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[Notices and Restrictions | List of Subjects Discussed]
NOTICE Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened August, 1972
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
August 20, 1968 by Jerry N. Hess HESS: Mr. Bell, for the record, would you relate a little of your personal background, where were you born, where were you educated, and what positions did you hold prior to your service in the Truman administration? BELL: I'd be glad to do that. I was born in North Dakota. My folks moved to California when I was about five and I went through primary and secondary school in Palo Alto where my father was on the faculty at Stanford, and I went to college at Pomona College in southern California. I graduated in 1939. I went to Harvard for graduate work in economics, completed the M. A. in June of 1941 and had started to work on a Ph.D. when the war started, and my draft deferment was cancelled, as it should have been. For a few months in early 1942 1 worked as a junior staff man in the Bureau of the Budget. But in the middle of 1942 I enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve, as an officer candidate. I was called to active duty and sent to OCS at Quantico in late '42, was commissioned in early '43 and was assigned as an instructor there until '45 when I was assigned to California briefly and then for several months to the G-2 Section at Marine Corps Pacific Headquarters in Hawaii. After the war ended, I was returned from Hawaii to the States and put on inactive duty in about November or December of 1945. I had acquired a wife and baby during the war and returned to the Budget Bureau in late '45, rather than returning to Harvard to finish my economics Ph.D. In the Budget Bureau I had been assigned in 1942 to work in the War Organization Section, as it was called, which was headed by Bernard Gladieux. When I returned at the end of the war, I was assigned to the division of the Bureau that handled labor and welfare matters, and worked with Dave Stowe and Bob Clark on some of the agencies in the Labor Department and in what was then called the Federal Security Agency and later became the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. I worked with that group through 1946. In late '46, I think it was, Jim Webb, then Budget Director, sent to Clark Clifford in the White House some ideas on labor legislation which we had been thinking about -- it was a very important issue in those days -- as material for the January 1947 state of the Union message. It happened that Clifford was more impressed by the ideas about labor legislation that came out of our group in the Budget Bureau than he had been by any of the material that he had received from the Labor Department, or the National Labor Relations Board, or any other Government source. So he asked Stowe and me and Ross Shearer to work with him on that section of President Truman's state of the Union message in January 1947. During early 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act was under consideration, and Clifford used us as his personal staff to keep track of the progress of the legislation, and to analyze the various provisions that were under consideration during the legislative process. And then we assisted him in drafting the Taft-Hartley veto message after the bill had been enacted. All this, incidentally, was and is not extraordinary but a frequent type of service that Budget Bureau staff members become involved in, because the Budget Bureau is part of the Executive Office of the President and serves as an augmentation staff for the White House. In this way I became known to Clifford and to Charlie Murphy, and in late '47 Murphy asked me to come over full-time on the White House staff working for him. HESS: As a man who was associated with the Budget Bureau for a number of years, including a period of time as head of that Bureau, I'd like to ask you a few questions about its operation. Just how has the role of the Bureau of the Budget changed since its establishment in 1921? BELL: Well, as I understand it -- I'm no expert on the detailed history of the Budget Bureau -- in the early days it was thought of primarily as an organization concerned with the efficiency of Government operation. They used to tell a colorful story attributed to Charles Dawes, who was one of the early Budget directors, to illustrate his conception of the Budget Bureau's work. He said, it is alleged, that the Budget Bureau was not concerned with the purpose of governmental activities, it was concerned with whether they were efficiently executed, and if one of the purposes, for example, of a Government agency was to dump garbage on the steps of the United States Capitol, it would be the Budget Bureau's job to find out whether this garbage was dumped at the least possible cost. HESS: What was your view of that? BELL: I think that's silly. I think that Government efficiency is an important part of the interest of the Budget Bureau, but I think that how much money the Government spends is influenced far more by decisions as to what the Government will undertake, and the most important questions that the Budget Bureau is involved in are questions of what the programs of the Government should be, and whether they should be enlarged or diminished. The Dawes view was, by and large, the view through the twenties and thirties. HESS: The view that was accepted at that time? BELL: As I understand it. I don't want to minimize the importance of the Budget Bureau in those days. It was a great step forward in the efficiency of the United States Government to have in one place the anticipated expenditures of the Government all accurately assembled, related to the same time period, and made available where anybody could look at them, compare parts of them, add up the totals, and so on. That had not been possible before the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, so that it was an important step forward to have a Budget Bureau at all, and to have the President required to submit a single budget to the Congress each year. But in the late 1930s, with the Brownlow Committee -- Louis Brownlow, Charles Merriman, and Luther Gulick -- that Roosevelt appointed, a new and broader concept of the Budget Bureau came into being, which was that the Bureau ought to be a major staff arm for the President advising him on overall budget questions, policy questions related to the budget, fiscal policy, and matters of the organization of Government, and that it ought to be taken out of the Treasury where it had been up until that time, and put into a new Executive Office of the President, which was invented by the Brownlow Committee. All of this was done in about 1939. HESS: This was the Reorganization Plan Number One of 1939. BELL: That's right. And the first director of the Budget Bureau under the new arrangement was Harold Smith, who had been budget director for the State of Michigan. He remained as budget director through World War II, and it was under him that I served first in the Budget Bureau in 1942. He resigned in 1945 -- I think this is right -- and went to work for the World Bank. He died shortly thereafter. He was a very fine man, an excellent budget director, and he established what is essentially the modern view, the modem role, the modern organization, and the modern methods and procedures for the United States Budget Bureau. He was succeeded, I think, immediately by Jim Webb, and later by Frank Pace, and Fred Lawton, all during Mr. Truman's term. It isn't part of the answer to your immediate question, but it's worthy of note, I think, that in Mr. Eisenhower's two terms, the Bureau declined in importance somewhat because it was placed in the charge of accountants. Accountants are estimable people, but the particular accountants who headed the Budget Bureau during the Eisenhower years did not have the same broad conception of the Budget Bureau and its role as Smith and Webb and the others had had. So when I became Budget director in 1961 under Mr. Kennedy, we quickly restored the broader view which had been held earlier, which was not a novel view and was a very simple thing to do, as most of the senior staff members felt the same way I did because they had all been there in the Truman days, as I had. HESS: The four men that you named: Smith, Webb, Pace and Lawton, did they carry out their duties in any noticeably different manner? BELL: Well, you understand that I was a relatively junior member, first of the Budget Bureau staff and then of the White House staff in those days, and also that this was now twenty years ago. My impression is that Harold Smith had more impact on Government decisions than any of the other three, which is, I'm sure, largely due to the fact that he was in the job a long time, and he established a very intimate and effective relationship with FDR during World War II. There were a lot of issues having to do with the organization and reorganization of Government for war purposes, which were natural issues for the Budget Bureau to take the lead on, and many issues of war and postwar fiscal policy, on which the Budget Bureau had a good staff, and had a lot to say, so that Smith, and the Budget Bureau in Smith's day, were very significant. Webb was also a very active Budget Director. He was in office in a crucial time, up through Mr. Truman's first term, until January 1949, I think, when he became Under Secretary of State. Webb was a vigorous figure, used the Bureau imaginatively, and in my own observation was second only to Smith in the impact that he made. Mr. Pace and Mr. Lawton were, I think, less influential. In part, I suspect, that's because the issues that came along in their terms were less significant issues than Smith and Webb had had to deal with. In part also, I think, they are different people, and Pace was perhaps not as comfortable in the job of Budget Director as the others. He was a natural executive and, I think, was much more at home after he became Secretary of the Army with a major operational responsibility. Fred Lawton is a superb person. I admired him greatly as a Budget Bureau staff member. He was the first career man to become Budget Director. He had worked in the Bureau for a long time, and in the Government for a long time. It was a significant reward for a longtime Government official to become Director of the Budget Bureau. I think Fred did a good job. He was not at home -- it was not his natural milieu -- working on major issues of Government policy. And he would, I'm sure, be the first to say that he had less impact on, say, the economic policies of the Government than his predecessors had had. But he ran a strong Budget Bureau and was a strong, effective man. HESS: Are there any changes that should be made in the Bureau today, either in its organization or basic functions? BELL: Well, I'm out of date somewhat, and I cannot really comment in any detail on how the Budget Bureau is organized or how it operates today. I left it in December 1962. I've known the subsequent Budget Directors well, but I'm not in any sense familiar with the organization of the Bureau today. I thought when I left -- that is now nearly six years ago -- I thought the Bureau had not successfully adapted -- this is obviously, as far as it's a criticism, a criticism of me more than anybody else -- had not successfully adapted to the necessity for using modern management techniques. The Bureau had done useful work on the adoption of computers in the Federal Government, standards for doing that efficiently, minimizing costs, and so on. We had successfully restored in the Kennedy years -- this is a very important matter in my opinion -- we had successfully restored the concept of direct responsibility by the operating head of each agency, and the elimination of Government by committee, which was so pernicious during the Eisenhower years, with the National Security Council machinery, and all sorts of other committees being the normal way to proceed, wasting enormous amounts of time and producing the least common denominator of results. The fact that this was done in the early Kennedy years was in significant measure a return to the system which had been followed most sharply and markedly under Mr. Truman. One of Mr. Truman's most characteristic attitudes was that he wanted to place responsibility clearly on an individual, to give him leeway and opportunity to function, to carry out that responsibility, and he wanted a sense of the direct line relationship between himself and the principal officers of Government, so that they could get on with their work and he could know exactly who was responsible for any given issue. We restored that concept easily and effectively in the early days of the Kennedy administration. And the Budget Bureau's role in doing that was significant and useful. But there is a lot more than that to the effective operation of the Government of the United States today. It's very large, very complex, and the problems it deals with are increasingly hard to handle by simple concepts of Government organization. Relationships between the executive branch and the Congress are increasingly tangled; I don't think the Budget Bureau did anything particularly useful about that when I was there. Relationships between the Federal Government and the states and localities are also increasingly tangled; again, I don't think that when I was there, the Bureau was contributing very much toward the solutions to those problems. The relationships between the United States and international agencies and other countries are very complex and difficult to handle efficiently and effectively. And the Bureau did a lot of work on those areas when I was there and has done more since, but they remain stubborn and intractable. So that all of this which is really organization, communication, structure, lines of responsibility, the ways to establish a well-functioning modern Government, this is the area in which, it has seemed to me, the Budget Bureau could do more than it has done. The work that the Bureau did then and has done since on programming and planning and budgeting has been very valuable and very good, but its work in this other area has, I think, been less impressive. HESS: What we have just covered is probably part of the answer to my next question, but what did Mr. Truman seem to believe to be the proper role of the Bureau of the Budget during his administration? BELL: He thought of it as a strong staff agency. It was not, in any sense, positioned between him and any of his subordinates -- any of his Cabinet officers or his agency heads -- but he regarded it as a very valuable source of advice, information, questions, crosschecks on what the departments were doing, or said they were doing. He thought of the Bureau as providing the extraordinarily valuable services of keeping track of the budget itself, the financial side, and providing backup for the legislative process, the preparation of legislation to go to the Congress, watching the legislation while it was there, and clearing the testimony of executive branch witnesses to be sure it was consistent with what his program was and what he wanted them to say. All in all, my impression was that Mr. Truman relied heavily on the Budget Bureau for staff services of great significance to him. HESS: Checking through the enrolled bill file at the Truman Library, I have found that Mr. Truman often placed great weight on the advice of the legislative reference service of the Bureau of the Budget, even many times as opposed to the majority of the advice from the other agencies. BELL: That's right. And you'll find, I think, that that's probably true of every President. As I remember the process, the Budget Bureau collected the views of all the agencies in town concerned with a given enrolled bill, prepared a summary memorandum, and prepared, if asked, its own recommendations. It did this in very close collaboration with Charlie Murphy in the period when I worked with Murphy in the White House. He was Administrative Assistant to the President in charge of the legislative coordination process. Later he was himself Special Counsel. I think in those instances in which the views of different departments and agencies were overridden, the President would want the views of Murphy, or sometimes Murphy and Clifford when Clifford was there, and it would be their views rather than the views of the Budget Bureau which would be given the most weight, but they relied on Budget Bureau staff work before they made up their own minds, and often the Bureau memorandum wasn't written until there had been preliminary discussions, so that the view the Budget Bureau would be stating -- the Budget Director's views -- and Murphy's or Murphy's and Clifford's views, would be the same and therefore the recommendation of the Budget Director in a sense was in line with and part of the recommendations of the President's staff. I'm sure there would have been cases in which the Budget Director's views were different from those of Murphy, or Murphy and Clifford, and it would be interesting to check through the files for such cases. In such a case, I would have assumed that normally the President would have agreed with Murphy, or Murphy and Clifford, rather than the Budget Director, but I don't recall any such instances offhand. HESS: Fine. The following quote is from your sketch in the 1961 Current Biography Bell also explained to the committee (the Congressional Joint Economic
Committee) Was that any different than Mr. Truman's view? BELL: I'm sure he would have agreed that the budget is an expression of national policy. He would have felt that he made policy in many instances by making budget decisions, that policy questions came to him very often in the form of budget questions. But the significance of that 1961 quote probably relates to the question of whether the size of the budget and the relationship between budget receipts and expenditures should be deliberately directed to influence the total economy. These are questions that have grown out of so-called Keynesian economics. On those questions, the state of understanding and acceptance of modern economics was much greater in 1961 than it was in Mr. Truman's day. I don't recall at this late date -- I can't give you direct evidence of Mr. Truman's views on the question of whether the budget ought to be deliberately unbalanced in order to stimulate the economy or -- well, now, wait a second. Maybe I can recall something that bears on this. It seems to me that in the early days of the Korean war, one of the questions that arose was what the tax policy should be, whether taxes should be raised in order to limit the extent of the Federal Government's deficit in order in turn to limit the degree of inflation which would follow. And President Truman did recommend quick and sizable tax increases in order to limit the degree of inflation that would follow from larger Government expenditures during the Korean war, so that this was, in fact, a direct application of modern economics. So that's a piece of evidence, I guess, that he would have seen the matter in that way. I don't think the question arose during his tour of office -- I don't recall it offhand, at least -- what should be done in case of a recession. There wasn't really any recession in the years immediately after the war, except for the temporary and brief hesitation in 1945 , which was a result of the conversion of the economy from war to peace. HESS: What do you recall about the press conferences that the President used to hold exclusively about the budget? BELL: Well, I can recall some of them very well. At least one of them I remember was held over in the theater-like area alongside the corridor between the East Wing and the White House. I can't remember whether he held them there each year. It is significant, I think, that President Truman held those press conferences personally. I can remember him sitting there with John Snyder on one side, and in the one that I remember most vividly, Jim Webb was on the other. So, it would have been in Webb's term. I remember Mr. Truman took great pride, and justified pride, in his knowledge of the budget. He spent many hours on it during its preparation. The practice was for the Budget Director, after he had held the appropriate internal hearings in the Budget Bureau, to prepare a memorandum on each department of Government or major agency, take it to the President, and discuss it with him. Then, of course, there was an opportunity for the head of that agency to appeal to the President if he wished to do so, so that the President frequently had to go into the matter in some detail in order to decide between the views of his Cabinet officer and the views of the Budget Director. So, Mr. Truman was thoroughly acquainted with the Budget by the time it was put together, and he took great delight in having these annual press conferences on the budget and answering the reporters' questions himself, or asking Snyder or Webb to augment what he had said, or to answer a question if there was something in greater detail than he wanted to answer himself. HESS: Would it seem to you that President Truman had a greater grasp of the budget itself than most Presidents have had? BELL: I don't think he had a greater grasp. I don't know about Mr. Roosevelt's grasp because I never had a chance to observe him closely. I have had personal experience with President Kennedy and President Johnson and both of them, like Mr. Truman, considered each budget issue as a very significant issue. They went over the agencies one by one, carefully, they listened to appeals from Cabinet officers and agency heads, and they knew the budget in considerable detail, Mr. Johnson, perhaps, in a little more detail than either Mr. Kennedy or Mr. Truman, because Mr. Johnson is a man who has an enormous capacity for detail, but with no more attention to the big questions, the important major issues, than Mr. Truman or Mr. Kennedy displayed. HESS: What do you think the President would do if he received conflicting advice from the Bureau of the Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers? Whose advice would he take? BELL: Well, he wouldn't normally get conflicting advice from those two sources. This is an important point, incidentally, which I should have mentioned earlier in response to your question about the role of the various budget directors in the war and immediate postwar years. One of the important changes in Government machinery which was made right after World War II, was the passage of the Employment Act of 1946, the establishment of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the assignment to that council of the responsibility for advising the President on overall economic policies intended to achieve full employment, and whatever the phrase is, purchasing power, or something like that. Until that was done, the Budget Bureau in a sense combined the responsibilities of advising the President on the budget and advising him on economic policy. Under Harold Smith, those duties were taken very seriously, and the fiscal division of the Budget Bureau included such people as Gerhard Colm, J. Weldon Jones, Gardiner Means, and others, who were significant economists in their own right, imaginative, strong minded men who participated deeply in the decisions on economic and fiscal policy during World War II. When the Council of Economic Advisers was established, part of the Budget Bureau's earlier responsibilities in effect were transferred to the new Council of Economic Advisers. This was a matter, incidentally, of considerable concern among the people in the Budget Bureau who had worked on these matters. I can remember during the time when the Employment Act of '46 was under consideration, there were some internal memoranda within the Budget Bureau which put forward the view that while the act itself was a useful thing, the duties that it established should be placed on the Budget Bureau, and not on a new and separate organization; that it was a mistake. in concept, in government organization, to establish a different agency. The functions should be left with the Budget Bureau. Well, that was not the course that was taken. The new Council of Economic Advisers was established. After it had been established it was logical and appropriate that the views of that council would be the views that would be sought and listened to by the President on major issues of economic and fiscal policy. It would still be possible, indeed it would still be necessary, for the Budget Director and his staff to come to views on, say, the size of the budget, the size of the budget expenditures, the relationship between expenditures and receipts, whether or not there should be a deficit or a surplus, and it would also be necessary for the Council of Economic Advisers to come to views on the same set of questions. There would be other issues on which the Budget Bureau and the Council would both be appropriately involved. And in those cases the President might well get advice from both sides. I would say that under those circumstances there would be no automatic answer to the question whose views a President would pay more attention to. It would depend on what he thought of the individuals involved, it would depend on what he thought of the weight of the arguments, it would depend on the advice he got from the White House staff members. When I was in the White House under Mr. Truman, one of my jobs was to work with the Council of Economic Advisers in the preparation of their annual economic report, which meant to participate in the raising and settling of the issues which were considered and commented on in that annual economic report. And as I said a minute ago, many of those issues would be of concern also to the Budget Director, so that as a White House staff member, I was often involved in this kind of argument. The Budget Director might have a somewhat different view than the Council of Economic Advisers, and sometimes I would be involved in taking an argument like that to the President, or more often, in being present when the President considered it, and I don't think he would automatically have taken the views of one over the other. He would want to listen to the views and see where he came out on the specific question that was at issue. HESS: On the subject of the state of the Union message for 1947, which you mentioned a while ago, would you describe the relations between the White House staff and the staff of the Bureau of the Budget in drafting state of the Union messages? BELL: In those days, you mean? Under Mr. Truman? HESS: In those days. This particular message for one. Other than their loaning you to the White House. BELL: I can't recall an awful lot about it. If I'm not mistaken the pattern of events was something like this: Jim Webb was Budget Director and he had become acquainted with Clark Clifford. Clifford was short of staff and asked Webb if he could have somebody to help him during the preparatory stages leading up to the state of the Union message, because Clifford wanted to ask for recommendations from all of the various Government agencies, recommendations as to what should be included in the state of the Union message and what positions the President ought to take. That involved a lot of work, getting in touch with the various Government agencies, collecting and collating their reports, pulling out the important matters and the issues to be resolved and all the rest of it. Jim Webb -- I believe my recollection is correct -- made available to Clifford a man by the name of Charles Stauffacher, who was then in the Budget Bureau, a very able man, incidentally, who later during the Korean war was staff assistant to Charles Wilson in the office of Defense Mobilization, and worked there for General Lucius Clay, who offered him a job thereafter with Continental Can about 1952 or 1953 and he's still there. He's been an executive vice president of Continental Can, and financial vice president in recent years. HESS: Was he assigned a specific portion of the message to write? HESS: My recollection is that he was not assigned any portion of the message to write. He was to assist Clifford in gathering material for the message. I was a personal friend of Stauffacher's. He was from Pomona originally as I was. We had been graduate students at the same time at Harvard, and Stauffacher knew that Dave Stowe and Ross Shearer and I and others on the Budget Bureau staff had been worrying a good deal about the question of labor policy. He suggested, I think to Webb and Webb to Clifford, that Clifford might be interested in our views on that subject, so that our suggestions about labor policy for the January 1947 state of the Union message, I think were transmitted to Clifford through Stauffacher. Thereafter, Clifford called us in and talked to us and we worked with him directly. So the part of the state of the Union message which dealt with labor policy -- I see it appears here under the heading, "Labor and Management" and it goes on for about two pages plus [ Reading from the state of the Union message for 1947, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1947 volume ] -- was originally drafted by us. That is, we prepared a draft of it for Clifford, and I'm sure he would have revised it very substantially, quite possibly rewritten it thoroughly, I can't recall at this late date. I don't know exactly where drafts of the other parts of the state of the Union message came from. HESS: Did James Sundquist help on that message? BELL: I don't think he helped on that one, at least I don't remember him. He was certainly around the Budget Bureau and the executive office in those days. I remember him much more vividly at the time of the Korean war. I'm sure he was on the Budget Bureau staff in the early years after the war, but I don't remember him in connection with this particular message. HESS: What part did George Elsey play in the writing of the 1947 message? BELL: I can't recall, but it was probably extensive because at that time Elsey was Clifford's principal personal assistant, and he probably -- although you can ask him, obviously -- he probably prepared the initial rough draft of large parts of the message, perhaps put a complete draft together from the various sources. But that's speculation. HESS: I've heard the 1947 state of the Union message -- this was, of course, the one that was delivered at the opening session of the 80th Congress -- described as the "opening gun" for the 1948 presidential campaign. What do you say about that? BELL: Well, I don't know. I don't think I have any useful comment on that. I do know something about later events leading up to the ' 4 8 campaign and during it, but as far as we were concerned, what we saw of the message was what I indicated. It was plain that in the President's mind the single most important issue was labor policy, and we were very pleased to have been involved in preparing that part of his policy and message, and very proud, as a matter of fact, that Clifford and the President had liked our suggestions well enough to incorporate them very largely in what was finally included in the message. But how far they saw that message as the opening gun in the 1948 campaign, I just have no way of knowing. HESS: Fine. I've heard that, and also the 1948 state of the Union message, referred to an "issue-making and record-building," but I didn't know exactly how much part that played in the thinking of the men who were working on them. BELL: Well, that's a slightly broader question -- at least I would interpret it as slightly broader. There's no doubt that President Truman perceived the annual messages as a means to put before the Congress and the country the President's views of what was called for in the interest of the nation. He wanted to make his positions strong and clear. He believed that is what the Constitution requires of the President in the state of the Union message, so he tried to make those messages clear-cut and to make his recommendations stand out. This also seemed to me thoroughly in keeping with Mr. Truman's character as a person. He liked to make an issue clear, make his statements clear, and he conceived that as part of his job in leading the country as President. Now, that comment is a different thing from trying to assess, which I do not have the background to do, how far the President in making the state of the Union messages in '47 and '48 was setting forth both a program of action for the Congress and the country, and a political platform for himself and his party. I would suppose that he was largely serving both purposes, and, particularly in 1948, that he paid great attention to the political effectiveness of his policy positions, as stated in the state of the Union message, because after all he would be appealing to the country and running later that year on the program that he set forth. HESS: I think that pretty well brings us up to the 1948 state of the Union message. Did you help write that one too? BELL: Well, by 1948, or by the end of '47, I was actually a member of the White House staff. I've forgotten the exact date on which I joined the White House staff, but it would have been sometime in the late fall, perhaps, of 1947 that I went to work for Charlie Murphy. It was the practice in the White House in those days for Clifford and Elsey and Murphy and myself and David Lloyd, who also worked for Charlie Murphy at that time, for the five of us to be involved in preparing messages to Congress, veto messages, public statements of various types, and speeches, so that my guess would be that I was involved in the January 1948 state of the Union message. But I have no independent recollection of what part I played in it, or indeed whether I was in it at all. HESS: One question that is often raised about the 1948 message, instead of incorporating all of the things that were sent to Congress in the next few months, it seemed to be a broader policy, and then as you recall on February 2nd, Mr. Truman sent his ten point civil rights message in. He sent his recommendations to Congress in several special messages and didn't send them all at once that year. BELL: I don't remember what the practice had been previously, so I'm not trying to suggest how far the arrangements you just described were invented in 1948, but it is certainly true that as the years went along, it became the practice for the President to lay some sort of a broad, general framework in his state of the Union message, and then to follow with a series of specific messages on different subjects: civil rights, foreign aid, defense policy, conservation, education, whatever subjects were important and on which he wanted to send special messages that year. This became so customary as to seem almost routine. It was continued through the Eisenhower years and has been continued to this day. I found it natural and customary to move back into this process when I went back into the Government in 1961 with President Kennedy. He followed the same practice. A whole string of special messages went up in the spring of 1961 on the various subjects he thought important. I hadn't remembered that that process was begun in 1948, but maybe it was. Maybe it became clearer at that time than it had been before. HESS: You mentioned that you worked in the White House for both Clifford and Murphy. Did they conduct the business as Special Counsel in any noticeably different manner? BELL: I've been impressed over the years with the degree to which those White House jobs respond to the demands of serving the President, any President, more than to the personal characteristics of the individual incumbent. So that when I went back to Washington to work for Mr. Kennedy, and saw Ted Sorensen in the role of Special Counsel, I was astounded at the degree to which the range and nature of his duties were identical to that which I had come to know when I was with Murphy in that job, and saw Clifford in that same job. And more recently, I have had some acquaintance with Joe Califano, who today holds a very similar job, and the main substance of the work is the same. Each of these persons as an individual is different. Clifford is different from Murphy, is different from Sorensen, is different from Califano, and in that sense their style in carrying out the job was of course substantially different. Clifford was very much at ease and at home with the senior members of the Cabinet and of the Congress and spent more of his time with such people. Murphy was more of a quiet backroom type, who was not at all afraid of working with such senior people and spent a lot of time doing it, and was very effective with members of the Cabinet and with members of the Congress as appropriate and necessary, but if he had a free lunch, he wouldn't necessarily choose to call up a Cabinet officer or a member of Congress, whereas Clifford would be very likely to do so. But I emphasize my first point that the nature of the job dictated what the man did, and what Clifford spent his time on in that job and what Murphy spent his time on in the job were virtually identical. HESS: Did Clifford and Murphy hold staff meetings with their staff or did they deal on a person to person basis? There would be more members of Murphy's staff as I understand, than there would have been in Clifford's. Is that right? BELL: Well, yes, in the limited sense that I think Elsey was the only person to work directly for Clifford. But that was in part because Murphy existed, and Murphy, while he didn't technically report to Clifford, was, in fact, a member of Clifford's wing, so to speak, at the White House, and so were those of us who worked with Murphy. So that in that sense, the size of the staff was not very different. Neither of them as I remember it held regular, formal staff meetings. They worked with individuals or they worked with groups as appropriate for the particular question under consideration. I remember very vividly the session in Clifford's office, after the Taft-Hartley Act was passed, when he had his final discussion as to whether or not we all thought it should be signed or vetoed. Murphy was there and myself and Stowe and I think there were one or two others, probably Elsey and Ross Shearer and maybe Harold Enarson. We discussed it at some length and then Clifford asked each of us for his opinion. I remember it in part because that was a rare thing for him to do. HESS: What was your opinion? BELL: I was the only one in the group who thought it was a close question, that I wouldn't have been at all adverse to seeing the President sign it. The others were very strongly of the view that the demerits greatly outweighed the advantages and that it definitely should be vetoed. I thought it was a close question then, and I still think it was a close question, on the merits. I think that if I had been the President and been influenced not only by the merits but the politics and what it meant symbolically in terms of which direction the country ought to be going, I would undoubtedly have decided as he did that it ought to be vetoed. There was no problem in identifying major errors. It was a bad bill in many ways. The veto message, I thought, was a convincing and effective document. But there were also a number of provisions in the bill which in effect redressed the balance between unions and management which had been weighted pretty heavily toward the unions. In considering the bill, we also had -- this is all in the files, I'm sure -- the views of a number of the leading labor relations scholars: George Taylor of Pennsylvania; Nat [Nathan Paul] Feinsinger of Wisconsin; Ed [Edwin Emil] Witte of Wisconsin. I've forgotten them all now, but they were all polled, they all wrote down what their views were. Anyway, I recall this case not only because of the importance of the issue, but because it was rare for the matter to be considered so formally, for individuals on the staff to be polled by Clifford for their own recommendations. HESS: In your opinion, what weight was given by Mr. Truman to the political considerations, the fact that there was an election coming up in the not too distant future and that he would need labor's vote? BELL: I have no way of answering you. I don't remember having been in a discussion of the Taft-Hartley issue with Mr. Truman himself. HESS: I'd like to ask a few questions about some of the other members of the White House staff since we've discussed Clifford and Murphy, and if you would tell me just a little bit about what their duties were, what seemed to be their relationship with the President, and with the other members of the staff, starting off with Matthew Connelly? BELL: Matt Connelly was the Appointments Secretary. There again is a job which seems to me to be heavily influenced by the nature of the service the President requires. The job that Kenny O'Donnell did for Kennedy was very similar to the job that Matt Connelly did for Truman. I never knew Connelly very well as a person. He always seemed to me to be a rather odd fish. He was astute and clever and obviously politically sensitive. His main role, as far as I could see, was to schedule the President's appointments, to have a big voice in scheduling what he did on trips and so on, particularly with a view to the political relationship involved, the visits he made with members of Congress and with party leaders. It seemed to me that Matt was very little involved in the substance of policy issues. He may well have expressed his views to the President on private occasions when I wasn't there, but the times when as a staff member I was involved in meetings that Mr. Truman held to discuss the substance of policy issues, or the meetings that he held to go over speeches, messages to Congress and so on, to go over the drafts, Connelly was usually not present. So, my recollection is that he was not a significant influence on policy and positions that the President took, but that he was very significant in the scheduling of the President's daily activities and in relations between the President and political leaders. HESS: The next man is William Hassett? BELL: Bill Hassett was one of the world's most pleasant people. He was the Correspondence Secretary, so-called; President Truman had inherited him in that role from Mr. Roosevelt. Hassett was a kindly, gentle, wise, witty person, with great charm, who handled the President's correspondence in the literal sense that he answered most of the letters that did not involve anything significant. He prepared the rather formal letters, communications that the President would send to the annual meetings of the Boy Scouts, and all that sort of thing, and he had almost nothing to do with anything of substantive policy. All of us had great affection for Bill Hassett as a person. We enjoyed talking to him, we enjoyed his company, he was a very unobtrusive person who was a constructive influence around the place because of his charm and good manners, but almost never was he involved, that I can recall, in policy questions. HESS: The next man is Joseph Short. BELL: Joe Short was one of the Press Secretaries. Charlie Ross was the first, that I remember. HESS: He died on December 5, 1950. BELL: Charlie Ross? HESS: Yes. BELL: Ross, I thought, was a wise and sensible person. He was a constructive influence on the President, in bringing to him a sense of how actions would look around the country, what people would think. Ross, it seemed to me, had very high personal standards of integrity. He also, incidentally, had high standards of English style. To this day, I feel strongly about certain matters of English usage that date from some of the matters that Charlie Ross used to snort about when he went over drafts of material that we had prepared for the President. For example, Ross was highly scornful of the use of the word "presently" to mean "now." As far as Charlie Ross was concerned, the word "presently" meant "in the near future." I have not forgotten that and I have the same bias today. Ross was like any press secretary, currently and constantly involved in the flow of news, of the day's headlines, what somebody had said that the President needed to answer, whether the President should answer a particular comment and so on. It is a strenuous, active job that involves ducking in and out of the President's office, and all of the White House offices, all of the time. I thought Ross was very good at it, and was a man of really great capacity. Joe Short was, I think, Ross' successor. Short was a good man, an able man. I think he was a lesser man than Ross. I don't mean to sound derogatory. He was a man who thought easily in terms of the meaning of the Presidency to the nation, and how the President's press relations and general public relations should be conducted. He was a man of high standards. I don't think he had the breadth of experience that Charlie Ross did, and he certainly didn't have the same influence with the President, in part because Ross and the President were old friends from Missouri days; they may even have been to school together, I'm not sure. HESS: They were in the same class in high school. BELL: Right. And Short also died, of course, in office, and was succeeded, I think, by Roger Tubby. HESS: Roger Tubby and Irving Perlmeter, for a while, and then Irving Perlmeter had a heart attack, I believe, during the 1952 campaign on the west coast, and then Roger Tubby was made Press Secretary, I believe, in December of '52 . BELL: Right. Irv Perlmeter had come over from the Treasury, if I remember rightly. Tubby and Perlmeter were much younger men. They were vigorous, sensible, active, but they didn't have nearly the seniority and status that Ross and Short had. HESS: John R. Steelman, The Assistant to the President. BELL: The Steelman role is an extremely interesting one, and I hope that some historian some day gets it straight. It would be difficult to do. It would be hard to tell what was the exact situation. There were times in the White House when it looked as though there was a constant, continuous and rather disturbing jockeying for position and influence between Steelman and Clifford, the two senior substantive policy advisers on the President's staff. To some extent this continued when Murphy succeeded Clifford, and it sometimes looked like and indeed sometimes was something of a contest between Steelman and Murphy. HESS: Who was the main protagonist in the conflict? BELL: I'm not sure what you mean by that. HESS: Who was the one who carried the brunt of the contest? Was it about even? BELL: Well, it's hard to say. Let me make one other point before answering you. At other times, the relationship did not appear to be that of a contest, but one of effective, strong and useful cooperation between two members of the President's staff, and their respective assistants. The relationship was curious. I personally felt, and still feel, that Steelman was not nearly as strong and useful an adviser as either Clifford or Murphy. I may have a somewhat jaundiced view of Steelman, but that does not mean that he did not have and does not have, considerable capacity. He does. He came out of a much narrower background than either Clifford or Murphy. He came out of a labor relations and mediation background. He had been found somewhere by Frances Perkins, when she was Secretary of Labor, and had come up through the Labor Department Mediation Service, had ended up in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, I think under Judge Vinson, and when Vinson left, right at the end of the war, Steelman sort of inherited that office. There were some very good men in that office Don Kingsley, who is now with the Ford Foundation; John Thurston; Robert Turner, who was later a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers in the Truman days and more recently was Assistant Director of the Budget Bureau for fiscal policy when I was Director. I asked him to come and join me in that position. Steelman continued to have able staff members David Stowe and Harold Enarson, who had both been on the Budget Bureau staff at the same time I had, and indeed we had all worked together in the same group, went over to the White House to work for Steelman. It was possible for those of us on the staff to work together very easily. There was never any animosity among Stowe, Enarson, Turner all of whom worked for Steelman, and Elsey, Lloyd, Neustadt, and myself, when we worked for Clifford and for Murphy. So it should by no means be understood to have been a feud or continuing struggle or battle in the simpleminded newspaper column sense, but nevertheless it was true that the organizational arrangement was unclear, responsibilities were unclear. It was to some extent out of character for Mr. Truman to have left them unclear for so long. I don't know why he did it. It may well be that he felt himself somewhat at risk of being dominated intellectually by people as strong and able as Clifford and Murphy, and he wanted to have a counterweight to them. This is pure speculation on my part, and may be entirely wrong. It may be that he found advantages in Steelman for other reasons. One of the things that Steelman brought to the White House, of course, was great expertise in labor matters at a time when labor issues were very important. All through Mr. Truman's tour there were big, complex, labor questions and Steelman was naturally the man to whom he turned very largely for the first assignment of a labor issue. At the same time, he did not give any exclusive fief to Steelman on labor issues and when legislation was to be drafted or when, as in some of the titanic clashes with John L. Lewis, there were court cases involved, or seizures to be contemplated, Clifford and later the Murphy group were always involved. At those times there was frequently a continuous teaming up of the Steelman group and the Clifford-Murphy group to follow and to handle and to make recommendations to the President on the issues that were involved. What Steelman did besides labor matters was always somewhat obscure to me. There was in some sense an attempted distinction between the Clifford-Murphy type of assignment, which was to look forward and to make policy, and the Steelman type of assignment which was supposed to be to deal with on-going, current activities of Government as distinct from forward policy and program building. But this distinction is not an effective one in a governmental setting and always broke down in practice. I remember, for example, at one time Bob Turner who was on Steelman's staff, was the White House man working on rubber: synthetic rubber, what should be done with the Government's synthetic rubber plants, what should be done with the Government's stockpile of rubber, and so on. All these questions, which are in a sense questions of current Government operation, also involved questions of legislative policy and recommendations to the Congress, so that there was no way in which the distinction between policymaking and current operations could be carried out. HESS: Did you think that Mr. Steelman was a particularly effective labor negotiator? BELL: I didn't see him close up in actual negotiations. It seemed to me that he was a vigorous negotiator. He worked hard and long, and when I heard him report, for instance at the morning staff meetings, on the current state of a labor situation, or when during some of the major crises, the Steelman group and the Clifford-Murphy group would meet together to bring each other up to date and talk about what should be done next, it seemed to me that Steelman frequently described the situation succinctly and crisply and with great accuracy. But whether he was an effective negotiator, I don't know. I would suppose that he probably was. HESS: Did you ever hear where he picked up the title: "The Assistant to the President?" BELL: No. I have a vague recollection that I once knew something about that, but I don't recall it now. Charlie Murphy or Clark Clifford would probably remember. I'm sure it was to distinguish him somehow from the various other assistants that were around. In those days, of course, there were a series of "Administrative Assistants" to the President, a term which had been invented by the Brownlow Commission at the same time the Executive Office of the President was created. It was a position of considerable honor and respect, as I remember vividly because I was later made one myself. Later on, of course, especially in the Eisenhower years, there was an inflation of titles, and by the time I went back to the Government in '61, the title "administrative assistant" described a rather low man on the totem pole. By then everybody wanted to be a special assistant to the President, and most people were. Nowadays, I'm sure, very junior staff men are called special assistant to the President. Well, this was beginning way back then, and I suppose somebody figured out "The Assistant" as indicating some sort of seniority and status as against the Special Counsel to the President who was Clifford, the Appointments Secretary to the President who was Connelly, the Correspondence Secretary, the Press Secretary, and so on. HESS: A few moments ago we were discussing the disagreements, to use the word, between Dr. Steelman on one side and Clifford and Murphy on the other. I was trying to get across the point of who seemed to be carrying on the brunt of the antagonism, was it more on one side than the other? BELL: I don't want to give you the impression that there was a lot of antagonism. I don't think there was. I didn't see significant personal antagonism. They all were friends HESS: Was it more a fight for power and status? BELL: Perhaps. There were frequently times when there was a question as to who should handle a particular piece of business for the President, and there was often a great deal of jockeying on such an issue, and there was normally a very strong view -- which I shared -- in the Clifford-Murphy group that Clifford or Murphy, either one, would be more competent to work it out, and get a rounded judgment and a strong position, if it was a policy question or a program question, than if the job were handed to Dr. Steelman. As I said earlier, this does not mean that any of us had any personal antagonism to Dr. Steelman, or that we didn't think he had a lot of talent in other lines, but the job of analyzing a policy or program issue, and putting it into form first for the President to face it and decide it, and then into action form in a message to the Congress or a position on a piece of legislation or a public speech -- that job, we thought, was done in a superior manner by Clifford and Murphy. And while, of course, I can't quote them, it's my impression that they thought so too, as opposed to the same job being done by Dr. Steelman. That led, naturally, to jockeying for position, and I suppose to some polite discussions with the President, which occasionally, no doubt, would have gotten a job reassigned, or gotten somebody else into the act if it had been assigned in the first instance, say to Steelman, and Clifford or Murphy wanted to be in on it also. HESS: Just a question on Clifford and Murphy. In your opinion, which of those two gentlemen carried out the job in a more competent manner? Who was the best man of the two? BELL: Well, I rate both of them extremely highly. I think they are two of the very best men I have ever known anywhere, let alone in Government. I think Clifford and Murphy and Ted Sorensen are all extremely able men, and the respective Presidents for whom they worked were very fortunate to have them. I think that if I had to rank them I would probably rank them Sorensen, Clifford, Murphy, but that's like ranking people on a scale of a hundred at ninety-nine, ninety-eight and ninety-seven. It's no slur on any of them. Murphy was certainly the easiest of the three to work with. They were all courteous and gentlemanly. Clifford was, undoubtedly, the most at home with senior members of Congress and the Cabinet. Sorensen was undoubtedly the most brilliant and imaginative. But I repeat, all of them were absolutely top-notch men in my observation, and there is very little to chose among them. HESS: In several books that have come out recently, one of them I have here, The Truman Presidency by Cabell Phillips, Clark Clifford's political strategy for the 1948 campaign has been given quite a big play. How would you rate Clark Clifford's political advice to President Truman at this time? BELL: I have read about that. I never saw the document at that time. I was not involved in those discussions, so I have very little to add to that. Looking back, like everybody else, I am filled with admiration for the accuracy and insight that were displayed. My guess, incidentally, is that a document like that, while it was undoubtedly prepared by Clifford and signed by him, would have been based on discussions between Clifford and Murphy, among others, in the sense that Clifford would have drawn on Murphy's advice, as well as that of others. And my observation of Murphy is that he has extremely shrewd views on political issues. I say that not in the slightest to derogate from Clifford's competence or achievement. HESS: I believe at that time they were holding meetings on Monday night at Oscar Ewing's apartment, at the Wardman Park. BELL: Quite possibly. I was never involved in any of those. But I do know that Murphy as well as Clifford was a close friend of Jack Ewing and of Oscar Chapman and Charlie Brannan and the others who were involved in all that. HESS: Just what was your involvement in the '48 campaign? This is getting off the subject a little bit. BELL: That's all right. It was fairly limited. I did not travel, as I remember it, on any of the campaign trains. I did go with the President to the convention. I was in his party when he went to the hall where the convention was held in Philadelphia. I have an extraordinarily vivid recollection of that night. The President was, of course, regarded as a sure loser at that time. Dewey had been nominated, and was already assumed to have been elected. The evening that the President went up to Philadelphia, some of the southern delegations had walked out, Alabama and half of Mississippi, or Mississippi and half of Alabama, I've forgotten, and they were, of course, later to nominate Strom Thurmond. It was miserably hot, and the hall was not air-conditioned. The proceedings continued all through the evening. It was perhaps two o'clock or two thirty in the morning before the President was called on to make his acceptance speech. We had been in Philadelphia since early evening. While the President was in a room backstage, those of us on his staff were wandering around the hall and observing what was going on. The delegates that evening were a tired, dispirited, soggy mass of beaten humanity. And when President Truman started his acceptance speech, they were listless and exhausted. I'll never forget the beginning of that acceptance speech. I can't recall the exact words, but the President said, with enormous vigor, something like this: "I want to thank you for your nomination, and Senator Barkley and I are going out and win this election and don't you forget it." And the crowd suddenly came to life with a roar. It was in that speech that the President announced that he was going to call the Congress back into session -- the Turnip Day session -- to see if it would support the positive program that had been written into the Republican platform, but which the Republicans in Congress, of course, had been refusing to enact for the previous two years. HESS: Where did that idea originate? BELL: I'm sure it originated with the President and his staff. As I recall it, we hadn't prepared a full text for that speech. We prepared notes for the President to use. It had already become clear that the President spoke better from notes than when he read a text throughout. I don't remember whether this particular announcement was in the notes or not. That's obviously available in the records. But the absolutely dazzling way in which the President brought that crowd together and to its feet with a fighting speech at two thirty in the morning, is one of the great recollections that I have of that time. You asked me about my general participation in the '48 campaign. Of course, there had been speeches and activities earlier than the convention, and as a member of the White House staff, I had worked on those. During the campaign, as I said, as far as I remember I worked entirely in Washington, and late in the summer, sometime, I was transferred back to the Budget Bureau staff. This was an act of grace, I think. I didn't have anything to do with it. It was just suggested to me one day. I think Pace and Murphy figured that I, and perhaps one or two others who had come over from civil service jobs, and who were junior assistants on the White House staff, if we moved back into the Budget Bureau were likely to be able to keep our jobs if Mr. Truman were defeated, as it then looked as though he would be. And since by that time I had a wife and two children, I fell in with this idea very readily. Now whether, in fact, I would have felt comfortable and appropriate staying on in the Budget Bureau under Mr. Dewey I have no idea; the question didn't arise. Later, of course, in 1953, when the transition came, I had a presidential appointment and the issue was different. As a presidential appointee, I naturally resigned and left Government. In 1948 , when I went back to the Budget Bureau staff I was still called on occasionally, but I did not work full-time as a White House staff member. I helped now and then on drafting speeches. I cannot recall vividly what sorts of speeches I worked on. I can remember working on speeches in the atomic energy field, and on conservation matters, which were things I had been doing some work on when I was on the White House staff. The President, in those days, traveled by train, and what he had was a series of major addresses, all of which were prepared as full texts, although sometimes they were translated into outline form for his use. He also had a series of whistle stop speeches which were usually put together in outline form for his use in the various places that his train stopped during the day. It seems like an enormous amount of work, looking back, but we were always proud of the fact that all of his material was different. Every major speech was different, every whistle stop was different. I don't mean that some of the themes weren't repeated -- a lot of them were -- but everything was tailored for the particular audience and the particular location where he was going to be. Much of this work was done by the so-called Research Division of the Democratic National Committee, under Bill Batt, which was a strong organization. My recollection is that Jim Sundquist worked there, incidentally, during that campaign. And it may have been that in the later stages of the campaign when Murphy needed more help, perhaps in part because I went back to the Budget Bureau, I think he got Jim Sundquist to work directly for him, but this is all a rather thin recollection. You no doubt have a tape with Sundquist. Also working for Bill Batt were various others. It's conceivable that that's where Dave Lloyd came from. HESS: That's correct. BELL: He was on Batt's staff, and it was from there that he was asked to join Murphy. HESS: Kenneth Birkhead, who is now with the Department of Agriculture. Johannes Hoeber... BELL: Yes, that's right. HESS: ...Philip Dreyer. BELL: I don't remember him. It was a very fine staff and they did a lot of work. And, as I say, the veterans of that particular campaign have always looked rather scornfully on some of the more recent campaigners, like, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Reagan whose practice it is to repeat the same speech over and over and over again. HESS: In June of that year, 1948, Mr. Truman took his so-called nonpolitical tour of the West. Do you recall anything in particular about that? Did you make that trip? BELL: Well, you'll have to remind me. I took a trip all right. I would have said it was in June 1950. HESS: Well, there was a trip in May of 1950. BELL: May of '50, I mean. HESS: That was when they went out to the Grand Coulee Dam, I believe, for the rededication of the dam. BELL: Right. HESS: I have found some drafts -- I knew that you were involved in that, but I did not know if you were involved in the nonpolitical trip in June of 1948. BELL: Where did this trip… HESS: They went out to Berkeley. He received an honorary degree at Berkeley, California, and made speeches at Seattle, and Los Angeles. It was sort of a preliminary shakedown trip. BELL: No, my recollection is that I did not go on that .trip, but I did go on the one in, May, 1950. It has always been interesting to me to think about the question of whether the members of Mr. Truman's staff expected him to win in 1948. I certainly did not, and I believe that most members of his staff did not. I remember discussing this question with Charlie Murphy after the election, and Murphy described to me a period sometime a week or two before the actual election, when the campaign train was in the Midwest, and when Jake More, who was national committeeman or state chairman in Iowa, told Mr. Truman he was going to carry Iowa. Well, if Mr. Truman was going to carry Iowa, that was a very startling and important fact, since Iowa was a solidly Republican state. According to Murphy, it was that report to Mr. Truman that convinced him that he would win, and therefore the victory was not a surprise to Mr. Truman. Murphy and others felt that Jake More must be optimistic. They were pleased to hear it and thought that it meant that the President had much more of a chance than they had earlier felt, but that the odds were still heavily against him. At the time, I heard Elsey talk about the matter and report on Clifford's views. Clifford and Murphy and Elsey, as I remember, were all on the campaign train most of the way through that last month or so. I don't mean to assert what their own views may have been by election day. It may have been that one or all of them agreed with the President in thinking that he was going to win. But the general view in the campaign group was that he was waging a gallant and effective battle which was extremely significant in establishing policy issues which would be important to the future of the Democratic Party, that it was important that he make the best fight possible, not only for that reason, but because it would influence the election of members of the House and of the Senate, but that it was a losing game. I recall, as of course many others do, sitting up all that night as the election returns came in over the radio. HESS: Where were you then? BELL: I was in Washington in our apartment. My wife sat up with me. My wife is a very strong Democrat. She sat up with me most of the night. We had a six months old baby and she went to bed about five or thereabouts, and I just stayed up. I can remember going into Murphy's office about nine or ten o'clock the next morning, in the old Executive Office Building, about the time that Dewey formally conceded, and the enormous delight that all of us felt at that time. HESS: Do you recall what Mr. More based his optimism on, why he thought Mr. Truman would carry the farm state, as he did? BELL: I've never understood what it is that allows political figures, whether they are candidates or managers and organizers, to assess the likely results of elections. I suppose their methods differ. I know that Kenny Birkhead, I've forgotten whether it was at that time, or later, asserted that he had an infallible precinct. There were something like eighteen votes in it and he counted them all and he could tell by the swing of one or two votes what was going to happen nationally. I never knew quite how much Kenny was just making a joke and how much this was a real indicator of what was likely to happen. So I don't know -- or at least I don't remember -- what it was that More based his views on. HESS: One of the things that many political scientists say helped swing the farm vote was the fact that the Congress had rewritten the charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation shortly before then, and had left out money for grain storage bins, so the farmers could not store their excess wheat crop, which was a very large crop that year, and if they couldn't store it in Government bins, then they couldn't get price supports. BELL: That's right. Government approved bins. They didn't have to be Government owned. I would have recalled it as corn rather than wheat. HESS: It could have been. Anyway, it was grain. BELL: Yes, grain storage bins was an important matter. It was inherently important, and it was made into an important political issue by the President. He pounded on that and every other political issue he could find, and this one was especially effective because it was so obviously correct. The Congress had done this foolish thing, and it was the Republicans who had done it, over Democratic objection, so they had only themselves to blame. HESS: In that campaign, Mr. Truman seems to make the 80th Congress his main protagonist and not Tom Dewey. Why do you think that decision was made? Why did he, more or less, run against Congress rather than against the man who was the Republican standard-bearer? BELL: I don't know the considerations that went into that. I assume it was because the "Republican no-good, do-nothing, 80th Congress" presented him with issues that were clear and effective. Tom Dewey was a fairly elusive target. He had been a reasonably good Governor of New York and hadn't taken many stands on important issues, so the Congress was a good target and Dewey was not. But this is all speculation on my part. I do not recall any discussion of it at the time. HESS: Some political scientists like to point out, that the things that Mr. Truman will be remembered for, the Greek-Turkish aid plan, the Marshall plan, the Truman Doctrine, were passed by the 80th Congress. And that the 80th Congress wasn't all that bad. BELL: Yes, the 80th Congress had a good record on foreign policy, and foreign aid. That was largely Senator [Arthur H.] Vandenberg 's doing. It was very important, and I think it would be correct to say that the President certainly did not emphasize that point during that campaign. At the same time, I think his criticism of the 80th Congress was directed at points where they were vulnerable, and he certainly didn't criticize them for supporting him on the Greek-Turkish aid, the Marshall plan, and so on. HESS: Fine. Is that everything on the election? BELL: That's all I remember. HESS: All right, let's get back to our list of men, and our first administrative assistant would be Donald S. Dawson. BELL: Don Dawson was a personnel man in the White House, roughly corresponding to what John Macy has done more recently for Mr. Johnson. I don't know what Dawson's background was or how he got into that job, but he worked on presidential appointments and to some small extent on personnel legislation, although most of that was handled by the Budget Bureau and the Civil Service Commission. HESS: And David Stowe, we've mentioned a few times. BELL: Stowe was my boss in the Budget Bureau right after the war and I've forgotten when he went over to the White House. I think he went over about the same time I did, perhaps a little later. He was a labor specialist most of the time in the Budget Bureau and in the White House. He worked on some other issues, but labor was his primary role. HESS: He was deputy to Dr. Steelman for quite some time, until 1949 and then made administrative assistant. David D. Lloyd. BELL: Dave Lloyd worked for Murphy as I did. The two of us were a pair. Lloyd was an enormously gifted man who was trained in the law, at Harvard Law School, but never practiced -- deliberately, because he didn't want to practice law. He wanted to work for the Government. He wrote a novel or two. I'm sure he was the most gifted speechwriter of all of us, in the sense of using the English language effectively. All of us admired him greatly, and I suppose that apart from campaign periods when so many people participated, more of the words the President used from his staff would have come from Lloyd than from anybody else. He was also a very imaginative and perceptive man. It was he who found -- what's the name of the fellow in the State Department -- Hardy, was it, who was the source of the idea for point four? HESS: Benjamin Hardy? BELL: Benjamin Hardy. He found Ben Hardy in the State Department. Hardy had tried without success to get the point four idea up through the echelons of the State Department and had been rebuffed at every turn. Lloyd found him and brought that idea to the President at the time the inaugural address was being drafted in early 1949. The President, of course, liked it instantly and incorporated it into the speech. Lloyd was a strong liberal. He was, I think, attacked mildly during the McCarthy days, probably by McCarthy himself, but there was nothing significant in his record that gave McCarthy a handle. Dave had been a strong liberal but had never joined an organization which made him vulnerable to a McCarthy-type attack. He and I were named administrative assistants to the President at the same time and were sworn in together, in December, 1951. He died suddenly, and prematurely, in the early '60s, shortly after my wife and I went back to Washington. HESS: Clayton Fritchey. BELL: Clay Fritchey was, I think, brought into the press office as an assistant press officer. I didn't realize he was an administrative assistant to the President. HESS: The dates I have are June 2, 1952 until December 12, 1952. BELL: I don't know how he happened to be brought in. Fritchey was not a significant figure to me until Stevenson was nominated, in '52 and visited the White House, and Fritchey and I were suddenly told that we were to go back to Springfield with Governor Stevenson and help him in the campaign and act as liaison between his staff and the White House. Fritchey worked essentially in the press office, or the press relations staff of Governor Stevenson, and I worked with the research staff, the speechwriting staff, while we were in Springfield. HESS: At what time was that, was this in August? BELL: This was in August. I don't know the exact day, but I would have said about middle August. HESS: Fine. Well, we'll come to that and go over it a little more thoroughly when we come to the '52 campaign. Philleo Nash. BELL: Philleo was the civil rights specialist on the White House staff. He had been brought in under Dave Niles, and then succeeded Niles. Philleo and his wife, and my wife and I, became very close friends. After the Truman years Philleo was elected Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, and then was brought back by Mr. Kennedy and made Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He is living in Washington now as a consultant in development. He was very sensitive and very effective in civil rights matters, and is entitled to a lot of the credit, I think, for Mr. Truman's generally strong and progressive stand on civil rights issues. I've always thought this is one of the areas in which Mr. Truman is entitled to great credit, partly because of his firm convictions in the field, having come from a fairly southern background. I think he had slave-owning ancestors. But he was very clear on the issue and Philleo, and Dave Niles before him, were very effective in bringing to the President the particular issues on which he could move, such as the abolition of all-Negro army units during the Korean war, and the civil rights committee headed by Charles Wilson in 1947, which was one of the best presidential commission reports in those years, I suppose one of the best ever. HESS: The one entitled "To Secure These Rights?" BELL: "To Secure These Rights," yes. HESS: Some historians say that Mr. Truman's views and pronouncements on civil rights were taken from a stand of political expediency. What would you say about that? BELL: That wouldn't be my observation. I saw some of them fairly close up and my very strong impression was that he was quite clear in his mind as to where he stood on those matters. I'm not sure I can cite you chapter and verse to back that up, but it was a matter on which my own views were very strong, and I think I would have been sensitive to any hollowness or superficiality or hypocrisy on his part. I'm sure Philleo would be a much better witness on this than I because he must have discussed it many times and many hours with the President as I did not. But I came out of those years with a clear sense that while Mr. Truman felt, as we all did, that there were limits on the rate at which these things could be changed, given our history, there wasn't any doubt that he wanted them changed and would do whatever he could to change them. HESS: In your opinion, how successful was Mr. Truman in separating the view he thought he should take as President and the view that he might hold as an individual? BELL: Well, I don't know. HESS: Do you think that would arise? BELL: I don't think I can cite you evidence on that. My own picture of Mr. Truman, which is one of enormous admiration, includes the feeling that he was a man of great integrity in the sense that he reacted to issues in a straightforward manner. He said what he thought about them. It was not natural for him to dissemble or to think first, "Now, how should I react to this." It was natural for him, in my observation, to react. If somebody brought him an issue he would say what he thought about it. And if the politics of his views were wrong, people would have to argue with him about it, and bring that to his attention. From my observation, he did not see an issue through political glasses first. He saw the merits first, and then, if necessary, he might modify his stand or what he said about it, in the light of political reality. HESS: And the man who held the post as special assistant to the President, from '49 to '53, Kenneth Hechler. BELL: Oh, yes. I'd forgotten that title. HESS: He and Richard Neustadt both held the title. BELL: That's right, and that's an interesting point. In those days, the title "administrative assistant" was regarded as higher than the title "special assistant," but there were a limited number of administrative assistants authorized, and when Heckler and Neustadt came along, there weren't any such positions -- I don't know that they would have been named to them anyway -- and so they invented the title "Special assistant to the President." Incidentally, for those of us who had been on the White House staff in the earlier years, when I first went on, they invented the title -- I think they invented it for me, maybe they had used it for others -- "special assistant in the White House office," not "special assistant to the President." That was a kind of a staff assignment, but I'm sure you're right that Heckler and Neustadt were called special assistant to the President. But, as I say, it was a junior title at that time, lesser than administrative assistants, although the two titles became reversed later on. Heckler -- where had we heard of Heckler? I'm not sure but what Murphy found him at the time we were preparing for that 1950 trip west. He had been working on the Hill. I think he was a political science student, or something like that. He turned out to be an enormous worker, a very pleasant and effective fellow, and he became a member of the Murphy team. He's now a Congressman from West Virginia, in his third, or fourth, or fifth term, still fascinated by politics. We had gotten to know Neustadt because he worked in the Budget Bureau on the legislative reference staff under Roger Jones. He took a year or so off to finish his Ph.D. on the subject of the legislative reference process, up at Harvard, and after he came back, he again worked, I think, in the Budget Bureau. He was at one stage, I think, a personal assistant to Jim Webb. He was one of the bright young guys around the White House and Budget Bureau and executive office complex; and he came to work for Murphy, exactly when I don't remember. As I remember it, the most important piece of drafting that Neustadt did was on the President's farewell message, in 1953. This was a very interesting occasion, an interesting speech, because the President's candidate, had, after all, been beaten, and Mr. Truman gave a kind of farewell address on the radio in January. HESS: All right. And Rear Admiral Robert L. Dennison. BELL: Bob Dennison was the Naval Aide, but at that time the naval aide had quite a different role than he had later under President Eisenhower. I think this stemmed from the role of the naval aide during the war, when the Navy had the duty of establishing the information center in the White House, the war room, the map room. The successive naval aides, therefore, were the channel through which the President received his information on the course of the war, his intelligence briefings, his classified messages and so on. Clifford was assigned to the map room, that's how he got into the White House in the first place. HESS: And George Elsey. BELL: George Elsey -- that's how Clifford found Elsey. Elsey was a junior officer in the map room. Well, Dennison was assigned as naval aide and inherited this particular array of activity. Dennison was an extremely able man, and became useful to the President on some issues of foreign and military policy. He was by no means as significant as Admiral Leahy had been, but he was much more involved in policy matters than, say, General Vaughan was. Vaughan was a close friend of the President's, and he was a man of more substance than he was given credit for at the time, but he was not involved in policy. He was jovial, friendly, an entertaining person, but not a significant man in policy matters. Dennison was, to some extent, on the communications network, and was certainly involved in that way, but I don't know how much farther. This is a significant point, incidentally, in relation to another matter. The one big difference between the White House staff in those years and the White House staff today, as it was reconstituted under Mr. Kennedy and largely persists to this day, is that there was nobody in the Truman White House who corresponded to McGeorge Bundy under Kennedy and Johnson. That role had not yet been identified clearly. There were people who in effect handled parts of it. The National Security Council was invented sometime in the early Truman years, and there was an executive secretary of the National Security Council, who I think at that time was Jimmy [James S.] Lay, or maybe he was an assistant, and Sidney Souers was the executive secretary. Both Souers and Lay were to some extent involved in advising the President, keeping his communication channels clear, keeping intelligence information flowing to him, and so on, in those years. Souers had been a Reserve rear admiral, and was a friend of the President's from Missouri, a good man, an able man, very helpful to him. And Lay was also a useful man, although much less strong on policy matters and primarily a fellow who carried papers around and made sure the President saw documents in the intelligence and foreign policy field that he ought to see. Souers I suppose was the closest to a Bundy, but he was in and out of Washington, and was actually on that job only on part-time duty much of the time. Nobody in the Truman White House had anywhere near the influence or the significant role in the White House that McGeorge Bundy had under Kennedy and Johnson. It's interesting to speculate about what that meant for the role of the White House staff in relation to the State Department. HESS: One question on Harry Vaughan. Mr. Truman was accused of having the Missouri gang in the White House, and it seemed that the press seemed to zero in on Harry Vaughan. Why do you think he was sought out as a target, if you do agree? BELL: Because he was a perfectly easy, simple target. He was a man who spoke his mind. He did some things that were imprudent. It was easy to criticize him. I always thought that most of this criticism was erroneous on two counts: first it was assumed that Vaughan was an important policy adviser of the President's, which he was not; and second, most of it did not correctly describe what Vaughan thought or what he did. I thought he was a much maligned person, and I felt very sorry for him. HESS: And one other service aide, Major General Landry. BELL: Bob Landry was assigned by the Air Force to be the Air Force Aide. He confined himself pretty much to being air aide, that is to say he organized the planes and carried messages between the Air Force and the President. He was neither as close a friend as Harry Vaughan nor as able or strong a man as Bob Dennison. HESS: Your sketch in the Current Biography states that you wrote some of Mr. Truman's speeches on economic affairs. Do you recall which ones those were? BELL: I don't know where they could have gotten that information. I worked on all sorts of speeches for Mr. Truman, but the process of speech drafting for him was such that there was very rarely a single author for any speech. It was typically a collegial process, and Mr. Truman himself did a lot of drafting in the late stages. HESS: That's a good question. Just how were those speeches written? BELL: There is on record an excellent description of this by John Hersey. He wrote a series of articles in the New Yorker. It was during the Korean war, and in preparation for the articles, he sat in on some of the speech drafting sessions and came to know some of us around the White House quite well. Our instructions were to show him everything and let him see how it was done. Hersey's pieces were excellent, I thought. I was always puzzled that they weren't published as a separate book. I thought they were one of the best things Hersey ever did. He was very accurate: We were all astonished at how precise his memory was, because while he was with us in those speech drafting sessions, in the Cabinet Room with the President, he didn't seem to make extensive notes. He would make a little scribble on a piece of paper now and then. He must have gone right back to the hotel and dictated the whole thing, and he must have had nearly total recall, because there was hardly anything in that whole series of articles that any of us would have felt was wrong in shading, let alone in general purport. Hersey's description, therefore, stands as quite an accurate indicator of the process. Typically, there would be an initial discussion with the President to get a sense of what he would like to cover, the general thoughts he would like to get across, the policy positions he'd like to put forward, what effect he'd like the speech to have. Then there would be further discussions among the group of us, and somebody would be assigned to write the first draft. That was very often David Lloyd. Then there would be a process of going slowly over the draft several times. These sessions would last for hours. I suppose that we worked more evenings than not, and more weekends than not. My wife remembers those years, incidentally, with great distaste. It was a miserable time for her. She thinks of the whole five years as essentially a period when I came home to sleep, and not very many hours at that. She has great sympathy for the wives of the people who do this sort of thing nowadays. Anyway, much of the time that we worked on speeches we sat around, two of us, three of us, four of us -- rarely as many as five, typically three or four of us -- going over the speech page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, trying to improve it, make it stronger, clearer, more telling. Then at a fairly advanced stage -- I'm not trying to describe a process that went on for weeks, but it probably went on for two or three days, for each speech, or for a message to Congress -- we would take it in and go over it, the group of us, with the President. If it was a speech, he would read it aloud and would comment on it, direct what changes he wanted made, and the rest of us would make notes on what we thought ought to be changed for impact or effectiveness. Sometimes outsiders would be brought in at that stage, members of the Cabinet or others, to see what they thought of it. This was a risky process, because it is very easy to criticize things like that, and frequently we would get scathing comments from Cabinet officers. We got to the point where we distinguished between the "workers" and the "drones." The drones were the Cabinet officers who would make free-swinging, strong comments to the effect that major parts of the speech ought to be rewritten or replaced, and then they would leave to go play golf. The workers -- Dean Acheson, for example, was one of them, and Charlie Brannan was another -- also would make comments that might be very scathing. I remember a classic occasion, during the Korean war. We had worked hard and prepared a draft and the President read it, and when he got through Dean Acheson said with that magnificent English manner of his: "You can't ask the President of the United States to utter this crap." And he was probably right. But he or Brannan, when they did something like that, would get up and take off their coats and say, "Where's the nearest typewriter." And they would prepare an alternate draft, something they thought would be more appropriate. We always had more respect for them. HESS: Who were some of the drones? BELL: I'm not sure I should name anybody; I would hesitate to blacken anybody's reputation. After a session with the President of that type, the text would normally be polished up in line with whatever had been decided, often by the personal ministrations of Clifford and Murphy and the President himself. And it would be wrapped up. This process, of course, is illustrated in many of the drafts which exist in the Library's files. HESS: If the speech was going to be on labor would the Department of Labor submit the draft, or would they submit questions or their thoughts ahead of time? BELL: It depended in part on what they were asked for. Normally they would be asked for recommendations. Sometimes they would be asked for a draft, particularly if it was thought there was anybody in the Department of Labor who could produce a useful draft. Certainly they would be invited to comment when the draft was ready. There was a process of clearing all speech drafts and message drafts, sometimes via the Budget Bureau, sometimes direct, using White House messengers. This might happen at night or on a Sunday or whenever, and the people would be sought out wherever they were and their comments would be requested. I'm sure this process goes on today. HESS: On the subject of White House-congressional liaison, just how was that liaison carried on during the Truman administration? Just how did Mr. Truman seek to gain support for his proposals? BELL: Well, I don't know too much about all that. Murphy had worked on the Hill in the office of the Legislative Counsel of the Senate, and knew a lot of people up there personally. Clifford also did a lot of personal work. President Truman didn't have staff of the kind that Larry O'Brien later organized under Mr. Kennedy until sometime in his second term, when he got Charlie Maylon and Joe Feeney. HESS: 1949. BELL: 1949, was it that early? HESS: Yes, that's right. BELL: I think Feeney worked the Senate side and Maylon the House. They had been found effective people to work with the Congress, and they were, in a sense, the kind of staff that O'Brien later had, that is, staff who worked the Hill regularly, maintained liaison with the committees and leading members, and conveyed to the President what the attitude on the Hill was on a given subject, and vice versa. All this was facilitated, of course, by the fact that the President himself had served on the Hill, as well as Murphy's having been up there. Both of them therefore were old hands, knowing everybody and knowing the ropes. I remember a very painful incident that happened when Steve Spingarn was working with us on the White House staff. We all liked him very much. He was an attractive, vigorous figure, but he got himself crossways with somebody important on the Hill, I've forgotten who it was, I never knew the story in detail. It happened very suddenly. Apparently, he gave somebody on the Hill the impression that he had a very low opinion of him, or he missed a base he should have touched, and somebody on the Hill ended up feeling very insulted. He called the President and Steve was moved on from the White House. He was given a post on the Federal Trade Commission, for which he was very well qualified, and he did it very well, as he's an able man. But he didn't have any idea of leaving the White House staff. He handled congressional relations in some manner that was very unfortunate, and it caused him to be bounced. The only other case of someone being bounced was George Elsey, who was bounced because he leaked the Wake Island minutes to Tony Leviero of the New York Times. The episode got Leviero a Pulitzer Prize which always struck me as rather funny because Leviero didn't do a damned thing to get that prize except answer his telephone. Elsey offered it to him, and he took it and put it in the Times. Elsey did it, of course, because he thought it was extremely important, at the time of the MacArthur crisis, that people have a correct impression of what happened at Wake Island. They were not getting a correct impression from what MacArthur was saying. The document, I imagine, was classified "Secret" or "Top-Secret," and it was strictly his own idea and strictly against regulations. I don't think he was on active duty as a naval officer, or there might have been a question whether he would have to be court-martialed. But the President felt he had to let him go, and I think he was probably right, and Elsey thought at the time he was probably right. Elsey felt that he had to do this. He recognized that he was acting against regulations and was prepared for the consequences. HESS: He did this on his own without checking with anyone else first? BELL: That is my impression, yes. He told me so, and I believed him at the time, and I have not heard anything in the intervening years to make me think differently . HESS: That's the article that was published in the New York Times on April 21, 1951, shortly after the MacArthur episode? I've heard that Mr. Truman was not enthusiastic about having a well-organized liaison between his White House aides and members of Congress. What is your reaction to that? BELL: It doesn't sound right to me. He was an orderly person, and understood the value of liaison, and I would have assumed was very happy to have Feeney and Maylon added to the staff. I suspect it was Murphy's idea, and I didn't have any impression that the President didn't like. HESS: The President usually met with the so-called "Big Four" once a week. Would he usually carry on his own congressional liaison at that time? BELL: Yes, in the sense that that's part of the congressional liaison business. But, of course, there were lots of committee chairmen who weren't there, and lots of members who weren't there, so there's much more to the congressional liaison process than that. Incidentally, at those meetings, I believe Murphy was usually present. His staff, and later the Budget Bureau staff, prepared a summary of the legislative position of the President's program, which formed the agenda for such meetings. HESS: How close was the President to Leslie Biffle? BELL: I couldn't tell you. He was obviously a good friend, but beyond that I have no impression.
Second Oral History Interview with David E. Bell, New York City, New York, September 12, 1968. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. HESS: Mr. Bell, today, let's start off by discussing two of the three big messages. In our last interview, we discussed the writing of the state of the Union messages. The other two messages that we should mention are the Economic Report, which is also supplemented by a Midyear Report sent up each July, and the budget message. What do you recall about the problems that arose in the compilation and the writing of those two messages? BELL: I recall a good deal because it was one of my jobs on the Truman staff to act as liaison with the Council of Economic Advisers in the drafting of the Economic Report of the President, and with the Budget Bureau in drafting the budget message. In this capacity, I used to sit in on the long sessions at which the draft Economic Report was discussed each six months by the members of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. This was frequently a fairly difficult process, first of all because the members of the Council had to accommodate their views to each other. The first Council as I recall it was Dr. [Edwin G.] Nourse, chairman; Mr. John Clark of Wyoming; and Mr. Leon Keyserling, and they were very different individuals. Nourse was from the classical stream of American economics; Clark a businessman turned economist, quite iconoclastic about American business practice; and Keyserling, a fairly radical reformer – I don't mean Communist, he was of course not in any sense adverse to the American system. He was a disciple of the late Senator (Robert F.] Wagner, very interested in radical change and radical ideas about how to influence the economy and to make it perform better. They were all strong adherents of the concept of the Employment Act of 1946. But they had wide divergences on specific policy issues, and of course, they had to debate those at length when the economic reports were in preparation. The method of preparation typically was for the staff of the Council to prepare drafts of the different chapters within an outline that had been agreed to earlier and then for the Council itself to debate at length the particular policy proposals to be put before the President. It was established early on that a White House staff member would be an appropriate participant in their discussions, and I was ordinarily designated as that person, not to control their discussions or their findings, but in order to keep the White House staff informed as to how the discussions were trending, and what issues were going to be important for the President to face when the report came to him in draft, since it was his report that was involved, and also to raise questions from the point of view of the White House staff. I rarely, in that capacity, engaged in any straight-out arguments. It was more my role to flag issues for the Council members, and for Charlie Murphy and through him with the President. The next stage in the process of preparing an Economic Report was for the Council, when it had a completed draft, to put it before the President. At that time, the draft would be commented on, normally by Murphy, to the President, and normally on the basis of the advice that I had given Murphy as to what the important issues would be. The Council would normally have an opportunity to discuss matters with the President, usually with Murphy and often with myself present. The President having heard the argument would leave instructions as to what he wanted done to the draft report, and then, typically, the Council members and Murphy and I would sit together and prepare the final draft of the report as the President desired it. It was also part of the system, before the President met with the Council, to circulate a draft copy of the Economic Report to the various Cabinet officers and to consider their comments. The entire process was very time-consuming, with lots of discussion and argument. It was not normally an acrimonious process, but ther |
