Charles S. Murphy Oral History Interview, June 24, 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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

[207]

HESS: All right, sir, at the conclusion of our last interview, we were speaking of some of the things that might possibly have held down Mr. Truman’s participation in the campaign of 1950, and we discussed Mr. Truman’s trip to Wake Island. In the month preceding that event, Mr. Truman had replaced Louis Johnson as Secretary of Defense. I don’t want to put words in your mouth and say "This is one of the things that held down his participation in the campaign," unless you would think so. But anyway, what do you recall of the events surrounding the resignation of Louis Johnson?

MURPHY: I don’t recall that it had anything to do, one way or the other, with the President’s participation, or lack of participation in the campaign. It may have had, but I have no recollection of it.

[208]

My recollection is that the President did request the resignation of Louis Johnson and that he reached a decision quite suddenly. I think the problems had been building up for some time, but he eventually decided that he had to ask for his resignation. I think that decision was made rather quickly.

HESS: What were some of the problems that were building up?

MURPHY: I would suppose that I would say that Louis Johnson was erratic and somewhat undependable and unreliable in his activities as Secretary of Defense. He later on had some trouble with a brain tumor, I recall, and whether this had anything to do with it as far back as that, I just don’t know. But my recollection is that the particular thing that actually triggered the President’s request for his

[209]

resignation was something that Louis Johnson said on a trip to New York City. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember it in that context.

HESS: Do you recall if these events took place before or after the invasion of Korea? There was quite a time in there, from the latter part of June until September, from the invasion of South Korea to the time that he resigned, but the events that caused him to resign, did they take place after the invasion of Korea, or before the invasion of Korea?

MURPHY: Well, they may have been spread out, but the President did not reach any decision about asking him to resign until very shortly before the request was made, certainly not until after the invasion of Korea. There had been some difficulties in connection with the Department of

[210]

Defense for which Louis Johnson was not responsible, in my judgment, and this may have had something to do with his resignation. This had to do with the budget for defense. Of course, the defense expenditures had been quite high in World War II and then President Truman was quite successful in getting them down after World War II, and at about the period of which we now speak, 1949 and ‘50, Louis Johnson was Secretary of Defense, and Jim Webb was the Director of the Bureau of the Budget. And Jim Webb got into his head a very firm and fixed notion that all the country could afford to spend on defense was in the order of thirteen or fourteen billion dollars a year. He is a very able advocate, Mr. Webb is, and he persuaded the President of the validity of that view, and so Louis Johnson was operating under instructions to keep the Defense budget down in that range. I think it’s been

[211]

generally felt that Louis Johnson was responsible for that. It turned out to be not a very wise policy, and he is, so to speak, he is blamed for it; he is the man who really used the meat ax on the Defense Department in terms of appropriations and things you can do with appropriations. It has always been my feeling that he was not nearly so much responsible for that as Jim Webb, and with the President’s approval. I think they told Louis Johnson that he had to keep the budget down.

Of course, when Korea was invaded, it became clear that the defense expenditures had to be sharply increased and I take it by the same token it became clear that it would have been wiser if they had never been cut back. We would have been in better shape, and had a greater degree of preparedness. I don’t really think that this was the reason that the President asked Louis Johnson for his resignation.

[212]

I’m quite sure in my own mind that it’s not, but the reason was that along about that time, Louis Johnson just got so he was not dependable in the sense that the President couldn’t depend on what Johnson told him, for one thing, and also he couldn’t depend on him to carry out his instructions on the other hand. And so he asked for his resignation, I’m sure, with the greatest reluctance, but felt that he had no choice about this. He asked for MacArthur’s resignation with reluctance too, but it was not the same kind of personal reluctance that he felt, because he had a very warm and friendly personal feeling for Louis Johnson, and always did.

HESS: How did Mr. Johnson get along with other members of the Cabinet?

MURPHY: I don’t have any clear recollection of that, except the Secretary of State. My impression is that generally speaking, he did not get along

[213]

well with other members of the Cabinet. I have a pretty definite recollection that he got along very poorly with the Secretary of State, who was Dean Acheson at that time.

HESS: What was the main area of their disagreement?

MURPHY: I suppose it was a policy disagreement. The thing that I remember is hearing Johnson say, and hearing reports from other people that he had said some very uncomplimentary things about the Secretary of State. I heard about this--some of it firsthand, but I heard most of it secondhand--but reliably enough that I’m sure it was true that he was, what would you say, trying to undermine the Secretary of State. There was, I think, a sharp disagreement between them about their policy methods and perhaps a little personality clash along with it.

HESS: Did Mr. Johnson tend to try to get into other

[214]

people’s area of affairs, and concerns, step a little out of his own bounds, in other words?

MURPHY: I don’t have any definite recollection of that. My impression is "yes," especially with the Secretary of State. My memory is not definite about it.

HESS: He had served from March 23, 1949. Why had he been selected as the Secretary of Defense?

MURPHY: I don’t know. He had been Secretary of War in some earlier period, as I recall, before the Defense Department was established. He was a very able man. He had an excellent reputation as a lawyer, and he was a personal friend of President Truman’s. And certainly one of the things that entered into the picture was the fact that he had served as treasurer, I guess, at least as the principal fund raiser, for the Democratic Party in the presidential campaign of 1948. He did a magnificent job, and President

[215]

Truman was very grateful for it, as he should have been, and I was very grateful for it too.

HESS: Why was General Marshall chosen as his replacement?

MURPHY: Well, in the first place, President Truman had the very greatest respect and admiration for General Marshall, just all the way around. He thought General Marshall could do anything and do it well, except make mistakes. I’m not sure he thought General Marshall could make a mistake. And he needed a new Secretary of Defense, and he needed one in a hurry and he needed one that he could rely on, and one that was not subject to criticism. General Marshall was that kind of a man, and he asked him to take the job. In many respects it was somewhat similar to the situation he had had earlier when Jimmy Byrnes resigned as Secretary of

[216]

State and he asked General Marshall to take that job.

HESS: He was Secretary of Defense for just about one year, from September of that year, until September of the next. How successful was he in running the Defense Department, in your opinion?

MURPHY: I’m not sure that I would be qualified to have a good judgment about that, but such as I have, I’d say that he was quite successful. He was greatly respected, not only by President Truman, but by everyone else, and he was a very able man and a very wise man. I would say that he had also, he had a very able Deputy Secretary, who I’m sure, contributed to the good running of the Department of Defense during General Marshall’s term as Secretary of Defense. That, of course, was Bob Lovett, who

[217]

succeeded him as Secretary of Defense. Lovett is a very able man.

HESS: On the subject of the invasion of Korea. Korea was invaded on June 25th of 1950, that was on June 24th, Saturday, eastern standard time, and on that day the President dedicated Friendship Airport over here in Baltimore and then flew on to Kansas City. What do you recall of the events of those times?

MURPHY: Not very much. I do remember working on the speech that he made at Friendship Airport. I was not with him at Friendship Airport, and so far as I know, the invasion of Korea came without warning to him, without forewarning.

HESS: How long was it after he received the news that you saw him?

MURPHY: Oh, it must have been two or three days.

[218]

I did not attend the meeting that was held at Blair House when he first got back, and most of what I ever knew about that meeting and the things that happened from the time he got the word until some of the first key decisions were made, were just things that I heard later on.

HESS: Was the decision to intervene in the Korean situation cleared with the congressional leaders before the announcement was made?

MURPHY: I do not know whether it was or not.

HESS: Would that have been the thing to do?

MURPHY: Well, you put the question, "Was it cleared with them," my own feeling is that perhaps it would have been better not to clear it with them, to inform them as politely as possible, but to tell them and not ask them. I remember one occasion when the President decided it was

[219]

necessary to call a special session of Congress, it may have been in the fall of 1950, it was in the fall of some year when I worked for him, and I recommended to him that he call the congressional leaders in before he made the public announcement to tell them what he planned to do and why. And they did come in to meet with him in the Cabinet Room, and in spite of the discussion they objected to having the special session called. And as a result of that, he decided not to call the special session. But the situation was the kind that made the session inevitable. It had to be called. And after a few weeks this became clear and he had to call it, but this was an indication of the risk that you run when you undertake to clear things with congressional leaders. And the situation in Korea at that time, I suppose, was one that did not lend itself very well to a lengthy debate.

HESS: From the standpoint of the world situation

[220]

as it exists today, how would you evaluate the success or failure of our intervention in Korea?

MURPHY: I don’t think you can say that a thing of that kind is either completely a success or completely a failure. It seems to me that probably the world is much better, and it’s been much better for the past twenty years, because that was done than otherwise. Actually we are in grave danger now of losing some of the advantages that were gained at that time, and losing some of the principles that were established at that time with respect to maintenance of a peaceful and orderly world. But it has been almost twenty years, and we’ve stayed alive for twenty years, and this is something. I’m confident that if President Truman had the same decisions to make again that he would decide to make the same decisions again the same way, and I would

[221]

certainly believe that that was right.

HESS: One of the events that may have held down Mr. Truman’s participation in the campaign of ‘50, was the assassination attempt on his life on November 1 of that year. What do you recall of the events of that day?

MURPHY: I remember something about that. I don’t think that had anything to do with his participation or lack of participation in the campaign. The thing that I do remember is that early in the afternoon, I was in the Cabinet Room with a number of other members of the White House staff working on a speech for the President, and one of the messengers, a man named Jackson, came in greatly agitated and shaken and said, "Somebody just shot at the President." And so I asked if they hit him and he said, "No." So said to my fellows, "Well, I guess we better get back to work." Well, we did

[222]

ask Jackson a little more about it. I don’t think he had the complete story at that time, because it had just happened across the street, but he told us what he knew about it. We did go back to work on the speech. The President was making another speech that same afternoon, as I recall it, I think in the amphitheater over at Arlington. He went on and made his speech and when he got back from over there he came and joined us in the Cabinet Room and sat down and I think that was the first time he had had a chance really to think about what had happened.

HESS: What did he say then?

MURPHY: I don’t remember precisely what he said, but he talked about it normally as a person would. I think at that time there was some reaction to this, a kind of nervous, emotional reaction. I think his principal feeling at the time was one of sadness about the man who

[223]

did get shot, [Leslie] Coffelt I believe his name was.

HESS: That’s right.

MURPHY: President Truman was not then, or ever, when I was with him, particularly nervous about his personal safety or what might happen to him, in any physical way. The calmest, most matter-of-fact man about that I ever saw.

HESS: After this time, did you ever hear him say anything about that attempt, or assassination attempts in general?

MURPHY: I’m sure I did. He would mention this from time to time conversationally just as anyone else would. There was no particular bugaboo about it as far as he was concerned, but over the course of the years there were bound to be times when something would bring it to mind and he would talk about it.

[224]

HESS: I have a couple of questions about one of the men who served on the White House staff, Mr. Stephen J. Spingarn. What do you recall of the role played by Mr. Spingarn in the drafting of the President’s ten point civil rights message of February 2, 1948, and the related Executive orders?

MURPHY: Well, my best recollection would be that he did not work on that civil rights message. I have not checked that anywhere. The civil right message was based on a report of a special commission that had been appointed by the President. The name of the report was To Secure These Rights, and the report was turned over to the White House staff including me, and it was studied and analyzed and we talked to the President about it. And eventually he did decide to send a message to Congress adopting, recommending, supporting most of the recommendations

[225]

of the Commission, not all of them but most of them. I worked on that message quite a lot. Steve Spingarn worked at the White House later and worked on civil rights matters a good deal, but the best of my recollection is that he had not started working with us on civil rights matters as early as that. I may be wrong.

HESS: I have a couple of questions on that report:

What was the President’s attitude when he received that report? Did he approve most of the measures, part of the measures, was he enthusiastic about the report, or what was his attitude?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t think you should speak of his attitude when he first received it. His attitude when he first received it was, I suppose and should have been, "I’ll study it." And he did study it and he had his staff study

[226]

it. As a result of that, he sent this message to Congress. As I say, that message supported almost all, but not all of the recommendations of that Commission. To that extent I take it that he thought their recommendations were right. I think this was a case where the President was particularly motivated by his sense of doing what was right, whether he was enthusiastic about this, I’m not sure, but I think he felt that the report of the Commission made the case for these recommendations. Some of them were recommendations that I’m sure he had views on before and agreed with before. I’m quite sure that other matters, that various other decisions were strongly influenced by what this Commission had found and what it had concluded.

HESS: On the subject of civil rights, there are some historians who say that Mr. Truman’s pronouncements on civil rights were taken from

[227]

the standpoint of political expediency. What would you say about that?

MURPHY: I would say that is just as wrong as it can be.

HESS: What, in your opinion, are Mr. Truman’s views on civil rights and the rights of the Negro, the rights of the minority?

MURPHY: Well, in my opinion, his views are what he said his views were. I think that he meant every word he said. I think he did his best at that time to say when he meant, and whatever help I could give him, why, I’m sure I gave him at that time. I think it was a sort of misleading and non-productive work of supererogation for me to go back now and try to recast what he said at that time. I think he said it then the best he could and I helped him the best I could to say it. I think he was

[228]

motivated by a profound sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, and not by politics.

HESS: What in Mr. Truman’s nature or his makeup do you think would lead him to have these views, a man from a small, almost southern town in Missouri, to have strong civil rights views? If that’s clear.

MURPHY: I don’t know what in his makeup led him to have these views. I do know that when he was President, and all the rest of the time as far as I know, but I know from firsthand experience during the time when he was President, he did what he thought was right, not just about this, but about everything. It seemed to me that he was just incapable of doing anything else. Why he thought these were the right views as to civil rights matters, I don’t suppose I could say. All I can say is that I’m sure this is what he thought was right. His views on this subject, as you may know,

[229]

did not agree with those of other members of his family, including his mother, as I recall. He would laugh and joke about that occasionally, and I don’t really think he discussed this with them a great deal. I think he did this knowing, in the full knowledge, that it was not, what would you say, altogether consistent with a part of his background.

HESS: The Fair Employment Practices Commission was never established, as I understand it, in the Truman administration. Is that correct, they couldn’t get that underway?

MURPHY: That is my best recollection, as well as I remember. I haven’t been into this in a long time. That Commission was first established by President Roosevelt by Executive order.

HESS: During the war.

MURPHY: The Congress for a good many years undertook

[230]

to disband it, and finally got into that position. I think it was an amendment authorized by Senator Russell on some appropriation bill, so the FEPC was disbanded. After that, President Truman did try to get legislation passed that would authorize it, but never was successful in getting the legislation passed. That was one of the points in his civil rights program, as I recall.

HESS: What were some of the difficulties in getting that passed, do you recall?

MURPHY: Not particularly, no. I’m sure that they were the kind that everyone’s generally aware of who has followed the subject. I don’t have any special recollection of that. After the 1948 election, it must have been in 1949, maybe 1950, President Truman did have us on his staff prepare an omnibus civil rights bill, and Steve

[231]

Spingarn did work on that. By that time he was at the White House, on the White House staff, and I think did most of the drafting on that bill and some of the legislative liaison work, which as I recall was not very successful. As a matter of fact, my recollection is that he never found anyone who would introduce the bill.

HESS: Why was Mr. Spingarn transferred from the Treasury Department to the White House staff?

MURPHY: I asked to have it done. I had known him for some time and had worked with him and had a good deal of respect for his ability and energy. I was on the White House staff, and I was assigned to some project, I can’t remember what it was, but it involved working with a group of representatives from the different agencies and departments in the Government. And Spingarn was sent there to represent the Treasury. He was at that time an

[232]

Assistant General Counsel in the Treasury Department. This may have been the Government Internal Security Program, Employee Loyalty Program.

HESS: The President’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty, perhaps.

MURPHY: For some reason, I remember, I think I do, attending a meeting over in what was then the RFC Building, I guess. At any rate, Spingarn was there and he told me a number of things. First of all, he took a very active part in the meeting, and he told me a number of things that he thought would be good for the President to do and the President’s White House staff to do, and he seemed to me to have good ideas and he was bubbling over and bursting with energy, and I thought it would be helpful to get him on the White House staff. So I asked him if he would be interested in coming and he said

[233]

he would and so I then undertook to get him transferred and I believe that was done, and he came in.

HESS: How effective was he as a White House staff member?

MURPHY: Oh, I think he was very good. He is a prodigious worker, and he is a very able fellow. He’s kind of an overpowering young man. But he did a lot of work, and a lot of good work. He did help some in the 1948 campaign. The President made a speech in Oklahoma City, and I expect it was on the subject of Government employee loyalty programs. Spingarn was the principal draftsman of that speech, and it was too long.

I don’t know if I have ever been into the speechwriting operation with you in 1948. I was running an office here in Washington and our bunch would send out a draft of a major

[234]

speech every day, and we never got a head start. We would send out a speech at night. It would go by courier plane to the President’s train, and get there before day the next morning, and that was the speech that he was to use that night, and he and Clifford would work on it as they had opportunity during the day. Then it would be typed and he would use it. We were about on that timetable when this speech was sent out for Oklahoma City, and it was too long and it needed to be cut. I never could get Spingarn to quiet down long enough for me to look at it and read it and pick out the parts that had to be cut, so I had to send it out too long. Then I took it home and I picked out the parts that had to be cut and called someone who was with the President on the train, after they got the speech. He had a copy of the speech at the other end of the phone, and I had a copy at this end, and

[235]

I told him what to cut out.

HESS: That was the speech on the accusation about Communists in Government, isn’t that correct?

MURPHY: That sounds right.

HESS: Why was he placed on the Federal Trade Commission, speaking of Mr. Spingarn?

MURPHY: Well, the President decided that he wanted to move him from the White House staff.

HESS: Why?

MURPHY: I think it was just this sort of overpowering personality problem. Steve just couldn’t keep quiet. It was nothing deeper than that.

HESS: On the subject of congressional and legislative matters, you’ve discussed some of these previously with Mr. Morrissey, but there are a

[236]

few matters on congressional liaison that I’d like to bring up. How did the President conduct his relationship with the "Big Four" congressional leaders?

MURPHY: Well, he invited them down to meet with him regularly each week, and they met almost always with no one else present, just the President and the congressional leaders; and what they talked about I don’t know, because I was not there. I think they reviewed the legislative program and the legislative situation in general, and they told the President what they saw fit about the situation in the Congress, and he talked with them about his program, and so far as I know, no one ever made any records of those meetings. I think I attended one or two on particular subjects.

HESS: What was discussed in those?

[237]

MURPHY: My memory is not clear. Someone was in the other day talking to me about the Aid to Education Bill, and I think I may have attended one meeting where that was the principal subject of conversation. As well as I could reconstruct this kind of thing for memory, I would have waited out in the reception room through a good part of the meeting, and then I would have been invited in for that particular item. But the President, I think, quite purposefully decided that he wanted to conduct these meetings by himself, and did not want staff there.

HESS: Did you participate in the drafting of bills you sent to Congress and analyzing of legislation to be sent to the President for his signature?

MURPHY: I did. During the three years that I was Administrative Assistant to the President, I suppose this was the major part of my work.

[238]

Then after I became Special Counsel, I continued to be responsible for the staff work in this field, and I did some of it myself, and then supervised the other members of the staff.

HESS: How is that done?

MURPHY: How is what done?

HESS: The analyzing of legislative policies, and who worked on these matters, and when did the President participate in the discussions .

MURPHY: Well, it’s done in different ways. I suppose that a sensible starting point is with the beginning of the President’s legislative program and recommendations for a year. This begins the year before in the departments and agencies, and a part of their regular function is to recommend to the President legislation which they feel he should recommend to Congress.

[239]

They submit this to the Bureau of the Budget along with the legislative recommendations which they, the departments and agencies, feel they should transmit directly to the Congress. The general dividing line is based on the importance of the legislation. If it’s a major policy matter, why, the general rule is to ask the President to adopt it as part of his program and recommend it to the Congress. If it’s a routine housekeeping matter, why then the agencies and departments send the recommendations directly to the Congress. Departmental recommendations are cleared and coordinated through the Legislative Reference Division in the Bureau of the Budget.

When the President makes recommendations to the Congress, he sometimes, but not always, accompanies these recommendations with drafts of legislation that would carry them out.

[240]

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, this was rather a sensitive point in the relationships between the Congress and the President, because to send up actual drafts of legislation was sometimes thought to be an undue effort to interfere with the prerogatives of the Congress, to dictate to the Congress. That thought has pretty well disappeared from the scene these days, I guess, and if the President doesn’t prepare, and if the Administration doesn’t prepare drafts of legislation the general feeling is that it is not living up to its Constitutional responsibilities. But it was not always like that. But if the President were going to recommend legislation, if it were a matter which fell within the field of activity of one of the agencies or departments, they had the primary responsibility for preparing the drafts. And the draft legislation will be submitted to the Bureau of the Budget for

[241]

clearance, and to make sure it conformed to and was in accord with the President’s program in it’s specifics, as well as generally. If the matter related to a particularly important policy question, or a novel policy question, why then this was likely to be checked with me and in turn I was likely to check it with the President.

The President relied on me, I think, a great deal for the technical language and the bills, that is for the language of the bills themselves, to see that his policies were properly reflected in the legislative language. This was the kind of work in which he had first gotten to know me. I was in the Legislative Counsel’s office at the Senate for twelve years, and this was the work I did, drafting legislation and trying to make sure that the provisions in the legislation reflected the policies of the Senators and Senate Committees, what they said they wanted

[242]

included.

HESS: Did anyone on your staff assist you with that, or did you do most of that yourself, the actual drafting?

MURPHY: Well, I think I would distinguish some between the first three years when I was Administrative Assistant, and the last three years when I was Special Counsel. In both periods, the bulk of the work was done by the Bureau of the Budget, so when you got to the White House, even at the staff level, you were sort of dealing with--not just the tip of the iceberg--but at least a relatively few major policy questions and not very much in terms of language. Such work as was done on the White House staff in terms of language during the first three years when I was Administrative Assistant, I did most of it myself. During the latter period, I had some help: Steve Spingarn helped

[243]

me in this connection, and after Steve Spingarn went to the Federal Trade Commission, Donald Hansen came over and did some of this kind of work. He also came from the Treasury Department. One of the first assignments that I got from the President when I went to the White House right away in the spring of 1947 was to work on draft legislation that set up the Department of Defense, the unification. There was a drafting team at work on that legislation made up of an admiral, a general, and me. For about two or three weeks we worked on that full-time.

HESS: Who were they, do you recall their names?

MURPHY: It will take me a minute. The General was an Air Force general who at that time was quite young, and he was later Eisenhower’s successor as commander in chief of SHAEF in Europe.

HESS: Norstad?

[244]

MURPHY: [General Lauris] Norstad. And the Admiral was a man who later was Chief of Naval Operations and died while he was Chief of Naval Operations, and died in Spain. He died when he was in Spain and he was Chief of Naval Operations at the time. [Admiral Forrest P. Sherman]

HESS: How closely did President Truman watch these matters when they were in this form, when they were in the bill drafting stage, and checking what was coming in from the departments?

MURPHY: He left that pretty much up to me to bring matters to him when they should be brought to him.

HESS: When should they be brought to him?

MURPHY: I’m not sure that anybody can have a cut and dried answer to that, but I can tell you about a rule of thumb that I developed when I

[245]

was working in the Legislative Counsel’s office. They had very few operating rules up there, but one of the rules was that as draftsmen we did not get into policy questions, we just dealt with technical matters. And for years I had a great deal of trouble distinguishing one from the other, and finally I discovered that if it’s controversial, it’s a policy matter, and if it’s not controversial, it’s technical. This worked just about a hundred percent of the time. There were a good many cases up there when the Senate Committees would have only general ideas as to what they wanted, and there were new matters, interest groups hadn’t had a chance to choose up sides, they hadn’t become controversial, and the committees just turned them over to the draftsmen to go out and do the best you can with them. I’ve written bills in that situation establishing

[246]

programs with very little controversy and come back to extend them a couple of years later when people have found out how it affected different groups, and then just any--the little things were much more controversial the second time around. But I don’t suppose I can give you any precise answer. But the recommendations were eventually sent to Congress with or without draft legislation, and Congress acted and sometimes would pass measures and sometimes would not. And when they did, they would come down for the President’s consideration and determination whether to approve or disapprove or just withhold his approval.

There was a regular pattern that was followed. The enrolled bill, the official bill signed by the Speaker and the President of the Senate, would come to Bill Hopkins, and he would lock that up in the safe. And copies, facsimile copies, would go to the Bureau

[247]

of the Budget when it came, and they were able quite promptly to send back a memorandum giving the views of the department as to whether or not the legislation should be approved by the President, and what he should say if he approved it or disapproved.

The Bureau of the Budget then, in the Legislative Reference Division, would undertake to synthesize these views and prepare a memorandum which summarized the views of the various departments and this usually was accompanied by a recommendation of the Bureau of the Budget itself, taking into account what the departments had recommended. This would come over to Bill Hopkins and if it was relatively minor and entirely non-controversial, why, they would usually go directly from Hopkins to the President. He would take them in to the President, and the President would look at the reports and sign

[248]

or not sign the bills. If it were a major bill or if vetoes were recommended or if the departments disagreed, if there was some disagreement disclosed in the file, then the file would come to me. I would study it, and then I would go in to the President and talk to him about it and he would tell me what he wanted to do. Usually this was accomplished very quickly in one visit. Like the department he was pretty well aware of what was going on before it got to him, and it usually did not require a great deal of discussion for him to decide what to do. Sometimes it did and sometimes it would take more than one visit.

HESS: How much weight would the President usually give to the recommendation of the Legislative Reference Service of the Bureau of the Budget itself. What I have in mind here is out at the Library, we have, of course, the Enrolled Bill File, and I

[249]

haven’t gone through all of it, but I have gone through portions of it, and many times I have found where all of the departments that the Bureau of the Budget would ask for recommendations would say one thing, the Bureau of the Budget would go counter to that and the President would do what the Bureau of the Budget said and not what all of the other departments and agencies had recommended.

MURPHY: Well, that would not be the majority of the cases. I’m sure you would find that in the majority of the cases everyone agreed. I suppose where there was a difference of opinion, the President would be more likely to agree with the Bureau of the Budget than he would with his departments. Now, one of the reasons for this certainly is that the Bureau of the Budget is the President’s agency, and the President’s arm, and they should be reflecting his views from the

[250]

beginning, and more often than not they would be. They are blamed for a lot of things that really don’t originate in the Bureau of the Budget. So this wouldn’t come just without any background and part of the background they would have would be the President’s views expressed in the fall before when the legislative program was being formulated, expressed in many conferences with the Bureau of the Budget people, from time to time, all through the year.

Occasionally I’m sure the Bureau of the Budget would recommend that the President do something that they knew he didn’t agree with at the time that they made the recommendations. And in that case, I’m quite sure that he didn’t agree with them after they made the recommendation. And I expect sometimes I recommended to him something different than the Bureau of the Budget and sometimes he would accept my recommendations

[251]

in such a case and sometimes he wouldn’t. By and large, he made up his own mind about these things pretty well.

HESS: How closely did you work with the men who were in charge of the Legislative Reference Service? I believe Roger Jones was there during the time that you were Special Counsel, is that correct?

MURPHY: A part of the time. I worked with them very closely indeed. I expect that they had the feeling at that time that they worked for and with me as much as they worked for and with the Director of the Bureau of the Budget. And they found this kind of relationship, I think, very helpful as far as their business was concerned. They were very glad to have this kind of access to the White House staff, and, I suppose, from their point of view, to help keep the White House staff from making so many mistakes as we would have made without

[252]

this kind of guidance from the Bureau of the Budget. They were and are an excellent staff. The Bureau of the Budget is very, very good.

HESS: What type of a man was Roger Jones? Just how effective was he in this job?

MURPHY: Well, Roger was very good, a very fine person, and I think he was effective in the job. He was immediately preceded by a man named Rosen, as I recall. I knew Roger. I recommended him for the job before he got it, when he got it and the time before that too when there was a vacancy. I think the head of that division when I first went there, was a man named [Frederick J.] Bailey of Maine--much older than I. I never got to know him very well, but the young people who worked with him had a great deal of respect for him. I think Elmer Staats was the head of that thing

[253]

at one time. I think I worked with Elmer quite a lot when he was head of it. There would have been two people before Roger Jones.

HESS: Once an agenda was set up, what steps did the White House take to get the bills enacted into law?

MURPHY: Well, the legislative liaison operation was not nearly so highly developed at that time as it has come to be since then, and compared with what went on in the Kennedy administration and more in the Johnson administration, I would have to say we did very little. I did begin to keep a record of what happened to bills up there, and how they were voted on. I think that President Truman came into office with a pretty definite feeling that he was not going to try to persuade the Congress or twist any arms up there to get them to pass legislation.

HESS: Why?

[254]

MURPHY: Because he regarded it as a function of the President to recommend legislation, and a function of the Congress to decide whether or not to pass it. I can’t put my finger on anything that will establish this definitely, but I think this is the case. I think in part it may have been a backlash from the Roosevelt days when there was a great deal of critical feeling in Congress about the President bringing pressures to bear, and trying to bring pressures to bear in trying to get legislation passed.

HESS: Do you think part of this attitude might have been because he had been there and saw it from the other side?

MURPHY: Yes, very definitely. And so I think that when he first came to the White House, this is one of the things he said he was not going to do. He shifted away from that attitude

[255]

some as time went on, but never got to the point where he really felt it was his obligation to make Congress pass legislation as well as to recommend it.

He did, I’m sure, some effective liaison work with the congressional leaders at the "Big Four" meetings. He would respond regularly when I went to him and would ask him for help or made recommendations that he get in touch with some member of Congress and ask for their support on a bill. This, as I say, was on a much smaller scale than has been done since then, but on that scale it was very effective. I’d go in to see him at his desk and I would tell him what the situation was and ask that he call a Senator or Congressman on the phone and he almost always would do it, and he almost always would do it right away. And a President is almost always able to get people on the telephone right away. So this whole thing

[256]

could be done in a very few minutes.

Basically, he and his White House staff operated on the theory that to the extent that the administration was to present its views to Congress this could best be done by the departments and agencies who had the expert knowledge. And on the theory that what we ought to do is to explain to Congress and if you explain to them, then Congress will do what it ought to do. Also, if there are, oh, persuasive steps to be taken, that the departments and agencies are basically best able to do that. There’s much validity in that. I think it has been shown since then that if this is accompanied by a large scale and concentrated effort from the White House, that you can do a good deal more than you can without that effort. Some of us on the staff would make calls occasionally to members of the Congress,

[257]

asking that they support legislation and occasionally we’d visit someone.

HESS: Was there anyone on the White House staff who was in charge of looking after such matters?

MURPHY: Not really. I suppose most of the time I came as near being in charge of that as anyone else. We just did not have any legislation liaison operation as such. It was just incidental to the preparation of the recommendations and the kind of work that I did. Now, the President did, in the last part of his term, I don’t remember just how late, appointed two legislative liaisons...

HESS: 1949.

MURPHY: ...one for the House, and one for the Senate. I would have thought it was a little bit later than that. It was Joe Feeney on the Senate side. Joe was a retired naval captain,

[258]

I guess. And General Charles Maylon on the House side. They worked mainly with and through and reported to Matt Connelly. My relationship with them was very pleasant and very friendly, but we did not work together a great deal. Their legislative liaison operation was not very effective.

HESS: Was he really in charge of them; if they reported to him, was he in charge of the legislative liaison agents?

MURPHY: He was in charge of those two, yes. And I think Maylon’s operation was more the receiving of views from members of Congress, more likely to be complaints and requests than anything else, and trying to get something done about it. Joe Feeney had quite close relationships with a few people in the Senate, and so far as those few people were concerned, this was quite helpful. He was very close to Senator

[259]

Olin Johnston of South Carolina, and when we needed help from Olin Johnston, Joe came in and talked to him very effectively. But apart from that and one or two other people, I’m not sure that this was a great help.

HESS: Did you as Special Counsel have occasion to call on those gentlemen for assistance, did you use them also?

MURPHY: When I thought they could help.

HESS: Did you use them very often?

MURPHY: No.

HESS: Did you find them effective when you did use them?

MURPHY: In this limited field I just described.

HESS: But not outside of that?

MURPHY: That’s right. I think their effectiveness

[260]

was limited. They did not have anything like the resources at their disposal that the legislative liaison staff has had in more recent times, and the techniques had not developed. I must tell you that just as a technician I have a great deal of admiration for the way this thing has been developed since then.

HESS: Since this time, who would you say was the best technician between the White House and the Hill on legislative liaison?

MURPHY: Well, I would say Larry O’Brien and his staff. I don’t believe I can separate him from his staff in this connection. Henry Hall Wilson, Jr., who has worked with Larry over there was extremely able. He did a real good job on organizing this kind of thing. But if you have to name one person, I suppose then I would name Larry O’Brien.

[261]

HESS: You mentioned a little while ago that along toward the end of the Administration or as the Administration went along, Mr. Truman’s ideas, attitudes, shifted somewhat towards having a little more formalized approach to the Hill. Is that correct?

MURPHY: I wouldn’t say formalized, but a little more initiative, a little more effort.

HESS: Who do you think brought about this change in attitude on the President’s part?

MURPHY: Oh, I could not point to any particular thing. I suppose it was just the passage of time and a growing interest in getting legislation passed, and a growing distance from Congress and growing feeling that he would like to get the Congress to do what it ought to do instead of keeping hands off.

HESS: What is your opinion of the success of Mr.

[262]

Truman’s legislative program?

MURPHY: Well, in the foreign policy field I think it was phenomenally successful, and in the domestic field, only moderately.

HESS: Why was it that way, why was that true?

MURPHY: Well, one reason was because Senator [Arthur H.] Vandenberg was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1947 to 1948.

HESS: That helped out a great deal on the success of the foreign matters.

MURPHY: That’s right.

HESS: Why was Mr. Truman’s success rather limited in the domestic field?

MURPHY: I think that was basically a reflection of the attitude in the Congress and that in turn

[263]

was a reflection of the attitude of the country about these matters of policy. And I think that was a holdover from the Roosevelt administration. If you will check, you will find that Roosevelt got a good deal of legislation passed in 1938. He never got much passed after that. That is, we talk in these terms. Actually the Congress every year passes a tremendous bulk of legislation of a great deal of importance. It is more or less usual, I won’t say routine, but usual. People are conditioned to it and they don’t talk about it. The little bit that we talk about mostly, the relatively little bit that we talk about, are the new things, the different. And perhaps we exaggerate, considerably, the importance of these things. But in those terms, I think you’ll find that Roosevelt got very little legislation passed after 1938. He couldn’t get anything passed in 1939 of much consequence, or 1940, or 1941. After that,

[264]

of course, we had the war. President Truman inherited some of this, I suppose. And certainly for the early years of his administration, the major job was reconversion. And the Congress did do well on reconversion, and President Truman did well. I think that was a remarkably successful experience for the country and for the Government. Although there’s not much pioneering in terms of social legislation during that period, I think we have to give them both pretty high marks for the degree to which they achieved successful reconversion. It’s true that Congress did terminate controls earlier than the President thought they should have had, we had a severe inflationary jump after that. Then came the 80th Congress, this was the "Good-For-Nothing, Do-Nothing 80th Congress."

HESS: Yes, the "Do-Nothing 80th Congress."

[265]

MURPHY: And Senator Vandenberg, this is the time when he was chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and the time that President Truman was called on to make these extremely important recommendations in the field of foreign policy having to do with aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall plan, and so on. And very fortunately, Senator Vandenberg agreed. And he did a great deal to make possible the passage of that legislation. We didn’t have a similar situation so far as domestic legislation was concerned. Senator Taft was the real leader. I don’t remember whether he was the titular leader of the Republicans in the Senate or not, but in domestic matters, he was their real leader. And he and President Truman did not agree about all these things, and as a matter of fact, if my memory serves me right, the Senate itself and the Congress as a whole, was less liberal even than Senator Taft. I

[266]

know that President Truman talked a great deal in the 1948 campaign about the housing legislation. He used to say it was the Wagner-Ellender-Taft bill, until the Republican Congress came along, and it got to be the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill. But as I recall, Congress wouldn’t pass it even after it got to be the Taft bill. I guess I would say basically this was a reflection of the sentiment of the country at that time. There was some legislation that passed that was notable.

HESS: What comes to mind?

MURPHY: Well, the only thing I can think of is the Employment Act of 1946, the Full Employment Act, so-called. There was, in 1949, some fairly significant social legislation. I’m afraid I can’t recall just what it was without going back to review that time.

HESS: Just as a matter of supposition, do you think

[267]

that you personally could have, perhaps, been more successful if you had had some people like Larry O’Brien working for you at this time?

MURPHY: No. In the first place, I couldn’t conceive of such an operation. I wouldn’t have understood it. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. In the second place, I doubt if the Congress would have taken it at that time. There was another administration that intervened between Truman and Kennedy, and this was Eisenhower. He had a legislative liaison operation which was right much larger, more high-powered than the Truman operation, and members of his staff would go up to the Hill and take positions, make statements, in a way that I was surprised that the Congress would accept.

But I thought then and I guess I would

[268]

still think that the Republicans tend to have more party discipline about such matters and they tend to be more receptive to the views of the Administration than the Democrats. Even so, I was surprised that the Republicans were as acquiescent as they were, in this kind of an operation, which they were, and I think this conditioned people some for the Kennedy operation. But I was surprised again when the Kennedy operation was put together and was successful. And I think there was another step up in the effectiveness of the operation of President Johnson. President Johnson himself was a tremendously effective person, individually, and he worked a lot.

HESS: Did he conduct a lot of the liaison himself, pick up the telephone and call somebody on the Hill himself?

MURPHY: Yes, he did, he did. And he was tremendously

[269]

effective, just overwhelming. He was just overwhelming.

HESS: Did Mr. Truman do very much of this back during his time, talking to someone besides the "Big Four?"

MURPHY: He did a moderate amount. He did not do very much. It is my belief that most of what he did he did at my request specifically, case by case.

HESS: What part did Leslie Biffle have to play in White House congressional liaison?

MURPHY: Not a great deal, so far as I know. He and President Truman were rather good, personal friends, but I don’t think he had a great deal to do with the White House-congressional liaison after President Truman came to the White House. He was quite close to Senator [Alben W.] Barkley and I would be sure that he talked with

[270]

Senator Barkley about things, and Senator Barkley told him some of the things which were said at the White House and in turn he made suggestions to Senator Barkley about what he should take up at the White House. But so far as being directly and personally involved, I think not very much.

HESS: How would the President decide to veto or approve measures that were passed by Congress? We had discussed this a little bit.

MURPHY: Yes, this was part of the same process. The Legislative Reference Division of the Bureau of the Budget would get the views of the different agencies and departments. They would put them together in a memorandum to the President, and then send it to the White House. If they recommended a veto it would come to me so that when the President got it he would have, in addition to everything else, he would have

[271]

my recommendation which might be in writing, but more often than not, was taken in orally. This disposed of by far the largest number of bills. Occasionally there would be a major bill and a major question as to whether to sign or veto. And this might involve discussions by the President with a number of people, congressional leaders, department and agency heads, outside people who were interested in the subject, and a considerable amount of newspaper reading.

President Truman read the newspapers and he read what was there. He saw what he read. You know, a lot of people will read and they don’t see what’s there, they see what they want to see. He saw what it said.

HESS: How much attention did President Truman give to reviewing the private bills that came in, where someone might be hit by an

[272]

army truck or something like that, or they just had a private claim against the Government?

MURPHY: Usually not very much, because in most of those cases they came to him with unanimous recommendations from all interested agencies and departments, and they are all staffed out, and he would glance at it and if he didn’t see anything unusual or surprising about it, he would sign it. He had seen a great many of these bills, and you get so you can pretty quickly form, at least a first impression. If it’s his impression that this is all right, and everybody else says it’s all right, he signs it. There are often stories, I remember one of the first major assignments that I had after I went to work down there, must have been fairly early in the spring of 1947. The Congress passed the

[273]

bill called the Portal-to-Portal bill. This was my first experience with this operation. Clifford was Special Counsel, and Clifford got sick and was in the hospital. The recommendations came over from the Bureau of the Budget and I was beginning to get into the legislative program a little bit at that time, and this looked to me like a difficult decision, which way should it go. George Elsey was Clifford’s assistant. I had looked at this for a while, and I said, "George, I see all these recommendations coming from the departments and agencies and from the Budget, who finally recommends to the President what he does about this?"

And George thought about that for a while, and he said, "In this case, if I’m not mistaken, you’ll be the man." Because Clifford was out in the hospital. Well, this just hadn’t occurred to me as a reasonable possibility and I was sort of taken aback. I thought this

[274]

was a pretty heavy responsibility. I said, "Well, let’s go see Clifford."

So, we went to see Clifford in the hospital and he had a fever and it was apparent he just really wasn’t in any condition to deal with it. So I took George on home with me and we sat there all evening and talked about this, pro and con, and came back and I recommended to the President that he sign the bill, but that he sign it with a statement which would interpret it in a particular fashion, saying that if he hadn’t understood--and this was a controversial point- and that if he hadn’t understood it to mean this and so on, that he would not have signed it. That was an attempt to make legislative history that would be a guide to the courts, in case this might have come to the courts later on. Well, he did sign it, he made this kind of a statement, sent it as a message to Congress, as a

[275]

matter of fact. Well, people who had the opposite point of view on that particular matter in the bill, and the Congress, didn’t like this. They came back later and made speeches on the floor and were undertaking to make some counter legislative history. That, so far as I know, was the first and maybe the last--maybe it should be the last time that anything of that kind had been done. At the time, it was a matter of some interest among technicians in that particular field.

HESS: How binding legally would that be, with the President putting that wording in his message?

MURPHY: Well, nobody knew at that time. I think it’s quite likely that this very case has been considered by courts since then. And a student who is sufficiently interested in the answer to your question can go and look it up and see what the courts said. I don’t know.

[276]

I don’t know.

One of the other experiences that I remember was in connection with the Taft-Hartley bill. The President was fairly well disposed to veto that when it first came to the White House from Congress, and as time went on and he considered it more, why, he became more and more of that view. That left it up to the staff, with expert help and advice, to write a veto message which dealt with all this in a technical sense and undertook to explain what was wrong with it. And this was an extremely difficult thing to do in the case of Taft-Hartley. It reminded me of, what is it, the Merchant of Venice where the man is trying to carve off a pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood. Well, they had done a very good job in the Taft-Hartley bill of getting their pound of flesh out of the labor movement. We did set up an operation that worked on that.

[277]

I was over in the Executive Office Building at that time and had a great big office over there and a great big office adjoining that was vacant, so we set up an operation in there to have people work very diligently for a good number of days and a good many evenings trying to take care of the technical aspects of a veto message that the President could use if he wanted to.

The President at this point took a trip to Canada, and he went on the train, if I remember correctly, and when he was returning from Canada, he had about one or two days before the time had expired in which he could act on that bill, and as he was getting on the train or getting off the train, somebody asked him what he was going to do about the Taft-Hartley bill, was he going to sign it or veto it. He said he didn’t know, he hadn’t looked at it yet. We had been working on this for ten

[278]

days straight, it turned out to be about two weeks by the time you take out Sundays and all. So we had been working on this night and day and he had decided that he was going to veto it, but he said he didn’t know yet, he hadn’t looked at it yet.

HESS: What was your personal view of that? Did you think the Taft-Hartley Act should be passed or vetoed?

MURPHY: I thought it should be vetoed.

HESS: Do you recall some of the people that Mr. Truman may have received advice from, some Cabinet members perhaps, other close advisers who held other views on that?

MURPHY: No, no, I’m sure he did receive advice from others. I don’t remember who. I’m sure Clifford had some views on it. And the Secretary of Labor, of course, would have had

[279]

some views and I’m sure--I say sure--I don’t have any recollection, but I’d be sure that the Secretary of Labor recommended the veto. But I have no actual recollections of who took what position on that.

HESS: One question on that. Even though Mr. Truman did veto the Taft-Hartley Act, he put it into play, he called for the injunction several times during his administration.

MURPHY: That’s right. But that’s a different question. The law of the land is the law of the land, whether he was in favor of it at the time it became law or not.

HESS: Would a President in a case like this when he had stated that he did not like a certain measure and then it came up to a time when he could use it or could use something else, do you think it’s the natural thing

[280]

to try to use something else rather than something you say you don’t like?

MURPHY: Oh, I don’t know. That would be kind of speculative, I guess.