James L. Sundquist Oral History Interview

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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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, 1964
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

MORRISSEY: Mr. Sundquist, we're interested in your relationship to Mr. Truman and to the Truman Administration. When did this relationship begin and what did it involve?

SUNDQUIST: I came into the Government in 1941, as a member of the staff of the Bureau of the Budget, which is in the Executive Office of the President, and was a staff member when Mr. Truman took office. In that capacity, I was borrowed from time to time by the White House, primarily to help draft speeches and messages and then in September of 1952, I was brought up into the White House full time for the duration of the 1952 campaign.

MORRISSEY: Why did the White House staff choose you as the one to borrow?

SUNDQUIST: Well, before I came with the Budget Bureau, I was a newspaperman. So during all the time I was at

[2]

the Bureau I got pulled in on various writing assignments and became known as the Bureau's writer. The first writing jobs I did with the White House were in the Bureau's own area of concern and the first time I went to the White House for any length of time was in connection with the 1947 State of the Union Message. Clark Clifford was looking to Jim Webb, who was then Director of the Budget, to help prepare it, and Webb had in mind bringing David Cushman Coyle down to help. Someone in the Bureau, Arnold Miles to be exact, said "Why, we've got a man already on our staff who would be as useful as David Cushman Coyle," and that was how I came to be assigned that year to Clark Clifford to work on the State of the Union Message.

MORRISSEY: Could you give me a little biographical information on how you came to be in the Bureau of the Budget?

SUNDQUIST: I was a newspaper man in Utah from 1935 to 1939 and during that period I finished college. Then I took graduate work at Syracuse from 1939 to 1941, two

[3]

years in Public Administration, with the intention then of going back into newspaper work. But the Government was expanding very rapidly in the spring and summer of 1941 and Public Administration graduates were in great demand. So I was hired by Donald C. Stone, who was Assistant Director of the Budget for Administrative Management, and who was looking for a combination public administration type and writer. He needed someone to translate into English the reports that his administrative specialists wrote. So I came in as a writer, but I soon got rather tired of sitting in the office and rewriting other people's stuff; I wanted to go out and do some of the glamorous analysis work too, and Mr. Stone let me cross over from being a writer to what in the Government is the equivalent of an efficiency expert. All during the war I was doing efficiency expert type work -- manpower control and organization studies, primarily in the military -- although from time to time I was pulled back on writing chores. I did some speeches for the Director and that kind of thing. I worked on the message on consolidation

[4]

of the War and Navy Departments, which was sent up in the early months of the Truman Administration, wasn't it?

MORRISSEY: 1945. I think after F.D.R.'s death.

SUNDQUIST: Yes.

MORRISSEY: From your experience, could you comment on the relationship between the Bureau of the Budget and the White House staff?

SUNDQUIST: Well, during my time there, it was very close. The Budget Bureau serves as an extension of the White House and Harold Smith was very conscious of the organizational role of the Budget Bureau as part of the Presidency. He was quite a philosopher about it and we were indoctrinated with the idea that every time we acted, it was the President himself acting. I believe that relations between the Budget Bureau and the President perhaps tended to be more direct in Harold Smith's time than later when they began to filter more through the White House staff. Smith was very jealous of his personal relation with President Roosevelt.

MORRISSEY: How did Smith get along with Truman?

[5]

SUNDQUIST: I guess I really can't answer that. I was not close enough to either one of them. But Smith was the man who built the Bureau into the institution it was. It had had a more limited role before he came and I have the impression that it reached its peak of competence and authority during his tenure. The Bureau carried out a very active recruiting program to skim the cream of the Public Administration people out of the colleges and it was a training ground for public administration personnel throughout the government. His successors were more politicians than professional public administrators and I think the agency lost some of the appeal that it had had -- and, well, agencies go through cycles.

MORRISSEY: Could you elaborate a bit on this impression you have that the relationship between the Director of the Bureau of the Budget and the President declined as time went on in the Truman Administration and the relationship became more one between the White House staff and the Director of the Budget.

SUNDQUIST: I don't know that I expressed it accurately if

[6]

I said it that way. Smith undoubtedly continued to deal with the President. It may be that the relation between the White House staff and the Bureau staff simply became more intimate. Charles Murphy was the man who organized policy work in the White House on a really systematic basis, and in doing so he spotted people in the Bureau that he could use and worked very closely with them. I'm thinking particularly here of Dave Bell and Dick Neustadt, both of whom he eventually pulled up on his staff. Dave Stowe was another one who came out of the Budget Bureau, but he was on Steelman's side of the White House.

MORRISSEY: Could you describe somewhat how Mr. Murphy handled his work and handled his staff?

SUNDQUIST: Well, that's not easy to describe. Murphy impressed me at that time, and still does, as a man with about as sound a judgment as anybody I've ever known. He would take great pains to weigh all the angles of a question in order to come out with the right position from the viewpoint of the President. He was absolutely selfless and devoted to the

[7]

President and completely anonymous. He had a capacity for drawing out of the staff people who worked with him the best they had to offer. They were a harmonious, congenial group. He was always very calm and level-headed and did not get flustered at all under pressure.

MORRISSEY: Could you specify some of the particular chores you did when you were working in the Bureau of the Budget but working with the White House staff?

SUNDQUIST: It was almost entirely on speeches and messages. The first one, as I recall, was the message consolidating the War and Navy Departments, an organizational question on which I had been working as a Bureau staff man. I have already mentioned the State of the Union Message in 1947, which actually meant, of course, December of 1946. I worked on a series of speeches Mr. Truman gave during a Western trip in 1950. Perhaps there will be some historical interest in how the 1947 message was developed. Do you want me to run through that?

MORRISSEY: Sure.

SUNDQUIST: I went over with Mr. Webb for a session with

[8]

Clark Clifford, where I was introduced and it was explained that I would work on it. Mr. Clifford in a very brief interview talked about the tone of the message. We were confronted, at that time, with the Republican 80th Congress which had just been elected and we had the special problem of addressing a message to a Congress of the opposite party. So there was some discussion as to how conciliatory we should be and so on. It was agreed that Mr. Webb and I would outline what we conceived the tone and general content to be and then arrange another conference. I prepared a document which set out some alternatives. One basic question was whether the tone would be "boldly New-Dealish," or one of "consolidating our gains." Those were phrases which I had culled, I think, from newspaper columnists' speculation. I recall Mr. Clifford scratching out “Boldly New Dealish” and saying, “Well, it won’t be that.”

As it turned out, it was a pretty prosaic message. There wasn't much innovation in it, as I recall, and it did take a general tone of consolidating our gains. My assignment was to coordinate the domestic phases

[9]

while George Elsey pulled together the international and foreign part. On the domestic side, I brought in various people from the Budget Bureau who had particular specialties. One of those, I remember, was Dave Bell, because what we had to say about labor-management relations in that particular message was important and Bell was handling that subject for the Bureau at the time, under Dave Stowe. Joe Reeve wrote a section on the subject of housing. What I tried to do was pull all those contributions into a synthesized domestic half of the message, and I turned my drafts over to Elsey who handled the clearances from there. It seemed to me that it all went very smoothly and simply. The Budget Bureau fellows were able to state the policy about as the White House expected it to be stated. And the White House staff, on messages and policy matters, at that time, was Clifford and Elsey, and that's about all. This may be one reason why relations between the Director of the Budget and the President seemed to be more direct at that time -- there wasn't any White House staff of any size to filter through.

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It was quite a contrast from the closing days of the Truman Administration when Mr. Truman had Murphy, Elsey, Dave Lloyd, Bell, Ken Hechler, Stowe, Harold Enarson, Dick Neustadt, and others on policy matters. The brain power really increased over that span of time.

I went overseas in 1947 and came back in 1949. In the fall of 1950, I was assigned to the Budget Message to pull together the whole document, which was done, of course, inside the Bureau without much White House review. Dave Bell, who had handled the Budget Message in 1949, was assigned to work with us and he came over and sweated it out in the Budget Bureau offices.

MORRISSEY: When was that message delivered?

SUNDQUIST: January, 1951, covering the 1952 fiscal year. We had to coordinate the Budget Message with the Economic Report and the State of the Union Message -- we had the three documents to dovetail.

MORRISSEY: Who was in charge of the overall coordination between these three messages?

[11]

SUNDQUIST: Charlie Murphy, I'm sure, but Dave Bell handled his relations with the Budget Message -- although not in the sense that Dave was giving orders. As the Budget Bureau's man, working for the Bureau and not the White House directly, I didn't regard Bell as having the final say on anything. He was just there to help, and his method of coordinating it was to sit there and work through with us. If we stayed up till 4 o'clock in the morning, as we did a couple of times, he stayed up till 4 o'clock. I suspect he worked the same way with Leon Keyserling on the Economic Report.

MORRISSEY: In regard to this point about brain power increasing in the Truman Administration as time went by, would you credit this Mr. Murphy?

SUNDQUIST: Yes. I guess it was Clifford who brought Murphy in. After Clifford left, then Murphy built the staff.

In regard to the 1950 Western speech-making swing, we met in Dave Lloyd's office and it was he who laid out the schedule and assigned the work.

[12]

MORRISSEY: Dave Lloyd did?

SUNDQUIST: Yes.

MORRISSEY: Had Mr. Lloyd arranged the schedule himself?

SUNDQUIST: I don't know. I assume he worked it out with Murphy and then took on the job of getting the drafts assigned. I was asked to write two of them -- one on foreign trade and one on foreign policy. I had never written a speech on foreign policy before, so I recall asking, "What do I say?" I didn't get any specific guidance.

Dave Lloyd said, "Well, here are a couple of speeches (Dean) Acheson has given lately; maybe they'll give you some ideas."

So I went around to my room in the Budget Bureau -- this was a Saturday morning -- and asked myself, "What is my foreign policy today?" I decided I would write my ideas on foreign policy before I read Acheson's stuff, just to see how it would work out. I came out with something pretty good, I guess, because hardly a word was changed and it was delivered in Laramie, Wyoming. I was told later

[13]

that the newspapermen took a poll and voted it the best speech of the trip. On the foreign trade speech, a draft had been done by some expert somewhere, and all I did was give it a literary touch. The one on foreign policy was scarcely even cleared with the State Department; they did contribute a couple of paragraphs at the beginning on a gift of wheat to India, but apart from that, they didn't change anything either. As you see, the speech writing process under Murphy was a rather informal one.

MORRISSEY: Why do you suppose you were chosen to write these two speeches?

SUNDQUIST: They had an extra body and they had two speeches that hadn't been written. I don't know why they didn't ask the State Department to do them. It probably was mostly a matter of mechanics. They were starting at the beginning of the schedule and getting the speeches assigned and then, as they came up almost against the day of the departure, they discovered the Laramie speech hadn't been written. So they sat around the table on Saturday morning

[14]

and said, "Well, this one better be on foreign policy." And there I was, so they matched me up with the speech.

MORRISSEY: Did you travel with the President on the train?

SUNDQUIST: Not that time, no. Several of us drove out to hear the final speech of the swing, at Cumberland, Maryland, where incidentally we developed one of the more important innovations in the speech process. (I'll have to enter a caveat here that I'm not sure whether the Cumberland speech concluded this particular swing or another later one, around Labor Day, but that doesn't matter for this particular incident.) We had written a rather good speech on labor surpluses; Cumberland was a depressed area, one of the first to be recognized. It was a minor speech, written by Hechler and Bill Batt and me after the President had left and we mailed it to them. It was about seven pages long -- not much more than that. Mr. Truman was on the rear platform turning the pages and he'd covered page 4 and as he went to turn to page 5, the wind caught one of the pages and he turned directly

[15]

to page 6, and went right on as though nothing had happened. Neither Mr. Truman nor the audience knew that anything had been left out -- only the authors were aware of the golden words lost in the wind. The result of that episode was the development of an isinglass cover in which they enclosed each page, which protected the manuscripts not only from the wind, but from the rain.

Early in 1951, I left the Budget Bureau to go to the Office of Defense Mobilization, where my particular assignment was the quarterly ODM report to the President -- which was a report to the public too on the progress of the defense program. Each three months, again, Dave Bell came over and sweated out the final version with us. Dave Stowe reviewed it one time when Bell was not available, but he didn't work on it with us line by line as Bell did.

MORRISSEY: Did you discuss these reports directly with the President?

SUNDQUIST: No, I don't think he gave them any extensive review. I believe Dave Stowe handled them for him

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along with Bell; they had been with him long enough to know his views and policies and when they gave the O.K., that was it.

I worked on a message proposing special relief for the Kansas flood areas after the big flood of 1951 and that was all until I got pulled into the White House on Labor Day, 1952.

MORRISSEY: I've asked you how Mr. Murphy did his work and how he conducted his staff business. How did his way of doing things compare or contrast with Clark Clifford's way of doing similar things?

SUNDQUIST: I can't really say, because I only did one job for Clifford. My impression from that job is that Murphy was inclined to devote perhaps more time to the detailed structure and content of a major speech or message. Clifford seemed more the operating executive type who handled a thing like this very briskly, while Murphy weighed each sentence judiciously, one by one. But I'm speaking only from one case, as far as Clifford is concerned. Clifford may have done more writing himself. Murphy did very few original drafts.

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His forte was editing the language and refining the expression of policy.

MORRISSEY: Let me pursue one matter in relation to the State of the Union Message in 1947. You remarked that the emphasis in this speech was on consolidation of gains, and that in the preliminary stages, Mr. Clifford seemed to take that position. Whose influence was prevailing in the writing of that speech?

SUNDQUIST: Well, at the time I got into it, Mr. Clifford’s mind was made up and from the firm way he expressed it, that it would not be a New Deal type speech, I thought he must be reflecting not just his own feeling but also that of the President.

The greatest frustration for me on that speech was on the foreign policy side, which I was not handling. I did my best to convince Mr. Elsey that the time had come for something bold in that area but I made no headway. After I went overseas came the message announcing the Greek-Turkish Doctrine and Mr. Elsey wrote me a note saying, "Here it is. This is what you wanted last winter."

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MORRISSEY: In regard to these two speeches you wrote for the President during the 1950 campaign, how much of a difference, if any, was there between the preparation of these speeches in Washington and their delivery out in the hinterlands? Would someone on the train look over these drafts and adapt them to the local conditions?

SUNDQUIST: Not in this case, no. These were prepared texts. Now, the President may have opened up with some off-the-cuff banter and local color comment. But once he got into his text he always stuck to his script. That was equally true during the campaign -- well, nearly so, anyway. Of course, he had a much bigger traveling staff in the campaign. Do you want to go now into the '52 campaign?

MORRISSEY: I was about to suggest it.

SUNDQUIST: The speech-writing staff in '52 under Mr. Murphy consisted of Dave Lloyd, Charlie Van Devander, Dick Neustadt, Ken Hechler, and me, with occasional drafts from other people, particularly selected people in the agencies who had something to offer. In the early

[19]

part of the campaign, Van Devander and I were back at home base cranking out drafts and sending them to the train. Ken Hechler was also there part of the time. But Hechler specialized early on local color and stopped doing any drafting. Actually, he was a good speechwriter but he insisted he was not, and in any case he seemed to prefer the local assignment, and he was extraordinary at it. Neustadt began to specialize on the smaller whistlestop type speeches, which were written up in outline rather than textual form. However, the outlines were so complete that if the President decided only to read the outline, it still came out as a speech and toward the end, that's about what happened. Dick had these speeches numbered and would rotate them somewhat so that if there wasn't anything special to say at a particular place, he'd pull out number five which hadn't been given yet that day. The major speeches were the ones that were released to the press in advance and there were two of those a day -- one for the afternoon papers and one for the morning's. Ordinarily we had one on foreign policy and one on domestic policy and the general

[20]

pattern was that Lloyd did the former and I did the latter. We could work at the rate of about one speech a day each, but of course it would be considerably easier if someone had contributed a good basic draft to start from. Sometimes there would be an extra luncheon speech thrown in, and then there were letters and messages too that might be released -- you might have as many as four or five texts in a day, but the standard was two.

MORRISSEY: What were your major problems during that '52 campaign?

SUNDQUIST: You mean mechanical or substantive?

MORRISSEY: Either, or both.

SUNDQUIST: Well, the main mechanical problem was the lack of an opportunity to sleep. The grind on the train was a rough one. I wasn't on the first trip, which took place in September -- the western swing. I joined the train at Buffalo on the way back, followed it into New York and later went on some of the other trips but not all of them -- the others were shorter. We

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would generally get the speeches ready by evening, and then go over them with Murphy until they were done to his satisfaction. That meant going over every line with great care. At the beginning of the trip, we'd have the first speeches ready before we left and we might get the first day's work done on the train by a reasonable bedtime hour, say 11 o'clock. Then we'd start losing ground so that by the end of the trip we might not get them all buttoned up until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. At that point, Dave Lloyd and I -- although I can't speak for sure about Lloyd -- would go to bed and Mr. Murphy (I don't know whether he slept or not) cleared these speeches at breakfast with the President and I would wake up in time to hear one or two of them and then start to work on the next day's grist.

Substantively, I don't recall any particular problems. We had a good story to tell; we had the administration's policies and record that we knew forward and backward. The problem was to put it in language that would communicate. It was Mr. Truman talking about his administration and at some point

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in the speech, making a plug for Adlai.

MORRISSEY: As you recall, how did you view the chances of success during that campaign? Did you think the Democrats were going to win another term?

SUNDQUIST: I must confess that I got myself convinced at the end that Stevenson was going to win. This came on gradually. I didn't let myself fully believe it until the very last weekend in St. Louis when we all listened to a man named Charlie Hamilton, from Mississippi -- I believe I have his name right. He said he'd just come back from the convention of country preachers, and all the country preachers were for Stevenson and that meant the grass roots were for him. I guess there was a swing toward Stevenson at the end, but it got started much too late. And I don't suppose that at best it could have ever produced a majority. People were convinced that the Truman regime was corrupt, and full of communists, and even if they weren't sure, they were ready to give the other side a chance after twenty years.

To get back to Truman's relation to the speech

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writing business on the train; We would get our cues from Mr. Murphy as to what he was most interested in talking about, but I had the impression that he had all he could do to deliver the speeches and meet the dignitaries and jolly up the politicians, all of whom had to ride the train to the content of the speeches. I remember one evening I was typing away in my compartment when I felt someone behind me and looked over my shoulder and there was the President of the United States; he smiled at me benignly and said, "Don't get up. I just wondered what stuff you're planning to put in the President mouth tomorrow?" And I assumed he wanted to know and started out to tell him, but he shushed me and said, "That's all right, young man, I'm sure that what you're coming up with is going to be a lot better than anything I could suggest." And he strode jauntily away. Margaret used to come back and cheer us up occasionally too.

Another delightful incident was in Cincinnati. I had written a humorous takeoff on Taft for Taft's hometown as a change of pace after so many serious

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speeches. Dave Lloyd added a few touches, and so did some others. Truman apparently liked it, too, because he hammed it up and ad libbed a great many additional lines that added punch and humor. He thought he was so good -- which he was -- that he stayed up to hear it played back in the club car. Then he laughed so hard at his own wit -- and ours -- that he almost broke down and had us all breaking down with him. In short, he was a fine, relaxed, and enjoyable man to work for.

MORRISSEY: Could you give me your impressions of David Lloyd?

SUNDQUIST: Dave was a careful and penetrating thinker on international and foreign policy questions. He probably was good on domestic questions too, but the former was his specialty. He was as good a writer as he was a thinker -- with a very lucid and eloquent style. I thought he wrote brilliant stuff during that campaign. He was a delightful fellow to work with, as they all were.

MORRISSEY: There must have been occasions when there simply

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wasn't time to go over some of the speeches prepared for the President line by line?

SUNDQUIST: No, that didn't happen. Murphy stayed up as, late as necessary to go over them line by line before he went to bed. Each day he had a full set of speeches to clear with the President at breakfast.

MORRISSEY: Was there much discussion between the President's speech writers on whether he was more effective speaking extemporaneously or more effective speaking from a prepared draft and not deviating from it?

SUNDQUIST: We all thought he was more effective extemporaneously and so did he. We wrote in what was called, jocularly around the White House, "Missouri English," which was designed to incorporate his extemporaneous style into the manuscripts. What that meant really was short sentences and short words where we didn't have to have big ones. His secretary, Rose Conway, had devised a way of typing these so that they almost read themselves. Maybe you've had this story before?

MORRISSEY: No.

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SUNDQUIST: Her trick was to put the natural pauses always at the end of lines, so Mr. Truman could read on line to the end, pause, then read the next line to the end, and then pause and so on. And the pauses came out naturally. This was something, incidentally, that I taught the lady who typed President Kennedy's speeches in the 1960 campaign.

MORRISSEY: Could you enlarge on that a little bit?

SUNDQUIST: Well, I don't know that this is pertinent to the Truman Library.

MORRISSEY: Well, we'd like to hear it.

SUNDQUIST: I was in the balcony looking over the President's shoulder when he was delivering a speech in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and I noticed he was following with his finger to keep his place as he looked up at the audience. And when he came to the end of the line if he paused there, it might be pausing at the wrong place. They had just given him a solid block of type -- the large speech type -- with no spacing whatever, long paragraphs and sentences which overlapped lines and even

[27]

pages. He had difficulty in keeping his place and finding the beginnings and endings of sentences. In every case, he had to pause at the end of the page while he turned it -- and these pauses might be at very awkward spots. So I explained to Mrs. Lincoln how Rose Conway used to type speeches. I had a feeling that day I had really accomplished something for the Kennedy campaign.

MORRISSEY: Is it difficult for a Presidential speech writer not to take pride of authorship in what he's preparing?

SUNDQUIST: Well, you take some pride, but in the review process we always had the right of argument and Murphy was never arbitrary. As a general rule, he would tend to preserve the original draft rather than make changes where it was an evenly balanced decision. I remember, for example, working over a speech draft that Laszlo Ecker-Racz had done for Spokane.

MORRISSEY: This was in 1952?

SUNDQUIST: Yes, '52. I remember rewriting it to put the language more in the style that I'd developed, and to

[28]

refine the concepts in a way that the administration had customarily done. I discovered later that Mr. Murphy had used the original Ecker-Racz draft, almost without change. I asked him why he hadn't adopted my "improvements" and he said, "Well, it seemed to be fresher the way Ecker-Racz had drafted it and it seemed a little stale by the time you'd worked it over."

This illustrates his tendency to preserve the original draft unless there was a good reason for changing it. He had a remarkably good feel as to whether a speech could be delivered or not -- whether it was really a speech as distinct from a magazine article or something written for a learned journal. He was also good at inserting the colorful phrase. They still talk about the Hungry Horse Dam speech which began with the line, "You people here had better take a good look at that dam because if the Republicans are elected, you'll never see another one." That line has been quoted ever since for more than ten years. Nobody remembers a word about what was said in the rest of the speech. The rest of the speech, I did,

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but it was the line that Mr. Murphy wrote in at the beginning that lives.

MORRISSEY: Were you involved in any other campaign activities in 1950 and '52?

SUNDQUIST: No. In '50, of course, I was a career civil servant. I don't recall the campaign very clearly.

One reason I got emotionally involved in the '52 campaign was that in the Office of Defense Mobilization, we had been trying to mobilize the country and rebuild the Armed Forces and so on, all of which involved some inconvenience to the American people in the form of controls and high taxes. The Republicans, and their Presidential candidate in particular, chose to make political capital out of what seemed to me to be a patriotic necessity. This got me sufficiently fired up that I probably wrote better than I otherwise would have. I thought then, and I still think, that it was one of the most unprincipled campaigns the country has ever seen. Maybe later on as I mellow it will look more like normal political behavior, but it did not then.

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MORRISSEY: Were you involved in any of the planning during the transition from the Truman Administration to the Eisenhower Administration?

SUNDQUIST: Well, I worked on the President's Farewell Speech. Other than that, no, except, of course, I worked with Henry Fowler on getting the office of Defense Mobilization ready to turn over, and I made my own recommendation that the report I had been putting out for two years be abolished.

MORRISSEY: Could you enlarge a bit about the preparation of the President's Farewell Speech?

SUNDQUIST: Yes. This was a labor of love. Whereas we had been accustomed in the campaign to turning out four or five speeches a day, as a group, now we had more than a month to turn out one speech, and everybody agreed this had to be a masterpiece in which we would express in a sensitive way our feeling about the
seven years of the Truman Administration and maybe get across the suggestion that the American people had made a mistake in repudiating it. Dick Neustadt was assigned to do the first draft and I think took

[31]

almost a month just to do that. The pace had slowed down that much. But at a certain point, when he had a draft to work on, we used to assemble late every morning in the Cabinet Room and work it over. Then the President would come in each afternoon and take up some of our time reminiscing. He got in the habit of putting in a couple of hours there a day -- at least, it seemed to be almost every day. This was most enjoyable; here's where the oral history project should have had a tape recorder.

For instance, I remember his saying one day, "Somebody asked whether there's anything I would do differently if I had it all to do over again. I said, 'No, I wouldn't do one single thing different,' and that's true." Somebody said, "How about the appointment of (James P.) McGranery?"

Truman smiled, "Well, maybe I'd do that one different."

He told a lot about Jackson County, Missouri, and cracked jokes. The high spot was the day he came in, one afternoon, with a thundercloud on his face and

[32]

everybody said, "What's the matter? Why are you so grim?"

And he said, "Well, I never really worried about the future of the Republic until today, but I just had lunch with that man again," (this was his second meeting with General Eisenhower) "and he told me he was going to do this job on a forty hour week. I started to explain to him why that was impossible, that you had ceremonies in the Rose Garden and people you had to see and all those things that had nothing to do with the office of the Presidency, and running the Government alone took forty hours a week, and every night you had to go up to your bedroom with a briefcase full of papers -- National Security Council documents, some of them fifty pages long -- and Eisenhower interrupted me and said, 'I'm going to have all that on one page.' And I started out to explain to him why you couldn't put some of those things on one page and suddenly I realized that he was just sitting there thinking, 'The trouble with you is you're just inefficient.' So I gave up. I wasn't really worried until now, but I am worried about the future of the country under a forty

[33]

hour Presidency." I had many occasions to recall that afterwards when that appeared to be what was happening.

MORRISSEY: Any other recollections from these sessions with the President?

SUNDQUIST: I recall his discussion of Mr. Kefauver and his committee; he insisted on calling him "Cowfever." I don't think he said anything there he hasn't said on other occasions, but he recalled how he had tried to advise "Cowfever" not to go into Kansas City and Chicago and he said, "Every place that man had on his list was a Democratically run community and he wasn't going into any Republican cities at all. I tried to explain to him that wasn't the way to do it and he just wouldn't listen to me."

MORRISSEY: Let me go back to 1945 and your work on unification of the Army and Navy. Could you elaborate a little bit on that?

SUNDQUIST: Well, this came out of the efficiency experting.

The Budget Bureau had a staff under Leonard W. Hoelscher that worked with the Army and the Army Air Forces all

[34]

during the war. We began before Pearl Harbor. I went over there the day after Pearl Harbor. We worked with General (Joseph T.) McNarney on the March 9, 1942, directive reorganizing the War Department into the Army Air Force, Army Service Force, and Army Ground Force. Larry Hoelscher became, I think, the leading philosopher on the subject of military organization that the country has. He is now the Deputy Comptroller of the Department of the Army. We went from one project to another. All during the war we worked extensively with the War Department General Staff. We had a man who worked on the organization of the intelligence services. We had in the Budget Bureau, but not under Hoelscher, another group who worked on war supply problems and did some work with the Navy. When the Air Force was created we worked extensively on the reorganization of the Army Air Corps and the Air Force Combat Command, both of which were abolished, and on the pooling of their functions and so on. A couple of us were assigned to work with the Air Transport Command. What it amounted to was that throughout the war the Bureau

[35]

had a floating group of maybe 10 to 20 people working with various parts of the War and Navy Departments, most of them under Larry Hoelscher's direction. We came to the conclusion, which was probably primarily Larry's, that the coordination of the two departments ought to be at a level lower than the White House and the Budget Bureau, and in this he had the complete backing of Harold Smith and everyone else in the Bureau except probably the examiners who handled the Navy Department. At some point President Truman was converted. I'm under the impression that the whole idea was tried out on Roosevelt and he said in effect, "Come back and talk to me after the war; we've got a war to win." We came back after the war, we talked to Truman and got his go ahead. So I was assigned to write the message, sometime late in 1945 or early 1946. At that time, Mr. Truman still had as his principal ghost writer, Sam Rosenman, who was held over from the Roosevelt Administration, and I recall we sent our draft over to the President and Rosenman wrote a preamble and a conclusion which largely duplicated what was in the material we sent over but the original message that I drafted was still intact in the middle. So we

[36]

took the liberty of editing out of the preamble and the conclusion the material that was duplicated and that was the way it was finally submitted. We took some pride in having rewritten Rosenman and made it stick.

MORRISSEY: Were you concerned with the formation of Civil Defense legislation in 1950?

SUNDQUIST: Oh, yes. I acted then as a staff member of the Division of Legislative Reference, which had the job of pulling together the administrator's position on all legislation. I happened to handle that particular one and did some mediating of differing departments' views, but I don't recall having made any great contribution to it.

MORRISSEY: Were you involved in any way with the issue of the steel seizure of 1952?

SUNDQUIST: I worked then for Charles E. Wilson, the Director of Defense Mobilization, who was involved. I mainly recall the staff meeting Mr. Wilson called when he returned from the White House one afternoon and dramatically announced to all of us that he had just

[37]

resigned because his integrity had been questioned. He did not stress the substantive disagreement between him and the President; what he stressed to us was that he felt he had been called a liar in front of other people. Others can reconstruct other aspects of that episode, of course.

MORRISSEY: Did you attend any of Mr. Truman's staff meetings?

SUNDQUIST: No.

MORRISSEY: Did you ever attend any of his pre-press conference sessions?

SUNDQUIST: No.

MORRISSEY: Could you tell me about your months with Stephen Mitchell when you worked for the Democratic National Committee?

SUNDQUIST: In connection with Mr. Truman, you mean? Or just in general?

MORRISSEY: In general.

SUNDQUIST: I went over to the Committee in February of 1953 because it seemed like the best opportunity to appeal

[38]

the results of the election, which had left me feeling out of sympathy with my new employer. It seemed like ages before I was able to get out of the administration. Actually, it was only about three weeks, but we were, of course, all thoroughly demoralized before January 20. Arthur Flemming seemed to be intent on dismantling everything that the Office of Defense Mobilization had been doing and there didn't seem to be any good reason to stay there. Mr. Mitchell needed a speech writer and by that time I was a specialist. I stayed with him until he retired at the end of 1954, as his principal speech writer, traveling research assistant, and general handyman.

MORRISSEY: Could you comment on the problems of trying to revitalize a party that had just suffered a major defeat?

SUNDQUIST: Well, it turned out to be easier than I had thought it would be and I think Mr. Mitchell had the same reaction. There were an awful lot of people in the same frame of mine as we, who felt as though the wrong man had won. They consisted particularly of a whole breed of new idealistic politicians who had sprung up as personal

[39]

admirers and supporters of Stevenson; the kind of people that possibly no other presidential candidate since, maybe, Woodrow Wilson, had been able to attract into politics. They were rarin' to go; they could hardly wait for the next election after November '52. And we began having in January of '53 some of the biggest political rallies that the particular localities had ever seen. Even before I joined him, Steve was telling about a meeting in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in a high school auditorium in below zero weather that had 2,000 people there from all over Minnesota. Steve had an amazing talent for inspiring party workers. He went all over the country for two years giving pep talks -- and they took. He could go into a state where everybody was gloomy and down in the dumps and by the end of the day raise their spirits to a pretty high level. He had a very contagious enthusiasm.

MORRISSEY: Any particular states where this...?

SUNDQUIST: Oh, I recall seeing it particularly in Arizona. When we arrived in the morning they began telling us all their problems and troubles and difficulties, but at the end of the day they were telling us what

[40]

they were going to do. This happened in more or less degree everywhere where the Democrats were out of power. Where they were in power; of course, then they tended to have a little different outlook on life.

There was an interesting progression in Mr. Mitchell’s thinking as National Chairman. When I first went to work for him in February of ’53, he was still quite suspicious of the Truman image. Occasionally, I’d turn out a speech for him which he would toss back at me and say, “It sounds too much like Harry Truman.” By the time he had left office, he was sounding more like Truman than Truman himself. He became convinced of the general Truman idea that there is a class struggle in the country and that the Democratic Party can’t really hope to appeal to the upper classes and be all things to all people, and that as Truman used to love to do, we ought to call a spade a spade. I was toning his language down at the end.

Mr. Mitchell was very careful, always, to maintain correct and cordial relations with Mr. Truman. He went to see him as often as he could. The distrust seemed to be a little bit both ways at the beginning, but I

[41]

believe they both warmed up to each other substantially before it was over. The old Truman crowd didn't care much for Mitchell and I think Mitchell felt that the President himself might have had something to do with that. Probably Mr. Mitchell himself had something to do with it, because he occasionally took cracks at various old line politicians who were closely identified with Truman -- sometimes not expecting to be quoted in print.

MORRISSEY: Could you comment on the influence an ex-President has on politics in general and party affairs, specifically?

SUNDQUIST: Well, as you know, I went through the '56 campaign with Mr. (W. Averell) Harriman, and when Truman came out for Harriman in Chicago, it didn't appear to change a single vote among the delegates. We had Frank McKinney on Harriman's staff, and his mission was to round up the old Truman people and deliver them to Harriman, but I'm not sure he produced anybody either. There's a great tendency in politics to look to the future, not the past, and what can Truman do for anybody from now on? I guess there was also a feeling that no matter how much you loved and respected the man, his public image had been hopelessly tarnished in the '52 campaign

[42]

and by the press treatment of him during and prior to the campaign. His audiences, of course, loved him, particularly in what was known as "Truman Country." After 1952, he was particularly invited by places like the steel towns of Pennsylvania and some of the farming areas. He wasn't much in demand as a speaker in most of the suburbs.

MORRISSEY: Were you involved in any way in the relationship between Harriman and Truman?

SUNDQUIST: Well, I was an observer; the go-between, I guess, was Sam Rosenman.

MORRISSEY: Could you comment on your observations?

SUNDQUIST: Well, Harriman knew, of course, all through 1956 that he was way behind. Stevenson had got commitments out of practically every incumbent governor -- the principal exceptions were Governor (G. Mennen) Williams and Governor (Frank J.) Lausche. But Stevenson had commitments from George Leader of Pennsylvania and Bob Meyner of New Jersey and most of the others including the New England governors. Stevenson also had most of the old-line bosses for one reason or

[43]

another. He had a peculiar combination or the best elements in the party and the worst. He had people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Reuther from the North and he had some of the worst segregationists of the South. He had his personal, idealistic, worshipful following that stayed with him from 1952. So Harriman knew that something dramatic would have to happen. Stevenson would have to stub his toe in some manner in order for him to have a chance. Stevenson would have to alienate some of his established support.

After the Minnesota primary, where Kefauver beat Stevenson, Harriman thought maybe Stevenson's Achilles heel was going to be his weakness in the primaries. But then Stevenson went into Florida and won and he overwhelmed Kefauver in California, so that didn't come through. Harriman began, I guess, from that time on, to count more and more on Truman's endorsement as perhaps the thing that would somehow make the difference -- the important dramatic development. So during the first half of '56, he maintained very close contact with Truman and at some point along there, well before the convention, Truman gave him a promise. It's at that

[44]

point where McKinney came aboard, and McKinney had the mission of getting the word across to all of Truman's old friends that Harriman was the man. Now, whether McKinney was authorized to tell them that Truman was going to come out for Harriman at the right time, I don't know. Harriman himself never said right out, even to his closest advisers, that he had a promise from Truman, but we all were certain he did. The right time was selected out at Chicago and Truman made his television appeal. The rest of us waited after that for other leading delegates to make their pronouncements following Truman, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody did not even one. My own feeling then was that if as many as ten or fifteen or twenty-five came out for Harriman, including maybe a few conspicuous switches away from Stevenson, that it might start a trend because there was an awful lot of dissatisfaction among the Stevenson supporters with Stevenson. Of course, we heard mainly from the disgruntled people who didn't like Stevenson for one reason or another and so came to Harriman. But that included some who were publicly committed to Stevenson and who wound up voting for him, and Stevenson to this day may not have known were disgruntled. I've

[45]

often said that in a secret ballot, Harriman would have won the nomination, but with everybody voting on the record and with the governors and the state chairmen and the party organizations whipping their people into line to make good on their commitments, it was just not possible for people to vote the way they felt. We would have gotten a substantial number of votes out of the Illinois delegation, for example; conversely, Stevenson would have gotten a few out of New York.

MORRISSEY: When did you go to work for Governor Harriman?

SUNDQUIST: January, '55, after the election -- at the point where Steve Mitchell left the National Committee.

MORRISSEY: What kind of work did you do for him?

SUNDQUIST: I had two jobs. First, I was in charge of all of his speech materials, speech drafts, public appearances, getting his briefing materials ready, working on his speech schedule and handling other documents that carried his name like proclamations and messages of various kinds. Second, I was his staff man on national affairs as distinct from state affairs. Originally in 1955 that didn't mean national politics, but during the year 1955, it developed into

[46]

that. Whether Harriman had in mind my experience with the National Committee and my political contacts when he hired me, I have no idea. He told me when he interviewed me for the job in November of 1954 that he was committed to Stevenson for President and intended to support him. But early in '55 politicians from all over began coming to Harriman and saying, "Look, you're the only alternative we have. You've got to get off this Stevenson kick and keep yourself available" -- and they persuaded him that he should. Then he became convinced that Stevenson was not the man for the job. I think I was with him at the moment where he made up his mind. We were going to the Statler Hotel in Washington one night when the Washington Post front paged the story that Stevenson had just come out for what could be interpreted as unilateral disarmament. Harriman said something like, “That does it; you can’t trust that man to deal with the Russians.” And from that time on, he was an active candidate although he didn’t announce his candidacy, of course, until long after that.

MORRISSEY: How long did you stay with Governor?

[47]

SUNDQUIST: Through the year 1956.

MORRISSEY: And then you...

SUNDQUIST: Then I came with Senator Clark of Pennsylvania. I decided to leave Albany on the general theory that my days there were numbered anyway; that I couldn't make a career at Albany and I had better get back to Washington where there would be more long-range job opportunities. So I wrote to three of the new Democratic senators. One or two of them didn't answer my letters, but Senator Clark did and hired me.

MORRISSEY: What kind of work did you do for him?

SUNDQUIST: I was in charge of the legislative side of his office, as distinct from the Pennsylvania political and errand-running side. I stayed with him during his entire term.

MORRISSEY: When did you come into your present position in Agriculture?

SUNDQUIST: January, 1963, at the end of Clark's first term.

[48]

MORRISSEY: In regard to this hand-written speech draft* -- would that be the right word for it? -- that you brought over today, could you give me the background on it?

SUNDQUIST: Yes. That draft presents an outline of a speech on corruption. The Republicans, of course, had been campaigning on "Korea, Communism and Corruption" and the President was extremely sensitive on this point. He felt that he was being severely maligned; that he had run a good, clean, decent administration and that he had been shamefully misrepresented by the Republican press and that speech there reflects his ideas on how to answer the charge. My recollection is that that was incorporated practically verbatim into a speech which Charlie Murphy personally wrote and which was delivered at Fargo, North Dakota, the opening speech of his first whistlestop train ride.

MORRISSEY: Could you give an approximate date when you think that the President probably wrote this?

SUNDQUIST: It was three or four days before the departure of the train.

[49]

MORRISSEY: Do you recall how you...

SUNDQUIST: It seems to me that the train left about the middle of September, which would put the date of that about September 10. Murphy did a draft and then handed me the draft and the President's notes and said, "Would you go over this draft, and here's what the Boss wanted written." Murphy had stuck very faithfully to the President's text, and I don't recall that I edited it much. Then I kept that as one of my prize mementos.

MORRISSEY: Could you give me your general impressions of how Mr. Truman ran his office?

SUNDQUIST: Well, maybe it isn't a general impression, but one very strong impression I have is that he was the master attended one of his press conferences where he bounced back answers to every question that was thrown at him. I went with Fred Lawton to present the issues contained in the budget in December of 1950; Fred asked him a lot of detailed policy questions pertaining to Veterans affairs and Social Security and odd bits of legislation -- did he want to endorse them in the Budget Message or not -- and with not a single exception Mr. Truman knew

[50]

what those questions were about and he knew exactly where he stood. He was a man with a very clear and simple frame of reference -- to use that horrid term that there seems to be no good substitute for. You could watch him throwing a specific question against that general frame of reference and getting the rebound instantaneously. He didn't take long to make decisions; he didn't fret about them and having made them he slept on them with no difficulty, and this is something he boasted about during his post-election period when he used to philosophize with us in the Cabinet Room. He was quite a philosopher about the office of the Presidency and had a strong sense of history. He developed the analysis of the five parts of the President's job which Dick Neustadt worked up into a whistlestop speech. He worked hard at his job all the time to the very end. He was very much on top of his job; he knew what was going on. He was a good executive -- although, as so many others have noted, he may have placed too much trust in people that he happened to like and that he felt were loyal to him.

MORRISSEY: Anything else you care to talk about?

[51]

SUNDQUIST: If I think of anything else, I'll add it to the record.

MORRISSEY: Thank you very much Mr. Sundquist.

Acheson, Dean, 12
Arizona, Democratic party workers in, 39
Armed Forces, unification of the, 3-4, 7, 33-35

Batt, William L.,14
Bell, David E.,6, 9, 10, 11, 15
Budget, Bureau of the:

• • Air Force, work in connection with creation of the, 34
    staff members assigned to the White House, 6
    Sundquist's, J.L., job in the, 1-3
    War Department general staff, work with during World War II, 33-34
    White House staff, relationship with the, 4-6
• Budget, U.S., 1952, 49-50

   

  California, 1956 Presidential primary campaign in, 43
  Campaigns, Presidential. See Presidential campaigns
  Cincinnati, Ohio, 23
  Civil Defense Act of 1950, Federal, 36
  Clark, Joseph S., 47
  Clifford, Clark M., 2, 8, 11, 16
  Congress, 80th, 8
  Congress, messages to. See Presidential messages to Congress
  Congressional campaign, 1950, 18
  Corruption, H.S.T. draft speech on, 1952, 48-49
  Coyle, David Cushman, 2
  Cumberland, Md., 14

  Democratic National Convention, 1956, 43-45
  Democratic Party, revitalization after 1952 defeat, 38-39
  Dewey, Thomas E., 29

  Ecker-Racz, Laszlo, 27-28
  Eisenhower, Dwight D., 32-33
  Elsey, George M., 9, 10, 17
  Enarson, Harold L., 10

  Fargo, N.D., 48
  Flemming, Arthur S., 38
  Florida, 1956 Presidential primary campaign in, 43
  Fowler, Henry, 30

  Greece and Turkey, aid to, 17

  Hamilton, Charles, 22
  Harriman, W. Averell, 41-47
  Hechler, Kenneth, 10, 14, 18, 19.
  Hoelscher, Leonard W., 33-35
  Hungry Horse Dam, H.S.T.'s 1952 speech at, 28

  Kansas flood relief, 1951 Presidential message on, 16
  Kefauver, Estes, 43
  Kennedy, John F., 26
  Keyserling, Leon, 11

  Laramie, Wyoming, 12
  Lausche, Frank J., 42
  Lawton, Frederick J., 49
  Lincoln, Mrs. Evelyn, 27
  Leader, George M., 42
  Lloyd, David D., 11-12, 18, 20, 24

  McGranery, James P., 31
  McKinney, Frank, 41, 44
  McNarney, Gen. Joseph T., 34
  Messages to Congress. See Presidential message to Congress
  Meyner, Robert B., 42
  Miles, Arnold, 2
  Minnesota, 1956 Presidential primary campaign in, 43
  "Missouri English," 25
  Mitchell, Stephen A., 38-41
  Mobilization as an issue in the 1952 Presidential campaign, 29
  Murphy, Charles S., 6-7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 18, 21, 25, 28, 48

  Navy, Department of the, consolidation with the War Department, 3-4, 7, 33-36
  Neustadt, Richard E., 6, 10, 16, 18, 19, 30-31
  New Deal, 8
  New England governors, 42
  1950 Congressional campaign,18
  1952 Presidential campaign. See Presidential campaign, 1952
  1956 Presidential campaign. See Presidential campaign, 1956

  Office of Defense Mobilization, 15, 29, 38

  Presidency:

  • H.S.T.'s concept of the, 50
    Smith, H.D.'s concept of the Bureau of the Budget's role in the, 4-5
  Presidential campaign, 1952: H.S.T.'s speech on corruption,
  • 48-49
    H.S.T.'s speech at Hungry Horse Dam, 28-29
    H.S.T.'s speeches, preparation of, 18-23, 27-28
    staff for preparation of Presidential speeches, 18-19
    Sundquist, J.L., joins Presidential train at Buffalo, N.Y., 20
  Presidential campaign, 1956, 41-45
  Presidential messages to Congress: Budget message, 1952,
  • 40, 49
    relief to 1951 Kansas flood sufferers, on, 16
    State of the Union message, 1947, 2, 7-9, 17
    unification of the Armed Forces, on, 3-4, 7, 34-36
  Presidential primaries, 1956, 43
  Presidential speeches (Harry S. Truman): at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1952,
  • 23-24
    on foreign policy and foreign trade, 1950, western trip, 11-14
    at Hungry Horse Dam, 1952, 28
    isinglass cover to protect reading copy of, 15
    at Laramie, Wyoming, 1950, 12-13
    1950 western trip, 7
    loss of page at Cumberland, Md., 1950, 14-15
    preparation of for 1950 campaign, 18
    preparation of for 1952 Presidential campaign, 18-19, 21-28
    Sundquist, J.L., assigned to work on, 1-2
    See also State of the Union message, 1947
  Presidents on politics, influence of former, 41-42, 44

   

  Reeve, Joseph E., 9
  Republican Party, conduct of the 1952 Presidential campaign by the, 29, 48
  Reuther, Walter, 43
  Roosevelt, Franklin D., 35
  Roosevelt, Mrs. Franklin D. (Anna Eleanor Roosevelt), 43
  Roseman, Samuel I., 35-36, 42

  St. Cloud, Minn., 39
  Segregationists, southern, in 1956 Presidential campaign, 43
  Smith, Harold, 4, 5-6, 35
  Speeches, Presidential. See Presidential speeches
  State of the Union Message, 1947, 2, 7-9, 17
  Steel industry, 1952 seizure by the Government, 36-37
  Stevenson, Adlai S., 22, 39, 42-46
  Stone, Donald C., 3
  Stowe, David H., 6, 9, 10, 15
  Sundquist, James L.:

  • Agriculture, joins staff of the Department of, 47.
    biographical information concerning, 2-3
    Budget, Bureau of the, as employee of, 1, 36
    Clark, Senator Joseph S., works for, 47
    Harriman, Gov. W. Averell (ICY.), as assistant to, 45-47
    Office of Defense Mobilization, employed by, 15
    Presidential campaign, 1952, work in, 18-25
    White House, on loan to as speech writer, 1
    White House staff, joins, 1

  Taft, Robert A., 23-24
  Transition from Truman to Eisenhower administrations, 30
  Truman Doctrine, 17
  Truman, Harry S.:

  • corruption in government, 1952 speech on, 48-49
    Cumberland, Md., 1950 speech on, 14-15
    estimate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 32-33
    farewell speech to the Nation, 1953, 30-31
    Harriman in 1956 Presidential campaign, support of W.A.., 41-44.
    Kansas flood relief, 1951 message to Congress on, 16
    Mitchell, Stephen A., relationship with, 40-41
    in the 1952 Presidential campaign, 18-27, 48-49
    in the 1956 Presidential campaign, 42-45
    on 1950 western tour, 7, 11-14
    politics, his influence on, after leaving the Presidency, 41-42
    preparation of Presidential speeches for, 18-20
    role of Bureau of the Budget in the administration of, 5-6
    seizure of the steel industry, 1952, 36-37
    and the State of the Union message, 1947, 17
  "Truman image," 41
  Truman, Margaret, 23
  Turkey and Greece, aid to, 17

  Unification of the Armed Forces, 3-4, 7, 33-36

  Van Devander, Charles, 18

  War Department, consolidation with the Navy Department, 3-4, 7, 33-36
  Webb, James E., 2, 8
  White House staff:

  • during last years of the Truman administration, 10
    and 1947 State of the Union message, 7-9
    relationship with the Bureau of the Budget staff, 4, 9
  Williams, G. Mennen, 42
  Wilson, Charles E., 36-37