back to and that is about Bob Carr. Now when the group did start out on the train in September 1948, Dave Noyes was not going to stay here, he was going back to California. I don’t remember about Bill Hillman. I was left at that time with just no help really in the things that I was supposed to do and I expressed my dismay about that and Dave Noyes did arrange

[156]

for Bob Carr to stay and work with me. He was a very able man, a very nice man. And he worked, he could write, and he knew something about some of the issues that were then current. He wrote a major speech each day for I think four or five days. It pretty well wore him out and burned him out but he got us through the first week--I edited his speeches. I didn’t edit them much but he didn’t quarrel about that. We didn’t have any friction, we had a completely satisfactory working relationship, and he did a fine job. But it burned him out and he left.

Well, by that time I had gotten some help from other places and some more help on the way. It was along about that time that I got Dave Lloyd over. Dave Bell, I guess, was--Dave Bell had been in the Budget then, I know he wouldn’t have been available on the regular full-time basis but I’m sure he would have

[157]

helped some. I also began getting in drafts from the departments and got some very good material from Agriculture. Some of it was topical enough that I had to leave it in agricultural speeches and other was general enough that I could rob some of the farm speeches and put the material in other drafts. Later on, I continued to clamor for help and Dave Noyes arranged for John Franklin Carter to come and work with me. He was a columnist who was then writing a newspaper column under the name of Jay Franklin. He was an old timer and had a great deal of experience in this field. A man with a great gift for words. They just flowed out with the greatest of ease and his literary style was fine. A very ingenious fellow. I don’t, I don’t think his judgment was real good about what to put in and what to leave out but we worked out a kind of a system that he produced just great volumes of material, and I

[158]

would use what I thought was good and what I thought wasn’t good I would just discard. Some of us have to sit down and struggle and struggle to get words out but not John Carter. He just sat down and out it came.

Some of this material began to be reflected in the speeches that came in the latter part of the campaign. We took him with us on this last ten-day trip and he continued to make a very valuable contribution. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these speeches but there’s one that--oh, I started to say celebrated--in terms of the internal staff it was--but we kept trying to provide the President for use in these speeches some humorous material. We thought that some of the material that we provided was pretty good but the press ignored it, and that bothered us, it really did. So, among us we got up the idea one day that we would do a speech for the

[159]

President that didn’t have anything else in it except these things that we thought might catch on with the public because they were humorous and so we did. We said that if the press writes about this speech they’re bound to tell about some of it. Finally, we did it for Madison Square Garden in New York, if I remember correctly. I think that this was the one about "the little man following me around." This theme of the little man following me around came from John Franklin Carter.

By that time we were developing some techniques for the speech drafts and one of the things that we would seek for was how to employ a framework, a theme that would run through it that you could hang different things on. And so he came in one day very, very happy. We’d been trying to think of something and he says, "I think I’ve got something that will do, ‘The little man

[160]

following me around.’" Well, we tried it awhile and it looked like it was working out.

On that trip we went to Boston, and I think this speech was mimeographed and released to the press as we were leaving Boston on the train coming to New York. And after that on the train, Matt Connelly and Charlie Ross, I guess, got the President to call a staff conference and they were distressed because the newspapermen on the train were saying that this was not the kind of a speech that the President ought to make and they got Charlie and Matt worried about it. So, the President reviewed the situation and decided he really didn’t have much choice except to stick with this speech and he did, and I think that this turned out fine. This just turned out to be, you know, very, very good.

Later on, this lack of judgment on the

[161]

part of John Franklin Carter was made evident in some other ways. The President had planned to keep him on his staff to help with--oh, I don’t think that the plans ever shaped up--but generally with the historical record of his administration. And...

HESS: In what way did Carter’s poor judgment manifest itself?

MURPHY: He wrote an article that was published in some periodical magazine.

HESS: Life magazine?

MURPHY: I think it was quite indiscreet. The President saw it and he thought it was quite indiscreet and he called me and he says, "You go fire him." So I did.

HESS: Do you recall what article that was. Just after the election he wrote two. He wrote one on

[162]

the campaign itself which came out shortly after the campaign, and then he wrote another that came out the following January dealing with the fact that Mr. Truman was going to change his foreign policy.

MURPHY: Well, there was one, "What Truman Really Thinks of the Negro," wasn’t there?

HESS: By golly, there could have been but I don’t know about it.

MURPHY: My memory is not clear. My recollection is that the one in the Life magazine caused right much of a stir, a flap.

HESS: Both of those were published in Life. One in November and one in January.

MURPHY: Well, the...

HESS: I don’t remember any racial overtones in either one but there could have been.

[163]

MURPHY: At some point--my--I haven’t checked this but I just think I remember at some point he wrote a piece entitled something like, "What Truman Really Thinks of the Negro," and I have some recollection that the first one that came out, whatever it was, was pretty bad, but it--you know we sort of smoothed that over and maybe we were going along and then something else came up that was still worse and I think it was when the second one came out that the President says, "Charlie, you go and fire him right now."

HESS: But he was brought in by Dave Noyes? Is that right?

MURPHY: Yes, yes. And he was--now Dave didn’t press him, he didn’t push him forward. He called him because I was pleading so desperately for somebody and Dave knew people in that field and he says this is the man and maybe

[164]

we can get him. So, when you say he was brought in by Dave Noyes, why, I don’t want to leave the impression that Dave Noyes pressed him on us. Quite the contrary, we were looking for help desperately, and this was someone that Dave Noyes knew and brought in and he was extremely useful. My part of the operation, I think, might have broken down without him.

HESS: One other question I wanted to ask was about Sam Rosenman. Why didn’t Mr. Rosenman go on the campaign, do you recall? As I recall he had offered his support sometime in the spring and then as you mentioned he came in to help with the President’s acceptance speech, but then he sort of dropped out.

MURPHY: I’m inclined to respond by asking you a question. Why should he go on the campaign? I don’t want to be facetious about this but there were millions of people that didn’t go

[165]

on that campaign.

HESS: Well, in other words, he had offered his help.

MURPHY: Well, I don’t know.

HESS: Okay.

MURPHY: Okay.

HESS: That’s fine.

In the fall and during the campaign, the proposal was made to send Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow. Where did that idea come up?

MURPHY: My recollection is that it originated with David Noyes and some of that group. Maybe Bob Carr, I think maybe Bob Carr, Albert Z. Carr. And it’s also my recollection that those that were on the regular White House staff thought

[166]

that it was a good idea and helped to promote it and that the President finally asked Vinson if he would go and Vinson finally said he would go and at this point, the President communicated with General Marshall, who was in Paris, I think, and General Marshall’s reaction was very strong and very negative, and the President called it off. That’s the way I remember.

HESS: Dealing with the events in 1948, Cabell Phillips, in the book The Truman Presidency on pages 196-97, states in effect, that Mr. Truman in the autumn of 1947 had offered to step aside for General Eisenhower if the General would accept the Democratic nomination, while he, Mr. Truman, would take the number two position on the ticket as Vice President. Do you think that is correct?

MURPHY: I don’t know. I’ve read things of that kind from time to time, I’ve never had anything

[167]

that would give me any insight on it that’s not public.

HESS: Ever hear anything around the White House during those days along this line?

MURPHY: No.

HESS: Anything else come to mind dealing with the events of ‘48 that we may have overlooked? I imagine that some of these things that we have discussed may even be repetitious of what you discussed with Mr. Morrissey, but if they are, we will take them out, or we’ll decide if perhaps we were hitting it from two different angles and in that case we’ll leave them in.

MURPHY: All right. There may be some repetition. You know you can talk about the 1948 campaign for a long time without telling the whole story, and some of us regard it as a very important

[168]

event, or series of events.

HESS: I don’t know if Charlie asked you, but where were you on election night?

MURPHY: I was at home. I lived in Maryland, and voted in Maryland, out here in Montgomery County. At that time Maryland did not have an absentee voter’s law. I had been on that train, that last trip and the President wound up on Saturday night before election with a big speech in Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. It had been my plan to leave the train. Clifford, I think, did leave the train there or possibly left the day before. It had been my plan to leave the train then and come back home so that I could be here to vote on Tuesday.

Before we got to St. Louis, someone gave me a copy of a speech that had been prepared for the President to use on the radio on election eve, Monday night, before the election.

[169]

I thought it was terrible and I was just dismayed and upset about it. I went to Charlie Ross, who was on the train, and a very wise person, and told him about my concern and he shared it. Maybe not so strongly, but he shared it. And I said, "Charlie, if you’ll help me talk to the ‘Boss’ and try to persuade him not to use this speech, I’ll stay on the train instead of going home from St. Louis." And he said he would. So, I stayed on the train and went to Kansas City.

Charlie called the President about this on the phone. I wanted him to talk to the President. I was pretty junior on the staff at that time and I wanted him to talk to the President about this, and he called him. We were at the Muehlebach Hotel and he called the President at his home in Independence on the telephone, but he put me on the telephone to talk to the President about it and so I had to

[170]

tell him, and did, that I didn’t think that he ought to make that speech and he says, "Why?"

And I says, "Well, this speech has you up there on the radio presenting yourself as an indispensable man and I just don’t think that’s in keeping with your character and I don’t think it comes natural and I don’t think it would go over well and I don’t think you ought to do it."

Well, I had hit a responsive chord, that’s what the speech did and he didn’t feel that way, ever. He said, "Well, I’ll come in and we’ll talk about it." And so he came down to the Muehlebach Hotel and we started out there--well, we talked about it and he decided not to use that one and so we started out to prepare something for him to use and he went off, this was one of the few times that I know of when he did this, he went off and took his pen and

[171]

started writing in longhand. And Charlie Ross went off and he started writing and I went off somewhere and I started writing and we all wrote for awhile and we got together and put it together the way the President said put it together, and that was the speech he used that same night. I think this must have been Monday when we were doing this work in the Muehlebach Hotel, it may have been Sunday.

The only specific thing I remember about that talk, you know it’s customary on occasions like that, or it was in those days when things were a little more gentle and polite, to urge folks to go out and say I don’t care which way you vote, but go out and vote. I said, "Now, let’s don’t say that, you know it’s not true. You want them to go out and vote for you so don’t say you don’t care which way they vote."

Well, this draft was completed at any rate so that I could leave by Monday afternoon

[172]

and I then started out to fly home so I’d be at home to vote. I got grounded in Chicago. The airplane, in the first place, had lost an engine out of Kansas City about an hour and turned around and went back to Kansas City and we got in another plane and started over and got to Chicago late, and the weather was so bad we never could get out of Chicago. I spent the night there and came home the next day. Got home in the afternoon and went and voted and then I went to dinner with my family at home and went to sleep at the dinner table and so they put me in bed and I spent the night at home asleep and I did not know how the election came out until the next morning.

HESS: Were you surprised?

MURPHY: Well, more or less. I remember that on the

[173]

trip from Chicago to Washington on election day I sat on the plane with a man who was a stranger and we talked about the election. I remember what I said to him there about the outcome. I said I didn’t know how it was going to come out. That I really thought it was just as close as a question could be and I had thought, oh, a couple of weeks before that President Truman’s chances were not very good. But then in the last ten days, I had been on that train with the President and I had seen the way people were responding to him and since I had seen that why I just thought he might make it. That’s what I said then and I guess that’s the way I felt.

HESS: Do you recall who wrote the President’s speech for Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis?

MURPHY: Well, yes. I remember about that. We had a prepared draft of a speech which we--I think

[174]

I may have covered this with Charles Morrissey. I think I read it somewhere, but at any rate, I don’t remember where this first draft came from but it was not very good and when the President saw it why he couldn’t see anything worth saving and so he said, "Well, don’t worry about it." But we went off and prepared a completely new draft on it and the second one was a pretty good speech as I remember. I don’t remember what it was about but it was a pretty good speech and I think he did approve that draft and, as I recall, it was then mimeographed and released to the press as his prepared text. But then after that, he was on the train, and I saw him a time or two. He was sitting there with his notebook on his lap and he was making notes and he sat there and made, I’m pretty sure, an outline in longhand of a speech. And I was sitting behind him when

[175]

he made the speech in Kiel Auditorium and he didn’t look at a note. He just didn’t. The speech he delivered was, we would say, was a stem-winder, and that crowd went crazy and they were just about climbing the wall.

HESS: Any other memories of ’48?

MURPHY: Oh, I’m sure I have a lot of them but none that occurs to me, none that occurs to me right now.

HESS: What about 1950, the President took a trip in May of 1950.

MURPHY: He went out and dedicated Grand Coulee Dam again.

HESS: Again, that’s right. Why was it necessary to go out and dedicate a dam again?

MURPHY: I don’t know. In my part of the shop we

[176]

did not have very much to do with making decisions about when the President was going where and the trips he was to make. I don’t have any recollection of why he decided to make that trip.

HESS: Did you go with him on that trip?

MURPHY: Yes sir. Yes sir.

HESS: What do you recall about it? Anything in particular?

MURPHY: Well, so far as my part of the staff operation is concerned that probably was the smoothest one that we ever had. I not only went, but took along Dave Lloyd and Dave Bell and, I guess, Ken Hechler.

It was not a very long trip, maybe ten days and the President may have made six or eight consequential speeches. And we had some

[177]

advanced notice of it and we had all had some experience by that time so we did a lot of work before we left. Then we took our material along with us and we went to work on the train in order to keep up with things as they went along. We had, I think, we had a draft ready on time and ahead of time for the President in every town. We had an opportunity to do a little research about all the places he was going to stop.

There was some girl reporter on the train, wrote for the Washington Times Herald as I recall, wrote a column that amused and pleased us a great deal I might say. She spoke about the effectiveness of the staff work and said that if that train stopped at a little town out there somewhere for five minutes, and if they had crooked cue sticks in the pool hall, that we would know about it and the President would say something

[178]

about it.

One of the highlights of that trip, as I recall, he spoke in North Dakota on the way back, I’m not sure what town, I think Bismarck. But he spoke in the open square outdoors in the late afternoon and it was pretty cool and he spoke about the International Wheat Agreement. And he had that crowd cheering for the International Wheat Agreement. I thought that was sort of a high-water mark when you get a crowd outdoors to cheer for the International Wheat Agreement, that’s doing very well.

HESS: Why was that speech given in that place?

MURPHY: Oh, I would suppose it’s because wheat is relatively of great importance in North Dakota.

HESS: Did you think that the people that would turn out for a speech like that should understand the

[179]

economics of an international agreement?

MURPHY: Yes. I’m sure he did. Especially if they are put in clear and simple sentences as he liked to have things put. And I haven’t looked at that speech for a long time but I would hazard to guess that most anybody out in North Dakota would understand it if they read it.

HESS: Do you recall if Oscar Chapman went along as an advance man for that trip?

MURPHY: I don’t. If he served as an advance man--and it’s quite likely he did--he wouldn’t go along, he would go ahead. Now it is quite likely that he did go ahead as an advance man. He did a lot of that and he did it very well.

HESS: What are the duties of an advance man?

MURPHY: Well, I’m not real sure because I have never

[180]

been an advance man. But he makes the arrangements, where the speech is to be made, and what local people are to be responsible for the President and his party, and so on. I said I never had that job. But after the President left the White House, I did travel with him right much in the campaigns of 1954 and 1956 and even more in 1958 and I did make the arrangements for those trips. Now, we didn’t have as much staff and I did my advance work by telephone. I didn’t go ahead of him but I made the engagements and the arrangements for people to meet us and look after us when we got there. I made his reservations and travel arrangements and helped him with whatever material he had for speeches and so on. Most of the time there were just the two of us, Bill Hillman traveled with us a good deal.

HESS: Both years, ‘56 and ‘58?

[181]

MURPHY: ‘56 I guess. Dave Lloyd traveled with us right much in ‘58 and we had a good time.

HESS: Anyone else?

MURPHY: No, that was pretty much it, Dave Lloyd and Bill Hillman and I. Then in 1960 I did not travel any. I think Dave Lloyd did, I think Dave Lloyd traveled in 1960. But we had a lot of fun in ‘58, the President, Dave Lloyd and I. At one point in 19…

HESS: Where did you go?

MURPHY: We went all over the country. We went to the east coast, to the west coast.

HESS: Did you write all the speeches or did you help out on them?

MURPHY: Well, Dave Lloyd was involved and he did some and I did some. If you’ve ever read the "pink glasses speech" or the "rose colored glasses"

[182]

speech, if you haven’t you should. This is the speech that the President used quite a lot in that campaign. He liked it so much he used it over and over again. Dave Lloyd wrote that "rose colored glasses" business and it was about Eisenhower’s administration looking at the world through "rose colored glasses" and so the President got himself a pair of tinted glasses that he would--this was, you know--this was a warm up, and he would do this with motions and he delivered it once, I think the first time was at a big meeting in a restaurant outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and after that he used that "rose colored glasses" speech a good many times.

We started out the first trip in 1958 with just the President and me. We went in a National Guard airplane provided by the Governor of Iowa, I think, and we started off in that direction up through Iowa and North Dakota. I had made the

[183]

arrangements for the President’s campaigning during that fall and had done this as a representative of the Democratic National Committee. I was retained by the national committee at that time as a special counsel and an adviser to the advisory council, and President Truman always looked to the Democratic National Committee for telling him what was his part to do in the campaign. He would do what the national committee told him to do. And so, the national committee wanted him to speak in 1958 as much as he would and so I got the assignment of making the arrangements and worked out quite a comprehensive schedule that lasted, I think, about six weeks. The general pattern was that we would try to come back to Kansas City for two or three days each week and travel out of there by plane. We went up to North Dakota. I remember being out in the State of Washington, spoke out in

[184]

Seattle. He went out to Fort Lewis--went to Fort Lewis where his cousin Louis Truman was then the commanding general and Louis Truman’s mother-in-law was with them there. We got there late in the afternoon and General Truman had a little reception for him and the General’s mother-in-law was there. She was about the same age as President Truman and they both played the piano, so they played a duet, the President and General Truman’s mother-in-law. It’s a beautiful place and they had a military formation retreat, I guess it was, for President Truman at the end of the day. Then we went on down into California.

I had made the arrangements for these 1958 trips from here. I went out to Independence two or three days before we were supposed to start out on the first trip. When I got out there, President Truman’s health did not seem to be as good as it had been. Gene Bailey, who was

[185]

working for him at that time, was quite worried and afraid for him to start out on this rather strenuous campaign trip. I think Mrs. Truman was pretty worried. And I got frightened and so I sweated for a day or two about whether his health was such that I just had to call the whole thing off, but we didn’t. And we started on this trip, I remember this first plane we were on, it was, I don’t think it was a DC-3 but it was about comparable to a DC-3. It was a cold day and the President got in and sat down in a seat fairly close inside the door. He had on his topcoat and as we flew along for awhile he turned up his collar like he was shivering. I was in another part of the plane and I went back to see what was the matter. Why, I found out there was a crack in the door and a lot of cold wind coming through. So I got him to move up in the front of the plane,

[186]

and we got along all right after that. Well, as we got out on the road and he began to see people and the blood started circulating, why, he got chipper and spry and he improved steadily. At the end of the six weeks he was about ten years younger and I was about ten years older than when we started out.

Part of my undertaking, plan of operations, was to make him take a nap every afternoon. And this was sometimes rather difficult. So I got him in the hotel up there in North Dakota and he sent his suit out to the cleaners after lunch and when his suit got back I got it and I wouldn’t let him have it. I kept it in my room. I finally took his suit around to him. He was wandering around, he was all dressed except for his suit, in his shirttail.

HESS: That’s one way to keep him in his room.

[187]

MURPHY: Yes sir, it is. Well, I actually saw more of him on those trips in many ways than I did when I was working for him in the White House and it was a wonderful experience. He is just grand company all the time.

HESS: Where did you go on the 1958 trip?

MURPHY: Well, this was ‘58.

HESS: That was ‘58?

MURPHY: This was ‘58 that I was--I’m sure that was ‘58 and, of course, that was not a presidential election year and he was campaigning particularly for Democratic candidates for the Senate and whenever it would fit in, for the House. And a good many Democrats were elected to the Senate that year. It was a good year for the Democrats and most of them that were elected, the new men, were those for whom he

[188]

had campaigned. And I think most of them gave him a considerable amount of credit and were quite grateful to him.

HESS: Who were a few of those?

MURPHY: Well, Phil [Philip A.] Hart was one. Vance Hartke was one. I remember being out there for Vance Hartke in Indiana. I should remember some of the others, I’m afraid I don’t. But there must have been six or eight of them at least. And so the President was very much interested in the outcome of this election and when they were sworn in as members of the Senate, he came to the swearing-in ceremony. But wouldn’t, as I remember, would not go up on the floor and sat up in the gallery when these Senators were sworn in at the beginning of 1959.

HESS: In the 1950 campaign, President Truman took

[189]

a very small part. Now that was an off-year election, of course. Do you know why the decision was made, or was there a decision made, to hold down his participation in 1950? The only speech that he actually made was one also in the Kiel Auditorium where he always sort of felt at home. He always liked it down there in St. Louis. But that was the only major speech.

MURPHY: I do not have any recollection of any decision about that on policy. About anything that I would say now would just be speculative. I do know, of course, that that was the fall when the Korean war was a very great concern, a very great problem and at the time of the election things in Korea were not going well. The President had been out there to see General MacArthur, maybe in September?

[190]

HESS: October 15th.

MURPHY: October 15th. At that time General MacArthur told him that the war was over and that we had won and that by Christmas he would be able to send a division of the troops from Korea to Europe, and they decided which division to send and General .

HESS: Is this something that President Truman told you that the General said or were you present at the time that the General said that?

MURPHY: I was present, yes sir.

HESS: Tell me about that. I knew that you went to Wake Island on that trip. Tell me about that trip.

MURPHY: Well, the idea that this--I don’t know whether this should be closed or not. The

[191]

idea for that trip originated with George Elsey.

HESS: Is that right?

MURPHY: I’m pretty sure about this. And George Elsey was still on the White House staff. He was an administrative assistant to the President at that time, I guess. Clifford had left. And so, he talked to some of the rest of us on the staff about it, we in turn talked to President Truman about it. I don’t think he ever was enthusiastic about it. But we persuaded him to go. And I don’t think he ever did really care to go, to tell you the truth. But he went, and George Elsey went out as the advance man to Hawaii. George had been a lieutenant in the Navy in World War II and when he went out to Hawaii he was dealing with naval people from Admiral [Arthur W.] Radford on down and he would tell them what they had to do. I think he

[192]

got quite a kick out of it. They did it up right.

Well, the idea was that President Truman would go out and confer with General MacArthur about the progress of the war and that he would meet him between here and Korea so that General MacArthur would not have to be away from the troops in the field for long. I suppose I would have to say candidly, that among us on the White House staff, at any rate, was the feeling that this would be good public relations, and that, I think, is probably why the President had some distaste for it. He just had a distaste for public relations stunts. He really did.

HESS: Do you think so?

MURPHY: Yes. Unless it was absolutely and completely a by-product of doing what he ought to do anyway.

HESS: Was it discussed asking the General to come

[193]

all the way back to Washington? Was that discussed? Or to the United States, let’s say, to the Continental United States?

MURPHY: Well, it was not discussed seriously by those of us who were promoting this because that wasn’t what we all wanted. Well, the arrangements were made. We left here in two planes. The President went on his plane. They left a day earlier than the other and he spent the night at home in Missouri. Then the second plane left here and we joined forces. I was on the second plane. We joined forces at an airfield in California, Edwards Air Force Base I guess, I don’t remember which one, and flew from there to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Wake Island and then had the conference and back to Hawaii and back to California and on the way back he spoke in California.

Admiral Radford was the host to the President and his party in Pearl Harbor. Shortly before

[194]

that, he had been on duty here in Washington and something happened (I actually don’t remember what it was), that President Truman did not think was just right and it--I don’t remember whether it was connected with the "Admiral’s revolt" or what, but it was not terribly serious but on the other hand the President didn’t think it was good, so he arranged to have Admiral Radford transferred to Hawaii where he was commander in chief of the Pacific. But he was our host out there and a very gracious host. The President stayed in his quarters. When we got that far, someone came to me and said Admiral Radford had not been invited to go the rest of the way to Wake Island and he was a little bit hurt about it and would like to go. I went to the President and asked him if Admiral Radford could go and he said, "Yes, it’ll be all right if he’ll go on the other plane." So Admiral Radford went on the

[195]

other plane. I was on the other plane, General Bradley was on the other plane, Dean Rusk was on the other plane, it was a very respectable crowd you understand. Averell Harriman was there. Averell knew General MacArthur.

We got to Wake Island before day. I think we got there, no, I’m not sure whether MacArthur got there first or not. I know he left first, I know MacArthur left first. But at any rate, they met at the airport where they landed before daylight and then they went off for a private conference, I think, before the general conference. Then quite a few motor vehicles that were on Wake Island took this party around to the building where the meeting was held. Some of the senior members of the President’s group participated in the discussion. This would have included Averell Harriman, I expect, and may be General Bradley. General MacArthur did

[196]

most of the talking. It was still very early in the morning. I think it was still before daylight, I’m not sure, but it was still quite early. The President had something of an agenda, I don’t remember just now what it was on it exactly, and General MacArthur talked about the course of the war. That was the first time I had ever seen him. He spoke very persuasively, very plainly, very understandably. He just laid it out cold. And when he explained why and how we had won the war and why it was impossible for the other side to do anything about it, why, I understood precisely what he was saying, and I was convinced completely. And the question came up about the possible intervention by the Chinese and he said they could not intervene effectively. Not that they would not, but that they could not, as a military matter. That while they had large numbers of ground troops, they had no air

[197]

support of their own and the ground troops could not operate effectively without air support, while the Russians, even if they came into it, they had air strength, that they couldn’t work closely enough, well enough, with the Chinese ground troops to be effective and if those poor Chinese tried to invade Korea, the part of Korea that we were undertaking to defend, it just made him sick to think of the way that they would be slaughtered and piled up.

In addition to that, I believe it was on this occasion, that he talked about his intelligence sources, and his intelligence operation which was bringing in reports somewhat different from the intelligence reports that the departments were receiving here in Washington and he said that he believed his and not those of the departments. But they did agree, I say agree, he said one of the divisions then in Korea would

[198]

be sent to Europe by Christmas. I think, we’re getting into something now that should be closed, I don’t know. The State Department people on this trip, the group included Philip Jessup, by the way, as well as Dean Rusk. Dean was then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, I think it was. And to their credit, and that of General Bradley, I wish to say they were workers. Whenever there was any work to be done, Dean Rusk and Phil Jessup and General Bradley were ready to go to work. It didn’t make any difference what it was, they didn’t stand on their pride or dignity and hold back. We worked some on the way out on the speech that the President might make on the way back when we got to California, and then we finished that on the way back and he did make a speech in California reporting on the trip.

HESS: At the Opera House in San Francisco?

[199]

MURPHY: I think so. The State Department group had with them a secretary for stenographic purposes and when we went to the general conference with General MacArthur, they took her along and put her in an adjoining room. This was a tropical climate and prevailing winds, trade winds--I don’t know if they were trade winds, but prevailing winds, were blowing from this larger room in which this conference was being held toward the room in which this girl was waiting to be available if we needed any stenographic services. The door was open, louvered type door, so she could hear everything that was said in the general conference and she sat there and made shorthand notes about what was said and so we had pretty nearly a complete stenographic record of what was said in that conference.

HESS: Do you think General MacArthur knew that she

[200]

was there?

MURPHY: No. He did not. None of us knew that she was there. None of us knew that she was taking notes. But on the way home General Bradley took charge of an operation of preparing a report on the conference, which I suppose was a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Well, at this point we found out that his girl had taken these shorthand notes and so we, I suppose General Bradley made the decision to type them up. We knew exactly what went on and we might as well use them. And those shorthand notes were the basis for, I suppose, the most of that report. Now this report was classified "Top Secret" but there began to come out some reports later on when things were not going so well about how that conference went that were quite inaccurate and at a wide variance with the facts. Well, also a little later than that, the text of this report that was

[201]

then prepared was leaked to the New York Times.

HESS: Anthony Leviero.

MURPHY: Yes. And was published in full in the New York Times.

HESS: Who leaked that?

MURPHY: Well, should I really say?

HESS: Yes.

MURPHY: You’re sure this is going to be closed?

HESS: It’s going to be closed.

MURPHY: Well, George Elsey did it.

HESS: Why did he do that?

MURPHY: And he did it because some of us thought that it should be done. And he did it with the express approval of the President.

HESS: He did?

[202]

MURPHY: He did. And later he got fired. But the President approved it before it was done. I say he got fired, he got transferred. But the President approved that before it was done because when this was published it did raise something of a furor.

HESS: April 21st.

MURPHY: And so then there got to be sort of a question of memory, of accuracy--memory more than accuracy. At this point, I think it was, it came out that this actually was a transcript of what General MacArthur had said and then, bless me, instead of saying General MacArthur is a liar, we all caught hell because we had treated the General badly, taking down what he said. Well, we did come back.

One other little thing about that trip, I was here after the President left. I was

[203]

here for a day and some word came to me that some young Army officer had just come back from a tour as General MacArthur’s personal aide and said that if President Truman would like to do something that would please General MacArthur personally, the thing to do was to take him some Bluin’s candy for Mrs. MacArthur. Mrs. MacArthur was out there in the Far East and she was very fond of this candy that’s made in San Francisco. I didn’t know whether the President wanted to do this or not but I thought I’d do the best I could in making preparations, so I sent someone downtown in Washington to try to get a five pound box of Blum’s candy. They couldn’t find a five-pound box but they came back with five one pound boxes wrapped into a very neat package. So I took them on the plane and I got to Hawaii, I guess, and before I got to Hawaii I was telling this to Averell

[204]

Harriman. Well, Averell says, "This is a good idea but we really ought to have a five pound box." So, when we got into Honolulu he sent somebody downtown and he bought a five-pound box of Blum’s candy. And then I told President Truman about this and so I said, "So you want to give this to General MacArthur?"

"Hmmm, well, I guess so."

So, before we departed, I went and got this five-pound box of candy and stuck it in the President’s hand and he gave it to General MacArthur.

HESS: One question on the George Elsey matter. Why was he transferred after the action that he had taken was approved?

MUPRHY: I don’t know.

HESS: What was President Truman’s attitude in November of 1950 when the Chinese Communists

[205]

did cross the Yalu River? In October the General had told him what the Chinese would not enter and the following month in November the Chinese did. Just what was President Truman’s attitude?

MURPHY: In the first place, I was not intimately acquainted with all that went on at the time and in the second place, why, it’s been so long ago I might not remember precisely as much as I knew at that time and I could not separate out these different periods. But in my mind this whole thing is tied up with General MacArthur’s not following his orders and my recollection, I guess, is that he was ordered to stop at a line south of the Yalu and he did not stop. He crossed the line and after he crossed the line, the Chinese crossed the Yalu and so there would be some basis for thinking that he provoked this Chinese attack. Now, it’s been a long time ago and so I wouldn't rely on my

[206]

recollection very much but this is certainly in my mind that he just plain did not follow orders and I am right much clearer in my recollection that the reason the President removed him from his command eventually was that the President was convinced, and also General Marshall and General Bradley were convinced, that MacArthur had disobeyed orders, just plain disobeyed military orders. They just didn't think that was the way to run an army, even General MacArthur. This is all associated with the Chinese crossing the Yalu. But you'll have to go to some other source than me to get this one really straightened out.

HESS: We've got a little tape left but it's 4:30. Do you want to knock off for the day?

MURPHY: We'd better.

HESS: All right, that's fine.