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[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Appendices | List of Subjects Discussed]
NOTICE Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the Hechler oral history interview. In August, 2001, Mr. Hechler added several notes and corrections to this oral history. These changes are noted in square brackets throughout the transcript. In September, 2005, Mr. Hechler requested we add an appendix B to this oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened December, 1986
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Appendices | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
November 29, 1985 Niel M. Johnson JOHNSON: You are presently Secretary of State in West Virginia, isn't that correct? HECHLER: That's right, since January 14, 1985. JOHNSON: We're going to back up from that date. I'll back up and ask you for some genealogical information. Would you give us your full name, the place you were born, the date you were born and the names of your parents? HECHLER: I am Ken Hechler, born September 20, 1914 at Roslyn, Long Island, New York -- that's about fourteen miles from Oyster Bay, where Teddy Roosevelt was born and brought up. My parents are both Missourians. My father was born at Dalton, in Chariton County, not too far from Columbia, where he attended the University of Missouri. My mother was born in Ballwin, near Kirkwood, outside of the city of St. Louis. They both moved to Roslyn, Long Island in the early 1900s to supervise a 600-acre estate where my father was superintendent for Clarence H. Mackay, the father-in-law of Irving Berlin. JOHNSON: What were the names of your parents? HECHLER: Charles H. and Catherine Hauhart Hechler. They were both very interested in education. My mother attended a small college in Warrenton, Missouri, now out of business -- Central Wesleyan College. My father graduated from the University of Missouri after which he taught animal husbandry at the University of Missouri. That is one reason he was called to Long Island by Clarence H. Mackay, because Mr. Mackay was interested in getting someone to supervise, to superintend, his 600-acre estate where they had a number of head of guernsey cattle. He came there in 1907, and I was born in 1914, the third and youngest son. I must say that my father and mother having been born in Missouri, however, didn't get me my job with Harry Truman; that was just coincidental. JOHNSON: I think there is mention in Who's Who that you had a grandfather who enlisted in the Union Army in West Virginia and fought in the battle of Antietam. HECHLER: Yes, my grandfather George Hechler was born in Germany, not too far from Heidelberg, a little town of Schweigern, and he came over to this country in 1854. He settled in Marietta, Ohio, and enlisted in the 36th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment of the Union Army in Parkersburg, West Virginia, which was then part of Virginia. He fought in a number of engagements and was wounded at Antietam. My great uncle, John Hechler, fought in the same regiment and was captured at Chickamauga and died in Andersonville prison in Georgia. After the Civil War my grandfather, George Hechler, moved west to Missouri and settled in Dalton in Chariton County where he operated a large farm. And that's where my father was born in 1882. JOHNSON: So he was a Civil War veteran, who maybe got homestead rights, or probably got cheap land at least. I guess it wasn't open for homesteading in that part of Missouri at that time. HECHLER: No, that wasn't a homestead. It was an opportunity to purchase land, good farming land, good bottom land, and he was a very successful farmer. Of course, he carried on also his interest in education. He was head of the county board of education, as my father was in Long Island -- president of the board of education. Both my father and my mother drilled me in the necessity for a good education. JOHNSON: Your mother was German in background as well? HECHLER: Yes, her ancestors were German, although she and my father were both born in this country, in Missouri. JOHNSON: I think you've already indicated that this influence passed down from previous generations, at least in terms of emphasis on education. HECHLER: Very much so. Not in terms of politics, however. My mother and father were both staunch Republicans. My father was a Republican officeholder, a township councilman in one of the large townships on Long Island. My mother was a Republican committeewoman and also was vice president of the Nassau County Women's Republican Federation on Long Island. JOHNSON: Could you tell us something about the period of your growing up, of your childhood years, your years in school? Where did you attend school as a child? HECHLER: I was a graduate of Roslyn High School, the local high school, where I finished second in a class of 30. In the salutatory address I based my speech on journalism as a career. I was very interested in becoming a journalist at that stage of life. I then went on to Swarthmore College, right outside of Philadelphia. I had very great difficulty in measuring up to the high academic standards of Swarthmore. It wasn't until about my junior or senior year that I began to see the light and learn how to study and learn how to write. JOHNSON: In other words, a small town high school was not necessarily the best preparation for Swarthmore? HECHLER: Well, it was good preparation, but Swarthmore had an extremely high and exacting standard. It was a college where I learned a great deal about exhibiting the necessary courage to take risks and also sympathy for minorities and exploited people, which was cultivated a great deal more when I was working with President Truman. JOHNSON: Did you get experience in journalism in your high school courses? HECHLER: Yes, I did, a good deal. In high school I was the correspondent for the local newspaper, particularly covering sports. At Swarthmore College I was on the student newspaper, as well as being the head of the press board with a staff of about 20 students who assisted in covering all college news for the Philadelphia and New York papers, and for other newspapers around the country. JOHNSON: Sort of a public relations effort I suppose then too. HECHLER: Public relations as well as straight news. Also it earned me about $2,000 in my senior year, because the system that was operating at the college enabled the chairman of the press board, who had worked his way up for three years, to collect all the checks that came in from the newspapers. I had a number of other rackets at college that I supervised, such as a cleaning and pressing business, and I had the concession for The New York Times which sold close to 200 subscriptions in a college of 500. JOHNSON: Where is Swarthmore located? HECHLER: 11.2 miles from Philadelphia. JOHNSON: Denominational, isn't it? HECHLER: It primarily has the influence of the Society of Friends, although I am not a member of the Society of Friends myself. It had that predominating influence. JOHNSON: What made you decide to go to Swarthmore? HECHLER: I wanted to get reasonably far away from home, at the same time not too far away. I really didn't know enough about the advantages of Swarthmore. I since have found out that it had a tremendous influence on my career in terms of making me learn how to study and having the inspiration also to follow ideals that I've always treasured. JOHNSON: Maybe it was a stroke of fate as much as choice. Were there people in your hometown, a counselor in your high school, for instance, who had anything to do with you choosing a Quaker college? HECHLER: No, I'd have to admit, it was pretty much a choice that came by chance. But I was very fortunate to go there, because where else can you find a college where the professors take you out for dinner, and spend an evening with you, helping you and inspiring you? The professors at Swarthmore were not as much devoted to research as they were to teaching and helping the students. It was a tremendous inspiration to study there where the standards were so exacting and the ideals were so high, and the atmosphere was so conducive to learning and intellectual development. JOHNSON: Were there any particular professors that stand out as having an exceptional influence? HECHLER: Robert C. Brooks, in political science, was the person who believed in cultivating diamonds in the rough and he felt that I was a diamond in the rough, so he spent a good deal of time polishing. I was pretty much of a C or C- student until I began enrolling in his classes. He would take me out to his home, or his farm, and would give me the kind of advice and inspiration which I found was necessary for intellectual development. He gave me a lot of encouragement. JOHNSON: What years were you there? HECHLER: 1931 to 1935. I graduated in 1935. Although I started out as a C student, I finally ended up with the highest average in political science, and this was largely because of Brooks' influence. I started as a major in economics, and when I changed to political science that incurred a lot of opposition from my parents who couldn't understand. They said that political science was just a "talkie" subject, and they felt that economics had more value for a person's business career. JOHNSON: Well, especially I suppose in the depths of the Depression because you started at the end of Hoover's administration, and then the first two or three years of Roosevelt's. HECHLER: That's right. They were very shocked that I became a strong supporter of the New Deal when Roosevelt took office in 1933. I was one of the leaders on the campus to mobilize support for the Democratic Party, which kind of shocked my Republican mother and father. JOHNSON: They were living where at the time? HECHLER: On Long Island. JOHNSON: They apparently were not affected as much as perhaps some other people were by the crash and the Depression that followed in that they did help pay your expenses, no doubt. HECHLER: Well, I did pretty well work my way through college, with the kinds of commissions I could get by selling the Times, by being on the press board, and by my cleaning and pressing business, as well as waiting on tables. The Depression did affect them quite seriously because Clarence Mackay, the owner of the estate, lost very heavily in the stock market crash. Along about 1932 he moved into what had been our house, and we moved into what had been the tennis professional's house. Everybody sort of engaged in a game of musical chairs. My father's salary was cut about 2/3 at that time. He was pretty seriously hurt by the Depression, although he had many other outside activities, including the vice-presidency of the Roslyn National Bank and Trust Company, and he was also very active in real estate. JOHNSON: He was not unemployed in the ordinary sense? HECHLER: No. He had also had the advantage of starting a new incorporated village in which he served as the trustee and treasurer. The incorporated village was set up largely to save taxes for Clarence H. Mackay. Nevertheless, he did suffer a great deal in terms of principal employment, but he had a number of other activities which helped tide us over during the Depression years. JOHNSON: Did we get the date or the year when your parents moved to Long Island? HECHLER: My father moved there in 1907, and my mother moved shortly thereafter. JOHNSON: At Swarthmore, I guess the perception would be that that was a pacifist college. HECHLER: That's right. The influence of pacifism was very strong at Swarthmore, and it helped me to develop that philosophy. JOHNSON: Of course, there was not only a Depression but the way world affairs were developing toward war. Was there a high political consciousness on campus, not only about the economy, but about world affairs as well? HECHLER: Yes, we had very many speakers that came in from the outside. Albert Einstein visited the campus. There was a number of leading isolationist senators like Gerald Nye of North Dakota, who as you know was on the kick of attributing the entrance of America into World War I to munitions makers. T here was a very strong pacifist feeling on the campus. There was also a very strong anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi feeling. One of our students, for example, Joseph Seligman of Louisville, enlisted in the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War. A lot of the students recognized what was going on during the Spanish civil war as a kind of a testing ground for fascism and nazism versus freedom. Even though there was pacifism on the campus, the feeling against the rise of Hitler and Mussolini was even stronger in those early 1930s, when they came to power. JOHNSON: Could you characterize the student opinion as isolationist, or at least as a modified version of isolationism? HECHLER: I think so. At that time it certainly would tend toward a combination of pacifism and isolationism, and yet with a realization of the threat of Hitler and Mussolini. JOHNSON: Did you cover these events? Did you write them up for the college newspaper? HECHLER: Yes. Not only for the college newspaper, but for the Philadelphia and New York papers. As speakers came to the campus, that was my primary responsibility. JOHNSON: Did you interview these people as well as take notes on their speeches? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: So you interviewed Einstein, for instance? HECHLER: Very briefly, very briefly. JOHNSON: Do you have scrapbooks of those clippings? HECHLER: I have some of them, yes. JOHNSON: That would be interesting to have. By your academic record, you're saying that you started out slow but you were on a roll by the time you were in your junior year? HECHLER: That's right. Robert C. Brooks helped me, and really it was mainly the inspiration that gave me the self-confidence. I had a terrible inferiority complex when I went to Swarthmore, and he helped to shake me out of that, and gave me the confidence to go ahead and do what I thought could be accomplished. JOHNSON: Did he publish, or is he known? HECHLER: Yes, he's written several books on the government and politics of Switzerland as well as one on democracy and dictatorship, entitled Deliver us from Dictators. JOHNSON: So then in 1935 you graduated from Swarthmore? HECHLER: Yes. I immediately went on to Columbia University that summer for graduate work. My ambition at that time switched from journalism to teaching. I wanted to be a teacher because I had seen what great teachers could do at Swarthmore, and I wanted to emulate that type of teacher. The atmosphere at Columbia University was radically different from Swarthmore. Going from a campus with 500 students to a campus where the faculty was four times as big as the student body at Swarthmore was quite a wrench. JOHNSON: What influenced you to choose Columbia? HECHLER: I think it was largely the outstanding reputation of the faculty at Columbia University, in both American history and political science. There was also proximity to my home on Long Island. I felt that I could get both the advantage of the professors and the low expense of living close to home by going to Columbia. JOHNSON: You lived on campus in both places? HECHLER: Some of the time I commuted from Long Island, but after I got a scholarship and fellowship at Columbia University I moved into the residence halls with an eating scholarship that covered my meals and room and board; I also had some additional funds through a fellowship called the George William Curtis Fellowship, which enabled me to pursue my graduate work towards a masters and Ph.D. at Columbia. JOHNSON: Who did you work under? Who was your advisor in the graduate school there? HECHLER: In American history, Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager; in government, Lindsay Rogers, Schuyler Wallace, Arthur Macmahon and Philip Jessup. They were all outstanding people in their field, and even though they did not devote as much personal time as had been devoted by Swarthmore professors, nevertheless I was far enough along to be able to work on my own at that time. JOHNSON: Was that a three-year program at Columbia? HECHLER: Well, if you worked at it very hard you could get your master's degree in one year, and then of course, to get your Ph.D. there was not a specific time period. But after I had been at Columbia for about two years I got a telegram one day from the University of Nebraska; I had applied for a teaching fellowship, and I was very anxious to accept it because I had never had an opportunity to teach. The chairman of the department at Columbia, Schuyler Wallace, said, "Why do you want to go to a God-forsaken place like that? Maybe we can get you a job here at Columbia teaching." So I started teaching in the Columbia University extension in 1937; this helped a great deal in terms of my expenses but it also lengthened the time that it took me to complete my Ph.D. which I finally completed in 1940. So it actually took me five years. It wasn't a specific year program, but it took that long because of the fact I was teaching at the time first at the Columbia University extension and then later at Barnard College, the women's college, and also Columbia College, the undergraduate school at Columbia University. JOHNSON: I think the average nowadays is probably even longer, more like six or seven years. HECHLER: I wanted to get it over with as fast as possible, and I even tried to get it under my belt in 1939, but I couldn't quite get quick acceptance of my dissertation. JOHNSON: At Swarthmore did you have an honor's thesis, or senior thesis? Was there any major paper that you did at Swarthmore that you can recall? HECHLER: We had quite a few major papers to write. That was one of the great challenges at Swarthmore -- to develop a thorough analysis of many, many different subjects, all the way from reviewing the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens to analyzing the relationship between eugenics and politics. We had great emphasis on biography at Swarthmore, along the lines of the Carlylian theory of history -- that great men make events, rather than events developing men. This had a great influence in terms of focusing my attention on great American political personalities, which was the title of the course that I first taught at Columbia and Barnard. JOHNSON: I guess Mr. Truman had somewhat the same idea. His early reading included biographies of great men and great women, and he always felt that men did more to make history than did impersonal events. HECHLER: I subscribe to that 100 percent. It actually started much earlier than my college career. I can trace it all right back to the first grade when the teacher one day brought out a nice little brown book called Builders of our Country, which had a very elementary discussion of the influence of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Andrew Jackson, and other early leaders, on the development of the great constitutional traditions. I'll always trace it back to that, but got into courses in more depth in later years. JOHNSON: That was a line of consistency. How about your master's thesis; could you recall the title of that for us? HECHLER: Yes, this was written between 1935 and 1936. I got my master's degree in June of 1936, on the eve of the national conventions of that year. I selected as my topic the question, "Will Roosevelt be Reelected?" It was a very lengthy thesis which ran over 300 pages. The last chapter, however, was very short, the last chapter was one word, "Yes." Fortunately, I got my degree before the election, because I had estimated that Alf Landon would carry perhaps a dozen states, whereas, of course history records he only carried Maine and Vermont. JOHNSON: The Literary Digest poll didn't influence you very much, did it? HECHLER: As a matter of fact, I won a great deal of money by betting fellow students and faculty members who had followed the Literary Digest poll. I had to give them odds, but still I think I made about $150 which was pretty good, by betting on Roosevelt. A friend of mine working on Wall Street placed a number of bets for me, giving 5-1 odds on Roosevelt. JOHNSON: That was quite a bit of money in those days. HECHLER: That's right. JOHNSON: So you were vindicated more or less by the election in '36? HECHLER: Although I did accord too much weight, after having read the newspapers, that Landon might carry some of the breadbasket states. JOHNSON: Or even his own state, Kansas. HECHLER: Yes, that was amazing. JOHNSON: Were you part of an organized lobbying group, or political action group, on campus? Did you get involved in any kind of demonstrations, or organizations? HECHLER: Very much so, primarily on behalf of the Democratic candidates. I was a very outspoken advocate of the New Deal and FDR, both on campus and in my classes. Everybody realized that I was taking a position very strongly, opposite to many people, including my parents on Long Island. JOHNSON: Your parents never moderated their Republicanism? HECHLER: No. They brought me up to think for myself and then they discovered that I had taken that advice very seriously. JOHNSON: The faculties of Swarthmore and Columbia -- would you characterize them as pro-New Deal? HECHLER: I would say perhaps more liberal in their outlook. Objectively, they weren't necessarily pro-Democratic, but naturally Roosevelt's policies fell in line with the general philosophy of members of the faculty in large part. At Swarthmore one or two of the economics professors tended to be conservative, although one of them was a strong socialist, and we were exposed to all shades of opinion. JOHNSON: How about Keynesian economics? Was that being taught yet at Swarthmore? HECHLER: Not as strongly as later on. JOHNSON: Did you take economics courses at Columbia? HECHLER: No, I sat in on a few, but my major emphasis was in American history and political science. JOHNSON: Do you remember the book, The Middle Way by Marquis Childs, that had a great deal of influence on the thinking of some of Roosevelt's advisors? HECHLER: As I recall, wasn't that a book that was largely devoted toward emphasizing the government of Sweden and how well Sweden had developed its economy? JOHNSON: Without going toward totalitarianism. HECHLER: Right. Of course, Columbia contributed a large number of people to the New Deal. That's where the "brain trust" was recruited. Raymond Moley, for example, who was one of Roosevelt's early speechwriters and became Assistant Secretary of State, was a professor who influenced me a great deal in the course that he taught. As a matter of fact, when he went on leave from Barnard College, he was teaching a course in Great American Political Personalities which he asked me to take over while he was on leave. There are a number of other professors at Columbia who actively joined the New Deal in its brain trust. JOHNSON: Did Moley end up as one of the more conservative of the braintrusters? HECHLER: That's right. He broke with Roosevelt over Roosevelt's tax policies at the end of the first Roosevelt administration in 1936, and then in later life he became a columnist for Newsweek magazine and wrote some very, very strong and almost bitter anti-New Deal columns. His philosophy was clearly conservative. I might add, parenthetically, that he came to Marshall University in Huntington (West Virginia) where I had been teaching at a time when I was running for reelection to Congress, and he helped me considerably among the conservatives in my congressional constituency by publicly praising my teaching. They felt that if a person like Raymond Moley could say some nice things, why I wasn't such a wild-eyed radical after all, and that helped me a great deal politically. JOHNSON: That would have been in the '50s? HECHLER: Early 1960s. JOHNSON: Well, I guess friendship sometimes transcends political differences. HECHLER: I didn't think he really realized how much of a radical I had become. JOHNSON: Apparently he had asked you to take over his classes at Barnard. HECHLER: At Barnard, yes. Well, that was a thrilling experience for a young bachelor in his early twenties to walk into a classroom with 40 gorgeous coeds. I sometimes had difficulty in concentrating on the subject matter. JOHNSON: Were they pretty good academically? HECHLER: They were, they were. In contrasting them with my Columbia students -- if you gave an assignment to Barnard students, you didn't have to check up on them; they always completed their homework and always got in their term papers on time. Everyone did their outside work, which I required, on political campaigns. JOHNSON: Would that have been the fall of '39 that you... HECHLER: That's correct. JOHNSON: You had finished your classwork on your doctoral dissertation? HECHLER: Yes, I had pretty well finished my classwork, but I was still working on my dissertation. JOHNSON: That happened to coincide, of course, with the beginning of World War II, in September of '39. HECHLER: That's right. JOHNSON: Do you recall reactions to the invasion of Poland in September, there on campus? HECHLER: Very, very strong, and there was great polarization on the campus. There were those who felt very strongly that we should stay out of this conflict and there were others led by the dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, who later became one of President Truman's appointees at the San Francisco Conference of the United Nations, who were strong interventionists. There was a great intellectual struggle going on at Columbia and Barnard at that time, over what position that America should take. JOHNSON: Who was your chief advisor on your dissertation? HECHLER: Although it was done primarily in the government department, which was then called Public Law and Jurisprudence Department, it had a distinct historical flavor and therefore I guess the principal advisors were Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, both of whom gave unstintingly of their time and effort to enable me to develop a very lively dissertation. JOHNSON: What was the title of it? HECHLER: It was called "Insurgency: Personalities and Politics of the Taft Era." I t focused around the revolt of the pre-Teddy Roosevelt progressive Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate, who fought against the policies of William Howard Taft, and fought for progressive measures like postal savings and railroad rate reform. They fought against the high tariffs, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, and the dictatorship of Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon in the House of Representatives. This group of primarily Midwestern Republicans teamed up with Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Senate to form the type of coalition that carried forward Teddy Roosevelt's policies. In the area of conservation, for example, you had the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy, which evolved around the extent to which the national forests and parks should be preserved against exploitation by private interests. JOHNSON: Was that published as a book? HECHLER: Yes. Every Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia was required to be published. Mine was published and actually I still get royalty checks on it. It was a very exciting venture to put it together, because it involved not only research in documents that were available around Columbia, but I hitchhiked through the Middlewest into Wisconsin and Kansas and Iowa and got a lot of inspiration from people like William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia Gazette, and from some of the older insurgents who had served in the House and Senate in the early 1900s and were still alive in the late 1930s, people like ex-Congressman Victor Murdock of Kansas, Senator George Norris of Nebraska and the LaFollettes of Wisconsin. I uncovered a vast storehouse of new material and new documentation. I know how Robert Ferrell and Monte Poen and others felt coming to the Truman Library to see some of the rich new materials on Truman's letters because I was able to at that time get the thrill of finding new documents in the basements of banks, and in the haylofts of former United States Senators who didn't realize the value of these documents, and nobody had ever touched them. I was able to persuade them to open these up so that I could get some firsthand material, not only through interviews, but also through documentation of otherwise unavailable materials. Former Kansas Senator Joseph L. Bristow's letters were in the basement of a Salina, Kansas bank. JOHNSON: You had to travel quite a bit, it sounds like. HECHLER: Yes. There was a vast amount of travel, although, as I say, I did it largely through hitchhiking. I found spots at the YMCAs where I could share rooms with other young people. I even found one place in Ottawa, Kansas, where -- this must be a world record -- I was able to stay for 35 cents a night and they even provided an alarm clock. JOHNSON: This was in 1938, '39? HECHLER: 1938 and '39, that's right. Yes, primarily during the summer and during vacations. JOHNSON: You were interviewing and you were uncovering certain collections, private collections. Did those collections ever end up in archives, or libraries afterwards? HECHLER: Yes, for example, there were the papers of Senator Miles Poindexter, who was a Representative and later a Senator from the State of Washington, who was one of the insurgents. He had his papers in an old barn down near Natural Bridge, Virginia. I spent about four or five days down there at his house and came back several times. Later, I persuaded him to transfer them to the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia where they now are. JOHNSON: Was this your first trip, your first visit, to the Midwest? HECHLER: No, I had frequently gone out to visit my grandparents along with my parents, who lived in Dalton, Missouri. Also on my mother's side, there were relatives outside of St. Louis. So I had that exposure to the Middlewest, although I was amazed at the openness and the generosity of people in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota and other states who opened their homes and their hearts and helped tremendously. I had been used to the kind of impersonal atmosphere around New York City where lots of people don't know their next door neighbor in the apartment building. There's a good deal more unselfishness, I think, in the attitude of a lot of people in the Middlewest. JOHNSON: It's still in print, is that right? HECHLER: Yes, in print in the Columbia University Press, and it was also printed by Russell and Russell in London. JOHNSON: This provided you some of the background that you were to use later on in working for the Truman White House, I suppose, including some valuable practice and experience. HECHLER: Yes -- research tools and interviewing techniques, and I suppose the ability to put facts and figures together which was pretty well schooled by the Columbia faculty, as well as the Swarthmore faculty before them. JOHNSON: Were they into quantitative methods at all? HECHLER: Not then, not that early, no. No, that was not emphasized until the Michigan school of thought began to dominate. JOHNSON: Did it acquaint you with some of the local color, so to speak, that was one of your specialties, I understand, in the '50 and '52 campaigns? HECHLER: That was pretty much developed by George Elsey at the time I was working for Truman at the White House. It was pretty much of an original effort at that time. JOHNSON: In 1940 you got your Ph.D. from Columbia? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: In the meantime you were teaching classes at Barnard. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Did that last just the one year, or two years? How long did it last? HECHLER: It was interrupted by one summer when I took a position in the Bureau of the Census -- the summer of 1940 -- and then I went back to teaching in the fall of 1940 and stayed there throughout the academic year 1940-1941. I began to feel very strongly at that time that winds of war were already sweeping across the country, and I simply felt that I wanted to be a little bit closer to the decision-making at that time. I might back up and say, however, that I had been doing a great deal of work for Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, starting about 1939, on the public papers and addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. JOHNSON: I'm glad you mentioned that because we need to ask at this point how you got in touch with Samuel Rosenman. How did that originate? HECHLER: Well, this was pretty much a case of just luck -- being in the right place at the right time. I used to do a lot of crazy things in my classes at Columbia in order to make the classes more interesting. One of the students who was very extroverted, named Michael Gelber, would help me a great deal on these hijinks that we would pull in class, such as illustrating the campaign of 1840. That was when William Henry Harrison ran against John Tyler [2001 note: strike "John Tyler," replace with "Martin Van Buren"] on the slogan of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," and used the log cabin and hard cider symbols. Gelber one day dressed up in a Daniel Boone outfit and rushed into the classroom swinging two jugs of cider and yelling "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Then we proceeded to discuss the issues of the campaign of 1840. But Gelber was the kind of guy who was always anxious to enliven the classes. Anyway, one day he said to me that he had been working with Judge Samuel Rosenman as sort of a tutor and companion for his two boys, two young boys, and that Judge Rosenman had asked him whether he knew of any young professors around Columbia who were interested in research. I had mentioned Judge Rosenman a number of times in my classes as being one of the key Roosevelt speechwriters. I tried to discuss Rosenman in terms of his great influence as a Roosevelt confidant and speechwriter. So I was fascinated by this opportunity to get to meet this great man, and I seized the opportunity to go down to visit Judge Rosenman. When I rang the doorbell of his Central Park West apartment, he immediately introduced me to Benjamin V. Cohen who was another Roosevelt confidant. Then we sat down to talk about various things that Roosevelt had asked him to do, including annotation of the speeches and press conferences and other documents of the Roosevelt administration. Rosenman said that he didn't really have enough time to do a lot of this research and wondered whether I would be interested. I jumped at the opportunity, and it became a lifelong association that was not only very productive, but also perhaps was the greatest part in getting me associated with the Truman administration later on. JOHNSON: What kind of research did that entail? HECHLER: The publication of the public papers and addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt was done privately, the first five volumes by Random House, the second four by Macmillan Company, and the final four by Harper and Row. It entailed a discussion in Roosevelt's own words of the background of why certain speeches or actions or orders were issued and what resulted therefrom, in the form of administrative regulations or legislation. So, while Roosevelt was still alive, the volumes from 1933 to 1941 were written in Roosevelt's own words, and this involved ghostwriting for Roosevelt on how these things were generated. It involved everything from relations with other nations -- the quarantine speech of 1937 that Roosevelt delivered in Chicago -- to domestic aspects of the New Deal. I was a little scared at first getting into so many different subjects that I wasn't familiar with, but one thing Rosenman taught me was never to be afraid to tackle something new. He said by concentrating, and focusing your study, you can learn almost everything that has to be learned about any new subject within two or three weeks. He advised me to just focus and concentrate on it and look for the wheat rather than the chaff. Of course, he would then go over these things, after which President Roosevelt himself would take a final look at the annotations that had been developed. Roosevelt had the chance to use his own words. Then in the 1941-45 volumes, which were annotated entirely after Roosevelt's death, why Rosenman did these in his own words since, of course, Roosevelt was no longer there to do so. It was a brilliant opportunity to get associated with a great man, who was close to the President of the United States. JOHNSON: Do we have a month and a year when you met Rosenman the first time? HECHLER: It was in the fall of 1939. I would say it would be about October of 1939 when I first met him. We worked very closely together up until the time I went into the Army in 1942. Then after I returned from the Army in 1946, I worked very closely with him on the completion of the final four volumes of the Public Papers, and in addition to that helped on the research and writing of his book called Working With Roosevelt. JOHNSON: Does that mean then that you had three things going at one time? You were teaching how many hours. HECHLER: The full teaching load; that would be about fifteen hours. JOHNSON: You were doing that; you were working with Sam Rosenman on the research for these papers, and then you were finishing up on the dissertation. HECHLER: That's right. JOHNSON: All three at once. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: I haven't asked you this, but apparently you are single. Have you ever married? HECHLER: No, I've never married at all, although I've come very close to it on a number of occasions. JOHNSON: Do you have any brothers or sisters? HECHLER: Yes, I have one older brother, Charles, Jr. who still lives up in the family home in Roslyn, Long Island. My oldest brother George died in 1939. JOHNSON: Did your brother Charles follow in your footsteps at all? HECHLER: No, he's an older brother. He's the handsome one of the family. JOHNSON: Did he go into college and graduate work? HECHLER: No, he went to several different colleges, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Amherst College. He also spent a little while at Harvard. He eventually got his degree at New York University. He is considerably different than I am in both his interests and tastes. JOHNSON: In partisanship too, his political partisanship? HECHLER: Yes. He's a Republican. JOHNSON: That's about the way it is in my family too. I guess the next subject is your experiences while you were in the Bureau of the Budget. I believe you were there for a little while before you went into the Army. HECHLER: Yes, I started out with that job in the summer of 1940 with the Bureau of the Census, as a section chief reviewing the enumerators' reports of the Census Bureau and trying to clarify them and put them into order. In the fall of 1941, after quitting Columbia to get a little bit closer to things, I got a position with an organization known as the Office for Emergency Management which recruited personnel for defense agencies. This lasted until the spring of 1942 when I was recruited by Pendleton Herring of Harvard University who was setting up a small group of historians and political scientists in the Bureau of the Budget under an organization known as the Committee of Records for War Administration. It was to try to capture and record some of the key experiences of the personnel in defense agencies. This was largely a history job but it was developed within the Bureau of the Budget which may seem to be kind of a funny place to put it. But Roosevelt was very interested in the recording of history on the wing, and he was of course, a great historian himself. His interest was in naval history. JOHNSON: Did you ever meet Franklin Roosevelt then? HECHLER: Oh, on a number of occasions. JOHNSON: Do you remember your first meeting with President Roosevelt? HECHLER: Very clearly. Judge Rosenman brought me into the Cabinet Room. I'll always remember Roosevelt coming into the room where Federal Security Administrator Paul McNutt was displaying a number of photographs and broadsides that were being used to help raise the morale of the civilian population. The first thing I saw was almost like a cartoon caricature, the end of a long cigarette, then the cigarette holder, and the prominent chin, and then the massive shoulders, and then the sudden shock you get from seeing Roosevelt in a wheelchair, which you immediately forget as he begins speaking and you experience the dynamic character of this great chief executive. After talking with Paul McNutt for a while Judge Rosenman then introduced me to the President, who made some remark like, "I understand you're the only person who's read every word of all of my speeches, press conferences and letters." We had several opportunities to get to meet him and I had an opportunity to attend several of his news conferences. JOHNSON: When was that first meeting? Do you remember month and year? HECHLER: It would be about the fall of 1940 or the spring of 1941. JOHNSON: You didn't have any conversation other than just a few casual remarks? HECHLER: Certainly I didn't get to know him as well as I did his successor, President Truman. JOHNSON: But you had several other meetings with him? HECHLER: Yes, most of my contact, however, was through Judge Rosenman. But I did do a great deal of work at the White House itself while Roosevelt was President, while Rosenman was acting as his special counsel and at the same time trying to get completed the Public Papers and Addresses of FDR. JOHNSON: How many volumes of his papers were published? HECHLER: Thirteen altogether. The first volume was on the governorship, 1928-32, and then the subsequent volumes covered each year of the Presidency. The very last volume was 1944 and the early months of '45, up until his death, the 12th of April. JOHNSON: You did editing and annotating and that sort of thing? HECHLER: Primarily did annotating, and some editing in terms of selecting the news conference texts that were utilized. JOHNSON: This, of course, helped get you acquainted too with techniques, or the style, or presidential speechwriting. HECHLER: Yes. Also, every now and then Rosenman would give me a small letter or greeting of Roosevelt to draft, nothing very major; for major things he participated himself, along with Robert Sherwood or Harry Hopkins or Archibald MacLeish or someone like that. JOHNSON: So Rosenman had some influence; he was one of a number of influences on your own way of thinking and your own style of writing. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Does your style, your speechwriting style, bear resemblance to Samuel Rosenman's? HECHLER: Well, Rosenman wrote a letter to Clark Clifford which is in the files here at the Truman Library, recommending me as a member of the White House staff, but he said, candidly, "Now this is confidential and off-the-record, but Ken Hechler's writing is a little bit complicated." I certainly could not measure up to Judge Rosenman. JOHNSON: Well, you had a journalism experience and don't you think that is an important part in making a clear writer? HECHLER: I hope so. I hope I learned a little bit from Judge Rosenman in terms of clarity and respect for the truth. At the same time, I could never measure up even to ten percent of the ability of Judge Rosenman in terms of making words sing and emulating the Roosevelt style. Of course, Rosenman had been associated with Roosevelt ever since the days when Roosevelt was Governor in New York, and Rosenman participated with Roosevelt in developing speeches for the very first campaign when Roosevelt ran for Governor in 1928. So I never could quite measure up to that, and as a matter of fact, most of my work with President Truman was not speechwriting on the major speeches. I wasn't one of the key speechwriters on the big speeches; I worked primarily on the minor whistlestop speeches that were given at the smaller communities along the railroad track. JOHNSON: Did Sam Rosenman have journalistic experience? Did he write for newspapers? HECHLER: Well, he was trained as a lawyer, but he just had that magic touch in terms of telling what needed to be told in a simple, direct and dramatic fashion. JOHNSON: He apparently avoided legalese, even though he was a lawyer. HECHLER: Yes, that's right. Some people are able to do it. I guess people like Oliver Wendell Holmes were able to do it on the Court also. JOHNSON: We're up to '42, I believe. You say you're doing some historical work in the Bureau of the Budget. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Did you carry the title of historian, or was it something like analyst? HECHLER: I was called "administrative analyst," which pretty much clouded precisely what I was doing. I was doing a great deal of interviewing of people in the defense agencies. For example, when Elmer Davis was made head of the Office of War Information he coordinated a number of information activities that had been spread over the government, and one of the things that we were trying to do was to develop the background of why the office of War Information was established and what some of the goals, objectives and principles of the new office were. Likewise, I interviewed Fiorello LaGuardia on what he was doing with the office of Civilian Defense after he was Mayor of New York. I had a whole series of recorded interviews with people in the defense and war agencies, and these, of course, were good raw material for future historians of that period. JOHNSON: Did you wire-record or... HECHLER: No, I did these primarily on face-to-face interviews, on which I took notes and then wrote them up, and usually submitted them to the interviewee afterwards. JOHNSON: How about those papers, those interviews? Do you still have those in your personal files? HECHLER: I have a number of copies of those, yes. JOHNSON: You are meeting interesting people, of course, this way. How about the Truman Committee? Did you have any acquaintanceship with the Truman Committee? HECHLER: You know, that's very interesting. I took a number of Columbia students of mine down to Washington in January of 1941, and we interviewed all of the leading members of the United States Senate and Supreme Court and the Roosevelt administration. But neither myself nor any of the students thought of interviewing a Senator from Missouri named Harry Truman, because these interviews were done primarily during January of 1941, and the Truman Committee was not established until about two or three weeks after we got back in February of 1941. So actually we did not get to interview them, and my interviews in the Bureau of the Budget in 1942, even though the Truman Committee had started, were primarily in the executive branch. I was told to stay away from Congress, that they were taking care of those interviews themselves. So, I never actually got to meet Harry Truman during this period, nor did I get to work on the development of the Truman Committee. JOHNSON: Your teaching terminated in the spring of '41? HECHLER: Yes. The spring term of '41 is when I finished teaching and then I went right to work in Washington. JOHNSON: I suppose Sam Rosenman had something to do with that, but was there any other person or persons that influenced you to go from teaching into government? HECHLER: This was pretty much of a personal decision. I just felt that with the war coming on that I wanted to be closer to things than teaching provided. I wanted to be where the action was. JOHNSON: Were you still teaching just women students? HECHLER: No, there were not only the courses at Barnard but at Columbia College which is the men's division, the undergraduate division of Columbia University. So I had three classes that were exclusively of men and one that was exclusively of women. JOHNSON: These were political science courses? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Do you remember the names of those courses? HECHLER: Yes, at Barnard, the technical name of the course was American Political Life; actually it concentrated on great American political personalities. The courses at Columbia College were in political parties and American legislative procedure, American government, and a senior seminar in public administration. JOHNSON: I suppose one of the less satisfying things about teaching also is the grading: HECHLER: I liked that. I liked that very much. As a matter of fact, I have files and files filled with copies of letters that I wrote to students about their term papers, or about their examination papers. I used to take a tremendous amount of time in writing each individual student an analysis of their work. I got a lot of inspiration from Robert C. Brooks and some of the Swarthmore professors to personalize. I felt that Columbia was not personal enough in terms of the relations of most professors to the students. I tried to emphasize this. I didn't find this a chore or a burden; I found it an inspiration and a way to get closer to the students. JOHNSON: But it meant long weekends and long work days probably. HECHLER: Yes, it did, but it was very rewarding because they responded very well. Also I followed the Swarthmore custom of trying to be closer to the students by getting out and playing tennis and softball with them, and we used to have an annual picnic out at our place on Long Island, where my mother served gingerbread and whipped cream. We'd buy a keg of beer and go out and play softball out in the cow pastures prior to having a little celebration. The students would come out and assist; it helped a great deal in terms of closer relations with the students. JOHNSON: Did any of your students become prominent in any particular fields, especially in Government? HECHLER: Yes, I had one of President Johnson's Cabinet members, Alexander Trowbridge, who was Secretary of Commerce. Jack Bunzel became President of San Diego State University, and a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. I had a number of West Virginians who I taught later at Princeton, who had high positions such as Angus Peyton; he was head of the Department of Commerce in West Virginia. I also had editors of Fortune magazine, Good Housekeeping and the Readers' Digest as well as broadcasting executives and heads of Wall Street brokerage houses. JOHNSON: Have you kept in touch with some of these former students? HECHLER: I have kept pretty closely in touch with them. I've had Circuit Judges, and I've had a number of corporate executives in my classes that have become millionaires and successful in their line of work. JOHNSON: How about political science professors? HECHLER: Yes, some have become political science professors. I had one who is head of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University now; he was a student of mine. There are many others who have become active in both law and politics. JOHNSON: Well, that has to be a satisfying feeling. HECHLER: Very much so. JOHNSON: In '42 you're still in the Bureau of the Budget? HECHLER: Yes, until I was drafted in July of 1942 into the Army. That, of course, terminated my career with the Bureau of the Budget. JOHNSON: You decided to let them draft you and start at the bottom, so to speak? HECHLER: Yes, I started right at the bottom as a private in the infantry. JOHNSON: You probably could have arranged something different such as officer's training school? HECHLER: I don't know. I was interested, though, in going in to learn a little bit about the Army from the bottom up, instead of getting a commission like some other people did. JOHNSON: Where did you have your basic training? HECHLER: At Camp Croft, Spartanburg, South Carolina. That was during a very hot summer in 1942, in the red clay and mosquito-laden South Carolina swamps. JOHNSON: Maybe you were having second thoughts by that time. HECHLER: Well, it was good toughening procedure. It was very good for a desk-bound professor to get out and march 25 miles with full pack, and run six miles before breakfast and do all those other things which were physically hardening. JOHNSON: You had been a tennis player. Was that your main conditioning beforehand? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Of course, that was some months after Pearl Harbor. I suppose you have strong memories of December 7th, 1941. HECHLER: Well, that Sunday afternoon I was out skating in Washington, D.C. when the news came in. One of the first things I thought was, "Gee, I would sure like to get a ticket to hear Roosevelt's speech." So I decided to call the White House and ask for Judge Rosenman. The White House operator immediately said, "Judge Rosenman's in with the President and he can't be disturbed. He's very busy, and would you kindly get off the line." So I hung up, and this disturbed me a little bit, because I really wanted to hear that speech. So, the next time I called, about an hour later, I disguised my voice. The chief operator at the White House was known to be able recognize everybody's voice who called. So I said, "Is Judge Rosenman thay're?" And the operator said, "Just a minute, Mr. MacLeish, and I'll put you right through." I was horrified at this point, but she said, "Well, he's in with the President and can't be disturbed now. Should I have him call you at home?" And I said, "No, that's perfectly all right, I will get in touch with him latah." I didn't get in to attend that speech. JOHNSON: It seems to me an annotated copy of that speech was just uncovered about a year ago, by an archivist at NARA. It had been misplaced years earlier. HECHLER: I think that that has always been available, at Hyde Park, because I worked on that in connection with Rosenman's book. The thing that I'll always remember about this was the way the first draft read -- "This is a day which will live in history," and Roosevelt had struck out "history" and wrote over it in his own handwriting, "A day that will live in infamy." The drafts that I saw when I was working on the book were all put together neatly up at Hyde Park. JOHNSON: Did Rosenman draft that speech? HECHLER: Well, as I pointed out, Rosenman may have drafted the original text, but Roosevelt clearly had a hand in giving it the kind of drama that the eventual text displayed. JOHNSON: There's that famous line too, you know, when Italy invaded France, about being "struck in the back by its neighbor." HECHLER: That was a speech delivered in Charlottesville, Virginia in June, 1940 -- "The hand that holds the dagger has struck it in the back of its neighbor." JOHNSON: Do you think that's a Rosenman line? HECHLER: It's hard to say. JOHNSON: What did you do after basic training? HECHLER: I applied, as many of us did at that time, to be sent to Officer Candidate School at the Coast Artillery. We felt that that was the easiest way to go through the war more safely. We were all surprised, all of us who put down Coast Artillery, that we were all sent to the Armored Force Tank School at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I liked that though after I got used to it; the idea of driving these 35-ton behemoths kind of appealed to me. JOHNSON: You were a tank man. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: A driver? HECHLER: Well, I went to Officer Candidate School where you learned everything about tanks, including how to drive them. We trained basically to become tank commanders. JOHNSON: Was this a Sherman? HECHLER: A Sherman, yes. JOHNSON: Not an awful lot of room to maneuver around inside that tank I suppose. HECHLER: No, it was again, though, a fascinating, physically hardening experience. I loved Ft. Knox a lot more than I did Camp Croft, because the social opportunities on weekends were a lot better in Louisville than they had been in Spartanburg. JOHNSON: How long does that last? HECHLER: A thirteen-week period. JOHNSON: And then you were commissioned a second lieutenant? HECHLER: Second lieutenant, yes. In the spring of 1943, in May or June. JOHNSON: Then what did they do to you, or for you? HECHLER: The commander of the Armored Force School, whose name was Brigadier General Stephen G. Henry, called me out of the ranks one day. We had been required to write a autobiography of our interests and experiences. I devoted a lot of time to that autobiography, including my work with Rosenman and Roosevelt, and my dissertation work. I even got a demerit once, I remember, for writing after dark; I was using a flashlight under my blanket in bed and they caught me doing that. In any event, General Henry called me out, and he said, "This is the most remarkable autobiography. I don't think you ought to be a tank commander. I think we ought to assign you to something a little bit more useful in the Army." I of course saluted and said, "Thank you, sir." He then contacted G-2 of the Army Ground Forces and asked that I be assigned to something a little bit more important than driving a tank, which is quite remarkable for the person who is in charge of developing tank commanders. As an interim, I was assigned to the public relations division of the Armored Force at Ft. Knox, and assigned to write a history of the Armored Force, which I found was very interesting in view of my historical background. When I completed that I was sent to Washington to work for Major Kent Roberts Greenfield, who was then the historian of the Army Ground Forces, and a former professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. He had a remarkable staff. He had two very prominent historians working for him: R. R. Palmer of Princeton University, a modern European history specialist, and Bell Wiley, who is a very famous author of books on the Civil War, such as Johnny Reb and Billy Yank. In any event, Greenfield's assignment to me was quite fascinating. He said he was having difficulty with developing any sense or interest in history by the various commands in the Army Ground Forces, and he said, "I want you to go around the country and talk with the commanding officers of every military installation around the country. Try to infuse them, first of all, with an interest in the value of military history, and secondly, to convince them that history is not simply a list of dates and honors and awards and change of stations, but is the analysis of what kind of training the troops are getting, and what are the mistakes made, and what are the lessons learned." And finally, the mission was to get each command to designate an able officer who could write or supervise the writing of the history. So for the latter months of 1943 I was on a dream assignment, traveling around the nation, to the Desert Training Center in California, to the Mountain Training Center in Colorado, to the Tank Destroyer Center in Ft. Hood, Texas, back to Ft. Knox, and at the various corps and armies to get the commanding generals to assemble their staffs together and then I would, as a second lieutenant, give them a little pitch on what needed to be done. I found this one of the most fascinating assignments of my life. Finally, I said to Major Greenfield, "I think that my ambition in the Army now is not to stay in this country; I'd like to go overseas. I 'd like to go to the European theatre of operations." He said, "Well, we'd like to keep you here, but they're developing a corps of combat historians that are going to be activated as soon as the invasion of Normandy occurs in '44." So I was sent over to Europe to join, in England and Ireland, the team of combat historians that was preparing for the invasion. I went over in January '44 and got into Normandy in the latter days of June '44, and was associated with such prominent historians as Forrest Pogue and Fred Hadsel. JOHNSON: Did you come in on Omaha Beach? HECHLER: No, not until the end of June. But we still had to waterproof our jeep and drive off of a landing craft into the water in order to get up to the beach. The German artillery was coming in pretty heavy; we were still in a very narrow beachhead even at the end of June. The breakout from the beachhead didn't occur until the 25th of July. But this was again a fascinating experience, getting assigned a personal jeep to go up and down the front lines and get the in-depth story of the critical actions along the front. JOHNSON: You got oriented, more or less for this, you say in England? HECHLER: Not only oriented, but also we were stationed with the training and staging troops to get a feel as to what kinds of training and problems they were confronting prior to the invasion. We got to know and interview all the commanders and troops that were to participate in the invasion. JOHNSON: Do you remember any of the generals that you interviewed before you went to France? That you interviewed in England? HECHLER: Commander of the XV Corps, General Wade Haislip was one. I didn't get much above the Corps level. In the actual interviewing on the Continent of Europe, of course, I got to talk with General Bradley and General Patton and a few others of the higher generals as we developed the story of both the strategy and tactics of combat. JOHNSON: Did you go over by troop ship, or fly over? HECHLER: Initially from the United States we went over in a C-54 plane. JOHNSON: Where were you stationed in England? HECHLER: Initially in London, where the headquarters of SHAEF and General Eisenhower were. We started there, and subsequent to that I went to Ireland where a great many of the troops were trained, in northern Ireland, and then came back to a place named Atterbury, England where the XV Corps was stationed. JOHNSON: Was it named as a historical unit that you were with? HECHLER: Yes. These historical units were attached to Corps headquarters, but for technical support responsive to the Historical Section, which was based in London. It was initially headed by a somewhat aging and over-the-hill colonel named William Ganoe and later on by a dynamic military historian, S.L.A. Marshall. JOHNSON: Slam Marshall. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: So you reported directly to headquarters, corps headquarters, the commanding general. HECHLER: Yes. This made it a little bit difficult, because the corps sometimes had a different idea of what we were supposed to do than did the London headquarters. JOHNSON: Then you got down to the division and... HECHLER: Oh, yes, we got all the way down to the platoon level. JOHNSON: So now you're in France, and you're actually going up and down the lines in Normandy... HECHLER: Yes, the hedgerows. JOHNSON: With the German artillery hitting every once in a while. HECHLER: Yes, some sniper fire too, and a few night air attacks. JOHNSON: Not much bombardment from the air though? HECHLER: A little bit at that time, particularly when we had the German troops surrounded and they were trying to break out at an area near Avranches, France, and an area near Mortain where there was a German counterattack. There were lonely sortees by many German planes, one that we always used to call "Bedcheck Charlie" he'd come along about 11 o'clock and drop a few bombs while we were trying to get to sleep. JOHNSON: Well, how did you function in Normandy? Were you sort of freelance; did you go where you wanted? HECHLER: Pretty much, although we certainly tried to pick out what were the most critical actions to cover, and be kept in touch with the Army team captains. JOHNSON: Who prepared the after-action reports that were required? HECHLER: We did not actually prepare after-action reports. What we tried to do was supplement those after-action reports, to make them more meaningful. JOHNSON: Who prepared those? HECHLER: For the most part they were done by the S-3 at the battalion and regimental levels, and G-3 at the division and corps and army levels. JOHNSON: Now G-3 was... HECHLER: Operations. JOHNSON: Then you would supplement them, you say, with your own analysis. HECHLER: Yes, frequently we would try to get our reports prepared prior to the after-action report which sometimes came along later. We'd try to catch these things while they were still hot in the minds of the people. We would start generally at the Army level by getting the overall strategic plan, and then follow at the Corps level on what was being done there and then work our way down to the division, regiment, battalion, company, and platoon levels. We would frequently get a group of soldiers together that were involved in an action, and have a group interview, which was a particular technique that Marshall had developed in the Pacific. It was very effective, because lots of times people would see things a little bit differently, and this enabled us to get a more accurate and more dramatic story. JOHNSON: Were these stamped "Confidential" at that time? HECHLER: No, they were simply sent back to the Historical Section for eventual checking and use when we were trying to develop the history of combat operations after the war was over. JOHNSON: Did you carry a little portable typewriter, and bang it out on a typewriter, just like a reporter? HECHLER: Right. JOHNSON: We're talking here about procedures and we're mentioning that you probably got acquainted with correspondents and reporters who were also trying to write up the story of what was happening. Did you share information with correspondents and reporters? HECHLER: Yes. Lots of times they would give me tips on who to see and who would provide a dramatic sidelight. There was some elitist feeling on the part of some of the historians that were supervising our work, that we shouldn't pay any attention to what the newspaper correspondents said. But being somewhat of a frustrated journalist myself, why I liked to see these radio and news correspondents. I always felt that the human side of what they were able to emphasize and turn up sometimes lent a lot of additional color to the story itself. I would try to break the bonds of the kind of prescriptions that my superiors would impose. I don't mean Marshall, because Marshall was influenced a great deal by the journalistic approach, but I think particularly of my Army history supervisor, Dr. Hugh M. Cole. He had gotten his Ph.D. in military history at the University of Chicago, and he always took a dim view of my mixing with the correspondents and trying to put a little extra color into my accounts. He wanted to stick strictly to military history, as defined by what happened and why and not who was doing it. JOHNSON: Or what kind of personalities they were. HECHLER: Right. Exactly, or where they went to school or what their background was, and all those other irrelevant questions. JOHNSON: Well, you can see what my approach is. Did you happen to meet Ernie Pyle at any point? HECHLER: No. He was in Italy and then over in the Pacific. I went to Ie Shima where he was killed, after the war. I did not meet him personally, but I did meet a lot of soldiers when he had interviewed and I was very much influenced by Ernie Pyle's style of writing. I thought that this was something that we historians ought to emulate. The only criticism I had of the reporters was that they used to have such early deadlines that they'd dash out "by-guess and by-God stories" that frequently missed some of the underlying significance of the background and strategy of what they were covering. They were looking primarily and exclusively for color. JOHNSON: And like you say for scoops maybe, or speed. That was an advantage you had wasn't it, that you had more time to analyze. HECHLER: That's right. I was more like a magazine, with in-depth analysis, than just getting the whipped cream and the interesting or unusual. JOHNSON: Those reports that came back to Washington -- were they the only copies, and are those in the National Archives, in the military records? HECHLER: Yes, I kept copies myself too. JOHNSON: You have a copy, a carbon? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: You did make carbons. HECHLER: Most of the time I did, yes. JOHNSON: And so you're doing this from late June of 1944; you're following the armies through France? HECHLER: Yes. Well, actually, of course, it started in the training period in Ireland and England, in early '44 and continued by covering the actual combat operations in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and Germany, all the way up to the end of the war and then even after the end of the war in Czechoslovakia. JOHNSON: How about on June 6, D-Day? HECHLER: On D-Day, of course, I was not with the combat troops. I didn't land in Normandy until the end of June; nevertheless we did cover, after we got there, what had happened on the 6th of June. We made sure that we had the full story of the details of the invasion and the seizure of the beachheads at Omaha and Utah. JOHNSON: What Armies are you attached to then? HECHLER: I was attached to both the First Army and the Third Army at various times. JOHNSON: Now who was the commanding general of the First Army? HECHLER: A very quiet and non-publicity seeking commander named Courtney Hodges. Even though he was head of the army that captured the Remagen Bridge, much to General Patton's dismay, he was not the kind of swaggering, colorful publicity-seeking commander that Patton was. I was in Patton's army for quite some time and one time Patton personally bawled me out, which is something I'll never forget. JOHNSON: Well, I guess I wouldn't either. Probably nobody would forget. When did that happen? HECHLER: I think about the fall of 1944 when officers (and I was then a captain) used to cover the insignia on our helmet with this sticky, greasy stuff [2001 note: "called cosmolene"] that we had used to waterproof our jeeps. We did this in order to avoid getting shot at by snipers, because when the bars would glisten in the sun the sniper could spot an officer. So one day when I had this stuff over my helmet, why, General Patton drove into our camp, resplendent with his pearl-handled revolvers and gleaming stars on his helmet, and the flag, a red flag with the stars, boldly flying on his jeep. He looked over at me and in his high nasal voice said, "Come over here, Captain." And he said, "God damn it, are you proud of your rank?" And I answered, "Yes sir," saluting rather shakily. And he said, "Well, then dig that goddamn stuff off your helmet or I'll rip that insignia off of your uniform right here and now." This was mixed with a number of other expletives that made me shudder in my boots. JOHNSON: Apparently it was typical; it was not untypical of General Patton. HECHLER: Yes. But he was a great military commander and he believed in speed as a means of saving lives. This was very much the opposite of Field Marshal Montgomery who lost a lot of troops by the slowness of his advances. JOHNSON: Did you cover the breakout at Saint Lo? HECHLER: Saint Lo, yes, I did, very extensively. I was involved very deeply in that. We covered the bombing which killed General McNair, and the eventual breakout from Saint Lo, and the encirclement of the German troops at Mortain. JOHNSON: You were with the First Army when this was going on? HECHLER: I was with the Third Army at that time, and later on with the First Army. JOHNSON: Do you have any idea when that incident happened with General Patton? HECHLER: I would say it would be in the fall of 1944. JOHNSON: By that time you were how far? HECHLER: We were moving very fast. By that time we were all the way up to the Siegfried line. JOHNSON: Were you in on the march into Paris? HECHLER: Yes. We snuck off to get into Paris several days after it was liberated, at a time when the mademoiselles were breaking champagne bottles over the jeeps and it was a joyful time. There was a little gunfire still going on from snipers, but that was a time that the French people will never forget, and the Americans too. JOHNSON: You saw General DeGaulle at some point I suppose? HECHLER: Oh yes. Yes, from afar, not close enough to commune with him. JOHNSON: Did you interview the generals at all? Like General Hodges? HECHLER: Yes, General Hodges and General Bradley. JOHNSON: Did you ever interview General Patton? HECHLER: No, my one confrontation with General Patton was about enough, although as a historian I felt it necessary to listen in on the conversations of the generals. So whenever General Patton came down to our corps headquarters I would listen in. We had a big map board that sort of screened the war room, and the generals would sit down in the war room in front of the map where Patton would pinpoint what he wanted to do. I would hide behind the map board and take notes because I knew that I wasn't welcome in the conference itself. JOHNSON: Persona non grata? HECHLER: It's interesting the different attitudes that some of the generals had toward history. Usually if you would ask them directly, most generals would appreciate its value. But they would say, "Although we would like to have you here personally, we don't think General Patton would like to have you here; therefore, maybe you had better not come in." In that case I would always hide at a place where I could listen. JOHNSON: He was supposed to be quite a student of military history, wasn't he, even back to the Roman legions and... HECHLER: That is absolutely true. But I think in cases when he wanted to bawl out a commander, he would rather not have that story recorded. I remember once he came down and I was hiding behind the map board, and he was berating General Troy Middleton who later became president of Louisiana State University. Middleton was a very intelligent corps commander, the VIII Corps. And this was right before the Battle of the Bulge when the VIII Corps had about four divisions along the very thinly held 88-mile front. Patton couldn't quite understand why they weren't attacking instead of sitting there. I remember his phrase; "Troy," he said, "you've got two armored divisions here sitting on their goddamn ass. I don't understand why you don't get them to hell out there." Of course, that would have been even more tragic in terms of the slaughter they would have been subjected to by the Germans when the Battle of the Bulge started. The technique of gleaning the inner thoughts of generals involved not only talking with them personally but also trying to listen to them. At one point I tried to persuade the commanding general of the XIX Corps, General Charles Corlett, to assign a sergeant who could take shorthand and to record all telephone conversations that the general had. This sergeant was livid when he was assigned to it. He said, "I'll fix you. You just wait." So the very first day that this stenographic record came out, it started out this way (it was circulated to all the staff): "Sergeant Jones: Good morning General, it's 0600. General: Goddamn it, sergeant, I told you to wake me at 0530." Thereafter the stenographic record was not kept. JOHNSON: During the Battle of the Bulge you were stationed where? HECHLER: I was stationed at Bastogne eventually, which of course was one of the key areas that was surrounded by the Germans. I was stationed with the VIII Corps, which was the corps that was hit immediately by the Germans. I was right in the eye of the hurricane. However, the VIII Corps got the heck out of there when the Germans started to shell us in the headquarters. One shell struck the general's mess hall. We withdrew and let the 101st Airborne Division take over; they were battle-hardened combat troops who, as history records, held the Germans off. JOHNSON: General [Anthony] McAuliffe and... HECHLER: Who sent the famous message to the Germans when asked to surrender: "Nuts." JOHNSON: Did you interview him? HECHLER: Yes, oh yes. I interviewed General McAuliffe and his troops, as well as, after the war, those Germans that were attacking in the Battle of the Bulge. JOHNSON: So you watched Patton come up with his Third Army to relieve Bastogne? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: And you attached yourself then to the Third Army as it came in. HECHLER: That's right. JOHNSON: You ended up after the war writing a book, The Bridge at Remagen. HECHLER: That's right. JOHNSON: What was the date of that event, the taking of the bridge? HECHLER: March 7, 1945. JOHNSON: So that was about two and a half months after the Battle of the Bulge. HECHLER: That's right. This is when I was stationed with the First Army, with the III Corps headquarters, commanding the III Corps team. I just was lucky enough to be at the point about ten miles from Remagen, at III Corps headquarters, when this dramatic event occurred. At that time I went down to interview all of those who were involved. We were very fortunate that some of the first combat troops were brought back into reserve after they had captured the bridge. We just also had captured a wine cellar, which made the fluency of conversation considerably enhanced. JOHNSON: Did you carry a stenographic pad with you then? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: And take your notes and then from them you typed up your reports? HECHLER: Yes. It's too bad we didn't have small recorders that we could take along with us at that time, to get the full flavor of precisely what was being said. JOHNSON: How about these field notes, these original notes? Did you save those? Are those still part of your files? HECHLER: No, I didn't, because they were kind of jumbled up and I tried to save only the carbons of our eventual reports. If there was a whole series of actions in one operation, occasionally I would have an interim general report which would combine the individual interviews and dovetail them together. JOHNSON: Was it mainly these carbons you had that you used as a basis for your book on the Bridge at Remagen? HECHLER: Oh, considerably more than that, because I tried to make it a personalized story, in addition to the material that we collected for the Army. After World War II I went back to Germany on a couple of occasions to interview the Germans involved. And I did a lot of interviewing around this country after I had gotten out of the Army, to get not only the full story of military operations but the more personalized story of what kinds of home towns the participants grow up in, what the reactions of those towns were to the incident. JOHNSON: Did you speak German? HECHLER: A little bit, not as well as I would like to. JOHNSON: Were you able to interview in German? HECHLER: A little bit. Once again I always protected myself with a German-English reporter-interpreter who came along with me. JOHNSON: Let's see, your grandfather or great grandfather was born in Germany? HECHLER: My grandfather was born in Germany, and my mother and father both spoke fluent German. But you know that as a result of the experience of World War I and later World War II, why they tried to sort of shield us from learning the language. I wish I had learned German as a youngster. JOHNSON: Were you there where your ancestors came from? HECHLER: No, that was considerably south of where we were operating. That was in the Seventh Army area near Heidelberg. But I did go back into that area later on, after the war. Of course, I've got a lot of documentary material on the background of my grandfather. Someday I hope to wrote a book about my grandfather's experiences in the Civil War. JOHNSON: Did you get to Nuremberg? HECHLER: Not for the trials, but I certainly got there during the war and after the war. JOHNSON: You probably went out to the Zeppelin field where they held the rallies? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: I was there two years ago. You say you did not get there for the trials? HECHLER: No. I don't know whether you ran across this, but I had a rare opportunity to interview a number of high-ranking Germans before they even knew they were going to be tried at Nuremberg, when they were still very, very cooperative. JOHNSON: Right after their capture? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Including... HECHLER: Goering, Jodl, Keitel, von Ribbentrop, and Kesselring and... JOHNSON: You interviewed all of these people? HECHLER: Yes. This was part of a five-man commission that was called the Shuster Commission, headed by Dr. George Shuster, the president of Hunter College. The War Department had decided that they wanted to send this commission over to Europe, to interview these Nazi leaders before they developed a party line of their own, and to try to get things very, very fresh and quickly before they even knew they were going to be sent to Nuremberg. So they selected five members of this commission to concentrate on economic, political, diplomatic, and military affairs. I was to concentrate on military affairs. We interviewed these Germans at a little resort town named Mondorf in Luxembourg, about 15 miles from the city of Luxembourg. Jodl, Keitel, Doenitz, Von Ribbentrop, Kesselring, Julius Streicher and all of the leading Nazis that were still alive were interned there. The group included a fascinating English-speaking German lieutenant general named Walter Warlimont who had been Jodl's deputy, who I found to be extremely helpful. I violated a lot of the Army rules because I got to know these people as human beings, although I did not sympathize with them. I remember making a trip down into Warlimont's home area near Munich and talking with his St. Louis-born wife, who was one of the Anheuser-Busch family, and bringing back to him a lot of things like clean underwear and soap and other things that he didn't get in the prison compound. JOHNSON: That had to be quite an experience. Who depressed you the most? HECHLER: Well, I guess Goering depressed me the most because he regarded the whole war and conflict as somewhat of a joke. He asked me whether or not I knew General Eisenhower, and of course, I said, "persönlich." And he said, "Would you give General Ike a message for me?" And I said, "Ja, Ja, Ja." He said, "Would you tell General Ike that I will mobilize the Luftwaffe and the German army and we'll get Doenitz to get the Navy back together again, and we'll team up and we'll knock hell out of the Russians." He said, "That will solve all of your problems for years to come." What shocks me, of course, is that there are a lot of people in the United States of America today who believe that we could and should have done that. JOHNSON: Well, even General Patton was talking along that line, wasn't he? HECHLER: Yes. Yes, that's right. JOHNSON: Did you ever hear him speak about Russia? HECHLER: Oh, yes. Shocking, shocking -- I don't want to go into detail here, but of course at that time we were redeploying to finish the war in the Far East, and the mothers and fathers and cousins and sweethearts around the country were clamoring to the President and Congress to get our boys back home. But the Russians ordered their troops to stay there, and as a result if we had engaged in anything like that, we would have been decimated because the Germans had been completely flattened. They didn't have anything to offer. Morally, it would have been an outrage for the rest of the world. JOHNSON: April 12th when President Roosevelt died, I suppose you remember that date? HECHLER: Yes, very clearly. I remember the major called us all together and said, "We have just received the sad news of the death of our Commander in Chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt." Then he said, "The current information" -- and he picked up a piece of paper as though he didn't know what he was going to say -- and he read it, and said, "The current information is that a man named Harry Truman will succeed him; at least that's the latest report." JOHNSON: Harry who? Where were you when that occurred? HECHLER: This was in Germany, deep in Germany. It may well have been Weimar, Germany. It was pretty far in. JOHNSON: You were in many, many cities, I suppose, in Germany... HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: ...and it would take too long to recount all of them. Of course, that was only three and a half weeks before V-E Day. Where were you on May 8th? HECHLER: I was in Weimar, the birthplace of the post-World War I German republic. And it was Goethe's home. And it was the area where we discovered the shocking results of Germany's inhumanity to man, at Buchenwald, where corpses were stacked like cordwood. JOHNSON: Was that the first concentration camp that you saw, Buchenwald? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: When the Russians linked up, I think it was on the 27th of April on the Elbe. HECHLER: It was actually on the Mulde River, I think, a tributary of the Elbe. JOHNSON: Were you there in that area? HECHLER: Yes, I was there in that area and it was a very happy feeling with the Russians. We all drank a little vodka and slapped each other on the shoulders. JOHNSON: Did you interview Americans there? HECHLER: Yes. It was a very happy feeling. We thought that this was going to solve all the problems of the future of our relationships. JOHNSON: Did you get in on any of the surrender ceremonies? HECHLER: No. JOHNSON: Did you meet General Eisenhower on your tour? HECHZER: Yes. I met him and General Walter Bedell Smith, his chief of staff. It was very briefly, though, not a very deep conversation. I have a bone to pick with Bedell Smith. After I had written all of these wonderful interviews with the German generals and top Nazis at Mondorf, it constituted enough material for a very, very good book. This was fresh material on what we had learned. I forwarded these interviews up through Colonel Marshall, who by then was a general, I guess, and he forwarded them up to General Eisenhower's headquarters, and of course, they went wild over them when they got up there. Three or four months later, somebody showed me a copy of the Saturday Evening Post and they had a six-part series by Walter Bedell Smith, on "What the Germans Told Us." He had plagiarized, word for word, my interviews and made it sound as though it had been told to him. Of course, he must have gotten paid quite handsomely. I remember going to Hugh Cole, who was my supervisor and he laughed and he said, "Boy, it looks like you've been scooped." [2001 note: "Forrest Pogue later told me he had discovered in Bedell Smith's papers a copy of a check for $150,000 which the Saturday Evening Post had paid Smith for the articles."] JOHNSON: You were an unpaid ghostwriter, unacknowledged and unpaid ghostwriter, it sounds like. HECHLER: You see a lieutenant general can do anything with what a major discovers. JOHNSON: Rank has its privileges. HECHLER: Right. JOHNSON: How long were you in Germany after the signing of the surrender? HECHLER: I expect I stayed there until about mid-June. Then I was called back to Paris to participate in the writing of the first draft of the history of combat operations based on the documents, the after-action reports, the maps, and the interviews. Then about mid-July, the Shuster Commission was set up, and I then went back to Luxembourg for the interviews with the German commanders. This was a very fascinating period, when I could get to be almost on my own; and Shuster was just a great director for that operation. JOHNSON: Were these published, these interviews you did with the Nazi war criminals? Were they ever published in any other way? HECHLER: Well, as I say, Bedell Smith published some of them. JOHNSON: That became part of this account? HECHLER: Yes. I wrote a little account in 1949, called "The Enemy Side of the Hill." It reviewed the technique and the substance of those interviews. I did this as part of my reserve tour of duty at the Pentagon back in 1949. That's never been published. JOHNSON: Still in the National Archives? HECHLER: It's part of the Archives. JOHNSON: After that assignment, what did you do? HECHLER: With the completion of that assignment, I went back to the Historical Section, which by that time had moved from Paris, 72 Avenue Foch, out to St. Germain-en-Laye. We then finished up what we could do on the history of operations. Along in early 1946 -- why, Colonel S.L.A. Marshall asked me if I would head up the whole operation of writing the German side of the history by recruiting all the German generals and assembling them in a camp where we could interview them, have them write answers to questions, and supply maps and everything. I told him that I was very anxious to get back to this country because I wanted to get married. The gal that I wanted to get married to didn't see it quite exactly the same way. So I guess it was about April of '46 that I went back to work for the Bureau of the Budget. JOHNSON: When was it that you came back to the United States? HECHLER: I came back about March of '46. JOHNSON: And you had been gone since early '44. HECHLER: Right. JOHNSON: Two years in Europe. HECHLER: I didn't go back the same way I came. I went over on a C-54 and came back on the Muehlenberg Victory, which was a seasickly experience. JOHNSON: A liberty ship, sort of? HECHLER: I think they called it a victory ship. They changed the word to "victory" after V-E Day. They had just painted the water tank, of all things, and the taste of paint was in the water. It was just a very rough trip. JOHNSON: That was the first time you had been on the sea, I suppose, on a ship on the high seas except for the channel. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: And you finished up your work in St. Germain beore you left. HECHLER: Right. JOHNSON: They must have accumulated an archives there, brought things together. HECHLER: Yes. One of my jobs working there was to try to assemble a lot of the German documents and get them back to the United States before the Germans destroyed them. JOHNSON: These captured German documents eventually ended up in the National Archives before they were finally shipped back to Germany? HECHLER: Yes, they were shipped back to Germany. JOHNSON: After we microfilmed them all? HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Some of those items were among those that you had collected, no doubt. HECHLER: Yes. JOHNSON: Did they ever do that project that you turned down, interviewing the Generals? HECHLER: Yes, they did, and they did a very, very successful job of it. One of the ways I started this was to bring several of the German generals back to St. Germain while we were writing the history of operations. We brought them back there, to work with the American historians while they were developing their accounts. I always felt, even during operations, that this was something that we didn't put enough emphasis on. We had the G-2 out there who was trying to project what the enemy intentions and strengths were, but after the operation the G-2 would go on to a new operation. They would never look back on what had actually happened, and I always felt that we ought to do more in that area. Indeed, we did after 1945. JOHNSON: Did the Germans have military historians who were counterparts to you people? HECHLER: Yes, very good ones. They had full access to materials and they kept much more detailed and meaningful records than we did. Even at the time when they were very heavily pressed at the end of the war, their records were excellent. For instance, they had telephone diaries. Hitler's diaries are very good, too; they had a stenographer in Hitler’s headquarters who kept a lot of them. JOHNSON: I imagine the combat historians tended to be more truthful and factual than those higher up. HECHLER: I hope so. I'm quite impressed by the candor with which they wrote. JOHNSON: So now you're back in the United States and you go back into the Bureau of the Budget. HECHLER: Yes. I had two assignments when I got back in 1946. One was to be the overall supervisor of the development of war histories in every agency, war agencies and non-war agencies, civilian and military, to make sure that they had adequate financial support from the Bureau of the Budget in preparing these histories. They had able, competent historians who were writing them and they followed general guidelines that I tried to keep in touch with. The second assignment was to help recruit top personnel for some of the emerging agencies that were reconverting into civilian capacities. JOHNSON: So you're not with the office of Military History, Department of the Army. You're in the Bureau of the Budget? HECHLER: I tried to get a job with the Office of Military History, and the first thing they said to me was, "Well, we can only hire a Ph.D." I said, "I've got a Ph.D." Hugh Cole always had a dim view of my own capabilities and torpedoed the idea. JOHNSON: Perhaps you were over-qualified, and that was the problem. HECHLER: Well, I'm really glad that I didn't, because my career would have been much different had I gone back into the history area. This way, I had an opportunity in the Bureau of the Budget to do a lot of things which kept me in touch with all branches of government, and at the same time I got back into the swing of helping Judge Rosenman with the Public Papers. JOHNSON: Did you resume that title of Administrative Analyst? HECHLER: Yes. I got a nice fat promotion too. JOHNSON: Who did you work under? Who was your immediate supervisor? HECHLER: Patterson French of Yale University was my immediate supervisor. And I worked pretty closely with Donald C. Stone who was director of the Division of Administrative Management, particularly in the personnel recruitment area. I also worked with a gentleman by the name of George A. Graham, who was chairman of the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He was very active in the Bureau of the Budget, and he began talking with me about the possibility of getting associated with Princeton University. At that time it was much easier for an academician to get an assignment with a university, because you had hordes of GIs coming back. They needed teaching faculty personnel pretty badly. So Graham put me on a research assignment of developing a text on legislation and legislative procedure, on a grant from Princeton, at the same time I was at the Bureau of the Budget. I completed that and submitted it to a publisher. You know how publishers always farm out these things to experts, and this expert, who was never identified, evidently had a text in the field and didn't want any competition. That's the way I interpreted it. He had some acid comments to make, so this 400-page manuscript was never published. JOHNSON: You just made that one try; you didn't go to other publishers? HECHLER: No, I just got kind of discouraged by what I thought was basically professional jealousy. I just never did go ahead and try to get it published. I still have the manuscript, and I still think it's pretty good. JOHNSON: In your own personal files? HECHLER: Yes. I think it's pretty good, too. Well, eventually Graham offered me a teaching job as assistant professor of politics at Princeton, starting the fall of 1947. So I quit my job at the Bureau. I had pretty much by that time finished the work on the preliminary drafts of a lot of the material for Rosenman. So I was able to go up to Princeton in the fall of '47. JOHNSON: You mentioned resuming your work with Rosenman while you were there in the Bureau of the Budget in editing the final volumes of... HECHLER: Let me think; yes it was the final, yes. Actually, we didn't get that finished. I continued with that work at Princeton. We wound that up, I guess, about 1949. JOHNSON: How about your first encounter with Harry Truman? HECHLER: That did not occur until December of 1949. JOHNSON: Had you seen him, though, before that time? HECHLER: I wasn't introduced until December of '49. Before that, I had seen him speak, but I had |
