Robert G. Nixon Oral History Interview, October 20, 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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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HESS: Mr. Nixon, when we stopped yesterday, you were relating an incident about Charles Ross.

NIXON: Yes. I believe I was saying that Truman had made a very courageous decision. It may have been Greek-Turkish aid, the Marshall plan, or some domestic thing. So I told Charlie that I thought Truman was turning out to be good for the country.

Charlie smiled and said, "Bob, do you really think so?"

You can read all sorts of implications into that remark, but it illustrates how down the middle of the road Ross was as a Press Secretary.

HESS: Did it sound as if he did not think that Truman was good for the country? What did he

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mean by that?

NIXON: You have to draw your own implications. It seemed to me that he was saying: "So many of our colleagues don't think so, how come you do?" At the same time he might have been implying that he wasn't too sure himself. This illustrates how calm and even Charlie's press contacts were.

He was unlike Joe Short. He did not let his intense partisanship on behalf of the President interfere with his even-keel handling of press relations.

I always had the feeling that when Ross gave Truman his opinion, he laid it on the table and let it lay. He did not press. He would tell the President what he believed, make his recommendation, and then let the President make up his own mind.

HESS: Did Mr. Ross seem to have better personal

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access to the President than Joe Short did?

NIXON: I would certainly say so. Good heavens, they had grown up together out in Independence. They lived a block or two away from each other, and they graduated in the same class. They had a lifetime friendship. Truman came to Washington as a Senator in 1936, and Charlie was here as a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They were closely associated again, for a period of years, on the Washington level.

These were some of the reasons why Truman asked Ross to be his Press Secretary. I might add that in accepting this post, Ross was making a considerable sacrifice. He was making around $30,000 a year with the Post-Dispatch. In going over to the White House, he dropped to $10,000 a year. As we all know, trying to live in Washington on $10,000 a year is very difficult

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to do.

So, for all these reasons, Charlie had this very close access to the President. There was a rear door to Charlie's office that opened into a hallway. So, when he wanted to see the President, he would simply go out that door and up the hallway. I dare say that he never knocked on the President's door. That's how intimate and close their relationship was.

On the other hand, Joe Short had only been associated with Truman off and on as a Washington newsman. He had been one of the little handful of reporters that accompanied Truman on his campaign in the '44 election. Little of Truman's campaign ever appeared in the newspapers because he was completely overshadowed by Roosevelt.

I remember Truman later telling me that he drew crowds of two or three dozen, all over

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the country. He was quite amused and chuckled about it. His campaign was rather subdued, and, as I say, greatly overshadowed by the Roosevelt campaign. But he valiantly went back and forth across the country, just as he did later in the '48 campaign, when his crowds, I might add, were considerably larger.

There is a little anecdote that you might like to hear. The campaign was so subdued, and his speeches drew such small attendance that he said that sometimes he felt that he was talking to the air. The little group of five or six newsmen with him formed what they called their "hard rock club." (Truman was the head of it.) The term came from the deep mines in Montana--silver or lead or something. But anyway, in hard rock, it's pretty hard going to work with a pick. They had a jeweler make some little gold picks, as pins to wear on their

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lapels. Much later, after I had been with Truman in the White House for a while, he made me an honorary member of this little group, and said, "Bob, I think you had ought to be a member. You've been doing a little hard rocking too."

It was natural that Ross would have this very close access to the President. Joe didn't have as close a relationship. I'm sure that when Joe went down the hall to see the President that he very probably always went into Rose Conway's office and asked Rose if the President was occupied.

HESS: You mentioned that Mr. Short was highly partisan. Can you recall an incident when that attitude may have manifested itself?

NIXON: It did on quite a number of occasions. We must remember that a news correspondent in Washington or anywhere else for that matter,

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has freedom of the press. Maybe sometimes it's just a little too free, but it's a basic constitutional guarantee. Without violating confidences, or being otherwise unethical, a correspondent has the right, the privilege, and the duty, to report and write as he sees it.

But Short frequently would get quite angry if someone wrote a story about the Truman administration which he thought didn't put the President in very good light. A newsman can't operate under such conditions. There was one occasion that involved me.

I was called into Short's office one day. I had written an article that appeared, among many hundreds of other newspapers, in the Washington Post. Short didn't like the story. He felt it was embarrassing to the administration, and to himself.

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Now, I recall what it was. For years and years there had been no access to the White House transcript of the President's press conferences--with the possible exception of the three press association men, including myself, at the White House. If we needed, for the sake of accuracy, to check the stenographic record of some certain portion of the press conference we could get permission to go to Jack Romagna and get him to read to us this portion of the transcript.

I learned that suddenly the Russian correspondent for Tass, the official Soviet news agency, was being permitted to see this transcript. I was a little astonished. I said to myself: "This is news." So I wrote it, and printed it.

This had been an action taken by Short on his own. He was purple. He was angered that

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I had reported this, and our conversation went back and forth with some steam. I reminded him that I didn't have to get his permission to report news. I didn't have to come to him for confirmation, because I had confirmation. All I needed to know from him was, was he saying the story was true or not true.

As I say, things got pretty heated. He threatened to take away my official White House identification card. If you have this card, you can come and go as you please in the White House. If you don't have it, you can't get through the gates that are guarded by White House police. In other words, Joe (whether he realized it or not) was threatening to take an action that might have cost me my job.

I was taken a little aback, but I wasn't going to let him get away with that if I possibly could. By that I mean, I wasn't

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going to let a threat from him control my future news coverage of the White House just to please him and get him off of my back. I didn't feel I could operate under such conditions. So, I just smiled at him and said, "O.K. Joe, why don't you just do that?"

Well, that stopped him. He saw very plainly that I was reminding him that the entire Hearst organization would be down his throat before he knew it.

Newspapermen and editors are very jealous of their prerogatives of freedom of the press. If this took place, it could balloon into the old question of freedom of the press. The press of the entire nation could have let the White House know that they didn't care for that type of handling of press relations. It could have been a great deal more harmful

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to the Truman administration and to Joe Short than one little story or more such as I had reported. So, this was an illustration of the manner in which Short tended to handle things.

HESS: Do you think other newsmen found him difficult to work with also?

NIXON: Many of them have said just that to me. They remarked frequently on how much Short changed after becoming Press Secretary of the President, with all of the prestige and power that went with it. This type of thing in Washington is known as "Potomac Fever." I say in all charity, that this change did harm Short's actions as Press Secretary. To do that job properly, it's always best to keep your blood pressure down.

HESS: While we are discussing press secretaries, how effective was Mr. Eisenhower's press

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secretary, James Hagerty? What would be your evaluation of Mr. Hagerty?

NIXON: Jim conducted what I allude to as a "fiction factory." He was an extremely good press Secretary--extremely efficient.

Eisenhower was not a very dynamic President. He was not a doer. Despite his prestige, he conducted eight years on the order of what Mr. Truman in the '48 campaign called the do-nothing Republican 80th Congress.

Eisenhower didn't want to rock the boat. He wanted the presidency conducted on a subdued basis in which the economy of the country would go on evenly--which is not a bad way to do it. But there are times when very important and sometimes drastic decisions have to be made. As I say, Eisenhower's conduct of the presidency was on a rather subdued key. That meant there wasn't any news unless events made it news.

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In contrast to the rather dreadful view by the public of the Truman administration at various times, Eisenhower's eight years were made to smell like a rose. He could do nothing wrong, and even if he did, it was quickly forgiven. This was made possible by Eisenhower's tremendous prestige, his big boyish smile, and his whole personality. But it was really due, in fact, to Jim Hagerty.

Hagerty operated on the basis of making the sun shine 24 hours a day. Jim would go up to Gettysburg with Eisenhower and he would conduct two press conferences a day--one in the morning and one in the afternoon and sometimes more. He made every tiny little thing that the President did sound like it was news of tremendous and terrific importance. I don't like to use the word "fabricated," but he magnified. He made little things look big,

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and newsmen are always hungry for news. He kept this, what I called the "fiction factory," going day and night.

It made Eisenhower look awfully good in the nation's press. The publishers, all more or less Republican-minded, were so dazzled by a Republican President being in the White House for the first time since 1932, that they would front page anything that had the Eisenhower name on it. It also kept the newsmen busy enough so that they didn't have to go around looking under the rug.

Hagerty was, for Eisenhower, an excellent handler of news. He was a news manager. He managed the news, and this was something new. This hadn't happened under Truman at all, and I don't say that this is the way to do it because I don't like managed news. I don't like fictional news. An objective approach

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to what goes on is the way to report events. Truth and facts are not always easy to come by.

Hagerty's way of handling Eisenhower's press relations was very effective for a President who liked to spend his evenings playing bridge, and his days on the golf course. That was the way Eisenhower liked to do things. He detested desk work. He got away from the White House as often as a person possibly could. He would go out to the Burning Tree Country Club or down to Quantico to the Marine base, where they have a beautiful golf course. He invited professionals like Ben Hogan to play with him and spent hours and hours of the day playing golf.

HESS: During his administration did you have very many opportunities to have personal conversations with President Eisenhower?

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NIXON: No, I did not.

HESS: Did anyone else?

NIXON: I don't know of any other reporters who did.

Eisenhower's relationship with newsmen was a hundred and eighty degrees away from Truman's close and friendly relations with newsmen that he knew and liked.

HESS: Did you have the feeling that his attitude was more or less the officer-enlisted men?

NIXON: Oh, yes. We were all privates, and he was "General of the Army" and that's the way it went.

When Truman would see a little group of newsmen standing on the sidelines, he always came over. No matter who else was there, he would always come over and say, "Hello Bob,

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hello Tony," and pass the time of day and stand there and chat for a few moments. I don't know a single instance in which this ever occurred with Eisenhower. He was an imperious man. He regarded most people (certainly newsmen) as privates in the Army. He was "General of the Armies" and in complete command. He seemed to feel that he had to put up with the press. They were a necessary nuisance that had to be endured, but the further he was away from it, the happier he was.

In the beginning when Eisenhower went to Gettysburg, he went by car. We would all drive up together in a line of half a dozen cars, behind him, usually at about 90 miles an hour. He had a Cadillac at the time, 16 cylinders of heaven only knows what. He had a Secret Service driver who had a very heavy foot. On some stretches I've seen the speedometer

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go up to 98. Why none of us were killed I will never know.

But anyway, he began going up there in an airplane. The other newsmen and I would drive up ahead and be at the airfield to meet him when his little plane came in. Eisenhower would get out of this airplane. He would stand just a few feet away, but he would never even look in our direction. He would get out of the plane, walk over to his White House car, get in and zoom away. So, this attitude was in marked contrast with Truman's attitude.

HESS: Where did the newsmen stay at Gettysburg?

NIXON: Oh, in the Gettysburg Hotel.

HESS: Is that down on the square?

NIXON: Yes. They have the square right in the middle with a monument. While it isn't a

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Southern town, it looks almost like every little Southern town, because there's always the square and the Confederate monument.

This was a nice comfortable little hotel, right on the square. We had a press room adjacent to it where Jim Hagerty would come in and feed us this "fiction factory." Eisenhower just tolerated people in the news profession.

HESS: A necessary evil, but an evil nevertheless.

NIXON: Yes, that's right.

He had a back entrance to the Gettysburg farm. There were several approaches to it, but he had a private back entrance, off the main road. When we would get up there, his car would whip off the road and down through this private entrance, and that would usually be the last time that we would see him. On a rare occasion, Hagerty might arrange to have

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us invited out to the farm. This would be for some special little news occasion, like to show us the new tractor that some fat cat had given him.

HESS: All those fat cats were rather generous about what they helped Mr. Eisenhower stock his farm with, were they not?

NIXON: Yes, indeed.

Krushchev came up to the farm and Eisenhower showed him his very fine cattle--the Black Angus. We were permitted out there then. This was news coverage, you see, making the President look good. He would be a man on the stage, and we were the audience. He never even seemed to be aware that we were there.

The other times that we would see him would be when he went to the golf course. This wasn't restricted. So, when he would go out

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and play golf, we would go out there and watch him tee off. We were not usually permitted to follow him around, although we did down at Thomasville when he used to go down there to visit George Humphrey, his Secretary of Treasury, who had a beautiful estate down there--a hundred thousand acres or something of that sort.

At Gettysburg, we'd just watch him tee off and stalk off down the fairway and wait until he finished playing. He usually would play nine holes, then he would come in and get into his car and go back over to the farm. We would go into Gettysburg and write little stories about the day's events.

HESS: I understand they used to keep his golf score a secret, is that right?

NIXON: He was very sensitive about his golf score because he was an avid golfer. Sometimes he

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acted like this was the most important thing in the world. I would say he was a fair golfer, but not an expert golfer. He shot in the eighties.

HESS: Mr. Nixon, let's come back to the early days of the Truman period.

NIXON: Truman decided to address the final session of the U.N. conference in San Francisco. We left Washington, by plane and flew first to Olympia, Washington. One of the president's friends invited him to come out and see him. So, Truman decided to go there to visit first before going on to San Francisco--mix a little pleasure with business.

So he and Charlie Ross stayed at this really beautiful, lavish Governor's mansion on a hilltop in Olympia. This was wartime and there were scarcities in food.

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We were staying in a little ratty hotel down in the town about a mile away. Every morning for breakfast we had fried Spam, which was a dreadful wartime concoction. Then we would go up to the Governor's mansion and see the President or Charlie Ross. Charlie would come out rubbing his hands with a big smile and regale us with stories about the breakfast that he had just eaten. He delighted in knowing what we were putting up with. He was delighted in regaling us with these stories.

Anyway we stayed there several days. The President and our group drove over to that magnificent Mount Rainier. We went up to the park and saw the blue glacier, some of the great redwood forests, and then we went over to Seattle and Tacoma.

Then we flew down to San Francisco and put up at the Fairmont, which is pretty good living

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I might add. There's no other hotel in the entire country like it.

The president held a reception there for the foreign delegates to the U.N. He stood with Stettinius in a welcoming line. Then on June 27, or perhaps it might have been the 29th, he addressed the final meeting of the U.N. I guess it was held in the Opera House. As I recall, his speech dealt with the U.N.: its formation; and its purposes; and its future.

During those two or three days that we were there, Truman made up his mind that he was going to name Jimmy Byrnes Secretary of State. This was really a surprise to me. Byrnes had been passed over by Roosevelt in 1944, and he, under the circumstances, was still burning from this.

Byrnes, of course, had had a very impressive background in Government; a longtime Senator

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who was brought to the White House as a very top assistant to Roosevelt. So top that he was soon being called "Assistant President." And before that, he had been an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. He had been one of those men in the Senate that Truman had admired.

So San Francisco was perfect for Truman. In order to put Byrnes in the State Department, Truman had to do something for Stettinius. He didn't want to just bump Stettinius out into the cold, but at the same time he wanted Byrnes. So, there in San Francisco, Truman took Stettinius aside and discussed the fact that the United States now had to have a representative to the United Nations. He told Stettinius that he felt that he, Stettinius, was the perfect man for the job. Stettinius had presided over the United States discussions at the U.N. formation

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meetings at San Francisco. He had this long and fine background as Secretary of State, etc.

HESS: Do you recall what Mr. Ste.ttinius thought of this move?

NIXON: Stettinius didn't like it, but what could he do? Stettinius wanted to remain on as Secretary of State, which is the top Government job in Washington, and usually the most important. By protocol it's the top of the heap. Stettinius liked that. He liked his life in Washington, and he wanted to remain there. He wanted no part of the United Nations, but the President of the United States, who has the powers of appointment, can make you, and he can break you. You're there at his pleasure. So, what could Stettinius do?

This was presented on the basis of a kick upstairs for Stettinius. He was to be the

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first U.S. representative to the United Nations--this great world peacekeeping organization. So, in spite of the fact, that Stettinius didn't like it, he had to keep his own counsel and accept, or he was through.

There was no immediate public announcement. This was a private affair between Stettinius and the President.

After this meeting of the United Nations, we got aboard a plane to fly to Independence, Missouri, where there was to be a great homecoming for him--sort of like these smaller scale things that colleges have in the spring.

That evening we stopped, however, in Salt Lake City at the famous old hotel built by the Mormons, where they have enormous marble bathtubs. We had left San Francisco, and we were going to a homecoming in Independence. The United Nations story was behind us and had

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been cleaned up.

The so-called overnight stories are supposed to project the news of the next day. We needed something fresh, something a little more exciting than the President going to a homecoming celebration in Independence. I pressed Charlie that night, and he finally told us that when the President reached Independence the next day he was going to make a "very important announcement."

So, we had a story. What the announcement was about you could only conjecture. We didn't have the faintest idea what it was about. After the announcement was made the next day (which I'll get to), and it didn't turn out to be the surrender of Japan, Arthur Krock of the New York Times just chewed Ross out. He said that the announcement the President made in Independence was not a very important announcement at all, and it had nothing to do

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with world affairs. It was not the surrender of Japan which it should have been.

HESS: Japan should have surrendered?

NIXON: Yeah. Well, Krock was a mighty heavy-handed guy with all the prestige of the New York Times behind him, and Charlie was a little bit embarrassed.

HESS: Are you going to mention what the announcement was?

NIXON: Well, I'm going to, yes.

We flew out the next morning. (Knock and the others in Washington were breathlessly awaiting this very important announcement.) We got to Independence, and there was a homecoming celebration. The whole population of the little town of Independence and surrounding towns turned out. Truman made a speech and

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presented Bess to them. He told them about the little girl that he had met many years ago in a Sunday School class in the church across the street. It turned out to be Bess, his own childhood sweetheart, and the only sweet-heart he ever had in his life. It was a good homey, fine talk, and everybody was happy.

Then the President made his announcement. Truman told us that he had asked Secretary of State Stettinius to become the first U.S. representative to the newly formed United Nations, which was an extremely important job. It was a first, and the United States needed a very able man to take the job. In his stead he was nominating James P. Byrnes, a former Senate colleague whom he, greatly admired, to become his Secretary of State.

This was the first Cabinet change, and it took place a little less than three months

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after Roosevelt's death.

HESS: I have a couple of questions about Byrnes before we move on. Some historians have stated that Truman asked Byrnes to be Secretary of State sort of as a consolation prize because Mr. Truman was occupying the place that Mr. Byrnes thought that he should have had.

NIXON: I was going to touch on that a little earlier, and I forgot that I hadn't.

That is the feeling that we all had. Truman was a very kind man. He was also a man of very high principle, and he realized the shock and dismay that Byrnes had had to endure in being passed over by Roosevelt. The Secretary of State position is the highest one of all of the branches of executive government. It's the dominant position in the Cabinet.

Anyone who knew everything that had gone on, naturally assumed that the President was

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doing this as a consolation prize. Actually, as it turned out (and the reason may simply go back to that 1944 decision by Roosevelt), Byrnes looked down on Truman. He had a superior attitude, as events proved. He, in a sense, despised Truman. Certainly his actions later as Secretary of State seemed to make it pretty obvious that he looked upon Truman as an accident of history and not a very good accident at that.

Byrnes' attitude seemed to be that Truman was a nonentity, with no abilities to speak of, no knowledge of how to conduct foreign policy, or much else for that matter.

Under the Constitution the President is empowered to form and conduct the foreign policy of the Nation. This is his responsibility. When Byrnes became Secretary of State, and these difficulties with Russia were beginning to develop, Byrnes began acting as though under

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the Constitution, he was empowered to form foreign policy and conduct it. Actually, under our system, the Secretary of State is a messenger boy. He carries out the foreign policies that the President decides. Not Jimmy Byrnes, he was going to do it all, and do it without consulting the President. As events turned out, this later got Byrnes in very deep trouble with Mr. Truman.

HESS: Do you think he would have tried the same thing with Roosevelt?

NIXON: No, I do not. The circumstances would have been entirely different. The prestige and giant qualities of Roosevelt were well-known to all, and I'm sure were recognized by Byrnes who had worked as Assistant to the President. I don't think he would have dared to function in the manner in which he did under

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Truman. Roosevelt conducted his own foreign policy. It was well recognized in Washington for years that Roosevelt was his own Secretary of State. Aside from Congress, he was a one-man government.

HESS: What do you recall about the time Byrnes came from a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers at the time of his resignation? Byrnes came back from this meeting and stated that he was going to make an announcement to the American people before he spoke to Mr. Truman. Do you recall that?

NIXON: Yes. This was on a weekend. The President, Charlie Ross, and a few others were down on the Potomac aboard the Williamsburg at the Quantico Marine barracks, and the news of this reached Truman sometime that afternoon.

HESS: Where were you at this time?

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NIXON: I was there at Quantico. We had a cabin cruiser that we had chartered to go along wherever the Williamsburg went.

HESS: Was that standard procedure?

NIXON: Yes, that's standard procedure. That's one of the thing that makes White House coverage so costly. Wherever the president flies, we have to charter our own airliner, so you can imagine the expense. And it's done on a pro rata basis. If only three went, you still had to pay one-third of the total charter of a DC-4, then it was a DC-6, then a DC-8 or Constellation and on up as the jet age came in.

That's where Truman got the news. Byrnes had already made some pronouncements on his own over at this meeting in London without consulting the president or receiving his approval. Truman

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didn't know anything about it, and he didn't like it. We went out to the Pentagon where they had a direct teletype to London. Truman, dictating back and forth to the operator, got Byrnes on the other end of that teletype. The reason the long distance phone wasn't used was because the President wanted a record of this, which he could have on the teletype. He just chewed Byrnes out. He asked Byrnes what in hell was going on and what did he think he was doing. They batted this ball back and forth for quite a spell.

The President didn't get much satisfaction from Byrnes, who as I said before was conducting his own foreign policy. Then when Byrnes came back to this country and announced that he was going to go on the air and make an important foreign policy announcement to the American people before he even saw Truman, why that

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did it. Truman called him into the White House.

By the way, I'm not sure that Byrnes did make this pronouncement.. I may be entirely mistaken because memory is, of course, tricky. But my recollection is (and I may be dead wrong) that after this news reached Truman on the Williamsburg at Quantico, that he made Byrnes call it all off. I'm not sure; he may have made the pronouncement, but the thing that ticked off Truman was the incredible audacity of Byrnes of making such arrangements with the networks without consulting the President. The President had no knowledge of it whatsoever. So, Truman called him in and fired him, and it must have been quite a conversation. Truman was a World War I captain of a battery of field artillery, and he could be a very rough talker when he felt it necessary.

Oddly enough, this shows how every administration

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more or less uses the same devices. They never want to look bad to the public, and unless the whole story is known, things sometimes look entirely different than what they are. A great deal of the time the whole story can't be told.

It was arranged that nothing should be said about the real reason why Truman was firing Byrnes. It was arranged that Byrnes would announce his own resignation. It wouldn't come from the White House. If it did come from Charlie Ross, it was in behalf of Byrnes. Anyway, Byrnes had heart trouble. Of course, the only heart trouble Byrnes had was not physical heart trouble, but emotional heart trouble, which is perfectly obvious from the fact that he went back to South Carolina, got elected Governor, served one or two terms, and lived to a ripe old age.

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HESS: When you were speaking with Mr. Truman did he ever give an opinion of James Byrnes after this time?

NIXON: It seems to me that sometime afterwards in private conversation, Truman told me the story with the prefaced remark of, "Do you know what that fellow did?" And then he went on to tell about this business.

I went out to the Pentagon with him when he was chewing Byrnes out over the transoceanic direct wire, but frankly, we did not have the faintest idea of why he was out there at that particular time. It, of course, was a graveyard matter and no reason was given. If we were given a reason, I've forgotten it, and it would have had something to do with a conference with the Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense.

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HESS: Shortly after the United Nations conference, Mr. Truman went to Potsdam. We might discuss that in relationship with the change of the Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury, and he was replaced by Mr. [Fred M.] Vinson.

NIXON: This was almost immediately after we came back to Washington from the Independence homecoming celebration. We left for Potsdam just a few days later. We left Washington to go to Norfolk and boarded the cruiser Augusta to go across the Atlantic to Antwerp. Then flew on to Potsdam, Berlin.

Truman had been in communication with Churchill, and Churchill was pressing for another meeting with Stalin for postwar settlements. (He had earlier communicated with Roosevelt about this.) Potsdam was the place where it would be held. It couldn't be held

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in Berlin itself because Berlin was destroyed, and brother I mean destroyed! Not just a house here and a building there knocked down, but everything. Some few walls were standing, but everything was gutted. The Germans had had a very fine subway system and even the great blocks of streets under which the subways ran had been blasted and crushed in by the bombs. There would be blocks of great gouts in the earth where it had fallen in.

Mr. Truman had a very high regard for the abilities of Fred M. Vinson. Vinson had been a member of Congress. At this time he was Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, so he had a very good reason for being asked by Truman to go with him to the Potsdam Conference as one of his close and personal advisers. He was to go with us aboard the Augusta. He was asked to travel

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with us rather than flying to Berlin as most of those who attended the conference from this country did--the military and Navy people, various State Department people, and etc. It was my habit, as part of my work, that when we made these trips to find out ahead of time who was traveling with the President. I found out from Charlie Ross that afternoon that Fred Vinson was going.

All of these things contribute to the factual detail of a story when you are writing it. It was my habit to stand down at the rear of the train on the platform where the President's private car was and check these people off as they came down the stairs and went aboard the train. If there was someone boarding who didn't know about, it was part of a story and might be a surprise.

Everybody finally got aboard the train. They usually all arrived before the President

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because once he gets aboard, the train then pulls out. I checked them all off except Fred Vinson, whom I knew and had hoped to talk to on the train going down, as well as to see him every day aboard the Augusta. So, I went to Charlie Ross after the train pulled out and asked him why Vinson was not going to make the trip.

Charlie finally told me .that the President had asked Vinson to be the Secretary of the Treasury. I said, "Well, where in hell is Morgenthau," who was Secretary of the Treasury and who had remained over from the Roosevelt Cabinet in the Truman Cabinet, and was very jealous of his position as Secretary of the Treasury.

Well, Charlie finally said, "He's no longer Secretary of Treasury. Vinson will be Secretary as soon as the Senate confirms him."

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Morgenthau had worn out his welcome. He had been pressing Truman to take him to Potsdam. In everybody's mind, he didn't have any business there. But Morgenthau was of the Jewish faith. Having that in mind, he had proposed what was called the Morgenthau plan that would have turned Germany completely into an agricultural nation with farming as their entire economy. He had first proposed this to Roosevelt, and he was very insistent that Truman adopt this plan as part of the postwar settlement.

Morgenthau was blinded by his own desire because this was an impossibility. Truman would not take him to Potsdam, for good and sufficient reasons. He would have been too much of a nuisance, and so Morgenthau turned to an insistence that his plan be presented to Stalin and Churchill as part of the American plan for settlements, and

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Truman refused that. The situation was such that Morgenthau had finally worn out his welcome. Truman told him that he was accepting his resignation from the Cabinet, and he decided to ask Fred Vinson to fill the vacancy. Later, showing the high regard that Truman had for Fred Vinson and his abilities, he made Vinson the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

HESS: What do you recall about the trip to Potsdam?

NIXON: Incidentally, Byrnes went with us on the Augusta. His purpose, other than just going along for the ride, was to brief the President every day, and he hoped, I'm sure, to brief him in the evenings also, which he never, got around to doing, because Truman was otherwise occupied.

HESS: Playing cards?

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NIXON: Yes, we played some cards. You see, Truman was still having to do his homework on what had gone on during the entire war and during the entire Roosevelt administration, and he was having to bone up all the time. He had hardly scratched the surface. So, Byrnes was along, and he had had to do some boning up, too. He had to go through a period of briefings at the State Department to find out what had gone on. Anyway, his job was to brief Truman on the background of our whole foreign policy, particularly because those were the two that Stalin had attended. These things like Cairo, Casablanca, and Quebec were between Roosevelt and Churchill and had to do with the conduct of the war, rather than with anything directly concerning the Russians and Stalin.

So, Truman dutifully went through this during parts of the day. He was a man that never

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liked to just sit. He wanted to be up, around, and doing. Byrnes wasn't getting very far with him really because he was out on the deck walking--going from stem to stern of the cruiser, down in the engine room, in the galley, all over the place. I believe I said before that Fred Canfil was one of those the President took along out of the kindness of his heart just for the ride.

HESS: What do you recall about Mr. Canfil on the trip?

NIXON: Canfil was being Assistant President. He was really full of himself. This was undoubtedly the greatest event of his life. It would have been to most people, but it certainly was to Canfil. He would follow the President about just like a puppy dog--right behind him wherever he went, whatever he did. When Truman would go to the ship's galley and sample the food that

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was being prepared to be served to the crew, why Fred would be right behind him sampling the food too, telling the chief steward that the food was very good, giving his approval to everything just as the President had done a few minutes before. Fred was a very pleasant sort of person. He radiated in the sunshine of his friend, the President. He was really very full of himself.

The President had me in every night. I don't think we missed a single night during this fourteen day journey across the Atlantic. The reason we didn't make a rapid trip was that we didn't have to. There was plenty of time left. When we left Norfolk, we headed due east straight out into the Atlantic, and there we stayed. That's the bulge of the globe and the longest possible route that you can take to Europe. We stayed on that until we got a few

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hundred miles off the European coast. We then turned abruptly to the left and headed up straight to England through the Channel escorted by British destroyers on to Antwerp.

HESS: I think you were going to say how you spent your evenings?

NIXON: He would invite me and a few others--Harry Vaughan, Charlie Ross and a couple of others to his cabin. The Augusta was used as a flagship, and so it had an Admiral's cabin in addition to a Captain's quarters. Byrnes stayed in the Captain's quarters. The President in the Admiral's quarters. We would play cards from about 8 in the evening usually until midnight.

This meant that there were great opportunities for discussion for the greater part of the evening as the card game was being played. One of

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the discussions concerned Churchill. The British were to have a national election during the time of the Potsdam Conference. Truman said that because of this Clement Attlee would also attend the Potsdam Conference in the unlikely event that Churchill was thrown out of office. Truman said that all of his advisers had given him great positive assurance that it was inconceivable that the Laborites would win and that Churchill would be put out of office.

I wasn't that sure. I had lived with the British for the first two years or more of the war. Despite Churchill's tremendous prestige, the British were like our people were in 1932. They wanted a new government. This was not a turndown of Churchill. It was only a turndown of him as the head of the Conservative government. When the Conservative government goes out of power in Parliament, so does the Prime Minister,

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unlike our system. The British wanted a new deal, and they voted in a Labor government that would make Clement Attlee Prime Minister instead of Churchill. The Labor government generally does more for the people, just as the Democrats did more for our people. The war was over. The British wanted to get away from all of the privations that they had endured for six years.

Well, I tried to tell Truman this.

HESS: What did he say?

NIXON: Here I was saying to the President, "Look, they've given you the wrong advice. The Conservative government, with Churchill as its head, is going to go out."

This being quite early in the administration, Truman didn't know me as well as he got to know me later, and I think he thought I was out of my cotton pickin' mind. He didn't believe one

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word of it. I had to present the opinion rather gently because I was talking to a President. But I was positive about it. Once I had laid the opinion on the table, I had to let it lay, I couldn't pursue it.

Truman had a very good memory, and he mentioned that to me sometime later after Churchill was out. I remember him saying, "Bob, remember what you told me on the Augusta about the Churchill election?"

And I said, "Yes, Mr. President, I sure do."

And he said, "I wish you had convinced me."

This was really a very pleasant voyage. For one thing, it was a vacation for me in a sense. We were still under complete wartime wraps. We not only didn't have to, but we couldn't send any stories off the ship. It wasn't supposed to be known that we were on a

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ship in the Atlantic. The communications, of course, aboard the Augusta were Navy communications and controlled by the Captain of the ship. We had no outside access, so it was really a very pleasant voyage. This was midsummer. The weather was splendid; I don't recall that we had a cloudy day. My days were untrammeled, for the moment, by work, aside from making rather voluminous notes. I spent my evenings in the company of the President and members of his staff playing cards and conversing. Not many people get to do that. I was living under very high privileged circumstances.

Incidentally, this was the first time in over five years that I had seen outside lights on a ship. The first night when I went out on deck and saw the cruiser lighted, I was speechless. I couldn't believe it. I went to Captain [Rear Admiral James H.] Foskett and

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said, "My God, lights. How can you possibly go in a lighted ship on the Atlantic?"

He said, "Well, the war is over and all the U-boats have been cleaned up. They've gotten the final U-boat."

HESS: Were they absolutely sure there were no more around?

NIXON: That, of course, was what baffled me. But, by that time they apparently not only had pretty close tabs on the U-boats, but they had had, by that time, access to the German naval records because Germany had surrendered. Anyway, this really shook me, but it was very pleasant.

Another amusing thing that I recall, a little bit of color. When evening came, we would dine in the officers’ mess and then after dinner a movie would be shown. We would be sitting there after dinner, and a young

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Marine orderly would come down and lean over and whisper into my ear that the President wanted to see me, but after two or three nights had passed by he never said another word. He would simply come down the companionway, stand there, and when he got my attention, with his hands he would go through the motions of dealing cards. That was the signal to go up to the President's quarters. And he was quite a card player.

HESS: Dial they have a limit on the game?

NIXON: Oh, yes. This was pleasant relaxation to the President. From the end of the First World War, he had gone first to the National Guard and then to the Reserve Officers' encampments every summer. While at camp he and the other officers who were his friends, including Harry Vaughan and I think Ed McKim, would sit around

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the evenings with nothing else to do, and they would play cards. So, this had been going on for years. As I say, to him it was a very pleasant relaxation. He never cared whether he won or lost. He was an expert at cards because he had played cards so long. He knew what he called the possibilities much better than most people, and on top of that, the probabilities. He loved these wild games. Boy there were some so wild they'd make your hair stand up. He knew what to do; he knew the probabilities. This was no gambling game, no more than bridge is normally a gambling game. Of course, both can be, but this was pleasant relaxation. I remember at one point, this nervous Jimmy Byrnes, who was pretty full of himself, just having been made Secretary of State, came to me very much perturbed, not in a smiling, jocular fashion at all, but quite

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perturbed, and said, "Mr. Nixon, will you boys (as he called us) please leave the President alone?"

I said, "Mr. Secretary, what are you talking about?"

And he said, "I mean leave him alone in the evening. Stop occupying all of his hours. I've got to tell him what's supposed to go on at this conference."

And I smiled and said, "Well, Mr. Byrnes, I will have to apologize, but," I said, "I have no control over this." I said, "Why don't you go to the President and ask him to leave us alone?"

HESS: What did he say?

NIXON: He walked away. That was too much for him.

Access like that to a President, is not the order of the day. This is a very unusual

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thing. It was very kind and nice of the President to do this. These discussions enabled me to get some guidelines laid down for Potsdam because I knew the moment that we got to Potsdam that was all until the conference was over and the communique was handed to us. We weren't going to get anything out of the conference at all. The only thing that we were going to have while we were there were guesstimates. The rest was color. When we would see Charlie Ross he would tell us some of the little incidental things that had gone on. Stalin had come over and called on the President. He was guarded as closely as anyone we had ever seen. There were Russian soldiers with submachine guns all over the place. Even though the area had been cleaned out and gone over beforehand. Little incidentals of that sort. The President had gone over and called on Churchill. Where these villas were,

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and what they were like.

For instance, the Villa Sans Souci had been one of the many residences of the crown prince Wilhelm, the son of the late Kaiser. The interior was huge with a high, beamed, paneled reception hall and that was where the meetings were held. In general, we were given detailed description of the things like that. Where the President sat or who else was around the table. Things of that nature. If I was to be able to handle the running story from Potsdam competently, I had to have some idea of what was going on.

At that time, nothing was known about what had happened at Yalta, and Potsdam was, to a considerable extent, a repetition and extension of the problems that had been gone over at Yalta other than the conduct of the war. The Yalta Conference was mostly political. Stalin was running his own war. We were running ours, and

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things were getting along swimmingly for all. It was then that I was told by Truman that this concerned the postwar settlements and a hoped for peace conference, which never came to pass because of the Russian attitude.

These things that had been agreed upon in the earlier conferences, Tehran and Yalta, were tentative. It had been impressed upon the Russians by Churchill and Roosevelt that these were tentative understandings and that no permanent agreements were to be arrived at until the postwar peace conference. Some of these things concerned reparations. The United States and Britain had made it clear that they would not have any reparations. The Russians were insisting upon reparations to the tune of tens of billions.

They were raping Germany at that point. They were taking out every piece of machinery

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that they could get their hands on to restore their own economy. So, they were stripping the country bare. Anything that would move, what was left of the German rolling stock, their trains, every civilian automobile they could get their hands on. Their soldiers were even buying Mickey Mouse watches. These were those little $1.98 wrist watches that were being made at that time back in this country with the Mickey Mouse face. They were for children, of course.

These Russian soldiers used to have barrels of our occupation money in their barracks, and they were free to just go in and get a handful of it. This was money that the Russians had printed with occupation money plates that we stupidly had provided them. This was really a big steal. The Russians would pay $1,000 for a $1.98 Mickey Mouse watch. But where did the money go?

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The American soldiers were selling everything on the black market in Germany. The mess sergeants were swiping coffee and the Germans were paying them in marks. Coffee sold for $1,000 a pound. This coffee of course, was swiped from the commissary. All the soldier had to do then was to go to the Army Finance Office and get what was called a spearhead check. This was sort of a money order. He would lay down $1,000 in occupation currency, which was just worthless paper, and get a spearhead check from the Army Finance Office and send it back to the United States to his family, or to his bank, and this became a thousand American dollars.

I knew one sergeant who laid aside over a hundred thousand dollars in money back here in America. I remember saying to him one day, "Boy, you better watch out. When they catch

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up with you, you're going to jail."

He just laughed and said, "Bob, I've put so much money away back home. I own a restaurant and bar in Brussels that I bought on this black market operation. I've put so much money away that I wouldn't mind a year or two in jail. I'm fixed for the rest of my life."

We found out that all of the vast problems that have come to light since then were up for discussion, with the Russians trying to do one thing and the Americans and the British saying it can't be done that way. The greatest of these problems was Poland. I won't go into the details, they've long since been voluminously printed. But we and the British were trying to get Poland restored.

It became obvious that the Russians had no intention of restoring the sovereignty of

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Poland or getting out of there. They had a puppet government. They wanted to set up buffer states: the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, then Austria, Rumania, Bulgaria. They wanted buffer states around Russia so that they would be in the future reasonably secure in their own minds; and these were to be Communist states.

There was a proposal that postwar Germany be severed and cut into three separate states. This never came to pass, but it was a thing that was to be discussed. The aim was the permanent disarming of Germany. They were not to have a Luftwaffe in the future.

HESS: Did the President speak very much of the upcoming conference during the evenings that you were with him?

NIXON: Only in response to questions. These

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things, as I say, were things that were all discussed in snatches.

HESS: How responsive was he? It sounds like he was responsive.

NIXON: He was. Those were some of the subjects that came up. The President was never a man who was prone to develop a subject. He liked these short snappy ten word sentences and that was his mannerism. We would get these things in snatches, and we would have to ask question after question to try to develop it somewhat.

HESS: Was he responsive to your further probing?

NIXON: He was responsive. He would answer, but he would not go into any great detail. He was in no position to do it. What we got was sort of brief outlines, but we got the sense of some of the major things that would come up in the meeting.

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Incidentally, the President was already quite impatient with the Russians because he had been briefed on Yalta. Mainly, however, he was impatient because of Molotov's and Stalin's attitudes about the United Nations conference.

HESS: Now, he had spoken to Molotov in Washington.

NIXON: You bet he had!

HESS: What do you recall about that?

NIXON: Stalin had informed Roosevelt, or maybe it was Truman, that Molotov would not attend the United Nations conference in San Francisco. Stalin was sore at us about something that I don't recall. These unfriendly exchanges had been taking place between Stalin and Roosevelt some months previously. Stalin carried out his pique and decided that Molotov wouldn't go to the United Nations conference.

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His excuse was that Molotov was too busy. Truman and Churchill insisted that Molotov come. All of the premiers or prime ministers of all of the countries involved were supposed to be at the U.N. meeting.

I was trying to remember the upshot of it. Molotov must have gone to the meeting, because he came to Washington. Perhaps it wasn't wise for Truman to have done this, but Truman chewed him out. This was something that had never happened, I'm sure, to Molotov in his entire life. When he came out of the President's office, the look on his face was something to see.

HESS: You were there at the time?

NIXON: Oh, yes. I was in the lobby. We tried to get him to say something about what had gone on as we did with all the callers. He was

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gray in the face. He looked like he could bite a ten penny nail in two. He just swept through--brushed us aside--swept through the lobby, climbed into the Embassy limousine outside, and whirled away. We later learned from Ross that the President had expressed displeasure to Molotov over the Russian attitude towards the United Nations and their refusal for Molotov to go there. That's all I recall about that meeting. There may have been other factors involved that made it even more important, but that's just obliterated from my memory.