Truman Library - Robert G. Nixon Oral History Interview, October 9, 1970

News correspondent with the International News Service, 1930-58; served as editor of the service for a time. He first came to Washington, D.C., in 1938 where he served as their State Department and foreign relations correspondent. He was a war correspondent, attached to the British army in France and Belgium, 1940, during invasion of the low countries; evacuated from Dunkirk but later returned to France; evacuated with remnants of the British army from Brest, June 20, 1940; covered London Blitz, 1940-41; war correspondent, attached to United States forces in European theater of operations, 1942-1943; correspondent in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, and Mediterranean theater, participating in North African invasion and campaign. Covered Casablanca conference, 1943; Quebec conference, 1944; and Potsdam, 1945. Washington correspondent covering the White House beginning in 1944.

Bethesda, Maryland
October 9, 1970
by Jerry N. Hess

NOTICE
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

As an electronic publication of the Truman Library, users should note that features of the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview, such as pagination and indexing, could not be replicated for the online version of the Robert Nixon transcript.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

HESS: Mr. Nixon, to begin this morning, would you tell me a little about your background; where were you born, where were you educated, and something about your early newspaper career?

NIXON: I was born in Atlanta, Georgia in the year 1905. I was educated at Georgia Tech, with a degree in chemical engineering, and at Emory University, with a bachelor of arts degree. I became interested in writing in my teens. This led to my winning various awards in writing, oddly enough at Georgia Tech.

NIXON: No, they were current events subjects, and my English professor, after I had won one of these awards, said, "Bob you don't have to come to class anymore. You've made a passing grade as far as I'm concerned, and not only a passing grade, but a grade of higher merit, and I can't teach you anything else."

He encouraged me to go into writing. I was taking chemical engineering and I thought that I wanted to pursue that. Well, this was in the mid-twenties when chemical engineers were a dime a dozen. We had not advanced in the scientific area like we have in more recent years. I had a friend who was also my father's friend, and who was managing editor of one of the Atlanta papers. During the summers, when I was in college, I worked as a cub reporter on this paper, the old Atlanta Georgian, a Hearst paper. Some years later it went out of existence.

When I finished school I just could not put myself in the position of spending the rest of my life doing chemical analyses of cotton oil samples. I didn't have the vision to see into the future of what chemistry would come to. I don't think many people did then. Well, here was a ready made job on this newspaper, and I was interested in writing, so I just took the job and stayed in it.

I first became a reporter. Then I was made assistant city editor, later assistant Sunday editor, then makeup editor. This was over a period of time, but not much time either; I advanced very rapidly. Then the International News Service, which served this paper, and was one of the three large wire services, was having trouble with this paper. There was carping all the time about this news service which did not produce the material that they wanted. I.N.S. was a worldwide news service and was not providing much local, domestic news. They were criticizing the then Southern news editor for the ineptness of the International News Service.

So, New York said to the managing editor of the Georgian, "O.K., you pick your own man and we'll make him Southern news editor and he can get for you what you want, we hope."

The then managing editor of the Georgian said, "Bob, how would you like to have that job?"

Well, I said, "I sure would." Because that meant advancement from assistant city editor of a paper to Southern editor of what appeared to be a worldwide news organization, so I took it.

During that period I covered such things as the Florida hurricanes, which swept over the Keys and drowned all those poor people; the bonus marchers, who had been picked up here in Washington and sent down to these Federal camps; the Scottsboro trials, of those colored men who were supposed to have raped a white woman on the train in Alabama; the assassination of Huey Long and his burial, and the whole aftermath; the execution of Zangara who tried to assassinate Roosevelt; and the great tornados. In other words every major story. One year, for instance, two stories in the South were selected as two of the ten greatest news stories in the nation for that year.

They first wanted to send me to Rome. Then they decided to bring me to Washington and I came to Washington in February of '36. First I covered the Congress on the House side, and went to the two political conventions that summer. Then I was put in charge of coverage of foreign affairs in the State Department.

In September 1939, at the outbreak of the war, I flew to Lisbon and then went overland through Spain, which was just recovering from a civil war, to France and on to Paris. Later I went from Paris to London, and I was then attached to the British army as a war correspondent and went back to France. I was in France and Belgium when the Germans invaded May 10, 1940, and came out of France in the Dunkirk evacuation. A few days later, I went back to France with the first Canadian Division and landed at Cherbourg in Normandy where our own forces went in a number of years later.

HESS: At the time that you were at Dunkirk did you think that you were going to get back to England, or did you think you were going to be captured?

NIXON: Well, those are things that you just don't think much about at the time. You are too busy.

HESS: What size of a boat did you come back on? I understand that they had a fleet of small boats help with the evacuation.

NIXON: Yes. Actually, I did not get off the beach at Dunkirk. I was able to go to Boulogne and came across on a channel steamer, so I wasn't in one of those little boats. You see, this evacuation took place over a number of days, quite a number of days, and the little boats didn't come into operation until the remaining British and French forces had been shoved into a very small perimeter at Dunkirk and were fighting on the beaches. It was then that these little boats which had been gathered from all over England--were sent over in flotillas to bring off the remaining people except those that were left behind to hold the perimeter and who then surrendered. But, as I say, you don't think too much about those things at the moment. You do what you can and you do what you're told, and hope for the best. But frankly, things looked pretty black.

Anyway, we went back to France on June 10. This was a week after Dunkirk and I went up with the British army to below Paris. We went up through Lemans, all through Picardy, below Paris. That's as far as we got. Churchill had flown over to Toulon where the French government had retired from Paris to try to persuade [Paul] Reynaud to form a defensive line, the French army with the British. Reynaud said no, the French were through and were going to give up.

Seems to me it was on a Thursday, when Churchill communicated this information to his government. It was obvious then that there had to be another evacuation. So, I was given a choice of going either to one of the ports in Normandy and getting out there or going down to Brest. I was a little fed up at that time at being chased all over France by the Germans so I decided to go to Brest to stay in France as long as I possibly could and to get out at the last moment. I had a job to do. I was a war correspondent and supposed to report what was going on and if I couldn't report, then to tell later what had happened.

Anyway, I went down to Brest and at noon on the 20th or 22^nd--I believe it was Petain who got on the radio and announced the surrender of France to the Germans.

Well, that was it again. Many of the British troops remaining in France were evacuated from Brest as well as other ports in France.

I got aboard a British vessel in the harbor of Brest in the late afternoon after the French had surrendered. It was packed with blue RAF uniformed personnel. Of course, we expected to be blown out of the water, either by a U boat or German bombers. This was when the Lancastria was blown up at a loss of some 3,500 men. We left there that night and arrived the next day at Falmouth down near Land's Ending, England. There were so many of us aboard this ship that I had to stand elbow to elbow with men packed around me some eighteen hours.

Well, after that I went to London and then down to Dover expecting the Germans to come over imminently. There was nothing left to stop them. The British troops didn't even have side arms. They were completely unarmed except for their air force, about which we didn't know. We hadn't seen it in France. Every time we saw a plane there, it was a German plane.

We expected the Germans to come over. We didn't realize that they had overreached themselves and had made no preparations for invasion of England. They thought England would give up and collapse just like France had.

I went out with the British army on the south coast where the defenses were being planned and was in London throughout the blitz. These were sporadic attacks at first, and then mass fighter attacks by the Germans, which the RAF put down.

There were two in August, mass raids in which on two different days the British shot down two or three hundred German planes. We wondered how it was being done. We didn't know there was such a thing as radar then. Of course, it was radar that made it possible for the English to know where the German planes were coming from and get their fighter force up and knock them down. The blitz, that is the heavy all night bombing of London and other cities, did not begin until it became obvious to the Germans that they could not force Britain to surrender by destroying the RAF. So, they decided to attack the cities. That didn't begin until the first week in September, on a Wednesday night.

NIXON: I was in London, and I remained in London then throughout the blitz, night after night. It was a mess.

NIXON: Well, it was a very strange, eerie thing. The days were getting shorter, of course, and the nights were beginning at 5 in the afternoon, and later on at 4:30. A London night is a very black night, especially in the winter months when the weather is bad. The alerts are an eerie sound. The sirens blasted. At other times the first you would know, was when you would hear the bombers overhead, barummmm, barummmm, barummmm, barummmm, and then five minutes later, maybe they would turn on the alert. You didn't have to tell people, they knew it.

Everyone who could get out of London, in a sense, had gotten out. But there were several million still there, especially the poor people, and then of course, all the public officials, the well-to-do and those who had responsibility for government. They are very staunch people. But when I say the city was virtually deserted, I am speaking of it at night. In other words, nearly everybody had gone underground. The poor people were living at night in the London tubes. They would take their little bundles of blankets and their children and all and go to the tubes in the late afternoon. Transportation was virtually at a standstill, although, the busses and trams kept running. And the London cabbies never gave up.

The bombing of London did not really resemble what the U.S. Air Force and the British air force did later to Berlin and some of the other German cities. I remember flying over, I think it was Castell, a city in central Germany, on the way to the Potsdam Conference, after the surrender. There was nothing down below except powder. I saw one city, I forget whether it was Castell or the other one, that was just a mass of pinkish red rubble. This, of course, came from the powdering, by bombs, of the roof slates. But we had just obliterated these towns.

London, of course--I forget how many square miles it is--extends over an enormous area, and the Germans never got around to the type of bombing that we used, a mass of forces of heavy bombers. That's the way we smashed things up in those days. The Germans would send a few planes over and then a few planes over, and they would follow all night long, and they appeared to be bombing for no purpose except to create terror. In other words, they did not concentrate on a single target. Oh, they tried to smash the Battersea Power Station on the Thames, for instance. There was an obvious reason for that; stop the factories and disrupt use of electricity. They bombed the warehouses and the ships along the Thames. They went after factories. This was all night bombing.

In one night, you could count enormous fires, all over the whole face of London from one end to the other. There would be a great blotch of flame here and another maybe a half mile or a mile away. The Germans apparently were trying to burn London down.

One night, I was walking up Picadilly to a night spot across from the Ritz, just off Bond Street, and I heard what was called a "stick" of bombs. That means, say, six bombs are let loose from a plane at the same time, come down and burst at intervals. One will strike here, one perhaps fifty yards away. I heard those coming down and instinctively dropped to the sidewalk. Looking across Green Park, right next to the Ritz, I could see these bombs striking the turf in this enormous park with bursts of violet flames. The blast blew out the plate glass window, that had been taped up in a shop in Picadilly, three feet from my head, and when I got up I was covered with a shower of glass, dusted myself off, went to the Ritz Bar and got a drink.

NIXON: I mean that's what saved London on the ground. They had a very valiant fire fighting force, which had been in being all through the war. These firemen must have been a force of half million and they had been quartered in houses all over London. They had the strangest little fire fighting equipment I have ever seen. Nothing like our enormous trucks, but they proved extremely effective. They were tiny little vehicles, just about the size of the chair you are sitting in, with small gasoline engines. They were devised because the British realized that once the bombing began that their supply of water would be disrupted. Many people were drowned in their basements because the water mains would burst and flooded their basements and they couldn't get out. This meant no water to fight fires. So, the British put large containers of water all over London, and these little pumps (that's what they were), would pump the water out of these systems when the mains had been burst. The mains weren't always burst, but usually they were. They fought these fires with the water pumped from these systems, and they kept London from being obliterated by another great London fire. Many of the firemen, of course, lost their lives in fighting these fires.

One of the worst that I remember--I went to an area of central London, where the brokerage houses are. One of the main thoroughfares there is Cannon Street and that is where St. Paul's is. This particular night, it seemed like Cannon Street from one end to the other was just a mass of flames, blazing. The Thames is quite wide there and the city sprawls on both sides of the river, so that you can get a view of it that you couldn't get of, say, most American cities. It's a very exhilarating sight to see a city being bombed, but not one that you would care to see every day in your life. We got so used to it, really, as it went on without letup night after night for months.

NIXON: Well, I was there throughout the blitz. I guess I came home in May '41, and then Pearl Harbor came the following December.

NIXON: I was at the State Department in Cordell Hull's outer office. I knew that something was coming. I had no idea that it was Pearl Harbor. I knew that war was coming.

NIXON: Well, I was covering foreign affairs then, and I had followed the Japanese moves, step by step, and this was a mounting thing that became obvious to me.

HESS: Did you think the attack was coming while the two Japanese envoys were here in town?

NIXON: Well, it was obvious that they were here for some reason other than a peaceful purpose.

NIXON: You know what the old time airplane pilots used to say, that they flew a plane by the seat of their britches. Well, if you follow world events very closely and very intimately, you get an inner conviction that two has got to follow one. It's instinctive.

When I got to the State Department that morning, Cordell Hull's private secretary Gray, told me that [Naburo] Karusu--who had been sent here--and the Ambassador had asked for an appointment with Hull at either 11, 12 or 1 o'clock, I forget. So, naturally I was there. Incidentally, I was the only reporter in the State Department that day. God knows what happened to the others; they swarmed in later.

The two arrived at the diplomatic entrance of West Executive Avenue fifteen minutes late. I had gone down to meet them, and I went with them into the elevator and up to Cordell Hull's office on the third floor to ask them what they were there for. Reporters have to do those things, whether they get an answer or not. Of course all I got was a cold brush off; they didn't say a word. They were then met by Gray in the hall and taken into the diplomatic reception room which was just across the hall from Cordell Hull's large suite.

They had kept Cordell Hull waiting fifteen minutes so Cordell Hull kept them waiting fifteen minutes. They then went into his office. They had asked for the appointment at the precise moment that the first bombs were scheduled to drop on Pearl Harbor. Because they kept him waiting fifteen minutes, the bombing of Pearl Harbor had begun. Of course their purpose in seeing Hull was to tell him that this state of war existed between the two countries, which they did.

Hull, who was a Tennessee mountain man, kept his aplomb, but said (I've forgotten the exact quotation which he gave me at the time), "This is the most despicable act I've ever heard of."

The odd thing about the timing was, that the White House had phoned Hull and had told Gray, because Hull was then with the diplomats, that Pearl Harbor was being bombed. And Gray had gone into Hull's office and whispered into his ear this message from the White House. And Hull excused himself for a moment, and he knew before they told him that a state of war did exist.

Gray came out of Hull's office (and I was standing right in the door trying to find out what was going on) his face was gray like his name, and he said, "My god, Bob, the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor."

So, I raced (this shows you how luck is; this was one of the most disappointing experiences I ever had in newspaper business) to the telephone across the hall in the diplomatic reception room and called my officer here in Washington. There was one desk man in there. (We were not a twenty-four hour news service then as we became later.) I told him that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and he said, "Well, I can't do a thing about it." He said, "Our wire doesn't open for another hour." So, here I was, perhaps the first newspaperman in the world to know that Pearl Harbor was being bombed by the Japanese, and nowhere to go with the story.

Then our man who was there at that time covering the White House got the credit for it.

NIXON: His name was George E. Durnel. He's now dead. He got the credit, of course, for announcing to our wire service that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, because he was then called down to the White House and the announcement was made by Steve Early on behalf of the president. This was a couple of hours later.

NIXON: After the wire was opened. This was on a Sunday. We later became a twenty-four hour service, offering service around the clock. But at that time, International News Service was an evening newspaper service. Universal Service was the morning service. We did not open our afternoon service until Sunday afternoon. Here I was with the biggest story in the world and nowhere to go with it.

NIXON: Yes. It was a very traumatic experience, believe me. I was a very ambitious young man and I mean this was just horrendous. Here was the big chance and you don't get many of them.

NIXON: Oh, no. On January 14, five weeks later, I went aboard a U.S. transport ship in Brooklyn as a war correspondent attached to the American Army and in American uniform.

NIXON: Well, Europe and Africa were my areas. I had no idea where we were going. I assumed we were going to the Pacific, because that's where our war was at that time. Instead, I soon found out that we were on our way back to England with part of the First Armored Division, and Thirteen and a Half Armored Brigade.

HESS: Where did they get that half, was there a half a brigade in there or something?

I stayed on in the European theatre. We landed, incidentally, at Belfast. The first troops there were stationed in northern Ireland for training purposes and for some place to put them, and to keep the Germans from leapfrogging England into Ireland, which was feared at the time. These first troops were under the command of General Hartley. We assumed at that time that he was going to be the Commanding General of all of the American forces in Europe, which of course, he didn't become. We were unaware of the leapfrogging of command that was in progress at the time that finally put Eisenhower at the top.

In the latter part of October the Army liaison man came around to me one day and said, "Bob, how would you like to take a trip?"

I knew what that meant. And I said, "Well, just tell me one thing, do I need heavy winter gear or tropical gear?" Of course this was one of the most highly kept secrets of the war, and I got nowhere with him.

I wanted to know whether we were going to Norway or not. I'm not too fond of extremely cold weather, and I wanted to get a heavy Army overcoat if we were.

So that night I went over to Lancaster House, and got aboard an Army truck and was finally put aboard a transport with a lot of American and British troops. In two or three days time it became apparent that we weren't going to the north, we were going south, because the weather got warmer.

Thus, on the early morning of November 8th, we invaded North Africa. From the news point of view, I was fortunate because I had been chosen. In the first place, I was in charge of our news coverage, and in the second place was attached to General Eisenhower's headquarters. You couldn't get any higher up than that. At first his headquarters were at Gibralter, down in the damndest granite cavern you've ever seen in your life, right under the Rock of Gibralter. His headquarters was carved out of this rock on the ground level where a tunnel goes entirely through the Rock of Gibralter, from one side to the other, fortified, of course, on both sides. The British, fearful of an attack either by the Spaniards or the Germans, or both, had been carving out galleries and rooms throughout this rock, with artillery emplacements in them. The Lord knows how long they had been working on it. The work was still going on and you heard the blasting all day. It was rather a strange place. He had a little two room office, as I say, carved out of the rock.

I remember very vividly that on one occasion he called us in to relate a very graphic tale about how the French underground had gotten General [Henri Honoré] Giraud, one of the top French generals, out of the castle where the Germans had taken him; smuggled him underground through Germany and clear across France to Marseilles. The British then had sent a submarine to Marseilles, had taken him off there and brought him down to Gibralter, and he presented General Giraud.

NIXON: Well, he was one of the most stiff-necked fellows you ever saw. He just nodded and that was all. I remember I tried to get his story out of him, and he just got quieter and stiffer. He wouldn't say a word. He was a very difficult man, as events in Africa later showed.

They had brought Giraud out because they had a very difficult political situation in North Africa, that almost overshadowed the occupation itself. We were having trouble with everybody. The French were a very difficult people. Darlan was assassinated while I was in Algiers. De Gaulle was perhaps the stiffest-necked one of all. They all thought they should be in charge.

NIXON: No, he was in London. The next time I saw him was at the Casablanca Conference in January when he was brought down from England. Eisenhower said Giraud had been brought out to be given command of the French troops in North Africa. Then Eisenhower told us a very odd thing. When Giraud arrived in Gibralter he thought that he was being brought there to be put in command of American and British forces in North Africa, as well as his own. Now can you imagine?

HESS: He didn't think he was just being rescued, he thought they were coming to get him to head the whole thing.

NIXON: Take over the entire operation, which if you extrapolate it, meant that he expected to command the invasion of France later--all the forces. That's amusing, but it was a rather grim thing then.

HESS: What was it in the French personality that gave them these grandiose ideas? I'm also thinking of General De Gaulle.

NIXON: It is a very difficult equation, I'll tell you. Of course, the French have had a very great history--great in the sense of military things.

NIXON: I think it's a Napoleonic complex. This Giraud, for instance, and De Gaulle, were more difficult and stiffer-necked people than you expected the Prussian generals to be--than [Paul von] Hindenburg.

It was Churchill who repeatedly saved De Gaulle's neck. He brought him out of France (just before the French surrender) as he was leaving after an impossible conference with Renaud who didn't have the guts to stand up any more.

De Gaulle, then a young brigadier general of their armored force, was standing along the wall. Churchill saw him (of course, he knew him) and stopped for a moment and said, "I want you to come over to England."

Churchill realized that he had to set up a French government in exile in order to keep the French resistance up. Even though the French had surrendered, there was underground resistance all through the war.

HESS: At various times during the war there were different French generals vying for support. Do you know why he chose to give his support to De Gaulle?

NIXON: No, I don't know the answer there. I assume that this may have been a happenstance. In other words, he was the only one available.

HESS: Wasn't it Churchill who later said during the war, that the heaviest cross that he had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine?

NIXON: It sure was and he knew what he was talking about. For instance, De Gaulle, on the June 6^th invasion of Normandy, later.

De Gaulle refused to take any part in it or to let his French forces take any part in it. He was just pouting. He was pouting because he, like Girard before him, had not been put in command of the invasion.

After the invasion, and I had been in Europe again for many months, I came back to Washington before returning to England.

NIXON: Yes. I was expecting then to go back to England. As it turned out, my organization had difficulties with White House coverage. They asked me to take over the White House for them, which, of course, I did. I remained on with President Roosevelt until his death at Warm Springs when I was with him. That lead to my then taking over coverage of Mr. Truman.

NIXON: This would have been just prior to the second Quebec Conference. Churchill came over from England on the Queen Mary and Roosevelt met him at Wolf's Cove. The conference was in the fall of 1943, I believe.

I went everywhere Roosevelt went. We went out to Pearl Harbor for a conference with MacArthur before the invasion of New Guinea. This was when there was a question of who was going to be the Commander in Chief in the Pacific. There had been great rivalry between the Navy and the Army. The question was whether Chester Nimitz would be in command or General MacArthur.

I had known Roosevelt's aide here in Washington very well, and we were fairly close. When the conference was over I took him aside and said, "Well, what happened?"

NIXON: No, that was later in Japan. His name escapes me at the moment. Before the war, he had been an AP reporter in Washington, and we had covered the State Department in those prewar days.

NIXON: Yes, which meant that MacArthur had gotten command and would be in command of any eventual invasion of Japan. And all the forces he needed would be given to him.

NIXON: I recall another disappointment. Stalin put his foot down and would not let any American correspondents into Russia. He had his own there, but he wouldn't let us or the British have anyone. I told Steve Early that I didn't have to be a correspondent, that for two or three weeks I could be a member of the White House staff.

Steve said, "Sorry, Bob. I've tried to mention this to the President, but he says if someone like Stalin raises an objection, that's it. It has to be observed, out of courtesy if nothing else."

I stayed at Algiers while the conference was going on and boarded the cruiser Omaha there. Then I came back across the Atlantic with the President.

He was kind enough to tell me what he felt he could about what had happened at the Yalta Conference. There were many things that he could not say of course. He appeared to have on his mind, mainly, the United Nations. The making of the peace was his concern. The war was not over, but he was looking into the future.

I remember him saying that the United Nations, unlike the League of Nations, must work this time. He felt it was a safety valve for world peace in the future. He told me about the structure of the United Nations that had been agreed upon with Stalin and Churchill and said that each of the major powers would have the right of veto. You don't argue with a President, you know. But I did say to him, "Well, Mr. President, this means it won't work."

And I said, "Well, you know the Russians don't change their spots. If they object to something they veto it, and the whole thing is out in the cold. How can it work if one nation such as Russia can, by its single vote, make a negative to the wishes of the other nations that are in the majority?"

Well, he didn't have any answer, but he didn't agree. His whole heart was set on this. Roosevelt was failing in those days. Gosh, if you've ever seen a photograph, and I'm sure you have, of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin together, at Yalta, you will note how thin, haggard, and gray he looked.

NIXON: The same way. I had luncheon with him one day in the Admiral's cabin, and he seemed to be in good spirits, and good voice, and lucid. I wrote a story about it later that his White House physician, [Ross T.] McIntire quoted. I gave him permission to quote the story. It tells a little about Roosevelt on the way home.

But Roosevelt would sit--aside from that luncheon, which lasted most of the afternoon--on the Admiral's deck one flight above the main deck with his great cloak around him. The dark blue cloak and his battered gray felt hat that he delighted in wearing. He would sit there for hours, motionless, just staring, with his own thoughts perhaps. We knew he was a sick man. But if a war is on, and your country's in the hands of one man, and any adverse reporting is aid and comfort to the enemy, and you're not the doctor, you just don't report that a man is ill. If his doctor admits it, fine. If his doctor pooh-poohs the idea, which McIntire did, and gives out excuses saying that the President had been put on a diet to get some of the weight off of him, then you just don't say that a wartime President is ailing. It isn't like reporting in peacetime. If you do you're out of your cotton pickin' mind.

NIXON: That would be your end. Remember you are a guest as a White House correspondent. You are there on sufferance, not because you have your own right to be there. But we could tell he was really ailing.

HESS: Did he seem to still think that he could trust the Russians to carry out their agreements?

NIXON: Let us put it this way. The answer is yes, but it's conditioned. Remember, that up to this time the Russians had not broken the pledges that they made first at Yalta and then later at Potsdam. That had not happened. The fighting was still going on very heavily in Europe and Asia. We were, in a sense, keeping the Russians alive with supplies. The breaking of agreements did not come until the war was over.

It was the British and the Americans who insisted that there be no permanent settlements until after the war. Meanwhile these understandings and agreements (if you can use that word) that were made at these wartime conferences were temporary and not binding agreements in the sense of a final settlement. It was those agreements, made at the conferences, that the Russians broke, but they were supposed to be in effect until the final agreements were made.

Roosevelt gave no intimation that he expected any postwar trouble with Russia. Also, he said, "They are going to be too busy recovering after the war is over to be any trouble to anybody else." He said, "Half of all of Russia has been destroyed by the Germans." He told about how they had wrecked and pillaged the houses even at Yalta where this conference was held. He said, "They have lost millions, literally millions of people in this war. Their economy is destroyed. They are going to be too busy to be of any harm to anyone else."

HESS: Did you ever hear President Roosevelt comment on Henry Morgenthau's plan to make an agrarian nation out of Germany?

NIXON: I wrote a story about that after the war. They proposed that postwar Germany be divided up.

Before the Prussians took over all of Germany, and it became a centralized government, it consisted of separate little states: Schleswig-Holstein, Bavaria, Prussia, etc. So, they were thinking in terms of breaking Germany up into several small states. I think it was three. That is what I recall as of now.

This was supposed to prevent Germany from centralizing again and building up a huge war economy. This included, I believe, stripping the Ruhr, which of course, is the munitions source for Germany.

This may have been part of the Morgenthau thing. I'm not really familiar with the details of that proposal. But I know that President Truman would have no part of it. It seems to me I remember that. I don't think Truman cared too much for Morgenthau anyway. He was a little bit too big for his britches in many respects.

HESS: Do you think that President Roosevelt paid very much attention to his counsel?

NIXON: I really don't. That is as to taking action that he recommended. But he had an open door to the President's office, He was there many, many times. He was a friend. They lived up there on the Hudson close to each other. Morgenthau was a friend, a close neighbor, and his Secretary of Treasury. There are many funny tales about him.

NIXON: One is that I was told that under his orders--and this was before tape recorders, I believe--every telephone call that came into or went out of the Treasury Building, was recorded unknown to the speakers. In that way he kept--and this of course, was against the law--tabs on everything that had to do with the Treasury.

These things would be typed up. (They must have had to have had an awfully large stenographic pool.) They were typed up, and he would go over them every day. That's one of the stories I remember.

As to Roosevelt's further relations with Morgenthau, Roosevelt was a man with a very searching mind and a high intelligence. He liked to talk to people who were well informed. This was his way of getting information. Morgenthau was one of those people close to him, and I'm sure that this warm friendship that they had was a matter of Roosevelt doing a little brain picking and getting information.

[Bernard] Baruch had, being as wealthy a man as he was, very broad contacts in New York and around the country. He was a frequent traveler around the world. I remember in the months before the war began, Baruch had been to Europe. He came back to Washington and saw the President. (This is the first time that I had ever heard this intimated.) He told the President that this country was the ultimate aim of Germany, and that they were planning to surround this country. They were going to take over North Africa, Dakar, go across the South Atlantic, and take over Brazil. Brazil was just an open door to the southern part of the country. Their aim was to conquer Latin America first, then us. That was the first time I heard that.

That was the sort of information that I'm sure that Morgenthau repeatedly gave the President. He told him things he heard from responsible sources, whether they turned out to be true or not. I don't know how long their relationship was, but it was a close relationship.

HESS: A book that has just come out recently, the memoirs of Charles Lindberg, states that Roosevelt paid too much attention to Jewish advisers.

NIXON: Lindberg is an odd, strange character. I was reading a review just a couple of days ago of that book in the Post. The person writing it pointed out that flying the Atlantic alone did not make Lindberg any authority on world affairs.

He was a callow youth, an auto mechanic who learned to fly a plane. Let us face it, he did an amazing accomplishment for 1927. But his knowledge of world affairs didn't exist, and perhaps don't exist today. This article also pointed out that because of our hero worshiping of Lindberg, he had been pushed into posing as an authority on world affairs. He wasn't an intellectual big shot. Lindberg got himself in very bad repute. We all feel sorry for him because of his great tragedy.

NIXON: But he really made an ass of himself in the late thirties. Everyone in Washington who knew what was going on in the world, felt in their bones that Hitler was our sworn enemy and that sooner or later another world war was inevitable. They knew about these appalling things that Germany was doing to its Jewish population.

At the invitation of the German government, Lindberg went to Germany and was wined and dined. The red carpet was thrown out by Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. He was taken around and shown the German aircraft factories. He also accepted a medal from Hitler of a very high order. You just don't accept medals from foreign governments, especially from Hitler's Germany.

Then what did he do? He came back here and got an appointment with Roosevelt. He was a hero, though he was getting a little gray around the edges. Congress had voted him the Medal of Honor for his feat of ten years before. I'm sure he saw Roosevelt and he told him that the United States had better get on good teams with Germany, and never go to war with Germany under any conditions, otherwise, we would be smashed to bits.

He had seen the German aircraft factories; he had seen their air force. He had been told by Goering how long it takes to build fighting aircraft in sufficient numbers to be useful, and he was sure that we could never catch up with them. I'm sure that this was interesting information. Our own people were afraid of the same thing. But we did catch up with them later. We not only caught up with them, but we outdid them and smashed them to bits. His judgment was wrong.

He was the head of the America Firsters. They were a German propaganda outfit aimed at making American public opinion feel that Hitler's Germany was doing right. We went through dreadful days. You remember we had a so-called neutrality act? We couldn't provide arms, munitions, or ships to the British when they were strangling to death.

NIXON: I don't know of any preponderance of advice by any group. I was trying to think of any that were around him that saw him frequently other than Morgenthau.

NIXON: That's true, but Sam Rosenman was on his staff. He took Rosenman's counsel, I'm sure, in many respects, but really Rosenman was more a glorified speechwriter than anything else. I might add, not a very good one. That's my personal opinion.

The man that put all the spark in the Roosevelt speeches was Robert Sherwood. I think Rosenman put together a draft of the basic contents and then Sherwood made it vibrant and full of life. This was so evident when Sherwood left the picture, and Rosenman had to do some speeches by himself.

One of the dreariest, most uninteresting, most unmoving speeches that I can recall that Rosenman did alone (although Roosevelt may have had a little hand in it), was the speech at the Bremerton yard. It was just after Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor conference with MacArthur and Nimitz, and after his trip to Alaska. It was a report on his trips to Pearl Harbor and Alaska. It was fed out over the radio and went all over the country. It was in that speech that he used the word "quarantine" again and proposed to quarantine the Japanese after the war.

It was a silly idea. You just cannot quarantine another nation. If you want to do it, nobody else does. They're going to trade or not. If they don't trade, they're going to go to war to do it. But this was a dreary speech. It was too long. It didn't make much sense. I realized Rosenman had had to put this thing together without Sherwood. There wasn't one phrase in it that sparkled.

While Rosenman did counsel the President--their relationship had gone back to the Governor of New York days--he was mainly part of the writing team.

NIXON: As I say, these things are progressive. If you see a person every day, it's very difficult to detect these things. But during 1944, prior to the campaign, he had begun to lose weight. He had been a very muscular man--his arms, his shoulders. His face was full and round, and he had a powerful neck. Much of this probably was due to the fact that he could not use his legs. He had to use his arms for everything he did. He swam quite frequently for exercise. But it seems to me it was during the winter of '44 that he had the flu.

I'm not sure whether it was Morgenthau's suggestion or not. It must have been because he was host. But Roosevelt came out of this bout with the flu, drawn and haggard. So we all went down to Georgetown, South Carolina to Hobcaw Barony. There are a lot of these big estates that are enormous down there.

The idea was for Roosevelt to get a rest and recover his health. It seemed to me we were there forever. A frightfully dull place. A small South Carolina town that we had to stay in while he was out on this estate. Nothing to do but keep your eyes on him as much as you were permitted to. We stayed down there about three weeks, I guess.

He would go out on the water in a small power boat on the Waccamaw River--I think is the name of it--and fish and sit in the sun. Well, his fishing was pretty academic. There wasn't anything to catch down there anyway, except a few little perch, bream, and muddy catfish. The streams there are very muddy. He couldn't go out into the Atlantic; it was too rough.

I had one conference with him. He wasn't looking too good, but he got some color back in his face from the sun. He didn't appear to gain any weight.

We went back to Washington, and this was along, it seems to me in March, and from then on he never regained his weight. I would talk to his physician and point these things out. We always got this bland reply from McIntire that the president's blood pressure had been up a little so it had been thought best for him to lose some weight in order to keep his blood pressure down. We knew that he had a constant nasal drip, and this was supposed to have led to his flu and subsequent head colds.

I remember at one of his news conferences when he was asked about losing weight. Of course, he was sitting at his desk. He always sat, because of his legs. He patted his stomach and smiled that broad smile of his, and said, "Wow, I'm getting that pot off." Well, those things put you off, you know. They really put you off.

The Democratic convention was held in Chicago in '44, June I guess it was, or July. We got aboard a train from Washington and went to Chicago where we thought perhaps he would address the convention. Instead we just stopped for one day in the Chicago railroad yards, in his private car, the Magellan.

Several people from the convention, among them Robert Hannegan, came aboard and talked with him. I'm sure they talked convention talk. This was where the notorious statement is suppose to have taken place. Roosevelt was supposed to have told Hannegan, "Clear it with Sidney." It created quite a to-do. For all the reasons that was obvious.

NIXON: No. I don't. That's a blank for me. I do know that Roosevelt telephoned Truman.

NIXON: I believe this was from Washington before we left. I'm not sure. It might have been from the train.

HESS: Did he say that he had telephoned Truman, or how did you know that he telephoned Truman?

NIXON: I believe both Sam Rosenman and Mr. Truman later told me. You see, Roosevelt was a man who always fished around. He had a half a dozen men that he was considering for the vice-presidency. Sam Rosenman told me this in San Diego when we were at the Marine barracks. Roosevelt had in mind first Jimmy Byrnes. (I can't put them in the order of importance, I can just cite who they were.) Jimmy Byrnes, [William O.] Douglas, Truman, and Henry Kaiser. There was one other that I can't remember.

NIXON: Oh, he had been shoved aside. Sam said, "The President ticked them off. He said, 'It can't be Jimmy, unfortunately--I'd like it to be. Jimmy is a renegade."' In other words, he changed churches.

NIXON: That's what it was. That would alienate the vote. Douglas--I forget what the reason was. He might still have been considering him. "Henry Kaiser, I'd like to have him, he's a fine man and very capable. But I need him too badly building liberty ships for the war." And he got down to Truman and, according to Sam, Truman was the last name that he ticked off, and Roosevelt said, "I think it'll have to be Harry Truman. He has no strikes on him. He's from the Midwest, and we need that to balance the ticket. He has made a very fine record as the head of the Senate War Investigating Committee. So, he's the man."

Prior to this though, Byrnes then, feeling assured by Roosevelt that he was it, got hold of Truman and asked Truman to make his nominating speech at the Chicago convention. That was the position that Truman found himself in when he became the actual choice. How could he get out of this embarrassing situation with Jimmy Byrnes. This seemed to have been the thing that sparked the antagonism that Byrnes later showed for Truman.

HESS: In his Memoirs, Mr. Truman states that he believes that Jimmy Byrnes knew that he, Mr. Truman, was also being considered and that his phone call to Independence, to ask Mr. Truman to put his name into nomination, was a way of undercutting competition.

NIXON: Well, that's an interesting viewpoint. I had forgotten that. I've read the Memoirs, but it's been a long while ago, and I've forgotten what's in them.

NIXON: Virtually nothing. I had been out of the country then. I was up at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue; I was at the White House. In a sense, Senators were a dime a dozen.

HESS: Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Truman did not get along all that well during the time that Mr. Truman was in the Senate.

Truman was an obscure Senator, I will say that. When I say obscure I simply mean that he didn't create much ruckus. You see, the prominent Senators are those that are blowing off at the mouth all the time. The quiet ones (and Truman was one of them) weren't in the papers. He wasn't in the paper much at all, if at all. The only time that he would ever get in the newspaper was something to do with this war investigating committee.

HESS: The Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. What had you heard about the Truman Committee?

NIXON: Virtually nothing. This isn't necessarily because there wasn't much in the papers about it, but it was just another investigating committee. It didn't have any fireballs, so it never attracted my interest. When Sam Rosenman said that day that Roosevelt said Truman had a very fine record with the War Investigating Committee, I really didn't know what he was talking about, because I was not familiar with what the committee had done.

HESS: Before we move on, I want to ask you one question about Mr. Roosevelt's seeming disinterest in who was going to fill the spot. He did not even call Mr. Truman personally to ask him if he would run. Why do you think that he didn't?

NIXON: Let me tell you. This dovetails into the question of health. Particularly why nobody ever wrote that the President was dying. There was a structure around Roosevelt. I'm sure it gets around most Presidents, but remember Roosevelt was an exceptional President. He had been in office for over twelve years. He was a hell on wheels guy. He's the only President in our history that saved the country twice.

There was a structure built about him that made people take for granted that he was going to live forever. I'm sure he thought so too. I don't think it ever crossed his mind--the shadow of death. Now this may be a key to it in a sense. Rosenman in this discussion that I talked about, said something to the effect that it really didn't matter who was the choice for the vice-presidency. What he was saying was that the President was the important man--not the Vice President. The reelection of Roosevelt is the essential thing. His inference was that the choice was entirely political on the basis of here is a person with no strikes on his record, who comes from the Middlewest where we need representation. It was just that simple, I don't think that it ever crossed Roosevelt's mind that he might be succeeded by a Vice-President.

NIXON: Good Lord, no. Sam was part of the structure around Roosevelt. I said to Sam one day, "The most important thing in the world is for us to win this war."

And Sam Rosenman said, "The most important thing in this world is for Roosevelt to be re-elected."

This was part of the structure. Here was a man that presumably would live forever. Nothing would happen to him.

NIXON: The train and his private cars were put on a siding at the Marine base. There was another speech by Sam with very little inspiration in it. Again Sherwood was not there. From his private car on the end of the train, he made a speech by radio to the Democratic convention in Chicago.

NIXON: Yes, I'm sure it was his acceptance speech. He had been nominated. Yes, he made his acceptance speech from there.

When he was about to make the speech some news photographers were there. One picture that was used all over the country was a terror. His jaw was slack (he had a long moose face at that time anyway), his mouth was open and, of course, his face was drawn and pallid.

Well, later when I got back to Washington, my head man in New York phoned me and asked a very curious thing which really upset me at the time. He said, "My god, that photograph, is Roosevelt dying?"

Well, that sort of threw me you know. Here's a man talking about a president dying on a long distance telephone in wartime. Hell, I didn't know whether the phone was tapped or who was listening, but I told him the circumstances under which the photograph had been taken.

This was the worst of the photographs, and the photographer had taken it in San Diego before the train left and had very quickly made a print. He was under a great stress of time because we were about to leave there by train. The first photo that came out of the vat was that one, and it was slapped on the gadget that transmits these photographs electrically over the country, and that was it. I explained all this to my boss. I related what his doctor kept insisting--he kept pulling us off of the track all of the time. This may have been a little impertinent, but I was upset by this business, and I said, "I am not a doctor. I'm not the person who could say whether a man was dying or not."

Back to the Byrnes thing. It was my memory that Roosevelt had phoned Truman to tell him that he was his choice for Vice-President.

HESS: In his Memoirs Mr. Truman says that he did not speak directly to Roosevelt.

NIXON: That, my recollection now tells me, is correct. Roosevelt talked to Robert Hannegan.

Truman pointed out that he had been told by Byrnes that Byrnes was the nominee and had been asked to make Byrnes' nominating speech. Roosevelt finally phoned Hannegan again to find out what had happened and, in effect said, "Bob, you tell Senator Truman to get off the pot. I want an affirmative answer, and I want it now."

The timing of all of this goes around the convention. It was then that the President boarded the cruiser Baltimore in San Diego and went to Pearl Harbor for his conference with MacArthur and Nimitz.

We rode around all hell's half acre in New York, and he was in an open car--one of those White House jobs. It was cold, blustery, and rainy. We didn't ride just through Manhattan, but we were driving for hours. You wondered how the President could keep from stopping to go to the bathroom; it took so long. It seems to me we drove around Hyde Park, and all those little towns in the Hudson Valley.

HESS: Was this an effort to combat the bad publicity he was getting on account of some of the photographs that made him look like his health was failing?

NIXON: Well, how do you know? But this completely threw me off. I was physically robust. I kept myself in wonderful physical condition. I swam every lunch hour that I could at the University Club, and worked out in the evening when work allowed it. But I was miserable that day. It was dreadful--cold and rainy. Here was this man just full o£ beans--smiling and waving at the crowd.

Towards the end, we did stop at one of those ungodly suburbs of New York. (The Bronx I guess it was.) The President was given a change of clothes and a massage. He had a Navy commander named Fox who was a masseur on the White House physician's staff. His job was to massage the President, which he did, I suppose, every day. He gave him a massage, and he put on dry clothes; but hell he came out with the top still down, and away we went.

HESS: Did you think that he would have a difficult time defeating Dewey in 1944?

Oral History Interview with Robert G. Nixon

Oral History Interview with
Robert G. Nixon