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Oral History Interview with
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US Congressman, Fifth District of Missouri,
1949-1983.
October 21, 1988 and April 20, 1989 by Niel M. Johnson |
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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 June, 1990
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript]
Oral History Interview with
October 21, 1988 Niel M. Johnson JOHNSON: I'm going to begin Mr. Bolling by asking you where and when you were born, and what your parents' names were. BOLLING: I was born in New York City, on the l7th of May l9l6. My mother was Florence Easton Bolling; my father was Richard Walker Bolling. JOHNSON: Do you have any brothers and sisters? BOLLING: I had one brother, John. He died young; I can't give his exact age, but he was in his thirties. He was seven years younger than I. JOHNSON: How long did you live in New York City? BOLLING: My father was the chief surgeon of a great New York hospital, St. Lukes, and he died in his forties. I hated New York and I talked my mother into going back to one of the places that we visited regularly, his home, or his birthplace, Huntsville, Alabama. She herself was from Wisconsin. We had had a circle, when my father was alive, of going to Huntsville some, to LaCrosse, Wisconsin some, spending some time in Long Island, and spending some time in New York. I hated New York. I loved Long Island, but I hated New York, so I talked my mother--and this was a very bad thing to have done I'm afraid--I talked my mother into moving back to Huntsville. So I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, having lived in New York until I was l3 or l4. JOHNSON: So your education did start in New York City. BOLLING: That's correct. JOHNSON: One of the public schools? BOLLING: No, I did not go to school until I was about l0 or 11, and then I went to a private school, Allan Stevenson. JOHNSON: You're getting educated at home, by your parents? BOLLING: By my mother, who was quite a remarkable person. It would be a long story about my mother, but I won't tell it, unless you ask much later on. My mother was educated at Vassar, and a leader of virtually everything at Vassar; she was an intellectual, a friend of [Justice Louis] Brandeis as a young woman. She was of that quality. She was very opinionated, a rationalist if there ever was one. She, and the books that were available, educated me. The story that I've always heard is that I was frail, and I spent an awful lot of time at home because of that, and I did an incredible amount of reading. I read, I think you could say, practically everything that would be in an upper income family, from English literature of the l9th century. I had a grandmother who was a Francophile, who saw to it that I had plenty of French books. My mother knew and maintained her knowledge of at least three and perhaps four languages: English being one, along with German and French. In her widowhood she never remarried; she learned all the rest of the Romance languages, and one or two other languages, just on her own. So I was dealing with--I guess with any prejudice that I would have, I would be accurate in this one to say--a superior intellect and a superior intellectual. JOHNSON: A prodigy. BOLLING: She missed New York, and occupied her time as a widow in Huntsville, Alabama, by taking over the Board chairmanship of the little hospital where you went to die, and turning it into a tri-county hospital--and so on, and so on. JOHNSON: Is it correct to say that your father was of an aristocratic southern background? BOLLING: Well, it was as close as you could get to a political, aristocratic background. JOHNSON: Is it true that you are a distant cousin of Edith Bolling Wilson? BOLLING: That's right. I visited her and there's a funny story about that. But my great-great something or other was called Charles William Walker. He presided over the Constitutional Convention of Alabama, and he was the first Senator of Alabama. I don't know much else about him. One of my role models was my great uncle who lived across the street in Huntsville. He lived on what you would call "snob hill," McClung Hill, a very conservative area, but my mother was not a conservative. He was a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals judge, and a monumental person in a variety of ways. I don't have much idea or a notion of his politics, and I don't really remember exactly when he died, but we had enough contact so I remember him as a person that I admired a great deal. Later on, I had the interesting experience of talking about him, at least somewhat, to a man who had become more than an acquaintance, and less than a close friend, Justice [Hugo] Black. I had figured out finally that my great uncle had to be a political person. JOHNSON: What was his name? BOLLING: His name was Richard Wilde Walker, obviously my grandmother's brother. Black and I had sort of a casual conversation about him, during which he grinned a lot, so obviously I was hitting the right notes. But I always had a consciousness of this, and I was influenced not only by the old boy, but by the consciousness of having come from such a background. More interesting perhaps, or just as interesting, and I have not looked any of this up--I never was very interested in it except that it gave me a certain kind of feel--the Bollings came from Virginia and some Bollings were involved with people like Thomas Jefferson. Now that might turn out to be a myth. One of the things that I think was a myth was that we were in some way related to people who had been involved with Pocahontas; that was a big myth, that the Bollings were involved with that. Inevitably, you had a strong feeling of country, of being a part of the country. My reaction to it was always sort of negative; that it didn't do a hell of a lot of good to have ancestors like that, but what mattered was what you did yourself. JOHNSON: Was that an idea that just came to you from your reading, or where did you get that impression that regardless of having an elitist-type background, that you still had to do it on your own? BOLLING: I don't know where I got it; I suspect I got it from my mother. My mother always claimed to be apolitical, but she was intensely political. And I think she was probably something very close to a LaFollette progressive, although we never had a discussion on politics as such. JOHNSON: On your father's side, were there veterans of the Confederate Army, or the Confederacy? BOLLING: Oh, yes, my grandfather was supposed to have died as the result of being in some Federal prison. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. I know I had a disagreeable, charming grandmother on that side. I got to know her; but she was the kind of person who, when my father died, would send a telegram to my mother, asking "would the check continue"--that kind of thing. She was a southern belle of less than great quality. But then I had an equally remarkable, compared to the judge, maybe more remarkable grandfather on my mother's side, who I knew quite well. JOHNSON: What was his name? BOLLING: His last name was Easton; Frederick, I think he was called, but I never called him anything but "grandfather." I guess my grandmother called him Fred; I think that's right. They weren't an old aristocratic family; he was a second generation of a family that was extraordinarily rich. They were the rich people of LaCrosse, and there was a funny ending to that. In the Depression they went broke. This is a very complicated story--you could write a novel about it--fascinating, complicated, and true. I knew quite a lot about this myself. But anyway my grandfather had been chairman of the school board in LaCrosse, Wisconsin for years and years, and had been very influential in the quality of the schools. He didn't go broke, but the trust that he was the beneficiary of went broke because my grandmother didn't handle it very well. That's being nice about it. When he went broke, they wanted to keep him involved, so they shifted him. He needed a job, although he was in his 60s. They kept him, really not as the chairman of the board because he was an employee, but they put him in charge of all of the facilities. He never had had an actual job in his life; he was an inventor, and he invented a number of things. I'm told--I never checked it out--that if he had kept the invention in his own hands, he would have gotten rid on it. It was some pumps that were exceptionally complicated. So I had an extraordinary background. JOHNSON: Yes, both North and South. BOLLING: My mother being most extraordinary. I then went on to Phillips-Exeter and was a disaster. I didn't like it, and I didn't like being away from the place in Long Island. I had--let's say--four, five, or six bad years. JOHNSON: Was that when you were living in New York City that they sent you to Exeter? BOLLING: I started from there. I didn't do a bit of good at Exeter, and I'm not particularly interested in even worrying about it, because I decided a long time ago that there wasn't any point in my going to a psychiatrist unless I was going to spend a lot of time. And no matter how screwed up I was, it worked, so I wasn't going to mess with it. But in any event, I had a bad time, and I went to a little place called Sewanee, University of the South, Tennessee. I went there and you could say that I was a good football bum, and chased girls and didn't do much of anything. I got a bad injury; the injury was bad enough so that I was immobilized for four months, and I got back to the books. Then I started to be an intellectual. JOHNSON: A fateful injury. BOLLING: I started to be an intellectual again, because that's essentially what I was at l3, with mother. I started back, and I had a couple of jobs that were in the teaching field. JOHNSON: You did get good grades there? BOLLING: No, I didn't get good grades until my last year. When I got to my last year, when I had that bum leg and couldn't get around, I had much more... JOHNSON: No longer the playboy in other words. BOLLING: That's right. And besides, I decided it was a waste of time. What I did was not very healthy. JOHNSON: You majored in literature apparently there. BOLLING: Both bachelor and masters degrees. JOHNSON: Masters in literature. How about history; didn't you study history at that time? BOLLING: That was when I moved from literature, which I thought was reasonable. I went down to Vanderbilt for another year. Then I decided to volunteer under the Selective Service Act, thinking that I couldn't finish up on the Ph.D. It turned out that I could have, because they didn't call me under the Selective Service Act until almost a year later. I surely could have gotten finished. I turned and shifted to a Ph.D. in history. I hadn't written the thesis, but if I had known that I had a year I probably could have gotten through with the work, maybe not. But I never got the Ph.D. except in an honorary fashion. JOHNSON: And then... BOLLING: History was what I was interested in. JOHNSON: Before you entered the service, you apparently worked at Florence State Teachers College in Alabama. BOLLING: That's right. That's peculiar because I was working with a fellow that came out of Columbia, who had been the head of the education department there, and somebody at Florence State Teachers College was smart enough to employ him down there. I was not working for a southerner. JOHNSON: So it was a Dewey style philosophy? BOLLING: You got it. JOHNSON: And you apparently had to work with rural schools and teachers. BOLLING: That's right; we were doing the real thing. We were going out and working in poverty stricken areas. JOHNSON: You saw poverty at its worst, I suppose. BOLLING: Absolutely. JOHNSON: In other words, this could have been an influence on your life. BOLLING: Well, it was an enormous influence at Sewanee. I had a weird, weird, Bible teacher; that's the way he billed himself, but he was not a radical. He was a far-out liberal. He ran the movie theater among other things. He taught Bible. Well, it was comparative religion; that was what it was. He also ran the movie theater and he had a for-profit sort of cafeteria. One of the experiences that I still get chills from is when I was sitting there, I guess still on a crutch, just sitting there drinking a cup of coffee and thinking, when there wasn't much activity, and I saw this guy come in from the road. Tony--who I later roomed with, this professor who I later roomed with in my graduate year--Tony had a rule that whoever came in there got something to eat, whoever came in begging during the Depression. I graduated in '37, '38. This guy came in and he got, what I found out later by asking, he got the handout which was a couple of donuts, probably second-day or third-day donuts, and a big cup of coffee--with all the things that you'd put in a cup of coffee. I happened to watch this guy, and he drank the coffee down about that far, and then he filled it up with sugar and a little cream. This was a smart guy; he wasn't a dummy about food. That's what he had; he had those two donuts. And that got me to thinking. I'd already seen an awful lot on the train, when we'd come down and go back, there would be dead bodies beside the railroad tracks. My mother was a liberal in a real sense. When they set up a CCC camp down the road on the other side of town, over the hill and down where they had an old man's CCC camp, the snobs and the snots on McClung Hill said they weren't going to be allowed to walk over the hill. They found they had a tiger in their midst, and they found that they [the CCC men] also had the support of the judge. He just didn't think it was fair; he didn't have my mother's kind of views, but my mother's egalitarian views prevailed. Little things like that have an effect on you. I had enough of them so I came out... JOHNSON: Tony is the religion professor? BOLLING: Tony Griswold. JOHNSON: The professor you were talking about? BOLLING: Yes. And then I had two other things that happened to me aside from the gross thing that happened, of getting hurt and starting back with the books. Near Sewanee there was a place called Mount Eagle. And Mount Eagle had sort of a Chatauqua-like place; Sewanee was high enough up in the hills, the mountains, so that it was cooler in the summer, substantially cooler than the land down. The people that came up there came up there from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Nashville, Tennessee, and in Nashville, Tennessee is Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt University at that particular time had a remarkable group of professors, and others, who were involved in something called the "Fugitive Movement"--Robert Penn Warren, Allen Little, and the whole bunch of them. Carolyn Gordon was Warren's wife, and she was a writer too. There were a number of other names, of real quality, and they were involved in this thing called the Fugitive Movement. It was some way of restoring a Jeffersonian culture and the sort of phrase that they used on themselves was "40 acres and a steel mule." It was about the time that the New Deal, the "red hot" New Deal--I don't mean the communist New Deal or the Stalinist New Deal, the people who were trying to infiltrate--but I'm talking about the real left, intellectual left. They were trying to figure out--and Mrs. Roosevelt helped a lot on this stuff--they were trying to figure out how to compensate for the inadequacy of the land in various ways. The land in the southeast was a disaster in those days. Reconstruction of the land that came from the TVA is probably one of the great national phenomena that everybody has forgotten. These people had a few students who came over and visited with them, drank with them, and some of them were Vanderbilt students. But a very few of them were Sewanee students, and I was one of the ones that got there. Then there was another institution up there, that was probably Communist-dominated, Stalinist-dominated, and of course, I later on had a considerable career in dealing with Stalinists in various institutions. ADA [Americans for Democratic Action] was established to give liberals a home that was not connected with the Stalinists, the CPUSA [Communist Party-USA]. Well, for some reason, I've forgotten why, I guess the year between my graduation in '37 and the beginning of my masters, which was in English literature--I got my bachelor's in French literature and my masters in English--I went to a Quaker school, a Quaker camp, at a place called the Highlander Folk School. The Highlander Folk School was famous in those days for being dominated by the Stalinists. But there were also people like the Friends; the camp was a Friends camp at this school. I got exposed to all of that. I had a couple of people that are relatively well-known in Washington, one that was there, and we each remember the other as relatively sympathetic to their anti-Stalinist view. They were the ones that were most interested in the anti-Stalinist view. The guy I'm talking about is Adam Yarmalinsky, an intellectual with considerable potency. JOHNSON: This Quaker school would be inherently anti-Stalinist, would it not, since they do not believe in dictatorship? BOLLING: They didn't believe in it, but they were at the same school. JOHNSON: They were at the same school--or on the same grounds? BOLLING: No, they were there as guests of and paying their way at Highlander. In those days there was a large amount of infiltration into liberal groups that didn't know they were infiltrated. JOHNSON: They were going to try to convert these Quakers in the South, to their cause, I suppose. BOLLING: Exactly. JOHNSON: Did you ever meet Reinhold Niebuhr? BOLLING: Of course, I met him; I was a founder of ADA [Americans for Democratic Action] as well as an organizer. JOHNSON: So you read his work and was influenced by it? BOLLING: Oh yes, I was much influenced by it. I missed the earlier part; what came before ADA, but it was a much smaller group that he was heavily involved in. And Niebuhr in effect was one of my bosses. People like Joe Rauh were heavily involved in that. It's a funny story about ADA later on with Mr. Truman, because they were one of the groups--and you should remember this, I might forget it--they were one of the groups that wanted to dump Mr. Truman in the '48 convention. And you're going to see as we develop all this, an almost unbelievable set of reasons why I developed as I did, why I got the experience. It's already pretty wild. JOHNSON: Yes, it sounds like it. Was your mother living on income from her job, or was it coming from other sources? BOLLING: She was left a considerable amount of insurance by my father. There's a story about that later on, but what she did, she ultimately spent herself into poverty. I figured it out when I was in Congress, and began to take good care of her, but there was a time in there that I ought to be ashamed of, when I did not realize what kind of trouble she was in. JOHNSON: But there apparently were some aunts and uncles who were landowners, landed gentry, so to speak? BOLLING: Not really. Not really; the family is sort of gone in Alabama. There's not much Walker left, from that brand; I'm really sort of the end of it, of the Walker line. JOHNSON: So you joined the service before Pearl Harbor. BOLLING: That's right. I worked at Florence State Teachers College, with Morris Mitchell. There were several Mitchells who were famous in that period. He was the teacher, probably a socialist, and surely a pacifist, who had a place in North Carolina, one of those idealistic communities. It worked pretty well as long as he was around and later he turned up at Putney School as the master there, after I was in Congress. So all kinds of things have changed with him. But I had a lot of strange... JOHNSON: Yes, that raises a question; in view of all these influences, why was it you decided to become a military man, join the military, in early 1941? BOLLING: Well, Morris Mitchell was the last influence I had after I was committed. I had already volunteered, and I didn't find any conflict between the influences that I had had and the attitudes that I had developed, and the need to defeat Hitler. My mother, who pretended to be apolitical, was extraordinarily opinionated, and she recognized Hitler for what he was, much earlier than most people, because of her background. Those languages she didn't use. She was talented, but she was enormously knowledgeable about Europe. JOHNSON: She was anti-isolationist, it seems. BOLLING: Oh, totally. But she had been talented enough; the myth is--and I can't prove it--that she had training with Monnet, and she stopped painting when he told her that she would be very good but never great. She had a similar quality as teacher of piano. That's one of the reasons that I was always sort of pleased with Mr. Truman and amused by what I could connect in my head. She played the piano, and had a grand. That was one of the last things that she sold off. So she must be the dominant influence. I don't much give a damn, just so long as I had it, but hers was not an isolationist position. JOHNSON: She was warning about Hitler and what would happen if something wasn't done to stop him? BOLLING: I also, on my own, got the same sense; that we had to win that war although we weren't in it. I'm very much of an Anglophile; I was then, and that's obviously from the literature. JOHNSON: George Bernard Shaw; did you read his stuff? BOLLING: I read his stuff, among others. I read them all. I ended up, not with a Churchillian view; I had a very liberal domestic view before I went into the Army. It wasn't stopped by the Army. Of course, I had a weird job in the Army. I didn't start out with a weird job; I was one of those people that I suppose made the mistake of insisting on going in at the bottom. Most of my friends were going in as Naval ensigns or whatever they the hell called it. JOHNSON: What month and year was it you went in? BOLLING: I went in April 1941. I don't know how much detail you want--I can be quick--they couldn't figure out what to do with me and I spent a month and a half, two months, learning about real poverty in the South by looking at the people who were recruited with me. There were two people with some college in the group that I went in with, 200 from the draft, and the other guy was a drunk already. Later on in my career I had some problems with alcohol, but he started out that way. And mine never interfered with any part of my career, although it interfered with my life. They didn't know what to do with me, and they put me in a chemical warfare company. To make a very long story short, I ended up on the high seas seven days out of Pearl Harbor on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. We were on the wrong side of Pearl Harbor, and we ended up in Australia. Again, to make it a very short story, I got a job running the first Post Office in that theatre. I did that. JOHNSON: What outfit were you with at this point? BOLLING: Chemical warfare; I don't even remember the number. I think it was the 66th. It was a separate chemical warfare company. JOHNSON: You were attached to MacArthur's headquarters?
BOLLING: It wasn't attached to anything, not at that stage. We were a filler convoy sent to the Philippines; there were about 6,000 troops of all kinds, all little pieces. JOHNSON: Well, apparently they decided at this point that they weren't going to reinforce the Philippines. They diverted you down to Australia. BOLLING: We had one vessel to protect us; it wasn't a destroyer, it was another notch up, a cruiser. And we were met by an Australian cruiser wherever the hell we were, seven days out of Pearl. We were taken first into the Fiji Islands, and were kept there for a day, and then we were taken into Brisbane, Australia. I spent some time there, and in the process I moved from the Post Office to the BASE Section Command. I became the Sergeant Major of the BASE Section. JOHNSON: In Brisbane? BOLLING: In Brisbane, which is a big jump, a big job, an enormous responsibility, because I had relatively inadequate officers. I never did get my last stripe because I was on special duty from that chemical warfare company, and I was always a Tech Sergeant. I never got to be a Master Sergeant. But all of a sudden, I got to be a Warrant Officer and I was offered a commission, which was withdrawn quickly when they realized, within a day, that they were going to have an OCS [Officer Candidate School]. I went to a six weeks OCS in Brisbane, the start-up of a regular OCS that worked with--I guess he was just a colonel, not a general. JOHNSON: What was his name? BOLLING: Donaldson. His family asked me, when he died suddenly after World War II, when I was in Congress, to write his obituary. He was a hell of a good guy; I'm not sure how good a general in terms of going all the way to the top, but I think he went to Major General maybe. He was a good man, a very decent person, and he wouldn't let me go anywhere else. So I came back and the place where I had sat when I was sergeant major was right here, and the place where I sat when I was assistant adjutant general was right there. Theoretically, I should have had a lot less power when I moved. But having come from there, I didn't have less power. And this is where I began to learn about power--I mean consciously. JOHNSON: What rank were you at this point? BOLLING: Second John, second lieutenant. I had had "a much higher rank" before; the sergeant major had a hell of a lot more responsibility directly upon him. The difference was that when I got there, when I signed something, that made it official. The sergeant major didn't sign a goddamn thing; he just got people to sign things. There's no point in going into that. I could spend a couple of days on the philosophy of the military, and so on, most of it pleasant, but not all of it. This guy Donaldson was the best they had, and they picked him to be in charge of the advance echelon of the Services of Supply; the BASE Section was of the Services of Supply. He took me as his aide and assistant adjutant general; and I don't know how long I spent with him. But you know, I was an alter ego. Not in the personal sense; it was very professional. I was not the kind of person that was interested in a personal relationship. I wanted to get on with it. It's a strange attitude, and I haven't found many people like that. I didn't want to get on with it because I wanted to get promoted; I wanted to get on with it because I wanted to get it done. And that's when I first realized that what really moved me, and interested me, was to get something done that I really believed to be important and in the public interest. I really had gotten, at that point, into a hard commitment to public service of some kind. JOHNSON: So in a sense, this kind of initiated your interest in politics, in a larger sense? BOLLING: I missed the fact that I had been president of the student body at Sewanee when I was a graduate student. The guy that caused that to happen is still alive; he was a classmate of mine who decided that they needed me for another year as he left Sewanee to go on to law school. He arranged it so that I got to do that. JOHNSON: So you had experience in student government. BOLLING: Yes, and I was a radical in student government. I tried to get rid of hazing, and succeeded in that by one vote. I tried to get rid of the fraternities, and lost that. JOHNSON: This was at the University of the South at Sewanee? BOLLING: Yes. JOHNSON: Well, then somewhere along the line you met General MacArthur. BOLLING: Yes. JOHNSON: What was your immediate impression of him? BOLLING: Well, I didn't have any meeting; I didn't meet him for years. I didn't try to meet him. I didn't even try to look at him. But he did depend on my boss, his adjutant general, who was in a very peculiar job because it was different from any other adjutant general that I ever heard of. We handled all the incoming and outgoing messages of all kind, including the highest level of secrecy, which means combat operations. That came through that adjutant general, and although I didn't know it, that was the job I was hired for. The reputation I had from my work in BASE Section 3 and the advance section of SOS in New Guinea was such that they picked me out to take a look at. They brought me back to Brisbane and took a look at me and offered me the job. I was told later that they looked at twenty guys, but they picked me out, and they gave me this job. That was not the job that was at the highest level of secrecy, but it was the one that led into it, and relatively quickly. I had gone through the preliminaries and they had finished all kinds of investigations. The FBI turned me down one time, but Donaldson overruled them. That was when I moved from being an enlisted man to being an officer. At least that's what I heard. I never bothered to get those files. You know, it'd just clutter up what I am really interested in. But in the headquarters, Fitch had three assistants, three top assistants. JOHNSON: Fitch? BOLLING: B.M. Fitch was the Adjutant General. I became ultimately the third assistant; the other two were Regular Army enlisted men who outranked me. But in that job I was given more and more responsibility, and more and more rank. I came out finally, at the end, a legitimate Major. But he gave me the last push up, you know, when I left, and I came out a lieutenant colonel. I had two decorations and a bunch of other stuff. JOHNSON: So you were in on some of these major operations... BOLLING: I was in on all of them after I joined the Headquarters. I was on the advanced echelon of GHQ and MacArthur always had an advance echelon which he led. JOHNSON: Even though you weren't seeking to meet him, you had to somehow make contact with him. BOLLING: Oh, of course. When I got to Leyte--when we invaded Leyte on October 20, 1944, as I remember it--I went in a few hours after he did. I was told where to set up his office. It was set up here on a road, and mine was here just across the street. I still didn't see him much, except casually. I didn't have many associations, but I worked with him very closely. He'd say what kind of order he wanted or what kind of message he wanted to send, sometimes to me, through his... JOHNSON: You didn't have any input into the strategy? BOLLING: Oh no. I observed it with fascination. No, no, I didn't have that kind of operation. JOHNSON: Then, after Leyte there was the Okinawa campaign. Did you go into Okinawa? BOLLING: I went through Okinawa. I spent 40 months in the Pacific before I came back the first time. JOHNSON: Did you miss Iwo Jima? BOLLING: No, I went to all those places, but I wasn't in on the fight. You see, MacArthur didn't go in on those fights either. Okinawa and Iwo Jima were Navy; that came out of the other part of the Pacific. I came to Hollandia, Leyte, the Philippines generally. I was back from the U.S. to the Philippines in time for the surrender and on into Japan. JOHNSON: I understand there were some who referred to MacArthur as "Dugout Doug," apparently questioning his bravery. BOLLING: Yes, that was Navy propaganda. I'm not a great fan of MacArthur as a politician nor as the one in charge in Japan, but I'm a great fan of his as a general. He was a nut; he was so fearless. I went in a couple of hours later than he did into Leyte, and I was scared to death and had a right to be scared to death because they were still shooting at us. He believed that God's hand was on his shoulder. He was a kook. My wife and her brother do a great job of kidding me about MacArthur; every time they can find a funny picture they bring it back. When Truman fired him, by then I was far enough along so that radio people wanted to talk to me. One of them asked what I thought about it, and I said, the President made a terrible mistake; he waited too long. JOHNSON: Well, we're going to get to that, of course. On August 6, the atomic bomb was first used. Did you know anything at all about this project, before the dropping? BOLLING: No, sir, I didn't know anything at all about it, but I saw the guy come in with a briefcase that was handcuffed to him. He was the guy that brought the news to MacArthur. But I didn't know that then. JOHNSON: Brought the news? BOLLING: It came through a messenger. I think the guy was a general. JOHNSON: What was your reaction to that, the use of the atomic bomb? BOLLING: Well, I knew what wave I was going to be in, on the invasion of Japan, and I was very sympathetic. I was going to be in the eighth wave and my chances of getting through that were relatively limited. I was going to go in with MacArthur, and you know, I didn't believe a hell of a lot in what MacArthur believed. I didn't think I was being taken care of by the Lord. So I was glad not to have to do that. I did the paperwork on the first examination by whatever the committee it was, on Hiroshima, and I got quite a lesson out of that. JOHNSON: Getting ready for the surrender ceremonies in Tokyo harbor, you apparently had something to do with the arrangements for that ceremony? BOLLING: I worked as about the third man, working on the arrangements. JOHNSON: How about the writing of the treaty itself? You had nothing to do with it? BOLLING: Nothing. JOHNSON: You landed in Japan, what, two days before the signing? BOLLING: That's correct. JOHNSON: And it was a secure area? BOLLING: Well, it was supposed to be secure; MacArthur felt it was secure. I don't think the rest of us thought it was secure. JOHNSON: What kind of reaction did you get when you landed in Japan? BOLLING: It scared the hell out of us. When we got into buses that the Japanese ran, and we came in from the airport, which ever one it was, we went down roads that were still fields, and every Japanese turned their back on us. And when they took us into places to eat or live, I was scared all the time, and most of the rest of us were. There were a few war correspondents who were so nutty by then that they weren't scared. It went the way MacArthur said it would. JOHNSON: So you arranged for the U.S.S. Missouri to be where it was with other ships around it. BOLLING: Yes, I was just, you know, a flunky. I had to interview some of the generals and make sure they got where they were supposed to go, and get it all lined up. I just had a flunky's job at that point. JOHNSON: The Secret Service wouldn't be involved at all. BOLLING: Oh, I knew all the secrets. I didn't know about the atomic bomb but I had every secret there was except maybe a few sort of "double eyes only" to MacArthur. JOHNSON: In other words, almost all messages that came to MacArthur came through you during the war? BOLLING: Yes. The great bulk of them. Now there must have been some operational ones I didn't see, but I saw them in that advance echelon. JOHNSON: I guess there was a little rivalry between Nimitz and MacArthur, or did you notice any. BOLLING: I knew it was there and I was very concerned about the coordination. I knew enough to know that there was constant friction. JOHNSON: And everything went off as planned for this ceremony, the signing of the surrender? BOLLING: To my knowledge it did. To my knowledge there wasn't any problem. JOHNSON: Where were you when the ceremony itself took place? BOLLING: I was so mad at the brass at that stage that I didn't go. One of my rewards was supposed to be to have a place to hide on the Missouri. But I didn't go; I was furious. JOHNSON: You were on shore then when this was happening. BOLLING: That's right. Yes. Oh, all I worked with was plans and people. I didn't work on the ship. Somebody else decided where the ship would be. JOHNSON: You weren't on the U.S.S. Missouri; you never got on board? BOLLING: I never tried to. I refused to go as a matter of fact. I was in a position where I could refuse to go. Of course, it was obviously silly, but I was furious. I had worked in several privileged positions with very, very tough people who were very insistent on being treated as generals and so on. I, for example, would go to a cocktail party in Leyte, and I'd go and I'd be the only person who respected the President. It was insane for me to be there, but I was the only one that was pro-Roosevelt, when they were talking politics. JOHNSON: Is that right? And these were MacArthur's generals? BOLLING: Yes, that's right. They were damn near traitors in that conversation. JOHNSON: They hated Roosevelt? BOLLING: Oh, hell, yes. Just like MacArthur. Now, I never heard MacArthur say anything; but I heard his staff talk in ways that I found intolerable. JOHNSON: What did they dislike about Roosevelt so much? BOLLING: Oh, I don't know. I guess because he had more power than MacArthur. Some of these were good generals; you'll never hear me say a sour word about a couple of them. JOHNSON: They were political reactionaries? BOLLING: Yes, at least. Some of them were awful. One of them became sort of famous, a man whose last name was Feller. I can't remember his first name; he was a reactionary, a devious guy, who later had a political role in the United States. A dreadful person. JOHNSON: So this made you feel uncomfortable around these people? BOLLING: That's right, but we didn't talk politics. Joe Rauh and I became friends; you know who Joe Rauh is? JOHNSON: I believe he's represented a lot of ACLU people. BOLLING: That's fair. He was much involved with ADA--Americans for Democratic Action. He and I are still friends. I had lunch with him the other day. There's a funny story about Joe Rauh and the whole ADA board and Mr. Truman that you ought to catch me on later. JOHNSON: Was he in the military? BOLLING: Yes, he worked with the deputy chief of staff and became the head of what we called the PICAU, the Philippine Civil Affairs Unit. They were the military government in the Philippines. I did him a favor and he needed to get some orders for his people; he couldn't get anything done. he came in to see me and said that he'd heard that I knew how to get things done and could I work it out. I said, "Yes, I could." I told him just to wait a couple of days and we'd get it all worked out. By that time I knew what I could do, and what I couldn't do. I had it worked out so he had the orders, never any fuss. JOHNSON: You did learn how to accommodate to the military system. What was it that really enraged you, though, so you wouldn't... BOLLING: Well, you can't use polite language on what was happening. In war, and when there is a war, they'd put up with almost anything as long as you obeyed orders, and were efficient and got the job done, and helped them look good. I'm not being negative about that; I'm just saying the limits. As soon as they got out of the necessity to perform and produce, it turned into chicken shit. They were fighting over who should stand next to whom, and the head... JOHNSON: Protocol? BOLLING: All of that stuff. And I was so enraged by my experience with these guys that had been, if not heroes to me, people that I admired. I recognized their weaknesses; I recognized their competitiveness--I recognized all of that. I saw that before that in the battle of Leyte Gulf, for example; I heard about that, because I was there. It was a pretty sloppy problem that we had with [Admiral William F.] Halsey off somewhere, God knows where, and all the rest of us sitting down there wondering when the Japs were coming. We also had things like intelligence information that said the Japanese were going to dive in on us; you know, they were going to crash planes and send in parachutes, the works. We had kamikazes all around. But as soon as we got the surrender, all of these guys turned into--I don't know how to cite it. JOHNSON: Martinets? BOLLING: No, they weren't so much martinets; it was just all the chicken shit came back into the military. JOHNSON: As if there was no war to worry about anymore. BOLLING: That's right, and it just absolutely enraged me. I thought we just got the beginning of the job done. JOHNSON: So rank and status, and privilege, became the order of the day. BOLLING: That's exactly right. JOHNSON: Well, then after the surrender ceremonies, how long did you stay? BOLLING: Well I thought I might be able to do some good as a civilian working in the government section. There was a fellow there that I didn't like. I thought that doing the same thing I had done before, I might be able to be useful in the democratization of Japan, which was really a pretty remarkable opportunity. Theoretically, at least, according to the best information I had, the State Department was going to manage that. I had had some experience with State Department people at MacArthur's headquarters because I was just about the only officer that would talk to them. There were only two guys there that were quite remarkable people; one was George Atcheson, no relationship with the later Secretary of State. He was also a friend, and another fellow named John Stewart Service, who was famous. Both of them told me exactly the same thing about China. George Atcheson was a conservative Republican. Jack Service was not that; he was a liberal Democrat, not a Communist. I listened to them talk over a drink or two in MacArthur's headquarters, and it sounded to me like they were going to have a role in what happened in the democratization of Japan, and people like them were going to have a role. There would be conservatives and liberals, but people who had sane views, not views like MacArthur's seemed to be, because of his staff. I didn't hear anything from MacArthur, and MacArthur got along with [John] Curtin, who was the Prime Minister of Australia; I knew that, and he was a Labor guy, so I didn't really know anything about MacArthur for sure. JOHNSON: At least you thought there would be a "New Deal" for Japan? BOLLING: Yes, that's what I really thought. So I signed a piece of paper that said I'd come back and be discharged from the Army, and become a civilian. I got another leave; my other leave was the first leave I had had after 40 months, and I got another quickie. JOHNSON: By the way, you had been at Ft. Leavenworth too. BOLLING: That's right, I'd been at Command and General Staff School. JOHNSON: That was during '44. BOLLING: '44 or '45, I guess. I went back in '45. I got Christmas leave in '45, after the surrender. I came back, and between the time I left and the time I got back, MacArthur had been given the job of being Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. I wasn't about to become a civilian with Courtney Whitney the head of the government section. He was one of MacArthur's closest pals, one of the top Intelligence leaders, and I just couldn't see that. I was pretty sure I knew what he was, and that he was very close to a Fascist. I didn't think that was going to be much fun. I had thought I'd stay a civilian under the State Department and I'd probably be able to do some very useful things with those people in charge. I didn't have those views of Whitney's, and I had some experience with the Communists there, the Stalinists there--Lieutenant General Gerevyanko, I think was the name of the man. He was getting more and more arrogant as we were losing power, military power. Our divisions were disintegrating; everything was just going "whoosh"--on the "bring-the-boys-home" business. I didn't like that either, because I knew what was going to go on was going to be tough, without regard to what the Communists did. It was just tough because we had all of these different problems. So when I got back I decided that I had to get away from my agreement to be a civilian. I've always been terribly lucky. Luck came along and presented me with an offer from MacArthur's closest people, the people that ran his office and ran his door, a man named Bunker, Lawrence Bunker. He asked me to be his assistant. In my job then, I began to see MacArthur pretty regularly. But then I stayed military; I didn't become a civilian. JOHNSON: You were a lieutenant colonel? BOLLING: I was a major. JOHNSON: You're still a major. BOLLING: I get to be a lieutenant colonel when I leave, as I leave. JOHNSON: A parting gift? BOLLING: That's right. They did it to practically everybody. And Bunker wanted me to come along and I thought well, sort of cynically at that stage, that that would be an interesting wind-up. When the time came I could just tell them that there was just no way that I could be kept in the Service, because I had about twice as many points as you needed to have to be discharged. Although we had violated the law on those points on occasion, particularly when we sent a division into Korea that would have been without NCOs and second lieutenants if we hadn't, I'd be out. JOHNSON: You were married by this time. BOLLING: Yes. So that's about what happened. And I got out. JOHNSON: What month and year? BOLLING: Well, it was '46 and I think it was August that I finished my leave. In that period I made the transition, some kind of transition, to being a civilian. JOHNSON: As soon as you left the military then, did you move here to Kansas City? BOLLING: My wife had a house. Houses were in short supply in 1946. JOHNSON: In other words, your connection with Kansas City started with Ft. Leavenworth, I suppose. BOLLING: That's right. JOHNSON: In other words, if you hadn't gone to Ft. Leavenworth you wouldn't have been a Kansas Citian. BOLLING: I think that's right. Although when I was running the first time or two, I kept pointing out that I liked Kansas City as I went through it on the way to Houston. JOHNSON: It isn't too easy to get elected around here, maybe, unless you have some background with the old families. BOLLING: I was a freak. I was a freak, an absolute freak. JOHNSON: So you were coming back in '46, you say, and you start with the University of Kansas City? BOLLING: Yes. JOHNSON: In their what, veterans affairs? BOLLING: Let's see, I was Director of Student Activities and Veterans Affairs, and for all practical purposes I had a job that was sort of a multiple extra Dean. I did all kinds of things. JOHNSON: You counselled veterans who enrolled there. Did you teach any courses at that time? BOLLING: No. My job, theoretically, was just to counsel veterans, but what I did was work with the president, work with the Dean, work with everybody. All kinds of different things; I had to deal with housing, and I had to deal with every kind of problem a veteran could have. JOHNSON: How did you get that job? BOLLING: I just went up and applied for it. It was the only job I could find because even though I had a bachelors and a masters, and an extra year on a Ph.D., I wasn't qualified, they said, to be in public education. I was not the least bit interested in going into business. I had sort of a snobbish attitude toward business, I guess, is the right way to put it. JOHNSON: Where were you living at the time? BOLLING: At 524 Pierce Street. JOHNSON: And that was the Fifth District, Congressional District? BOLLING: Yes, that was the Fifth District. I didn't get in there planning to become a Congressman. I got in there planning to have a job and make a transition. I had a fascinating job and a fascinating time. I stayed on that job ten or eleven months; then I helped found ADA [Americans for Democratic Action] and they decided they would like me as a Midwest organizer. JOHNSON: This is in Washington, D.C. where the ADA was headquartered? BOLLING: Yes. JOHNSON: And who got you into the ADA? BOLLING: I think there was a woman, Vi Magrath, who persuaded Rauh and the rest of them who knew me slightly. I think she persuaded them that I was the kind of person they needed because she watched me chair a meeting out here at the University of Kansas City. It was a very, very rough political meeting. She knew what side I was on, and it wasn't a very big meeting, but when that side won by one vote after about three hours' fight... JOHNSON: Was this university politics? BOLLING: No. JOHNSON: You're talking about city politics? BOLLING: No, it was separate-group politics, groups like ADA. There was an organization in Kansas City which I helped affiliate with a national organization, which I later found had been taken over by the Stalinists, and I was helping reaffilliate that organization with the non-Stalinist and anti-Stalinist ADA. She was enough impressed by what went on to persuade them, I guess; and there may have been some other things. JOHNSON: This was a local chapter of ADA that you had helped? BOLLING: What I did was I created the local chapter of ADA out of this other outfit. I and others, you know, did this; there's too much "I" in this, but you can't do much about it. JOHNSON: What did they call that group? BOLLING: The Independent Voters League of Kansas City. JOHNSON: It was a Stalinist-oriented group? BOLLING: No, it was entirely local but the national group it was affiliated with was. It was called the Independent Citizens Political Action Committee, I believe. JOHNSON: It disappeared a couple or three years later, I suppose. BOLLING: Yes, it did. We had the Wallace movement, and it was very heavily involved in the Wallace movement and doing its usual purpose. I got us out of it well before the Wallace movement. JOHNSON: Fortunately. BOLLING: Fortunately for everybody in it, including me. JOHNSON: So this starts your involvement in activist politics? BOLLING: Correct, in a national politics sense. JOHNSON: Can we use the term "liberal" to describe your position? BOLLING: Yes. I can give you a time when I got involved in local politics. I'm going to be a little rough on the time. One of the set of times I can be sure of, I actively worked as a ward leader for a man named Jerome Walsh who ran for Congress in a primary--which included Roger Slaughter who was the sitting Congressman--and Enos Axtell. I was wrong as hell to be on Walsh's side, but didn't know it; he was a liberal. Axtell was not the liberal; he had been chosen in essence by Truman's friends. I worked effectively in one of the wards in the Fifth District of Missouri Congressional District. JOHNSON: That was in '46 wasn't it? BOLLING: That's right. That was in '46 just as I got out, almost. It probably was illegal one time, wearing the uniform, but I didn't know it. But in any event, Walsh got creamed and that didn't turn me off. I just thought it had been handled wrong. Axtell finally got beat; he beat Roger Slaughter in the primary, and Axtell got beat by Albert L. Reeves, Jr. a Republican, in the general election. I got interested in politics at that time, but I didn't think of running for Congress, strangely enough. I was really more thinking about running for something else, like [City] Council. JOHNSON: But you had been canvassing for Walsh? BOLLING: Yes. JOHNSON: So you had that precinct-type of experience? BOLLING: That's right. Late--and we are overlapping in a kind of way--but late when I was still working at the University of Kansas City, the Kansas City Star conducted a vote fraud investigation, the vote frauds of 1946. The frauds were concentrated on the prosecutor, and the Presiding Judge. There was a lot of corruption, and it was obvious corruption; and I didn't like it very much, so I helped the Kansas City Star--which was Republican as hell in those days--I helped them recruit student veterans, veterans who needed an extra few bucks. Most of them were married. They were recruited to help with the investigation. I was the guy who went with the top Star reporters--there were a couple of them--to interview the people who probably were guilty of fraud. It wasn't an accident that I went. This all sounds like a bad novel; it wasn't an accident that I went in my old trench coat, and I sat there with them and they all got to know me, and hate my guts. They... JOHNSON: You went to interview with two... BOLLING: Two of us would go, one of those reporters and I. JOHNSON: Who did you interview? BOLLING: We interviewed all kinds of people, and I can't tell you all of them, but I think Henry McKissick was one of them. Everybody was about to go to the pokey on that. I believe I've got it right--I believe that's when they blew up the safe and took a lot of material out of it. In any event, I had this rather bad reputation with some of the Democratic faction leaders. They identified me, and kept thinking about me. JOHNSON: They thought you were a Roy Roberts man? BOLLING: That's the kind of thing; Jack Swift was one of those guys. Ira McCarty was the other. JOHNSON: Two reporters, investigative reporters? BOLLING: Yes. Really good ones. I was involved, but only as a flunky, really. Then we got out of the overlap when we get ADA, and the ADA organizer job was superseded by my becoming the national vice-chairman of the American Veterans Committee, which was an organization of veterans which was very liberal. JOHNSON: Was this in '47, now? BOLLING: Yes, we're heading into '47. JOHNSON: Did you know Frank Kelly? BOLLING: Yes. JOHNSON: He was with the American Veterans Committee. He worked out here for the Star in the '30s and went east and became a writer. BOLLING: Well, I had to know him because I was the head of the various AVC chapters here, until I left as Vice-Chairman of the national American Veterans Committee. JOHNSON: The American Veterans Committee, was that an alternative to the VFW and the American Legion, or just ow did it fit in with that? BOLLING: It was a liberal veterans organization; it wasn't an old-line veterans organization. It was liberal in the same sense that ADA was. It had essentially the same kind of attitude. JOHNSON: In other words, they didn't believe that the American Legion was standing for the right thing? BOLLING: That's correct. The American Legion was the kind of veterans organization that was self-serving and very conservative. They wanted the veterans to have special privileges, and while we weren't against the veterans being taken care of, particularly if they had been wounded, we were for a broad-gauge social program, more like the New Deal. JOHNSON: Of course, your meeting with Tom Evans was a fateful one and it has been written up in an interview that we have here, about how this came about, how you met at UKC [University of Kansas City]. BOLLING: He probably remembers it better than I do. JOHNSON: He was apparently trying to get the pharmacy college, you know, funded and integrated with the university. He had been working on that and somehow he got acquainted with you. BOLLING: He probably got acquainted with me through a little political organization which I can't remember. It's the same one that Harry Morris was involved in. JOHNSON: Well, were you aware that if Emmett Scanlon had not doublecrossed Tom Evans at a state Democratic convention, it probably would have been him, rather than you, who would have had Tom Evans' support in 1948? BOLLING: That is correct. I think Emmett actually was doublecrossing an organization that Tom was for. I never did try to get that straightened out because it wasn't in my interest to have a discussion with Evans at that stage about why we didn't like Scanlon, but he sure as hell was for me. JOHNSON: Evans says he was looking for a good candidate, and I quote him, "...a group of young lawyers and young merchants told me about a fellow by the name of Dick Bolling." Do you have any idea what this group of young lawyers and young merchants was? BOLLING: It was a group headed by Harry Morris, but I cannot remember its name. JOHNSON: This was an organized group then? BOLLING: Oh, sure, it was a group that Harry Morris, who was Enos Axtell's campaign manager, organized. It had a name and I just have forgotten the name. JOHNSON: You mentioned being acquainted with Roger Slaughter and Axtell in the '46 campaign, and perhaps it was fortunate for your interests that they were defeated in '46, and so by '48 you kind of had to start out from square one again, and that opened up the opportunity for you in '48. BOLLING: Emmett Scanlon filed, and I filed the last night. JOHNSON: Of the last day that you could file, is that right? BOLLING: Yes. Then I found that Evans was actually for me. He may have encouraged me before that. JOHNSON: Didn't Evans talk you into that... BOLLING: He may have; I don't remember. JOHNSON: And, of course, your experience in winning in '48 may have paralleled Truman's in that if he didn't have a Congress to eat up on, a Republican Congress, you might not have won that election in '48. BOLLING: Oh, he needed the Republican Congress to beat up on, and one of the more unique beating-up jobs, because he beat them up very carefully on domestic policy, when he knew perfectly well, and I know he knew, that he had gotten out of that Republican Congress a remarkable amount of very useful things, including the Marshall Plan. JOHNSON: Foreign policy. BOLLING: And domestic policy; that's why I wanted those copies of that plan, the plan of the Truman campaign in '48, because I wanted to show that to a bunch of students. ["A Strategy for the 1948 Campaign," Whistlestop, vol. 16, no. 3, 1988. The article includes a memorandum prepared under the direction of Clark Clifford in 1947. This memorandum provided a guide for Truman’s successful campaign strategy in 1948.] If you read that, and I don't know whether you've read that or not, but if you read that it sounds just like today. It's insanely the same. JOHNSON: Yes. BOLLING: That doesn't mean that it's going to turn out that way but... JOHNSON: Do the students nowadays think that somehow you can run campaigns without interest groups? Would you say that we couldn't have a government that didn't operate through pressure groups? BOLLING: Well, that's been true, as you know, for decades and decades and decades. But it is even probable that a lot of Congressmen don't understand that, right now. JOHNSON: Tom Evans says that he was quite "enthused" with you and your ideas. BOLLING: He was. JOHNSON: You were promoting liberal ideas, and Tom Evans, this businessman, we enthusiastic about that? BOLLING: Tom Evans, a close friend of Harry Truman, was on the Truman line. By the time I filed in 1948, as close as he was to Truman, he must have known something about the plans. He couldn't have missed it. I don't know when they claimed that that plan went into effect, that they had in Whistle Stop. But Evans from my point of view was one of the most remarkable people that ever lived. If anybody ever had a better friend than Tom Evans, I don't think Truman had a better friend; there may be somebody that claimed it, but I was around for a long, long time and never saw any signs of it. JOHNSON: Did you meet him for the first time down there at the university? BOLLING: I had to meet him at the university, or in that group that he was talking about, because I was a member of that group, and I was looking for help. When I talked to Tom Evans, whenever that was, he was extraordinarily encouraging, and he implied that he was going to try to help me at the right place. He never said; he never in his life would pretend to be able to commit Truman to anything. He never, in my judgment, took advantage of Mr. Truman. JOHNSON: Well, Emmett Scanlon had already been endorsed apparently by Truman, so Truman says he could not change that. BOLLING: That's correct; Emmett Scanlon was running for the Goats, and it was a funny combination. That was a very funny combination, supporting Emmett Scanlon. I didn't know enough to know all the mutations of that, but he had good strong support. JOHNSON: How about Jim Pendergast? Was he involved too? BOLLING: I think he was involved. JOHNSON: Was he backing Scanlon? BOLLING: I think so; I think he [Scanlon] came from [James] Aylward and was adopted by Pendergast. JOHNSON: Well, now Tom Evans must have been much more impressed with you than with Scanlon because he certainly would have been under some kind of pressure, wouldn't he, to support Scanlon? BOLLING: The thing I'd like to tell you about Evans and Truman and me--and obviously I know the difference between who was important and who wasn't--Truman of course is infinitely more important, but we were all very much alike in one respect. We had very strong opinions and we were just as independent as hogs on ice. And Evans, sure he'd have a commitment; he wouldn't support me except as an individual, as long as Truman was against me. He didn't do anything overt for me in 1948. He didn't do anything to hurt me. JOHNSON: He didn't organize your campaign? BOLLING: No, he didn't. JOHNSON: Or collect money for your campaign? BOLLING: No, he didn't, not the first one. But what happened was that when Truman, and I can give you a lengthy story on this, when Truman decided to be for me, I was in desperate shape in my first term. There wasn't really much chance that I was going to get renominated--the reason being that the hoods, the [Charles] Binaggio faction, who had supported me without any demands, had disappeared, because Binaggio had been murdered. And Jim Pendergast had come back in as a power. Well, Jim Pendergast wasn't going to be for me, because he had been against me in 1948, and there was only one way I was going to get Jim Pendergast, and that was for Truman to be for me. The guy that was working on Truman steadily and constantly was Evans. You know, we all forget the time and we all are given to making the story a little bit better--I know you're an expert on this from having done all of these--but I just think he pulled the two together. He supported me but he couldn't support me out loud in the first primary. He helped me, he cheered me on, he kept it quiet, and I honored that. I never said he was for me. JOHNSON: Well, Truman a few months after the election in 1948 wrote to Evans, "You have sent me the finest Congressman that we have in Congress. Dick Bolling is a wonderful fellow and in my opinion has the greatest opportunity of anybody in politics that I know, if you can do one thing, if you can keep him from getting Potomac fever." BOLLING: Well, now, let me tell you the story that I have. I think I can document it if I needed to, but I don't expect to have to, because I don't think Evans said anything that isn't true. What happened was that when I got to Washington, I couldn't get into the White House. By then I knew enough about the keepers of the gate to suspect that it wasn't all Truman, because I did know that Evans was trying to convince Truman that I was the right person to have, that I was a good person to have elected, and I would be a good Congressman. I couldn't get in; I couldn't get in to see him. And I've always felt that was Matt Connelly more than Truman, because in Connelly you had the gate. I was in a sweat; I couldn't figure how to deal with it, because you can't survive from Jackson County if you've got a sitting President who still doesn't like you, or put up with you. Truman was not very verbal in the campaign of '48 about me. I wasn't worth the trouble. He didn't say anything out loud after he committed to Scanlon. JOHNSON: Do you think the fact that Binaggio had supported you bothered Truman? BOLLING: Well, I would assume so, and I would assume the fact that the Pendergast people said I was a Communist bothered him. JOHNSON: Andrew Biemiller; you know Andrew Biemiller, I suppose. BOLLING: Of course. JOHNSON: In his oral history interview he said that you won the primary on a "fluke," and then he mentioned Binaggio had backed you and implied that your win, by a small margin, was largely attributable to Binaggio's support. BOLLING: I think it was largely attributable to Binaggio; there wasn't any question about that. JOHNSON: Wasn't that the northeast Italian wards? BOLLING: Oh, absolutely. JOHNSON: And that was part of the Fifth Congressional District? BOLLING: Absolutely. There wasn't any question but what I won with their votes. No question about that. I got suspicion on that from Bobby Kennedy, much later. Go on. JOHNSON: The only one I've interviewed in the Northeast ward was Sam Anch. So the Italian vote in that ward was really important to you in '48? BOLLING; Absolutely. JOHNSON: Was it important to you in every election after that? BOLLING: Yes, it was critical. It was critical in the one where all the Democrats tried to beat me in '64, and Mr. Truman, or Evans either, didn't think I could win in 1964, in that primary. But that's a long way down the track. There wasn't any question I was elected by thug votes, gangster votes. JOHNSON: I recall seeing the newspaper article on Binaggio's murder, the murder scene, with Truman's portrait hanging up on the wall. BOLLING: Well, let me tell you my story about getting to see Mr. Truman. JOHNSON: Back to the White House. BOLLING: Something funny happened. There was this Postmaster out here who came from the Shannon faction. His name was "Boss" Graham. He suddenly died. There were three of these people, including Binaggio--it was a triumvirate that ran that faction--and a guy, whose name I don't remember, who was often their spokesman. Oh, yes, it was Binaggio, McKissick, and then there was a third guy, Frank somebody I think it was. JOHNSON: How about Charlie Corollo? BOLLING: No, no, he wasn't Italian. Frank held a different office, and he later went to jail and ended up a distance from Missouri. He wasn't really a bad guy; he was just a weak guy, and they used him as a spokesman. He called me up in the middle of the night and he said, "Dick, this is so and so. Boss Graham just died and I want the job." I was sound asleep, and I hadn't been sleeping well; I wasn't very happy, and I didn't like that call. I knew I was really on the spot--I've got a quick mind usually--and I said, "But you know Frank, I'm not going to have a thing to do with that. That's in Mr. Truman's territory, and he's going to make the appointment." Well, he sure enough did and I didn't try to get to see him before he decided. He appointed a fellow named Alex Sachs who later became one of my better friends, and one of my enthusiastic supporters. He did it quick. I was desperate to get to see him, because I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere otherwise. I knew what I was going to do on this program; I knew what his program was, and I had run because of the program. The reason I ran against Scanlon was that he wasn't going to be for the program. He was going to be like all of Truman's buddies out here, who talked nice to him when he was with them, but who weren't for his program. They thought he was crazy. They all told me he was crazy later on, before he got elected. JOHNSON: And you ran on a ticket of being a purer Trumanite? BOLLING: Absolutely. After I got nominated, against their will, all those guys said, "You know, you just might win against that Republican, if you just don't mention Harry Truman." And I never even told this to Truman. I never even told him who was telling me this because I didn't want to upset him about them. There wasn't any reason for him to be upset by people who had been his friends forever. They all backed out on him, with virtually no exceptions. And, of course, Evans was a screaming exception. He wouldn't even come out for me because he was going to stay with Truman. I think he had had a big job, maybe the treasurer in his [Trumans] Vice-Presidential campaign. I knew if I could get to see him, I had a chance, because I had Evans pushing for me and I knew that. But I had to get to see him. I wasn't an organization politician at all, but I did know how they thought. And Mr. Truman had been an organization politician, although I think his relationship with Pendergast was much more subtle, and I think that's going to come out more and more--that he did some things for Tom Pendergast. That was the way I felt about him all along. So I figured that his attitude toward what is the common practice, that that might make it possible for him to feel that he ought to talk to me about that Postmaster's appointment, even if he had already made up his mind, and even if I already knew that. So I called up Connelly and said that by God I thought I had a right to talk to the President about that Postmaster's job. He said, "Well, where are you, what are you for?" And I said, "I haven't got anything to say to you about that; I want to talk to Mr. Truman about that appointment." He said, "I'll find out." And he wasn't very friendly a bit, and he called back and he said, "Mr. Truman will see you at such and such a time." I got to go. I knew Evans had been talking. I didn't call Evans; I didn't do anything to rock the boat. When I got there, I was almost stuttering; I was so wound up because I knew that this was my first and last shot, if I didn't get somewhere. I thought I had absolutely an argument that simply couldn't be knocked down if he'd just watch. All I had to do was get him to trust me enough to think it was worth watching. I got in there, and he said, "Young man, what do you want to talk to me about?" I said, "Mr. President, first of all I want to tell you, those hoods that supported me, the Binaggio people, forgot to get any strings on me. I don't have any strings. I don't know what anybody else has said about me, but they didn't have any strings on me. And the only reason I wanted to run for Congress was that I was for your program. What I'm saying is that it is going to be easy to find out that I'm telling the truth or not because I'm just going to be voting on it." We talked a very little bit more. I never liked to bother a President, so I got out as fast as I could, and just left it there. Well, you know, I thanked him for being nice enough to let me in, and then it began to progress. In a matter of months, he couldn't have said that I was the best Congressman by then, but within a year he was saying it so publicly that I had to go down and ask him to back off because he was being too nice to me. But in the process, Evans said that he would be my campaign manager if Harry Truman would okay it, and Harry Truman okayed it. That's when Evans became my campaign manager. JOHNSON: Was it at that first meeting that maybe as a parting comment, Harry Truman said, "Now, you'll go far if you don't get this Potomac fever." BOLLING: Harry Truman talked to me about Potomac fever a number of times, but not that early. You see, I can easily see how Evans would have it that early. JOHNSON: He keeps repeating this in his correspondence. "I'm reminding you of this, but remember, this is from the Boss," writes Evans. These are instructions from the Boss. BOLLING: There wasn't any question about Truman's worry that I would get to be that way. The only time that it ever really came out to me directly was just as funny as it could be. I never did get to figure out why he did it. There were times when, you know, I'd give him a suggestion and he'd follow it, but I don't remember ever having told anybody, including Evans, that I thought I was one of his advisors. But one time Mr. Truman got me aside very quickly, quickly so he'd get back into the crowd; he didn't want to talk to me about it. He said, "You know that you're not my advisor don't you?" and I said, "Hell, yes." I knew exactly what was going on in his mind; he thought I was getting that bad illness. And you know that's a terrible illness. There are people that got to go to the White House once and think they advise the President. Evans just speeded it up; that's all. JOHNSON: If the temperature started rising, Evans was there to dampen it? BOLLING: Well, Evans did a lot for me. He came the closest thing to behaving like a father that I ever had. We got to know each other so well that when I stayed at his house, and I'd complain about how tough it was, and how crooked people were, he'd say--he always said the same thing; he didn't do it often, but he made it final--"Dick, now I have been in politics longer than you have by far." He never did bother to tell me both at a lower level and at a higher level, but he had. "And I've also been in business. You know I started out with borrowed money and one drug store, and I ended up doing pretty good." By that time he was a multi-millionaire so I knew he did pretty good. And he said, "I just want to assure you that politics is a cleaner game than business." So he was always taking care of me, worrying about my getting Potomac fever. JOHNSON: Well, of course, a Congressman has to do things for their constituents, and I notice that one of the first things that Evans was concerned about was the change in the wage and hour law. He said that he certainly felt it was all right to raise the minimum to 75 cents, but then he said that time and a half for overtime, over 40 hours, would raise his payroll costs by $400,000 year, which he said was three times the current profit in that drug store business. And you apparently empathized with that. BOLLING: I don't remember that at all. I don't know that that was the first time or the second time. He talked to me twice on the same subject, and it did have to do with drug store business. One time I said, "No," and the other time I said, "Yes." JOHNSON: Do you recall if his employees did get the 75 cent minimum. BOLLING: I have no memory of that. You could be right, if there's a letter on it. But I remember one time I agreed with it, and one time I disagreed with it, on the same subject as I remember. JOHNSON: He was paying more than 75 cents an hour, but he said because of drug store hours that they would have to work more than 40 hours. He was what you would call a progressive type businessman, I suppose. BOLLING: Oh, hell, he was wildly progressive because he generally followed Truman. JOHNSON: And he had a good reputation with his employees? BOLLING: As far as I know. He had a great reputation with the labor people. I got to know some of the labor people through him. I can't be specific about that. Larry Bodinson, if he recovers, would know that. JOHNSON: Well, now in your primary in '48, did you have to go to the labor unions to get voting support and financial support? BOLLING: I didn't get any financial support. Let me tell you, I raised all the money that was raised in that campaign, and it was less than $3,000. JOHNSON: In the '48 primary? BOLLING: Yes sir. JOHNSON: How about the general election? BOLLING: I don't think I had a hell of a lot more. We'd have to look, but I don't think I raised enough money to put in your eye. It was luck. JOHNSON: You mentioned that Senator [James P.] Kem was reported to be making some nasty broadcasts. I don't think that Senator Kem was one of Truman's favorites. Do you remember Senator Kem, and what the problem was? BOLLING: The problem was that Kem, whom he called James "Petroleum" Kem, was a reactionary, and he was one of a number of Congressmen and Senators that made a mistake of personalizing their attacks on the Democrats by making attacks on Truman. They didn't know that even though I was a recent Missourian, that I had some of the characteristics of Missourians. I don't get into vendettas often, but as far as I was concerned, anybody that unfairly attacked Truman was in for trouble. I had a lot of patience. Beyond that, all I can say is that Kem was like a couple of Congressmen; he was a bastard when it came to what he said about Harry Truman and I didn't take kindly to it. I waited to do the best thing I could, which was to beat him. JOHNSON: You started making radio broadcasts. I believe Tom Evans owned KCMO radio at this time, didn't he? BOLLING: That's right. JOHNSON: The Crown Drug stores? BOLLING: That's right. I think he had bought KCMO, the whole of it. He had half of it when I first knew him, and I think he bought it about then. I think he was unwilling--and this is why I thought he was so remarkable--he was unwilling to proceed in the effort to get the TV license, which is not the right way to say it, until his friend was out of the White House. As far as I know, he didn't seriously attempt to get that until the Eisenhower administration, and when he seriously attempted to get it he got it awful fast. He didn't ask me to do a thing on that, and it may have been for one of two reasons: one is that he probably thought I didn't think it was proper, and he could have accepted that. But it may have been that he didn't think I could do a damn thing. JOHNSON: Was he the one that encouraged you to start a weekly radio broadcast? BOLLING: Well, sure he encouraged me. JOHNSON: So you decided to do that. Well, when did these radio broadcasts start; do you have any idea just when? BOLLING: I don't know, just as early as I could. JOHNSON: In that first term. BOLLING: Yes. JOHNSON: Probably in early '49. BOLLING: Yes, I'd think. JOHNSON: And they apparently had a positive effect. You stayed with that... BOLLING: Oh, as long as I could get free time, I did radio and TV almost to the very end. JOHNSON: When did you first start using television? BOLLING: I don't have any idea. JOHNSON: It was after KCMO had gotten a TV license? BOLLING: It had to be that. I don't think I could have gotten in when the [Kansas City] Star had the only television station. I don't think I would have gotten any favorable treatment from them. JOHNSON: On your report to the people of Kansas City, January 1950, among other things, you said you'd voted for adequate appropriations for the HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Then you emphasized that there were other things like getting rid of poverty to help stem the Communist appeal, and so on, the liberal approach. At one point, Truman said the most un-American thing in America was the House Un-American Activities Committee. Of course, by this time, January 1950, it is about the same time that Joseph McCarthy comes out with the first charges about communism in Government. So the House Un-American Activities Committee still had a good reputation generally, apparently in January 1950? What about its reputation? BOLLING: Well, that's probably one of the many mistakes I made. Later on, I don't know what year, but it scared me very badly, Mr. Truman vetoed one of those bills that was supposed to take care of the Communists by edict, the McCarran-Walter bill. And I voted for that bill all the way down the track until we got the veto. Hardly anybody voted to sustain the veto, and I was one of the people that did. Harry Truman never spoke to me about it then and only mentioned it to me years later, when I brought it up, when he talked with me about it years later. I just was wrong for a while. Maybe I was scared; I think I probably was. I was scared and wrong on that subject for a while. JOHNSON: Did you think to win elections here, you did have to show a strong anti-Communist orientation? BOLLING: Well, I convinced myself that those bills were right. I got one of the worst shocks that I ever got in my life, when I read the President's veto of the McCarran-Walter Act. I read it in the Committee on Ways and Means room, because that was where the House was meeting--and we can date it from that. I listened to that debate and I read it one more time before we got to the vote, and I decided that it just wasn't worth staying in Congress if I was going to be as wrong as that statement made it. I knew that it was an honest statement because he didn't lie; Mr. Truman was less of a dissembler than most Presidents. So, I reversed myself and I caught a lot of flak. I had voted for the bill, and I had learned better. JOHNSON: You were voting to uphold the veto? BOLLING: I voted to sustain the veto, and I think there were 40 of us in Congress that did. I really got a lot of flak. I can't remember what year it was but I do remember that I did a funny thing. I think it must have been 1950. I had a date up in Chicago, so I came out by train to Chicago,and then I came down here. I didn't sleep; I was worrying about this thing, because I thought it was the end of my career, I remember. I thought that was the end of that, that I just wasn't going to be able to stand it because I had twisted. I had gone one way and said I was right then, and then I'd turn completely around and they were going to be ale to say that I did it because Truman vetoed it and put the arm on me. Truman didn't talk to me about it. Nobody from the White house talked to me about it. There wasn't any effort to get that vote sustained because they knew they couldn't sustain it. I just figured, you know, I'd done it, that I'd thrown that career away in a hurry. JOHNSON: But portions of that law were declared unconstitutional later on weren't they? BOLLING: Well, that's okay. I felt fine after I did it. What I did was that I'd reversed myself; I took all the heat I got from the reversal and I ran them off the stump with it. That's when I really got ugly on the stump. We had debates and I murdered them. JOHNSON: But were they trying to brand you as soft on Communism when you voted to sustain the veto? BOLLING: That's right. It was pretty funny because I was a member of two specifically anti-Communist organizations, and very active in them, and really totally anti-Stalinist, really fundamentally, so it was all sort of ridiculous. JOHNSON: Well, history repeats itself in some ways, and I guess with this... BOLLING: Well, of course, and we're back again. But that has a lot to do with my career because I made a decision that I thought was going to beat me. Then, I implemented the decision in the only way I could, which was being aggressive. I got Thomas Hart Benton, who was the only well-known person around here, who supported me, to interview me for fifteen minutes on radio that I paid for. I got him to ask me all the embarrassing questions; you know, I just came out clear and bloody with it all. I did all this, and I was wrong; I was wrong every time and then I saw this message and it changed my mind, and I voted the other way. The people thought it was wonderful. The conservatives went after me on ADA and ADC, and being liberal. I'd say, "Well, you know you people are just as right as you can be. I'm very, very sorry, but it's true. I was with Franklin Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt on all those programs, on Social Security," and I turned it into the right thing. You don't have to worry about what the hell they call you. [Michael] Dukakis ought to have sense enough to understand it. You talk about the issues, and you "peel" them on it. JOHNSON: Well, I guess that nowadays those who are so anti-liberal certainly aren't anti-Social Security, and they're not anti-FDC or SLDIC, not realizing these are liberal programs. BOLLING: Well, you know, those same people that are howling so much about the Government, they just gobble up Government funds to take care of the banks, and the savings and loans. I really believe that you can campaign against it effectively. I'm not running anymore but I wouldn't be the least bit frightened of a campaign this year. I think I'd strip their gears. JOHNSON: Peel off those layers of obfuscation. How about these groups that supported you, the interest groups that supported you? Where did you get most of your support for your campaigns? You went through a lot of campaigns. What groups would you say were the most helpful? BOLLING: I had one group that really was key to everything, and it was composed of two people. One of them was named Evans and the other one was named Truman; they were my basic interest group. I was completely for the labor unions, except when they got a little corrupt. I was completely pro-labor, and I was pro-labor philosophically. JOHNSON: Did most of the local unions give you their endorsement? BOLLING: No, not to begin with. I had a terrible time getting any support at all from anybody in the beginning, but by the time I had gotten through my first term, I was working the other way down. Biemiller and I were friends before I got to Congress. He was in Congress with me the first two years I was there; then, he was out but working for the AF of L or ADA or something like that. We maintained our friendship. I developed really good working relationships in those days, early days, with the steel workers, the auto workers, up there. I started to develop those relationships in ADA and ADC, because they were all related to us. I had a good, pretty good, strong national support from the labor unions. The bums out here were bums. Some of them were crooks and some of them were just conservatives. There were two or three really good ones, and I got them quickly. JOHNSON: Do you know who they were? BOLLING: They were Harold Edwards with the steel workers, and there was one guy I've forgotten, from the auto workers. Both of them went to Washington too soon for me, but by that time I had real strength in their rank and file. The key thing that I did was I started a home office, and nobody had home offices in those days. JOHNSON: You were the first Congressman from the Fifth District to set up a home office? BOLLING: Absolutely; a real home office, you know, working day in and day out. As far as I know, I was the first Congressman in the region to do that; as far as I know I was the third Congressman in the United States to do that. You did not have allowances for that. You got a room, but you did not have allowances for any of that. The two guys that had it; they were a funny pair. One was Chet Hollifield, who was a little bit more conservative than I, but a liberal. The other one was Vito Marcantonio, who was not a Communist, but he was a guy who went along with Communist line. He was an expedient fellow. They were the only two that as far as I know, had these home offices and got no funds for them. JOHNSON: The one who manned your office here, what was his name? BOLLING: Larry Bodinson. He wasn't there the first two years, but he and Evans were very close. JOHNSON: Well, when did Bodinson enter into your campaign? BOLLING: My campaign? Well, he was my friend from '46 on. He took my place when I left the local AVC; he took over those chairmanships. JOHNSON: And he was a friend of Tom Evans. BOLLING: He was a friend of Tom Evans through me. JOHNSON: Oh, through you, okay. BOLLING: But you see, he and Evans worked together on a consistent, regular basis. Evans was not the kind of guy that you had to call up and massage. Once he gave you a commitment, that was the end of that. And by the time I got to be a useful Congressman and really was doing something, which was at least the second or third year, he knew I was useful and he wasn't going to bug me, unless he felt it was important. Evans was a jewel. He was what I had that kept me from having to go crazy to raise money; he raised the money. JOHNSON: After the '48 campaign. BOLLING: Yes, I didn't get any money in the '48 campaign. JOHNSON: He was the one who raised the money for all of your subsequent campaigns? BOLLING: Until he died. As far as I was concerned, he raised all of the money. In '64 I had to do some. It wasn't fair to ask him to jump into that kind of thing and then raise all of that money. We had to raise a bunch, and fortunately for me, we could do it. JOHNSON: Would local businessmen often donate to both parties? BOLLING: Oh, he had businessmen; he had a big "scratch my back" list. JOHNSON: You were getting money from mainly small businesses? BOLLING: No, no, he'd get money from all kinds of businesses for me, as I got more powerful up there, which came fairly quickly. You see, by '56-'57, it was generally known that because I was so close to Rayburn that I ran the Rules Committee, even though I was the seventh man on an eight-man side. That might be a little bit early, but you see I began to have credibility with the interest group lobbyists up there. They probably began to tell them down here, you know, that it doesn't hurt to give Bolling some since you can't beat him anyway. Evans was always working on them and, for example, he got me Harry Darby. Harry Darby was my friend from the beginning and contributed money silently. Those were still the days where you could legally get silent contributions. JOHNSON: But he was mainly a Republican benefactor wasn't he? BOLLING: Well, he was a Republican Senator, and a Republican National Committeeman from Kansas. JOHNSON: And he was the one who donated a lot of money to Eisenhower. BOLLING: Oh sure, but he also was a friend of Mr. Truman's; they were close friends. JOHNSON: He was playing both sides of the street? BOLLING: Why, sure, and he and Evans were friends and I considered Evans my personal friend. He forced it on me that Darby was my Republican friend. I liked Darby; he was a fine old man. I called him not too long before he died. He was a great guy. He made contributions to me. One time after Evans was dead I called Darby up and said, "Harry, I just called up to tell you hello and to say that I've got to send the check back. You can't come in with a check; I have to report it." "Oh," he said, "that's all right, just go right ahead." So here I've got an ex-Republican Senator supporting me substantially. But Evans raised all the money; I was spared all of that. JOHNSON: I noticed that Elmer Pearson offered to contribute to your campaign in 1950, and Evans said that he was an "out and out Republican," but he was also a friend of Evans. BOLLING: That's right. What Evans did was what a lot of rich men do; they scratch each other's backs, and, depending on how rich they are, they do it small or large. I was on the short end of a Pearson contribution, but I wouldn't have gotten it if it hadn't been for Evans. You see, Evans would contribute, not politically to him; he probably would contribute to some charity, or something like that. JOHNSON: Quid pro quo? BOLLING: Yes, that's right. JOHNSON: Were there groups that were consistently criticizing and opposing you? BOLLING: Oh, sure. JOHNSON: Which ones were those? BOLLING: Well, it's hard for me. Bodinson got sick between the last time I was here and this time. We were about to get the guys that spent some time with me in the early days--there are only about three or four of them--Bodinson and I were going to tape them, so I'd remember that. I don't remember it. You see, I didn't really pay a hell of a lot of attention to money when Evans was here. JOHNSON: How about the Chamber of Commerce? BOLLING: The Chamber of Commerce of the United States in Washington would have me at major programs where people from all over the country came in, and the Chamber of Commerce here [in Kansas City] wouldn't. They didn't like me, and I didn't like them. JOHNSON: How about the National Association of Manufacturers? BOLLING: Well, the guy that's the present chairman is a friend of mine, but that's because of the fact that I worked with all of them when we were getting to the point where we were cramming something down their throat, or modifying some- thing so they wouldn't be so bitter about it. When I go to the level of making the final deals, they all worked with me, and found me reasonable, just so long as I got enough. JOHNSON: Well, they couldn't antagonize you too much, could they, because you would have something to do about getting Federal projects and contacts involving industry? BOLLING: Well, that's one of the things that Evans and I worked out; that's exactly the key. I got the business community off my back at Evans' direction, in fact, and with my own ingenuity added, by seeing to it that projects that I believed in, like the dam at Tuttle Creek got done, or like the [Federal] office building down here that was once one of the bigger office buildings in the United States. We had a substantial number of employees, and I never have had any compunction about the fact that that ought to stay in Kansas City. Nobody has ever convinced me an inch objectively, that there was any better reason for it to go to Denver, and that's usually where they want it to go. I beat Nixon on that, just plain flat; I beat Dick Nixon and all of the bureaucracy. I'm not mad at bureaucrats; I'm for them, but they weren't going to take that stuff away. JOHNSON: The other thing is that when businessmen were going to Washington to deal with the government, Evans oftentimes would write you and give you their names and say, "Now, you should help them make their contacts." Did he just ask you to make the contacts for them, and then let them take it from there? BOLLING: We make the contacts. JOHNSON: Did you go out of your way to accommodate businessmen who wished to make... BOLLING: No, no. This lady [Mrs. Bolling] worked in my office for a while, some years ago, long before we even thought about going out with each other. Really she worked for my then-wife. She used to go to a lot of the parties that those businessmen gave, representing me. That's the way we saw to it that they felt like somebody from the Bolling office was there and we arranged their appointments.
JOHNSON: [To Mrs. Bolling] You were the partygoer. What was your name then?
MRS. BOLLING: Herndon.
BOLLING: Nona Bolling is her name now. JOHNSON: Nona Goddard Bolling. Okay, so you did part of his work for him. BOLLING: That's right, and a very important part because, you see, I didn't go to anything social. You think we'd go to three or four social things in a year? MRS. BOLLING: Maybe. JOHNSON: How about these receptions that the White House would put on? BOLLING: I didn't go. I went to Truman's when Truman asked me, but I didn't go to the others. MRS. BOLLING: You went to a few. BOLLING: We went to a damn few. JOHNSON: But you did go to White House receptions when the Trumans were in. BOLLING: Oh, yes, we'd go to anything the Trumans invited us to. And we went to some things later on. You see, my late wife worked for the Kennedy administration. JOHNSON: What was her name? BOLLING: Her name was Jim, James Grant Aiken Bolling. She was a politician and she worked for the Kennedy administration representing HEW. She was the legislative director down there. She worked with Wilbur Cohen on that. We'd go rarely, but she had gone to lots of them before we married. Isn't that fair? See, Nona was a great fiend of Jim's. Jim died of a heart attack. JOHNSON: When it came to doing favors, I suppose you had to draw a line somewhere. Did you ever have a problem drawing the line on doing favors for constituents, and especially for interest groups? BOLLING: The only time that I ever did anything that upset me at all was when Evans and Truman insisted that I try to placate Jim Pendergast in the 1964 election. I got two guys, one of whom I thought was well-qualified, and the other whom I thought was almost qualified, to be considered for jobs and one of them got it. Those are the closest I ever came to accommodating anybody really, to my knowledge, because I decided early, and I checked it out, that I was going to follow my own convictions. I stayed out of all of the other stuff, happily. The only patronage I had was the Postmaster, and I guess I had a couple little Postmasters, but I don't even remember what happened with them. I just stayed out of the business. I also stayed out of the heavy stuff, you know, in pleasing them. As a matter of fact, the reason I had such a bitter primary, really, was that one of the guys that had been in that small group of businessmen and lawyers that Evans had been involved with where he found me, turned out to be a big politician himself and never quite made it to Governor. But Bill Morris damned near did. He got mad at me because I didn't give him enough house, and he got exactly the same treatment as everybody else did, which wasn't much. JOHNSON: Bill Morris. You hadn't given him enough... BOLLING: Treatment. You know I hadn't made special efforts for him. The truth of the matter is that we arranged all kinds of things for people, but I had almost nothing to do with it. That was almost all [the doing of] Evans and Bodinson. JOHNSON: Well, back in September '49, Truman in a letter to Evans says that you asked him if it would be all right for Evans to organize your campaign for reelection in 1950. Then Truman said, "I told him he couldn't get a better man." And then Truman asked Evans to, "Do what Dick suggests. I think that young man has a political career before him if he is lucky." Do you remember going to the Oval Office and asking Truman how about having Tom Evans run your campaign in '50? BOLLING: Well, absolutely. As soon as I thought he'd come around far enough--and that would have been some months after our first meeting--as soon as I thought he'd come around far enough, I went down because I had to have Evans quick. You see, I couldn't wait until the end of the year. I was in real trouble and what was going to happen was that the people that were going to be against me in the primaries were going to announce their candidate before I got Truman in, and I was going to make it embarrassing for the President because the people that would announce it would be Jim Pendergast and his bunch. What happened is that whatever month it was, and there's a story of this in the paper somewhere, a fellow that was still on the air the last time I looked, Frank... JOHNSON: Frank Bergholzer, in December of '49? BOLLING: Yes. He did the story. We've got to go. JOHNSON: Okay, we're at the point where we get into the '50 campaign, but Jim Pendergast is not on your side yet. BOLLING: You know the story, and we'll pick up with that, because I really do have to go.
Second Oral History Interview with Richard Bolling, Independence, Missouri,
April 20, 1989. JOHNSON: I'm going to try to pick up where we left off last time. BOLLING: Fine. JOHNSON: We were talking about Jim Pendergast and the 1950 campaign, and about a broadcast by Frank Bourgholtzer at the end of December, 1949. Bourgholtzer explained the friendship between Truman and Evans and then mentioned a meeting in the Muehlebach's penthouse dining room in which you were one of nine guests, all of them candidates for the Democratic primary. Bourgholtzer said, "And Jim Pendergast is there representing 25,000 votes in his pocket and straddling the fence." Then Bourgholtzer went on to say that eight of the nine left the penthouse as "ex-candidates" because you were the President's choice. And he said that "Truman would not formally enter this red-hot Kansas City fight." Now this was the 1950 campaign and that would be apparently your first campaign when Truman takes a hand. BOLLING: That information is not all from me, because the implication there is that we all met at the same time. In fact, as I remember the story, and of course, this one could be right, but I think I'd remember. As I remember the story, Mr. Pendergast, without me, came in with eight candidates, eight members of his organization who would make good candidates, and most of whom were known to Mr. Truman. Mr. Pendergast had missed the significance of Mr. Evans, Tom Evans, becoming my campaign manager. We announced that before this event. He went to Mr. Truman with this group; I was not along, and said in effect that "Mr. President, you know all of these fine gentlemen, and the one you select will be the one that will be the next Congressman" that is, taking my seat. And Mr. Truman, as I understood it, just in effect threw them all out and said that he wanted Bolling. Bolling was the one he wanted. I think that's right. He might have gotten some of that information from Evans; it might be correct. I wouldn't say for sure that I was correct, but my memory is that it was that way. JOHNSON: Of course, Truman had already become acquainted with you in your first two years there in the House, and… BOLLING: Well, see, the thing that made that fit was that Evans had been my supporter in 1948, quietly. He never did anything that the boss didn't approve of, and the President was not for me in 1948. I had to get virtually a written permission from Mr. Truman for Mr. Evans to become my campaign manager. We already had that before we got to the point where Pendergast came in, and quite naturally, he wanted to have a candidate against me because I'd defeated his candidate in 1948. So the story holds up. But it's just a slightly different point of view on it. We'll never find the Bourgholtzer thing, although I've seen Bourgholtzer on TV once, or heard him once, in the last two or three years. He's out on the West Coast. JOHNSON: Well, was Jim Pendergast still a fairly strong force? BOLLING: Yes, that's right. What he had left was a significant faction, which while it had been defeated largely with its major candidates, in 1948 had won the county committee and he, in effect, was coming into control of the Democratic Party as a whole, at least theoretically. The man who had defeated him was Charlie Binaggio and his faction, which included Henry McKissick and at least one other man named Frank something who had held office. What happened there--I'm bad on the date, I don't remember when it happened--the rivalry with Binaggio disappeared when Binaggio was killed in a gangland killing, which got a lot of notoriety. I think the bodies of Binaggio and his body guard appeared underneath a picture of Mr. Truman down in the Binaggio political headquarters. I think it appeared on the front of Life and a great deal was made of it. When Binaggio disappeared, Pendergast came back into full strength, and of course, he had the support of his old friend, Mr. Truman. Mr. Truman' s friendship with Jim Pendergast seemed to me to be one that came out of World War I, and probably was one of the reasons that Harry Truman got support from the Pendergast faction. JOHNSON: I noticed even earlier than December of '49, in October of '49, that Truman wrote you and said, "I have appreciated most highly your wholehearted support of the program and I hope you have no difficulty next year in coming back." So, he had apparently joined your bandwagon, so to speak, fairly early, a year before the election. BOLLING: Right, and I was in so much trouble in terms of reelection, that we announced Evans [as campaign manager] early in '49, which was a little early, before I filed. We started the campaign early, particularly to get out the fact that Mr. Truman was now for me, because I was not given much chance of surviving that election, unless Mr. Truman saved me. And the truth of the matter is that I could not have survived that 1950 election if it hadn't been for the President. He just plain flat saved me. |