David H. Stowe Oral History Interview, July 24, 1980

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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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 July, 1991
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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FUCHS: Mr. Stowe, I have some questions about the 1960 campaign that I believe have not been covered specifically in other interviews. One thing that has come to my mind, I believe there was a little problem of Mr. Truman ad-libbing. Do you recall anything about that?

STOWE: Yes, I do. We were receiving speeches mostly from Dave Lloyd and Charlie Murphy, in Washington. President Truman used to go over the text before he spoke. On some occasions he apparently would remember a very good line that was in the speech and occasionally he would take it out of context from memory. When he did that, the line had no context for the audience to appreciate, and then when he came to it in the written speech and repeated it, it was flat.

This occurred most pronouncedly in a trip to the State of Washington, and subsequently down to Reno, Nevada, where he did it two or three times. From Reno we were to go to Oakland, where we had a speech that Dave Lloyd had written that was absolutely

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fantastic. It was a take-off on Disneyland, with Nixon marching up to do this and doing all the things that are rides in Disneyland; it was brought into a political context, a beautiful thing. One doesn't usually want to say to a former President, "You're screwing up your speeches by doing this," but I finally decided to do just that because this one was so important, and knowing that he had been ad-libbing in the wrong place.

On the plane going to Oakland I talked to him. I said, "Look, Boss, this speech is beautifully done as a satire; Dave's done such a wonderful job that when you get to the red line, which I have marked on your reading copy, please do not ad-lib anything; just give it as it is." I explained to him what he had been doing.

At the meeting in Oakland the crowd was fantastic. The entire ballroom was sold out. They had closed circuit television in various rooms, with 20, 30, 40 people in each of these rooms--watching it way away from where he was speaking.

I didn't know how he would receive my criticism. I didn't know what he was going to do, but this was so important. Bill Bray and I were greatly concerned, whether he would continue to reach for these funny things and have them out of context.

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When he started his speech, he was ad-libbing as usual, until he got to the red line, and at that point his head went down and he started reading verbatim. Within the first two or three quips that came out I am sure he realized that he had a winner, and from then on he didn't deviate one word from the text. In addition to that, he felt comfortable with it and began acting and gesturing with his arms. We've often heard the statement of people rolling in the aisles laughing. Believe you me, this speech was so effective that I actually saw a couple of people rolling in the aisles with laughter. It was the most effective, satirical speech that I think I have ever heard in my life. Lloyd did an absolutely magnificent job and so did the "Boss."

FUCHS: This was the "Nixonland" speech?

STOWE: Yes. A few weeks later we were in the Carlisle Hotel in New York; we had one of the penthouses, and Kennedy was there and had the other one. The then-Senator Kennedy came in and remarked that he had heard about his Oakland speech and what a fantastic speech it was. I don't recall that President Truman returned to this business of taking ideas out of context after that, but it had become a very serious problem prior to that time. It was in his mind; he

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had read it just a few minutes before he went on and he'd remember those good lines and then ad lib them in the wrong place.

FUCHS: It's difficult to tell a former President to don't do something.

STOWE: I felt very uncomfortable, because after all he had made more speeches than I would ever make in three lifetimes and he was an expert at "ad-libbing."

FUCHS: Who were the principal writers of speeches in this campaign, to your knowledge?

STOWE: Charlie Murphy and Dave Lloyd.

FUCHS: What about David Noyes?

STOWE: He was not a principal writer in this campaign.

FUCHS: I see. As far as protection of the President is concerned, there was no Secret Service?

STOWE: No.

FUCHS: He didn't have them at that time. All right, you had some problem with the crowds. Were these crowds ever hostile or just jostling, and trying to get close to him and see him, or what?

STOWE: Since we were operating without any Secret Service

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protection, the main problem was the simple matter of trying to move him around without people crowding in wanting to shake his hand and all those things. No, there was little hostility, except for one instance, which I'll come to.

What we learned was that in small towns the local police were of little help. Selectmen, or whatever the local government politicos were called, would just brush them aside and come on in. I just couldn't cope with that many people. The reporters would be coming in, along with everything else, and I finally devised the idea of talking to the Governors in advance. I would call the Governor of each of the states we were going into and ask them to assign one or more state patrolmen. I found that the state patrolmen, who didn't necessarily come from the localities where we were stopping, were more effective in handling the visitors and maintaining the privacy of the President. This took quite a bit of doing, but I will say this, that most of the Governors were extremely cooperative, whether Republicans or Democrats, and the patrolmen were excellent.

This problem didn't hold true for major cities like New York or Chicago where the local police force could handle it because they were used to handling

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crowds and they had handled Mr. Truman when he was President. But in the smaller towns local police were just helpless. I don't blame them; they got shoved aside. But the patrolmen wouldn't be shoved.

Another thing that came up was that because of handling the visitors, the press, baggage, etc., we decided that we had to have at least one more person traveling with us. Originally it was just the President and myself. We had to have one more person. This is when Bill Bray was added. He was with the [Democratic National] Committee. They assigned him over to handle part of that load so that I could concentrate on working with the President while Bill was looking after the baggage and the press. He had certain things that he took care of at every stop. The only troublesome thing was the time I had to spend on the telephone the night before, for example, if we were leaving one state and going into another, making arrangements with Governors or with the people the Governor had told me to contact. I don't call it security, because we didn't have many security problems; it was really keeping people back so they weren't pressing in on him all the time, or coming in when we didn't want them in.

Now, we did have one situation that I would call really troublesome. We were going by train from

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Pittsburgh to New York after our last speech of that campaign, which was in Pittsburgh. Some group, and I don't know who or what they were, had about three cars hooked onto the train and they obviously were very anti-Truman. They became very obnoxious as we were going to the train, and they were obnoxious as we left the train. It was their language, their attitude, the vociferousness, and yet to this day I don't know what group it was. They had two or three cars and it just happened they were attached to the train we were on. It was unfortunate, but there it was pretty nasty for awhile.

FUCHS: How was that handled?

STOWE: We just got on the train and stayed there. When we left we took the elevators so that we didn't get involved.

FUCHS: Did Mr. Truman remark about this?

STOWE: Well, I don't recall whether he remarked about it. I felt it; they were brutal. You know, we were on a freight elevator which they had arranged to take us up, and these guys--there were twenty of them on--and they were saying very uncomplimentary things.

FUCHS: How did it come about that you were assigned specifically? Did he request someone be assigned,

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and then the Democratic Committee...

STOWE: Prior to the campaign, whenever he made speeches to organized labor or something like that, I always went with him. In the early days we did it at our own expense. On political trips, Charlie Murphy usually went out. In this campaign Murphy was traveling with Johnson. As you may recall, I officed in Charlie Murphy's law firm's office and Charlie asked me if I would make a trip with President Truman.

The original idea was that he was going to make three speeches. I asked what was involved, and Charlie said, "Fly out to Independence, pick him up, fly with him to where he's going to speak and fly back; then you come home."

I figured that would be fine and I would love to do it.

Well, the three speeches turned into about 40 to 60 major speeches. I don't know how many were off-the-cuffs. Actually, if you look at the schedule you will see from the first speech he made in Iowa, I believe, to the last speech he made, we were out of Kansas City from Monday to Friday almost every week. Instead of being three speeches, it turned into about six weeks of steady work, and I'm not sure I would have taken six weeks of steady work. But the

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political aspect of it was new to me.

FUCHS: Got into more than you planned on. How do you think that Mr. Truman handled the religious question?

STOWE: I think perhaps that was his greatest contribution to the Kennedy campaign. He had a speech, which I don't recall where it was first delivered, but it was used three times as I recall in the course of our travels. It really went to the heart of the religious issue that was being presented. I suspect that this is probably one of the reasons why we spent so much time in the South, in the Bible belt, as opposed to New York, or other parts of the country. If you look at our schedule you'll see a predominance of speeches in the South, in the area all the way from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, down to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas where I suppose there was some feeling that the religious question would be a major issue. I refer you to the speech rather than try to tell you what was in it, but he took the opportunity in each and every speech, usually, to indicate the fact that this question should have little or no bearing on how to vote. He also referred to himself as a Baptist, as a 33rd degree Mason, past Grand Master of Missouri, and apparently the religious matter was very much on his

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mind.

FUCHS: He did this off-the-cuff?

STOWE: Yes.

FUCHS: Nixon, as you know, was accused of calling Mr. Truman a traitor, and of course, later on he said well he hadn't done that, and it more or less came down that he had called him a traitor to the democratic principles, and so forth. Did you ever talk to Mr. Truman about that, or how did he, if you remember, really feel about the charge?

STOWE: As I remember, somewhere up in Wisconsin, when General Marshall was attacked, and certain people did not rise to his defense, this upset Mr. Truman because as far as he was concerned, General Marshall was one of the world's number one citizens. I'm not really familiar with this alleged traitor sentence.

FUCHS: I see.

STOWE: I do know that he was skeptical of Mr. Nixon's background, skeptical of a lot of things, which would not have made them political bedfellows even if they had been in the same party. I wasn't there when President Nixon, for example, brought the White House piano out to Independence or what his reaction was.

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I don't know.

FUCHS: Well, they kept us kind of out of the way. Of course, Mr. Truman was gracious to an extent, because you know he hadn't been coming to the Library for quite some time. He came back for that, and as he sat and looked at the piano, I guess Mr. Nixon sat down. But then Truman didn't escort him through the Library. He was older then, and had been ill. In the earlier days, you know, he escorted dignitaries through, and he might have for Nixon, if he felt differently, but I'm not sure what he would have done.

I believe it was in the earlier campaign, in 1952 when Eisenhower was running that Truman was very deprecatory of Eisenhower for not coming to General Marshall's defense.

STOWE: You are absolutely right.

In regard to Eisenhower, the thing that seemed to upset Mr. Truman more was the fact that at the time he went down to Kansas City to call on President Eisenhower after the election, he was told by some stupid staff member that the President was too busy to see him. That bugged him more than not being invited to the White House or anything else, as he told me a number of times. That incident upset him.

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I think I covered in one other interview the business of their rapprochement at the Blair House at the Kennedy funeral. I thought that was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened.

FUCHS: Truman seemed to have a great deal of respect for Bill Knowland, and of course, for Warren, Governor [Earl] Warren. Did he discuss Bill Knowland with you at any time?

STOWE: No, he didn't, but I am familiar with the Warren relationship. It started when we were campaigning. Governor Warren felt very sincerely that whenever a President of the United States came into the State of California, he should meet him, and, as the Governor, extend his courtesies. In the train trip on the '52 campaign, the Stevenson campaign, I recall he met us at our first stop in California, which is quite a ways from the capital of California. He came aboard the train and volunteered to introduce the President, which the President declined because he didn't want to embarrass Governor Warren in any way. Then, in furtherance of this non-embarrassment idea, I suggested to the Governor that he move two cars forward and then we escorted him over to his car. We knew where it was parked, but unfortunately the press having seen him come on the car, but not seeing him

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go off, the rumor spread that he had spent the night on the train. This may have created some problems for the Governor.

I was privileged to have dinner with Governor Warren and President Truman on two or three occasions. I always remember that on almost each occasion, President Truman used to say to him at one time or another, "You know, you're more of a Democrat than most Democrats." There was no question that there was a tremendous mutual admiration and respect between them.

I recall the first Truman reception--a fund raiser for the Library in Washington--that was held at the Shoreham Hotel. I had been through the line, and I was coming back out. Mrs. Stowe and I were leaving to go home when I saw then-Justice Warren arrive, and get into the long receiving line, about two or three hundred deep. I went over and said, "Mr. Justice, will you come with me?" I moved him up to about third in position, caught the President's eye, and moved him right on in. Later the President expressed his thanks to me for moving him up, but I believe Warren would have stood in that line until he got there in due course. He was that kind of person. Yes, there was a very warm relationship there.

FUCHS: Civil rights seemed to be downplayed somewhat in

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Mr. Truman's speeches. Was there any particular reason for that or was it a conscious effort not to get into that too much? Of course, your speeches were in the South; a great many of them were.

STOWE: No, I can't add to that. There wasn't any question that as President he had a very strong feeling on civil rights. The only thing that I can remember is that in two of the states we campaigned in he sort of chided the audience before he started, saying he didn't know what the hell they invited him down here for on this occasion, because in 1948 they wouldn't even let him on the ballot. And that got a good laugh. To answer your question, I wasn't really aware that it was downplayed if it was.

FUCHS: From your knowledge, was his first usage of, "I don't give them hell, I just tell them the truth and they think it's hell," in that campaign?

STOWE: No.

FUCHS: He used that in an earlier campaign?

STOWE: I understand that was in '48.

FUCHS: Well, in '48 was when they started to yell, "Give 'em hell," and he just came back with that rejoinder.

I can check that out.

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STOWE: Well, as I recall it, but I wasn't there, it was somewhere out in Seattle or Tacoma, that some guy from the balcony called, hollered that, and that's when that came up. Of course, he used variations of it from then on, not only in that campaign. Of course, then it became a trade mark, "Give 'em hell," and we heard it a lot.

FUCHS: What did he think of the debates, the Kennedy-Nixon debates? Did he talk that over with you, do you recall?

STOWE: Well, in the second one I think it was, we were in Raleigh, North Carolina, a big dinner; they put a big screen on and we all watched it together. That was the one where the question came up about his profanity, and Kennedy handled it beautifully about Mrs. Truman. I caught his eyes real quick, and he was laughing so I figured we got over that one. And then, of course, the next one, which I think was the third or fourth, I'm not sure, anyway the one on international affairs was a disaster, as far as we were concerned. As I've already mentioned to you, when Kennedy went through everything dealing with international policy, back to Wilson or Roosevelt and never once mentioned Truman and all the things like the Marshall plan, and things you would expect, he

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was very disappointed.

FUCHS: Do you think this was an oversight, or why did Kennedy view that it would be to his detriment to bring up that matter?

STOWE: I have no idea why. It was a shock to everyone. I don't know whether we covered this off-the-record earlier, but that same night after I talked to Matt McCloskey in Philadelphia, apparently Matt talked to Kennedy, and after Kennedy called Truman, down in Louisiana or somewhere, he was a different man. What the explanation was, what their conversation was, I don't know, but it seemed to take the heat out of the problem. Still, it was a bad mistake on Kennedy's part.

FUCHS: Well, I think you could expand on this when we go over this at a later date, and go into more definite detail about that situation. You did mention it in your earlier interview.

Did he ever mention Joe Kennedy?

STOWE: Well, I wasn't there, but there is the classic quote; in which Truman said he "was not afraid of the Pope, he was afraid of Pop."

FUCHS: I have a document here that kind of interested me; it involves Kay Folger of the Speaker's Bureau. You

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wrote her and you mentioned a map.

STOWE: Yes.

FUCHS: You hoped a map would be made of that campaign. Did you ever have that?

STOWE: No.

FUCHS: It never came about?

STOWE: I never saw it.

FUCHS: I often wondered about that.

STOWE: You see, the committee in his own campaign had made a map showing every place he went and where he made speeches.

FUCHS: In '48?

STOWE: Yes. And I had hoped that something like this could have been done for the Kennedy campaign. But so far as I know it never was done. I think it would be fascinating, because of all these little towns we stopped in. For example, in North Carolina, we stopped at every little hamlet in eastern Carolina, and no President or Vice President had ever been there before. The crowds were fantastic.

FUCHS: Well, I'm sure when scholars go to these papers

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and they see that, they are going to ask us if it ever got done and . . .

STOWE: I don't think it has; if it has I've never seen it. Somebody could still do it.

FUCHS: Joe Feeney, in his interview, said that he didn't think Kennedy would have won if it hadn't been for Paul Butler, who more or less made a big indictment of the Republican Party. Did you feel that that was important?

STOWE: My own feeling is that Kennedy might not have won without Truman.

FUCHS: You think that Truman really ran a very effective campaign?

STOWE: I think that was, and I think President Kennedy recognized that.

GO TO Page 75 June 24, 1989 Oral History by Niel M. Johnson