Robert G. Nixon Oral History Interview, October 30, 1970

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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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 December, 1978
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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NIXON: We had been talking at some considerable length about how political judgments are formed. The most knowledgeable people could be badly wrong.

Sometimes the expectable norms were completely upset. The norm in our history has been that after a war there is a change in administration. This happened at the end of the First World War with Wilson's administration coming to an end. The 1946 bi-election, just a few months after the end of the Second World War, brought in a Republican Congress. The Korean war, a much smaller conflict, was the final blow that turned the Democrats out of office in 1952. The Vietnam war turned Lyndon Johnson out of office.

There had been sixteen years with the

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Democrats in power.

Look what happened to Churchill in the British election after the German surrender in the mid-summer of 1945. Certainly, one of the greatest statesmen in all of Britain's history, was turned out of office. At the end of a war, all of the dissatisfaction comes to the surface.

The labor movement, because of wartime controls, had not been able to get wage increases throughout the war. They wanted a change. The farmer who had price controls on his produce wanted a change. Industry had the prices of its products held down, but more than that, it was not able to turn out any civilian products for the entire period of the war. Industry had been converted to producing weapons to fight a war. So, there was dissatisfactions there. With all of these things, it was expected that the Democrats would

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be turned out of office, and a Republican administration, regardless of who was the candidate, would come in.

All of these things were in my mind in 1948. All these things that I've enumerated certainly gave great weight to the preponderant knowledgeable opinion in the country that it was an open and shut case. Come election day, it didn't seem to matter who the candidates were. The Democrats would go out, and in would come the Republicans.

People said it did not matter what kind of a campaign Dewey conducted because he would win. Dewey conducted a very prissy sort of campaign, because he was sort of a prissy man. His appearance was against him. The very fact that he represented, in the public mind, that implacable financial area, Wall Street, and not the common man.

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Truman made a lot of errors. We've already gone over the fact that his reputation was not very high. His public image was so bad that his own party was trying to turn him out. It was no wonder that there was widespread acceptance that this was going to happen.

When we made that first cross-country whistlestop swing in June, Truman fought and won his party's nomination against great odds. I accepted this as the normal course of events. This continued through the summer. There was nothing to change my mind or anybody else's mind.

The change in my mind was a gradual one. It was based entirely on the reaction to the manner in which Truman conducted his campaign, and the things he told the people where he spoke. As the farmer in Dexter, Iowa, at the National Plowing Contest said to me, "This man makes

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sense." I've already pointed out how that meant to me that Truman was going to get the farm vote.

There are only three or four major groups of votes in this country. One was the farm vote; another was the labor vote. There was the white collar vote of the city and suburbs, and the minority groups. Most of the minority vote was mixed up in these other major groups. Then there were the other unknown factors of the swing vote, which in itself could be decisive. The change in my opinion was a very gradual one. It was based upon the public turnout, which day after day, week after week during the campaign, snowballed. Though the crowds started out small during the June trip, they became enormous as the campaign continued. The beginning was Labor Day at Cadillac Square in Detroit.

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It was not only the size of the crowds, it was their attentiveness. They gave an enthusiastic response, and you could tell it was genuine. If it's a puffed up balloon from an organized turnout that is palpable. There was a vast difference between that sort of reaction, and people who have come out to listen to a man because they are genuinely interested in issues.

HESS: Even though you were on the Truman train all the time, did you hear from people who were on the Dewey train about how the crowds were reacting to Governor Dewey's appearances and speeches?

NIXON: Of course, I heard, but I've never been one to seek second-hand information. It's too loaded with partisanships and lack of objectivity.

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HESS: You don't believe that newsmen should sit around and interview each other?

NIXON: No, I most certainly don't.

HESS: I believe that that was a comment that was made after the '48 campaign. That that's what the newsmen spent too much of their time doing.

NIXON: Yes. Yes, that was I think, certainly true, but I liked to see things firsthand and photograph them in my own mind.

HESS: You mentioned the incident in Dexter, Iowa, where you spoke to the farmer that was there. You said you had it in mind to go out and find someone who you could interview. Were there times at other stops when you purposefully got off the train to interview people to try to find out what the mood was in that particular area?

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NIXON: Oh, yes, that naturally followed. In the cities we would go in, I would talk to taxi cab drivers. I would talk to waitresses in the hotel dining rooms. I talked to politicians. Of course, what I got from politicians had to be weighed very, very carefully. Their point of view carried with it the partisanship of the party. They wanted to see their man win. Unless things were really dreadful for him, it was very unusual for them to come clean and say, "Sorry, you haven't got a chance."

HESS: What kind of an impression did you come away with after speaking with the average citizen?

NIXON: Oh, they were all for Truman, almost uniformly. Their remarks about Dewey were usually critical. They didn't like little things about his personality. They would tell

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me that he represented the wealthy classes.

HESS: The Wall Street classes.

NIXON: Yes. That was his image. I had no criticism of Tom Dewey. I knew him well in earlier years when he was Attorney General of New York and later Governor. But I'm trying to report factually, and this was his image.

The farm vote seemed to be going for Truman. There was also the labor vote. Despite the difficulties that Truman had had with labor immediately after the war, particularly with the leaders of the Railroad Brotherhood.

HESS: A. F. Whitney at that time said he would spend every penny in their treasury to defeat Mr. Truman, but, in 1948, he was one of Mr. Truman's main supporters.

NIXON: Yes. Alvanley Johnson.

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HESS: That's right.

NIXON: As you pointed out so concisely, these troubles were behind him. Labor, which had supported the Roosevelt administration, was now solidly behind Truman.

He had the farm vote, and he had the labor vote. Certainly he had the vote of the preponderance of the people who turned out for these whistlestops. It seemed to me that he had the rural vote as such. Now, the city vote and the suburban vote, were a more difficult factor to determine.

HESS: One of the factors there was Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party.

NIXON: Yes, that is true. There was this third candidate.

HESS: Also a fourth candidate, who we need to

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discuss pretty soon, Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats.

NIXON: Yes, that was certainly true. This was a quite mixed up election.

HESS: Wallace pulling the liberal vote away, and Thurmond pulling the southern vote away.

NIXON: Yes. I really should have remembered to mention that as one of the unusual factors that determined this widespread opinion.

HESS: The Democrats usually relied both on the South and on the liberals.

NIXON: Yes. The southern vote, for generations after the Civil War had been Democratic. The colored people had tended to be Republican.

Two weeks before election day, I was on the train. I received a telegram from my New York office asking me to write a story

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predicting the outcome of the election. I wrote the story, but I didn't start off by saying, "Truman will win."

If you are writing for a news service, and not writing a column, you have to use different phraseology. You have to use some hedging phrases. The tenor of this story was that there was a snowballing tide of public opinion for Truman that indicated very strongly that he would be the winner in a great political upset. I went on to tell many of the things that I have been relating here. I even mentioned in the story that my opinion had changed, and that all these things told me a great political upset was in the making. So I wired this story into my New York office.

My job was on the train. I just barreled this stuff in. It went on the wire or didn't go on the wire. I might or might not see a

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newspaper in which it would appear. I just churned this stuff out ream after ream, on virtually a 24-hour basis.

My New York office was part of the Hearst organization, which blatently opposed any and all Democrats. They had hated Roosevelt with a passion, and they despised Truman because they considered him a very inept man. They never used my story. They never put it on the wire. They thought I was crazy. They thought that this one reporter of theirs, who wrote that Truman would win, should be taken off the train and sent to a doctor to have his head examined. Of course, I'm exaggerating a little for effect, but that was the basis of it.

We, like the Chicago Tribune and everybody else, were reporting up to the very early hours of the morning, that Dewey was the certain winner, despite the fact that the

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election figures showed different. I believe it was when Ohio came in Democratic (Republican Ohio, Democratic) that they finally threw in the towel. The way I found out that this story had not been printed was when after all this my New York editors said to me, "Why didn't you tell us that Truman would be the winner?"

I had them. They were looking down my throat, but I had them. I said, "Please refer to news dispatch number so and so, filed at such and such a time, on such and such a date, in which you requested me to predict the outcome of the election, and I did. The dispatch was sent to you, as you well know. It should be in your files, unless you threw it in the wastebasket. So, please don't come to me saying, 'Why didn't I tell you?"'

HESS: Did you get a reply?

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NIXON: They let it drop.

HESS: They found out that they were wrong so they let it drop.

NIXON: They let it drop and started bombarding me with requests to write highly descriptive stories of the "new Truman."

There was a corollary to that. Several days before election day, we were in New York. Truman campaigned in automobiles all over the metropolitan district, including Harlem. The President had been advised by some not to go into this colored area. Others advised him that by all means he should. He made a civil rights speech to an enormous crowd of black people. There hadn't been the Supreme Court decisions, that came later. Civil rights was a highly controversial subject. The President was even having to try to overcome

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the demands of the ADA leaders. One of their two chief spokesmen, Hubert Humphrey, had thrown the Democratic convention into turmoil by his demands.

HESS: You weren't down there at that time though were you?

NIXON: No.

HESS: You were still back here in Washington with the President.

NIXON: That's right. This was a convention fight.

This all indicated that the black people would vote for him. There were other factors too. They were all working people.

At one point during the campaign, we had gone to a suburb of Chicago. This was an industrial area almost entirely populated by persons of Polish extraction. Here, again,

[651]

they were blue collar, working people. He got a very, very fine reception from them. There was no question but that he was going to get that minority vote. Thus it was with some other minorities we ran into.

How can you lose if everybody's going to vote for you and for what you represent, which means the principles of the Democratic Party in opposition to those of the Republican Party.

We went on from Harlem that evening to a jam packed crowd in Madison Square Garden. There was just one phrase that I remember from that speech. (By this time, Truman was delivering platform speeches very well, with great emphasis, and it went over.) He let Tom Dewey have it, and almost for the first time, because he had been campaigning against the do-nothing no-good Republican 80th Congress and more or less ignoring Tom Dewey. But this evening, he

[652]

said that a little man had been following him around everywhere he went. Meaning that when he would take his campaign into a certain area of the country, Tom Dewey's train would come along behind him in order to be the one to have the last word. This little man, Truman told his audience, had been following him around everywhere he went, but he shouted, "He's not going to follow me into the White House." This brought down the house. The crowd just roared, and stomped and cheered.

After the speech that night I was aboard the train. It was an hour or so before the train pulled out. (This is where the corollary to the prediction story goes.) I was sitting in the club car with a reporter from either the Chicago Sun Times or the Chicago Tribune. He was from the Washington staff, but he was not a regular White House reporter. He was one

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who was on the train on this particular trip. He began interviewing me, because I was a regular. I had been with the President every moment of the entire campaign. He asked me who I thought would win.

And I said, "Well, if you want to know what I think, here it is." This was just two or three days before the election and I told him that in my own mind I was certain that Truman was going to win. It being conversation, I was far more emphatic and to the point than I had been able to be in the prediction story. I just told him bluntly that I was laying my money on the line. I believed Truman was going to win. I gave him the reasons again. I mean this was sheer logic. These are things that make you fly in the face of overwhelming opinion by those that you consider probably are a great deal smarter than you are.

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HESS: What seemed to be the attitude of the White House staff members who were along on the train at this time? Do you think they thought Mr. Truman would win?

NIXON: Most of them were interviewing each other. There was, by and large, a general acceptance that Dewey was the winner, and that Truman was a comer. One of the reporters said, "If we just had two weeks more, Truman would win."

HESS: He saw there was a swing to Truman, but thought it was too late.

NIXON: Oh, yes.

This was a growing realization to those who had been on the entire campaign. The tide was rolling for Truman, but in the main, it was believed that it was just a little too late.

If this Chicago reporter interviewed me,

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he probably went around and talked to other regulars. He may have gotten an entirely different opinion from them, and I'm sure did. He came to me in Washington, some weeks, after the election. It was the first time I had seen him since that evening, and he said to me, "Bob, I wish you had convinced me."

He didn't write what I told him. If he had, he would have been a hero with his newspaper.

HESS: If they would have believed him.

NIXON: Yes. If they had printed the story, he would have been their reporter who predicted, against all odds, Truman's victory. But he didn't.

HESS: I believe Mr. Truman made one trip into the South, do you recall that?

NIXON: I was trying to remember exactly what part of the election it was.

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HESS: I think it was sometime in October.

NIXON: This was a very brief incursion. It was really undertaken only to let it be known that he had gone to the South...

HESS: To get a little geographical balance to his campaign.

NIXON: Yes, that's right. With Strom Thurmond as the so-called Dixiecrat candidate, and the way the South sometimes voted, it was more or less taken for granted that Strom Thurmond would certainly get the deep South.

HESS: I have a list here. He won Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In Tennessee he got one of the twelve electoral votes.

NIXON: That was almost the entire deep South.

HESS: Virginia went for Mr. Truman. North Carolina

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went for Mr. Truman, and Georgia went for Mr. Truman.

NIXON: Florida was hardly a Southern state. Its population largely came from the North--retired people. Thurmond did pretty well to get the South that year. It was also thought that there was a possibility that Wallace might get some of the rest.

To give, as you say, a geographic balance to the campaign, we made this brief incursion into the South. One of the arrangers of it was Jonathan Daniels. This was a member of Truman's staff. He was a publisher of a Raleigh newspaper. His father was the late Josephus Daniels, who was Wilson's Secretary of the Navy.

We first flew to Miami. In Miami Beach Truman made an evening speech to a veteran's convention, either the American Legion or the

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Veterans of Foreign Wars. This, of course, was to appeal to the veterans' vote.

We then flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, the capital. Truman made his two speeches; one on the capitol grounds and another at a county fair gathering. Again, you would have to go to the text of those speeches to know the burden of them. I simply do not remember. They certainly had something to do with the Southern vote and the locale which he was in. Then we came on back to Washington.

We did go out to the rather lavish country home of the billionaire tobacco heir of the R.J. Reynolds fortune, R.J., Jr., I suppose. The President was a guest there for one part of a day.

HESS: Are there any other points pan the campaign that we should cover before we reach the last speech which was at Kiel Auditorium in

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St. Louis? Anything else come to mind before the last major speech?

NIXON: Not at the moment.

HESS: Do you recall anything in particular about that speech in St. Louis?

NIXON: We left New York by train and went to St. Louis. This was the final speech of the campaign. It was election eve and the meeting was in Kiel Auditorium. It was an enthusiastic audience.

The country was aware of the fact that Truman had conducted a one-man battle. (Americans have an affection for people who fight for what they believe in.) Truman had been able to overcome the errors of the earlier period. The country had begun to admire him. They admired him as a fighter. What he said made sense to them. His manner of delivery had changed

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completely from a rather hesitant, lackadaisical monotone way of speaking, to speech mannerisms in which there was a fist in almost every word and a fight in every sentence.

He was getting genuine, enthusiastic, heartfelt ovations wherever he spoke. This was what he got in the Kiel Auditorium that night. This was a SRO crowd. As happened in many other places, there were so many people there that the firemen had to clear the aisles because of the regulations. There was a large overflow crowd outside of the auditorium where loudspeakers had been set up so the people could listen to the President's speech. This also happened in places like Buffalo, New York, where there wasn't an auditorium or a stadium large enough to hold the turnout.

This was his last speech of the campaign, the grand finale. It turned out to be one of

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the fieriest and best speeches of the campaign. A speech had been written for him with his thoughts in it. This was the way those things had to be done.

When the President was introduced on the platform of the auditorium, he threw aside the prepared speech. He made a speech of his own, completely off-the-cuff (which was his best delivery manner) with no notes at all--nothing except that which was in his mind and his heart. He started off by chewing out the newspaper publishers of the land.

I will say that he did it very effectively. Colonel Brady McCormick (publisher of the Chicago Tribune) and Hearst, with his string of newspapers all over the country, had been Truman's bitterest foes. They were the ones that Truman singled out. Their attitudes and policies were well-known around the country,

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but no one was neglected. There were many others that he tore into (if my recollection is correct), including I believe the then, New York Herald Tribune, which for years was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party. He let them have it.

Truman said a kind word for the newspaper correspondents who accompanied him everywhere, saying in effect, "It's these publishers, not the reporters who work for them. The reporters are for me." He went on then into the outstanding points that he had tried to bring out in the campaign. Things for which he and his party stood for.

The text of that last speech is bound to be on record, because the official White House stenographer was along on the stage. It was a fine speech. It was one of his best, and one of his most emphatic fighting speeches.

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This, of course, caught us all by surprise. We had already filed stories based on the contents of his prepared speech.

HESS: Which had been handed out by the press office.

NIXON: Yes. This was standard operating procedure.

HESS: How much of a shock was that to a newsman to be sitting there with his work all done and then to hear words that are strange?

NIXON: It meant you had to do it all over again. It meant you could not work from a text where you could read and mark certain passages that you wanted to use and to write your story from. It meant that you had to make very quick, brief notes of the speech, then you had to start writing. You could not wait until Truman finished, because when he finished everybody got on the train and you had to file the story before you got back.

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What you had to do was to write a new story while you were taking notes. You had to listen long enough to get a news point, for instance, the attack on the publishers (which may or may not be the big news in the entire talk). Then, with your typewriter on your knees, you had to bat out a new story as fast as you possibly could. We wrote what was called a running story. That was a story written descriptively as the event unfolded. You had no idea what he was going to say. If at some point further on, he said something of greater significance, you had to retop your story. In other words, you stopped writing the running story and rewrote the lead paragraphs.

Now, that was the predicament. When he finished speaking you had to grab your typewriter, folded or not, and get out of the

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auditorium. That was what happened to us on that occasion. Here we were sitting there checking our copies of the text that had been given to us earlier, and there was not a word similar to what he was saying.

You always checked the text with the speech as it was made. If he departed from it, that might be the kicker. So, this was a pretty hectic night. I might add, he seemed to delight in these surprises.

HESS: He enjoyed pulling the rug out from under you?

NIXON: No, it wasn't in that manner.

Truman was the friendliest President probably in this century, except for Roosevelt, but Truman's friendliness was the friendliness of an equal. The friendliness of friends. You could sit down with him, exchange conversation, and just live with him. Roosevelt's

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friendliness was of a most gracious man, but you were always aware that you were in the presence of greatness. You did not feel that Roosevelt was just another guy that you had gone to school with.

Truman's delight in this was not a delight at pulling the rug out from under reporters who he genuinely liked. (He didn't like all of them, of course, but those that he did like he liked on the basis of close friendship.) The delight was that here was something cute and unexpected. It was a surprise to all that he had pulled off.

HESS: Not necessarily a surprise just to the reporters, a surprise to everyone.

NIXON: We were just the media for telling the Nation what he was doing; these would come as surprises to his own staff.

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HESS: Did you ever hear any comments by any of the members of his staff about this particular time when he did not give the written speech and gave his own?

NIXON: I'm not sure I did. But if I did it made no lasting impression on me at all.

HESS: Which of the regular White House reporters seemed to have the President's particular favor? What reporters, whether they were the regulars or not, did the President not get along so well with?

NIXON: Well, now we come to dealing with personalities, and...

HESS: Which is a subjective thing at the very best.

NIXON: Yes, I would not want to do that. The only thing I would say is that the President was

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particularly friendly with the three White House correspondents who covered the three press associations, including myself. I say this with all modesty; but this was just a happen chance. The reason was not the personality of one individual or another. We just always were there.

Down at the Norfolk Navy Yards one day, the President was on the bridge of one of the Navy ships; it might have been the Augusta. I was standing on the dock below while Truman was talking to the captain of the ship. When he saw me standing down there he waved to me and said, "Hello, Bob." Then he turned to the captain and said, "That young man has traveled with me all over the world," which was literally true. Now, that was the kind of proximity that we had with him. He was a friendly man.

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There were a few other regulars, meaning the representatives of individual newspapers like the Baltimore Sun, who covered the White House entirely. That was their job. They didn't go up to Capitol Hill or fiddle around with foreign affairs unless it was in a presidential action or speech. In other words, they covered the White House, more or less like we did.

HESS: Folliard of the Post and Fox of the Star.

NIXON: Eddie Folliard of the Post, Joe Short of the Baltimore Sun, Joe Fox of the Star, to name a few. They did not have as close proximity as we did, because...

HESS: They were not news service men.

NIXON: Well, not only that, but we went everywhere the President went. We went with him on some

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of these trips where others were not permitted to go, for one reason or another. Otherwise, they had the same sort of proximity, and he was very friendly with them, as he was with us.

In other words, we were a relatively small close-knit group whose faces were familiar. We were always around. So, that's the way it went. I say this, hoping that I'm not leaving out anyone. I am bound to be leaving out others. But this was the way the friendliness went. This did not mean that he favored any of us. It didn't mean that he would call in one individual, or two or three individuals, for long private talks and favor them. He favored Krock on one occasion, but Krock was one of these prestigious men from the New York Times Bureau.

HESS: I know you don't like to indulge in personalities,

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but were there one or two reporters that the President did not particularly care for? I'll throw a name out and see what you think of it. What about Duke Shoop of the Kansas City Star?

NIXON: Before we get to that, let me finish up this other topic.

HESS: Okay.

NIXON: Krock, with all due respect, was favored. The President, in order to get back at his critics and to defend himself, had used Krock for his own purposes, deliberately. The New York Times, having the prestige that it had, was the Nation's outstanding newspaper. Other than that, the President's friendliness did not mean that he favored one correspondent over another as far as information and news went. He just didn't play it that way. He

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played very fair. He hoped, that we all would be fair to him. His friendliness was of a type that I have tried to describe. He was friendly because he liked you and you liked him.

Now, what was this other?

HESS: A few reporters who he did not like or who did not treat him fairly in their columns.

NIXON: Oh, you mentioned Duke Shoop of the...

HESS: Kansas City Star.

NIXON: Again, the President made a sharp division between the newspaper publishers and editors, and those reporters who worked for them. The Kansas City Star, under...

HESS: Roy Roberts.

NIXON: Roy Roberts was a very partisan Republican.

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He was anti-administration. This, in many respects, was even deeper and far more intense than with other Republican papers because the Kansas City Star was his local paper. Independence is just a little suburb of Kansas City. The Kansas City Star was a native son and so was Truman. They had never seen eye-to-eye, and this sort of intensified the situation.

Duke Shoop was their Washington correspondent. Although Roy Roberts was frequently in Washington and did some of his own writing, Duke Shoop was his representative. He, naturally, had to carry out the policies of his paper. That's what he was there for. The Star buttered his bread. As far as I ever knew, Truman had a complete understanding of this situation, and he never took it out on Duke Shoop. When he would see Duke, he was friendly with him. Truman's ire went over Duke's

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head to Roy Roberts and the Kansas City Star. Truman never seemed to have much time or to be the type of man who would indulge in little petty enmities. He may have in other areas in his lifetime; I'm not trying to portray him as a perfect person at all. No one is perfect. But in the years in which I knew him and was closely associated with him, I don't recall any of these petty divergences of personalities. There may have been a few, but I don't recall any. If I do, I could tell you later.

HESS: Did he appear to get along well with May Craig of the Portland papers?

NIXON: Oh, he always liked May. She was a pert little lady and quite able.

HESS: I think she was with the Portland Press Herald, is that right?

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NIXON: It would be in the press section of the Congressional Directory. But she was a pert little lady. As I say, she was quite able. She always asked cute questions. I used to wonder how long she thought about the wording of these questions before a presidential news conference. She would ask them in a cute sort of phraseology, which would usually get a laugh from the President. He enjoyed it. She did not cover the White House on a day-to-day basis. She would come to the press conferences, but her main area of coverage was the Congress. That was where her Congressmen and Senators were. That was where things were going on in Government that affected the State of Maine. While she was writing national affairs too, she also had to pay attention to those things which interested the people of Maine.

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Another one, that used to give him a chuckle and who used similar techniques of cute questions, was Sarah McClendon who represented some Texas papers. They were the two women reporters. In a press conference with two hundred men, they were in a rather unique position. There were others...

HESS: Do you think sometimes they would be in a favored position?

NIXON: Oh, I don't think so. As I said, Truman was not a man who cast favors of that type around. He was fair to all.

HESS: Not necessarily speaking of Mr. Truman, but do you think it would be advantageous? Do you think that a woman reporter might be able to get in and elicit information from someone where a man might not be able to?

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NIXON: Being a man and not a woman, this is a difficult question to answer.

May Craig and Sarah McClendon stood on their own feet. They operated like men. But the very fact that a woman reporter was a woman (no matter how homely she might be) made them stand out. They were two out of two hundred; so they stood out in a crowd. Many times, by the very fact of the circumstances, they might have better entree into certain areas, than just another faceless man reporter. The man reporter might not be as welcome. That is a thing that enters every facet of our lives. They stood on their own feet, and that's what women reporters in Washington do. They don't number among them any winners of beauty contests.

HESS: They are there for their brains and not their beauty.

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NIXON: That's right, they are not B and B girls. They stand on their own feet. Their own abilities see them through.

HESS: I think that pretty well covers that subject. We were discussing the latter days of the campaign. What do you recall of Kansas City at that time, election day and election evening? I trust you stayed at the Muehlebach, is that right?

NIXON: I'm trying to get this in order.

HESS: Did they have a press room set up at the Muehlebach?

NIXON: Yes, always. We had our own teletypewriter machines with a direct hook-up, in my case to New York. This functioned on every trip that we made out there.

I'm trying to recall whether the train

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went into Kansas City or whether it took Truman right into Independence.

HESS: It goes through Independence on the way to Kansas City. He quite likely got off in Independence, and then the train would have just pulled the few miles into Kansas City.

NIXON: Now that my memory is refreshed, that is what happened. He was greeted by a very large crowd at the little train station in Independence. Charlie Ross, I, and others went on into Kansas City where we had headquarters at the Muehlebach Hotel. The President had, on the top floor, what was called the presidential suite. We were sequestrated from the President that evening. This was the night before the election. The campaign was finished. All that remained was for the votes to be counted.

Truman had to vote too, Truman and Mrs. Truman. My recollection is that he walked up

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four or five blocks from his house to a place where they always voted.

HESS: Probably the Municipal Building, but I'm not sure. That's where they usually vote now, whether it was someplace else, I'm not sure. It was just four or five blocks up the street.

NIXON: Cater-cornered from the Presbyterian Church that Bess attended when she was a child.

HESS: That's right, yeah.

NIXON: This was where he always voted at every election.

HESS: That's where he votes yet today, I think that is still his polling place.

NIXON: The polling place it seemed to me was in what was used as a basketball court. Why that would be in a…

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HESS: I don't know. I've never been in the building.

NIXON: In any event, they cast their ballots. I must have been there to record this, because I always went along when he voted.

Then I went into Kansas City by car. Our news tickers were set up in the President's suite to bring in the election returns. There, with Charlie Ross and two or three other members of the staff, was where I spent the evening until far, far in to the morning hours. We followed the election returns, wrote our stories, and so forth.

We kept demanding to see Truman, but to no avail. We learned, early the following morning, that he and the Secret Service agents had gone to a hotel in Excelsior Springs, a sort of local spa, a few miles away to spend the night, to get some rest.

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HESS: Charlie Ross wouldn't tell you where he was?

NIXON: No, indeed! This was one of those frustrations. We were supposed to be covering the President, but we couldn't cover him. We were supposed to be able to say where he was and we couldn't find out.

There, as he related himself, he listened to the returns on the radio for a while then turned out the light and went to sleep. Early in the morning, he turned on the radio again, and heard H.V. Kaltenborn of one of the radio networks, conceding that Truman was a little ahead in the returns. But, instead Kaltenborn said, "When the farm votes comes in, Dewey will be the winner."

Kaltenborn had a rather twangy, peculiar dialect, and manner of delivery. It was this phraseology that Truman later imitated.

HESS: At the dinner for the national electors. Were

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you there that night that he imitated Kaltenborn?

NIXON: Yes. Speaking to the electors at this meeting, he mimicked Kaltenborn, and it brought the house down. It was a riot. He was a good mimic.

HESS: He did a good job at that didn't he?

NIXON: He did a good job at it. He got Kaltenborn's voice, dialect, and manner of speech, down perfectly. It brought down the house.

Early in the morning, it was not certain who had won the election because of the manner in which votes were counted. There was a time change of several hours between the East Coast and the West Coast. Some polls closed at one hour in the evening and others closed at other hours. The California and Pacific Coast votes were always the last to come in. In those days they didn't tell you, with polls and predictions

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before. They didn't take two votes and extrapolate them into two million. You waited until the returns came in. This was a matter of many, many hours. The rural districts had to be counted. The city vote was always the vote that was in first. It was a close election for quite a long while.

HESS: Any more they take a sampling of pilot precincts and almost concede in the middle of the afternoon it seems like.

NIXON: Yes. Nothing like that was going on in those days. It was not until around 4 in the morning when the Ohio vote finally came in and decided the election. It was a spectacular political upset, and Truman was elected. I finally went to bed.

During the late evening, I wired my bureau chief in Washington and said, "Bill, stop writing that Dewey is the victor. You're

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going to find yourself dead wrong."

I was just wasting words but I thought that I should try to guide him, because like Kaltenborn and everybody else, they were still making Dewey the winner. They were flying in the face of facts.

I finally got to lie down. Everybody else was exhausted. One by one, everyone had gone off to bed. I was one of the last to leave still hoping that Truman would appear.

HESS: One question on that: Was there something that led you to believe that he was not at his home in Independence?

NIXON: I don't know. Come to think of it, that's where we thought he was, but we had been forbidden to...

HESS: Phone.

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NIXON: He had an unlisted phone. But we had been forbidden to go out there and stand in front of their house and that sort of thing. That's my recollection.

HESS: Anyway, as far as you knew he was at the house.

NIXON: The setup was for us to be in the presidential suite where our typewriters were and where the teletypes were bringing in the election returns, and cover it from there. Before I went to bed for a brief nap, I went down to the entrance of the Muehlebach Hotel which the President usually used. There were two entrances. The hotel sits on the corner.

HESS: The corner of Twelfth and Baltimore.

NIXON: I went to the uniformed doorman. I gave him a $20 bill and my room number and my name.

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I said, "I want you to phone me the moment the President arrives. I don't care when it is, whether it's ten minutes from now or ten hours from now, but phone me." Then I went up and got a nap.

About an hour later, the telephone rang. The doorman said, "Mr. Nixon, the President is just entering the hotel."

I didn't even take time to pull on my clothes. I had on my pajamas and bedroom slippers. I carried a trench coat with me. I simply wrapped this trench coat around me, raced out to the elevator and went up to the floor that the presidential suite was on. I walked down the hall. I was the only one there, except the President, and his door was wide open. He was sitting on a sofa on the telephone. He waved to me to come in. Tears were streaming down his eyes. It's rather

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touching to recollect it. From what he said, I knew he was talking to Bess in Independence, and he was telling her that he had won.

I really had a story. I talked with him a little while about the election and what his reaction was. I was still the only reporter in the place. Not even a staff member was around. All the others were snoring away somewhere. I remember asking him what had been his feeling and his belief during the campaign.

He said, "Bob, I never, at any single moment, had any doubt whatsoever, but that I would win."

Under all the circumstances of the campaign, that was really something. I felt at the time, and still do, that it was his faith, as well as his fighting spirit that carried him through. It was certainly the personal

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basis of the victory.

He wasn't kidding me. He was full of himself about this victory. He wasn't making this up as he went along. I was alone with him, asking him a few questions, and he was answering.

The first people he thought of when he learned that he was the winner was his family, his wife and daughter Margaret. He was, in a sense, overcome by emotion which was perfectly natural. This was basis enough for a colorful story of a man who had just scored a political upset of very great proportion.

We talked about the campaign. We didn't go into his future plans; this wasn't the time. This was enough for me. The rest of it I don't recall. I don't have a copy of the story, and this is right off the top of my head. I had an exclusive story that I had to file.

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It was a little later that other reporters and members of the staff began to learn that he was back in the hotel and in his suite so they could get up there and do their work. Then, of course, the President wasn't alone with one reporter like he was with me. They all sort of arrived at once. Here they all had the same account. They hadn't heard him and seen him when he first got there with tears in his eyes, talking to Bess and Margaret on the telephone. They didn't have any of that. So, the $20 bill was well worthwhile. The fact that I had been careful enough, even in a state of exhaustion, to think of that and do it.

There was a continuous celebration in his room, of the kind that you expect in a little political gathering. Friends coming in. Tom Evans, and Roger Sermon (the Mayor of Independence), and his local friends all came in to

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congratulate him and the reporters all around. It was that type of gathering. It was a joyous occasion to the President, and to his friends. That was the extent of it.

HESS: Then back to Washington. Not too long after that you went down to Key West. I believe that we've already mentioned a little bit about the trip to Key West just after the election, but what was Mr. Truman's attitude at that trip to Key West? Was he more relaxed? Did he seem happier, more joyous than on some of the other trips?

NIXON: The thing that stands out in my mind is that he was full of beans. He was vibrant and happy. He was pleased. Wouldn't you be?

HESS: The only way to be at a time like that.

NIXON: He was thinking, not just of his victory, but he was thinking of his staff. He had his

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staff with him. They were there, in the first place, to get some rest. Everybody was exhausted. But in the second place, he was there to think and plan for his future administration. When President Roosevelt died three months after his third term inauguration, he had inherited that chance. He was someone that due to circumstance had this enormous responsibility. Now, he had been elected himself. He had won his own election victory, and he had won it alone. He had a lot of help from other people, but he was the sparkplug that was keeping the motor running. He now had to lay out, with his advisers and staff, the basis for his continuing policies or new policies.

Remember this was not just a Truman victory, this was a Democratic victory. This was a victory which returned a Democratic

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Congress to Washington. The Republican controlled Congress went down the drain with Dewey. He had every reason in the world to take it for granted that he would get congressional approval of the legislative recommendation that he had made earlier to the Republican Congress. He could now build a fine record as President.

So, Key West was not just a matter of sitting back, they wanted to formulate new legislation and new recommendations. They wanted to get back Federal funds for storing farm produce instead of it lying and rotting in the field. To enable the farmer to store his surface crops, and thereby to feed the Nation. They wanted to deal with the cold war with Russia which was at its height. They also had the problem of Government reconversion of peacetime from wartime industries, which was

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a slower process than the conversion of peacetime industry to wartime production, as slow as that was.

HESS: What was your recollection of the success or failure of his legislative program now that he had a Democratic Congress? Did he do any better now that the Democrats were there?

NIXON: That is something that I would have to do a little boning up on.

HESS: There are those who say he had no greater success with the Democrats than he did with the Republicans.

NIXON: I don't know that to be a fact, unless you say it is a fact.

HESS: There were some things that passed.

NIXON: That is something that just doesn't stick

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in my memory. I haven't even looked back on it for more than twenty years.

HESS: Well, some of the things that Mr. Truman espoused were: he wanted the Federal Employment Practices Committee, to be made permanent; he wanted Government aid to education, which also was not passed; he wanted what now has become known as Medicare, which did not pass. One of the few things that Mr. Truman got through was the housing measure.

NIXON: If my recollection is right, that turned out to provide enormous monetary windfalls to greedy contractors and financiers. Something that was not intended by the President.

HESS: Could he have used the press as a forum to better educate the public and Congress along the lines of the legislation that he wanted

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passed?

NIXON: Oh, no. The press as a Nation was solid Republican, anti-Truman. They were biting at him just as hard, or harder, then they were before. Mistakes kept being made. his was the period when Joe McCarthy began pressing the pedal down on the charges of communism in Government and nothing had changed.

The Republicans were more infuriated than ever. They had expected to get a Republican President in the White House in 1948. Now after a sixteen year tenure of Democratic administration, they were confronted with four years more of what they called "the big spenders." Sixteen years of the Roosevelt New Deal had saved the country from economic bankruptcy, but the Republicans never

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believed in the Government spending money to help the poor, or to help the economy of the country, unless it helped the industrialists and the wealthy. Nearly four years of the Truman Fair Deal had gone by, and now, four more years of what they termed the "welfare state." This was a period in which there was a great clamor for cutting Government expenditures and economizing. Neither the Democrats, nor the Republicans, wanted to recognize the need for these recommendations, virtually all of which have since come into being. They were for them, finally forced to take action.

Truman continued to be beset by other difficulties he had no control over. By this time the Republicans literally were frothing at the mouth. They were saying to themselves, "My god, are we ever going to get back in power again?"

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Those who lead, or think they lead, the Republican policies, were frustrated at what happened. Truman as the candidate, had scared the most unprecedented political victory in our Nation's history. I am sure that will bear up. They not only continued to attack him, but they bit back harder and harder. They were mighty poor losers, let's face it; but there again, that's politics.

HESS: Do you think that the longer a party is out that the more violent and the harder they bite?

NIXON: Oh, unquestionably. In this instance it became almost a disease. They just couldn't stand it any longer and they had to stand it four years more.

They began continuous campaigns of trying to belittle Truman, of frustrating his

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legislative proposals, of accusing his administration of having Communist traitors in the Government. Although Truman could have run for another term, he and his administration had been so assaulted that it became obvious to him that he should not run again in 1952. No President in office likes to be defeated. Wisdom dictates the situation. You step aside, perhaps bloodied, but not bowed, and let somebody else come in. Even though it may be an administration of the opposing political party.

Except for those long years when Roosevelt and Truman were in, that has been the history of the country. It's healthy that this should be. Otherwise we might have found that our system was no longer a democracy.

Because of the Republican frustration, and because members of the Democratic Party and Truman concurred, a law was passed to limit

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the tenure in office of future Presidents to two terms. This was considered a healthy thing to do in order to prevent a recurrence of the four elective terms that Roosevelt had.