Truman Library - Robert G. Nixon Oral History Interview, November 4, 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
November 4, 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 G. 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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, in our last interview, we were discussing Mr. Truman's legislative program. I'd like to mention the names of two gentlemen that were brought in in 1949 and given the title of Legislative Assistant to the President, Mr. Joseph Feeney and Charles Maylon. Were they much in evidence around the White House? What do you recall about those men?

NIXON: Well, I remember one of them very well, Joe Feeney. The other one, Maylon, I have no memory of whatsoever.

Joe Feeney, being Irish-American, was a very friendly sort of person, and he liked to be in evidence. Being in evidence around the White House meant being in and out of the West Wing and knowing the correspondents, like

myself, who were there every day. He stopped and chatted with us when he came and went.

Both of them had offices across the street in the old State, War and Navy Building. They spent most of their time on Capitol Hill, because that was where their jobs were. They were liaisons with the Senate and House. Each worked one side of the Capitol. The reason I knew Joe Feeney was because he had an outgiving personality. Maylon may have been more reserved. He kept more to himself or more up on the Hill.

HESS: Do you recall anything about their effectiveness as Legislative Assistants in trying to help Mr. Truman's legislative program along?

NIXON: That is a difficult picture to frame. They may have been capable men who were just not able to get Congress to do what the White House wanted; but they may not have been. Regardless of their abilities (whatever they may have been), Truman didn't get his legislative program through this Congress any more effectively than he had under the Republican controlled Congress. It had to be a little better, but he just didn't get his program through. There were many, many factors. The Congress was still in an economy minded mood. There were also attacks on the Truman administration, such as has been made by Dick Nixon and his House committee and Senator Joe McCarthy, with his Senate committee. They were based on very vile accusations of communism in Government, and, for that matter, outright treason. So the atmosphere in Washington was just not favorable to the White House.

When Truman did something well, if there was momentary praise, it was quite momentary. The next moment they would be sticking a knife in his back. You have to bear all those things in mind when you try to answer whether these two men were effective as liaisons between the President and Congress. I do remember that Joe Feeney was a nice friendly guy with a likeable personality. On that basis, he probably got along very well with members of Congress, even if they wouldn't carry out White House requests.

HESS: To what extent were the members of the White House staff approachable by the members of the press? I'm not discussing matters of leaks, but background information or information from members of the White House staff to explain the President's or the administration's position. Could you go to people such as Clark Clifford, Charles Murphy, or Matthew Connelly and discuss with them things about the President's programs?

NIXON: By and large, no matter how well you might know members of the President's immediate staff, they were never very accessible. You would have to mention them one by one to describe their mannerisms and their lack of accessibility. In the first place, the President had a Press Secretary to carry out the relationships between the White House and the Nation's news media.

HESS: Would the Press Secretary take a dim view of the newsmen going to some of the White House members and discussing problems?

NIXON: This again is a matter of personality and who was Press Secretary at the moment. If people started going to the immediate members of the President's staff, other than the Press Secretary, they, in a sense, were undercutting the Press Secretary.

One of the other reasons for lack of accessibility of these people with the press was that they were privy to everything that was going on in the President's mind; everything he was proposing, and everything he was doing. They were the ones who attended the staff conference with the President every morning of the world. Their knowledge of what was going on was private and confidential with the President. The contacts with them depended wholly on your own personal contacts with these people. If they didn't know you well, you'd just get a blank stare. You would not even be received in their offices. You couldn't get past their girl Friday. There were some members of his staff that I knew quite well. Some members of the staff went with the President wherever he went, and so did I. There were quite intimate contacts on planes, or trains, and on these trips abroad on warships.

People like Sam Rosenman, for instance. I could go in and talk to Sam almost any time I wanted to, providing he wasn't tied up and busy. Clark Clifford made himself quite inaccessible to newsmen. Bill Hassett was an old friend I had known for years under both Roosevelt and Truman. He was very accessible. I had no difficulty seeing John Steelman at all. Matt Connelly was around all the time, but you just didn't go to Matt Connelly for information. His function was a little different. Donald Dawson, the personnel man, was an old friend, I don't know how accessible he was to other newsmen. I can only judge on the basis that I knew him well and whenever I wanted to see him, I could. I knew Charlie Murphy quite well.

NIXON: Anytime that you wanted to see Vaughan there was no difficulty at all. He was very friendly if you knew him, but no source for any hard information.

HESS: Do you think General Vaughan thought of himself as one of Mr. Truman's close advisers?

NIXON: Oh, unquestionably! But I'm convinced that it stopped at the level of buddy-buddy. It had nothing to do with the formation of policy.

Harry was a sort of messenger for the President. He fetched and carried for him. He, of course, made contacts with the Pentagon when the President wanted it done. Every morning when Vaughan came to the White House, he would go immediately to the President's office, and they would pass the time of day. Vaughan would, of course, find out if there was anything the President wanted him to do that day. That's as far as it went. He was no adviser on either domestic or foreign policy.

HESS: General Vaughan was a Reserve officer and not Regular Army. Do you recall if some of the Regular Army officers resented the President using a Reserve officer as the Military Aide rather than a Regular Army man?

NIXON: This was a natural feeling. If you aren't a West Pointer, you're a civilian as far as they're concerned. This was very natural. A West Point graduate is a professional soldier; that's his entire life. Anybody who comes into the Army from the Reserve is really a civilian. He's a civilian being a soldier for a time. When war comes along, the Reserves become part of the Army. They are just as expendable as the West Pointers, and, I might add, in far greater numbers. When the war is over, they go back in civilian life. If they remain in the Reserve, they go to camp for two weeks each summer and play soldier for a while.

I might add, this was carried to the point where there was a totally different description of the Army that's made up of the Reserve, the National Guard, and the West Pointers. One is the U.S. Army, USA, the other is the Army of the United States, AUS. That carries the distinction right down to its basis.

The professional soldiers, having pride in their service, would prefer that a West Pointer, a professional soldier, be the President's Military and/or Naval Aide. However, at the same time, they realized that the President had his own prerogatives. These often got to be quite personal things. It was natural for a President who has not been a professional soldier to want to have someone who has been close to him in civilian life, that he knows well, that he can trust, and who is a close friend, to be named his Military or Naval Aide.

Now, this happened in both cases with Truman. There was Harry Vaughan, and then early in the game there was Jake Vardaman, who was made his Naval Aide. Both of these appointments were based upon friendship. Later, the President made Admiral Foskett (well, it was Captain Foskett at the time), who had been captain of the cruiser Augusta, Naval Aide. The President went to the Potsdam Conference on the Augusta. He was impressed with Foskett's abilities and liked him, so he made him his Naval Aide. When Foskett's term of duty was up (and he was sent over to Annapolis to be superintendent of the Naval Academy), the President by that time had met Captain Robert Dennison on the voyage back from Rio. Captain Dennison had been in command of the battleship Missouri and the President liked him. So, he made him Naval Aide. In both instances, with Foskett and Dennison, they were professional Navy people.

There is one thing I wanted to add about the Military and Naval Aides. We must not forget that Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy was a professional soldier. He was a professional naval man, dating from his graduation at the Academy. He once told me about rounding Cape Horn in a sailing ship in the early days of his tour in the Navy. This was going back to the last century.

I took him aside on the deck of the Augusta coming back from Potsdam. I asked him his opinion of the atomic bomb which had just been dropped on Hiroshima. He sort of pooh-poohed it. He said, "Bob, this is just another weapon, and we've always developed larger, and larger weapons as we've gone along." He mentioned how Nobel had discovered dynamite. He was telling me that this was just another great high explosive paralleling the development of TNT.

HESS: I have heard that Admiral Leahy did not think that the atomic device would explode. Have you heard that?

NIXON: Well, I was surprised at this, if not appalled. Even at that early date when all we knew was that the atomic bomb was the equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT (which is an awful lot of TNT), and it had leveled an entire city.

To get back to the subject, Leahy had been Roosevelt's Chief of Staff at the White House. He then became Truman's Chief of Staff. Here was a professional military man, who was perhaps the closest adviser to the President on things that mattered. He was the adviser, not the Military Aide or the Naval Aide.

HESS: Did Admiral Leahy ever express an opinion of how he thought President Truman was doing as President?

NIXON: If he did I've forgotten. If he did, it would have been quite favorable, I'm sure, knowing Admiral Leahy. It must be remembered that professional military and naval people of the stature of a fleet admiral (which is the equivalent of the five star general of Eisenhower in the military area) do not express opinions of that type, probably not to anyone.

It's well-known that Leahy was a man of great versatility and profound wisdom. He had been appointed by Roosevelt to be our Ambassador to the Vichy government. Vichy was established after the collapse of France. It was completely dominated by the Hitler government. It was one of the few close sources of information about what was going on in Hitler's fortress Europe. He was appointed by Roosevelt, not only for his abilities and wisdom, but because he was a high-ranking naval officer in the American Navy and had a personal acquaintanceship with [Henri Philippe] Petain, the then French leader.

Now to get back to this access business at the White House. Each Press Secretary tends to run his shop in his own manner. When Charlie died of a heart attack at the White House, Joe Short was asked by the President to be his Press Secretary, and things changed markedly. The contrast being from white to black.

One of Joe's very first actions was to issue a flat order to all members of the White House staff that they could not have contacts with or give information to newsmen about anything, even the time of day or the state of the weather. Short told them that any contacts with the press had to be made by him, through his office. Anything that should be given to the press, should come to him. He would handle it and either clear it or not clear it. I might add that he had his Assistant Press Secretary and his staff quivering in their boots to such an extent that as far as serving the press, the Assistant Press Secretary was utterly useless.

NIXON: Yes. That's right. About the only thing that you could ever do with them was to take them a question about something that was in the news that you wanted to have the White House comment on one way or another. If you were trying to get access to Short, most of the time, you would get nowhere because he wouldn't let you in his office. He kept his door closed. You could tell his secretary you wanted to see him. Unless it was something of extreme importance, or something that he wanted to answer he would be too busy.

You could see Charlie Ross all the time, any time. As for guidance, I could only depend upon my experience, because it was a waste of time with both Tubby and Perlmeter. They were just useless for guidance. My reaction to it was what I've said about Short and his policies. His staff dared not, unless Short had told them that they could, and it had already been cleared. If you brought in something impending, and Short didn't want to be bothered, he would look ahead and say, "If anybody asks about this thing, thus and so can be said. So, that's the way it went.

HESS: Moving on from that topic to the topic of the Korean war. We have mentioned this already, but let's just start in with the weekend that you were in Kansas City, the weekend of the invasion of South Korea by North Korea during the latter part of June 1950.

NIXON: This was an exciting, and to some extent, a dreary frustrating day. The invasion was on June 24-25, depending on whether you were in this country or in Korea. It was a Saturday night, and Sunday, incident in this country.

During late Saturday evening (and this was unknown to me until the next day), Dean Acheson phoned the President at his home in Independence. Acheson was in Washington, and he told the President that the North Korean Communist army had invaded South Korea. Acheson told the President that this information was sparse and unconfirmed. There were no details. It wasn't known whether this was a full-scale invasion or whether it was just a few troops crossing the border for an incursion. These border incidents were happening, and even until today are still happening, with the North Koreans making deliberate border incidents.

The President had told Acheson to keep him informed. As uncertain as the information was, there was really nothing that he could do about it.

Eben Ayers, who was Assistant Press Secretary, was along with us on this trip. Charlie Ross for some reason had decided to remain in Washington. These weekend trips by the President to his Missouri home were quite frequent. Sometimes it got to the point where I felt I was spending more time in Missouri than I was in Washington because of the frequency of these trips.

Acheson called once again late at night, or early the first part of the morning. By that time, he had received sufficient information to make certain that this was a full-scale invasion.

The President got in touch with Ayers, and other members of his staff. All of us were staying at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, and Truman was staying out at his home in Independence. He told them to get ready to fly back to Washington immediately.

The staff was scattered. General Vaughan was visiting up in Glasgow, Missouri, his former home. The pilot of the President's airplane and members of his staff were scattered and difficult to round up.

After all, this was a Saturday evening on their own. There had been no hint that any great untoward event was impending.

About 7 o'clock Sunday morning, my phone rang. Ayers was on the other end of the line. He said, "Bob, get up to the press room right away." I knew from the urgency of this voice that something was going on that I had ought to know about in a hurry.

I pulled on my old trench coat over my pajamas again and raced out to go to the floor where we had a functioning press room with teletypewriters. I was the first one to get there. Promptness pays off.

Ayers then told me that we were going back to Washington immediately because the North Korean Communists had invaded South Korea. That was about all that we knew about it.

What a morning! I began writing as hard as I could write with the slim information that we had. I did not have the slightest idea how much of this was known to my office in Washington, or in New York, or anywhere in this country. My assumption was a natural one and a correct one. Everybody elsewhere was in bed on Sunday morning. This was a very private, confidential communication between MacArthur's headquarters, Dean Acheson, and the President. I was the source of information to the news media. It was Sunday morning. No newspapers were functioning. They didn't print again until Sunday night, but there was the radio news media.

Fortunately perhaps, Ayers disappeared to pack or to talk with the President again. We all had to prepare to leave. I say fortunately because very shortly I ran out of material to write and realized that I had to get to my hotel room to get on some clothes.

I remember one of the Western Union teletypists coming in the Press Room. I was the only one in the press room and I was typing my head off. She looked at me in this strange garb, pajamas, bedroom slippers...

NIXON: Yeah, and tousled hair, not believing her eyes. But I had to get to my room and pack. Then I had to get back to the press room and be sure that there was nothing else. I found out from Ayers that the President's plane was leaving, not from the Kansas City, Missouri airport, but from an Air Force installation, out near Kansas City, Kansas. I learned that the President might leave at any moment, just as soon as the plane could be put in order and the rest of the people could be rounded up.

I got in a cab and went out to this Air Force installation where the President's plane was sitting, but there was no crew. After a while they began arriving, one by one. At the very last moment, one member of the crew came racing out of an automobile to the plane, carrying on all of his spare uniforms and clothing, running as hard as he could to get in the plane.

Here again, I was the only newsman there. The others arrived later. When the President got there, it was around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I was the only one there when he arrived. I went up to him, and I said, "Well, Mr. President, have you heard anything more?"

By this time the engines were already beginning to turn on the plane. He said, "I'm going back to Washington, to consult with all of my top advisers, and then do what has to be done." With that he boarded the plane and took off.

There I was on the ground. The President was gone. How was I going to get back to Washington? Normally, when the President's plane takes off, we follow behind immediately. The arrangement was always made that we would be the first plane to land so we could be on the ground when the President's plane landed to do our work.

Our plane was chartered for our use alone. In this case, our plane chartered from American Airlines, was not in existance. Airlines keep their planes in use. When we charter a plane, it takes us to our destination, then flies off to carry regular passengers on some part of the line until we are scheduled to take off with the President. This was all normally arranged on schedule so the airline could have the plane back. In the case of a presidential campaign, charters work a little differently, because we are constantly traveling from one city to another city. The chartered plane stays with us. But in this case, it was a surprise.

I got a hold of Ayers. He told me that he had been in touch with the airline people, and they were trying to get a plane in service that could carry us (including members of the staff), back to Washington. Again, we were breakfastless and lunchless. I had to stay on this sort of barren Air Force installation. Since it was a Sunday, it was might quiet around there.

Finally an American Airlines plane was flown up all the way from Dallas, Texas. I saw a friendly face at the window of the control cabin. It was a pilot that I knew very well. He had many times piloted the charter planes that we were on, so I knew that finally we were going to get back to Washington. Meanwhile, the President had flown to Washington, landed, and gone to the Blair-Lee House.

NIXON: Yes. That was his residence. It was across the street and a few houses up in the next block on Pennsylvania Avenue. The house that is used as the residence for visiting foreign VIPs. When he talked with Acheson before leaving Kansas City, he told Acheson to round up advisers that should be at the meeting with him, which Acheson did.

All of these top people in the State Department and the armed forces, were in this meeting at Blair House that went well into the evening. As a result of further information and advice, he issued orders to General MacArthur in Japan to resist this invasion of South Korea.

Mind you, it wasn't just South Korea that was being attacked. It was our Army. It was small numerically, not well-equipped, and attacked by surprise, on a weekend, just like the Pearl Harbor attack. They were in Korea, where they had been since the Japanese surrender, to protect South Korea from further Communist expansion. In the same way that our forces were in South Korea, Communist forces occupied North Korea, and the complexion of that government was Communist.

I didn't see much of that meeting. I was still trying to get back to Washington.

NIXON: No, that had to be covered by our other people. When I say covered, they had to stand out on the street on Pennsylvania Avenue and see who came and went.

My recollection is that our plane didn't get back to Washington until around midnight. Remember this was not the day of jets. These were the best planes they had, but they were still four engine...

I went straight home to get some sleep to be able to be back on the job the next morning. Subsequently, the burden of the discussions and decisions, that were made there that night, came out, but that was some time later.

It seems to me that the details of that meeting were finally much later fed to a writer of the Saturday Evening Post. I know that it was highly secret and confidential at the immediate time.

It became apparent, bit by bit, that we were in a war, which was not called a war. We were in a "police action." This was the President's term.

There were adequate reasons for it. The cold war with Russia was going on. Communist China had become a great power. Intrinsic in all of this was that a declared war might spark a new war with Communist China and/or Russia. It was Russia that was the particular menace in the viewpoint back here.

HESS: What is your personal opinion? Do you think that we should have assisted the South Koreans as we did?

NIXON: There was nothing else that we could do. We had been attacked. Remember, our troops were almost driven out of Korea. They were ill-equipped, disorganized, and small numerically. They were pushed right down into the tip of Korea. There was almost an evacuation, and things were very desperate for them for quite a long while.

If we had gotten out of Korea under these circumstances and not defended ourselves, we would have suffered and accepted a very humiliating defeat. A great world power would have been humiliated by a relatively small Communist country, even though they were well equipped with Russian weapons. This may seem to be a small thing in itself, but it was a very large thing. The feeling here in Washington in our high circles of government, was to have accepted such a defeat would simply have been a green light to Russian communism and Chinese communism, for further expansion in the Far East. This could have meant an attack on Japan, and a Third World War with atomic weapons. That's why we had to fight.

HESS: It had been a belief that we should not engage in a land war in Asia, but as you point out, we had to.

Before we move on, are there any other things we should cover about Mr. Johnson?

NIXON: There was an incident when he first came into office that I've often wondered about as to the correctness of it.

When the President nominated Johnson to be Secretary of Defense, this was a reward for his being the money man for the 1948 campaign. He succeeded James A. Forrestal, who was the first Secretary of Defense, and had earlier during the war, been Secretary of Navy. Forrestal was ailing, but it wasn't an illness that confined him to bed. It turned out to be a problem of mind.

Johnson had an aide who was in uniform. He was one of these Midwest Reserve people, more politician than soldier. A uniform didn't make a man a soldier. This character, whose name I have long since forgotten, and other supporters of Johnson, did as peculiar a thing as I've ever heard of in public life. They gave him a testimonial dinner, a very large gathering, in the large banquet room of the Mayflower.

Words were to be said about what a great fellow Johnson was. Not after he had been in office for a year or two or three and was leaving the office, but saying all these things about him before he even sat down to his desk in the Pentagon. It was a most unusual occasion. They invited the President, and the President went. That's why I was there.

They also did what to me seemed to be a very cruel thing. (Probably this was not intentional. It was simply thoughtlessness, or a lack of thought.) They invited Forrestal to this dinner. Here was Forrestal in the position of having to listen to these full blown, lavish praises of a man who was succeeding him as Secretary of Defense. Forrestal was the man who should have been given the testimonial dinner. He was our first Secretary of Defense.. He had an excellent record. He had accomplished things. He had done well as Secretary of the Navy. But here, politely dismissed from office, he was put in a position of having to listen to these effulgent words about a successor who had not yet even lifted his pen.

I've often wondered, in all charity, what this did to Forrestal. My recollection is that he did not sit down at the banquet table and eat a full meal or participate in all of the words of great praise that were flying in the air. Out of politeness, he simply dropped by. He was put in this position that was uncalled for by back scratchers who were holding testimonial dinners for a man they hoped to gain things from before he had even become Secretary of Defense. This, without a doubt, was one of the most tasteless occasions that I remember happening in Washington in thirty-five years of close contact with Government and the White House.

As I've said, I've often wondered what effect this may have had on Forrestal's illness and his own self-destruction. I chatted with him briefly when he came by the dinner. I asked him what were his plans and so forth.

You could not believe the expression on his face at this gathering, just his whole facial reaction to this cruel and thoughtless thing that was done. It was ghastly, he looked like a man who just could not believe it.

HESS: We have discussed Mr. Louis Johnson, so we are up to the time of the trip that President Truman took to Wake Island to confer with General MacArthur in October 1950. When did you first become aware that such a trip was in the offing?

Two or three days before the trip, Charlie Ross told us in his daily news conference that this trip was in view, so that we could make our personal arrangements to go along.

HESS: Do you recall if any reasons were given as to why the President was taking this trip and General MacArthur was not coming to Washington for the meeting?

NIXON: Yes. General MacArthur, no doubt about it, was a very able general. He was also strongly political minded, which a soldier is not supposed to be. He had been William Randolph Hearst's candidate for the Presidency on a Republican ticket. I think, this goes back as far as 1936, but that is easily checked. In any event, he was Hearst's perennial candidate for the nomination on the Republican ticket. I suppose that would have been very pleasing, to MacArthur to have gotten the nomination, and/or to have become President. In any event, he was a strongly political minded general, which as it turned out, was finally to get him into trouble.

After the Japanese surrender, which he accepted aboard the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, he was made the commanding general of our occupation forces in Japan. He was the works. This became, under MacArthur, a principality. The officers on his staff built their own castle around him. His importance, which was important enough in itself, became more so. He literally had the decision of life or death over people.

He had led our armed forces in the Pacific, and he had gotten accustomed to running his own show. This stature of his in the Far East increased and increased and increased, because of the circumstances that I am trying to describe. Then the Korean war broke out. MacArthur frequently went over to Korea to direct things and then would go back to Tokyo. Through his military influence, and ability, the forces under him retrieved a very nasty situation, whereas for a time it looked like we were going to be pushed out of Korea and endure a costly and humiliating defeat.

By the time of the Wake Island meeting between the President and MacArthur, after some very bad weeks during the summer, MacArthur's forces had carried out the Inchon landing.

I guess you'd call it an end run, to use a football term. Inchon lies on the west coast of Korea, very close to Seoul and the 38th parallel which divides North Korea and South Korea. By making this landing in great force, the American forces got in behind the Communist North Koreans, who were further down this long and relatively narrow peninsula that makes up Korea. This meant that they had to back up and get out or they would be surrounded and annihilated. Pressure, of course, was being put upon them at the same time, by American forces further down the peninsula. The net result of the Inchon landing was that the North Korean Communist forces were pushed back to the 38th parallel. Things were going so well that it appeared back in Washington that the conflict was won. MacArthur again was a great hero.

Then a big question arose. Would we stop at the 38th parallel or would our forces go on into North Korea and force the surrender of the North Korean army. The primary reason that this was a very important question was Communist China. Would this bring China into the war and enlarge a relatively small though fierce conflict into a major war? Lurking over Communist China was Communist Russia. Would this bring Russia into the war. If so, all the bars were off and here was World War III, with us trying to fight seven thousand or more miles from the United States, with all the problems of communication and supply. There were perhaps mingled thoughts about this in Washington. But my recollection is, that asked this very important question at one of his press conferences, the President either said, or indicated, that we would go no further.

Obviously, this was communicated to General MacArthur in the form of a command. In any event, MacArthur was the "hot pursuit" type of general. He ignored the instructions given him by the Chiefs of Staff on the authority of the President. He went on in pursuit of the North Korean forces. A general, who is a field commander, is certainly entitled to make some military decisions that are necessary in the area of combat. But it's a grave mistake if he makes decisions which are of a political nature and involve very high policy which is decided back in Washington by a President and his advisers. It is worse still if he goes against the military commands and instructions sent him by the Chiefs of Staff, who are his superiors as far as command goes.

MacArthur, on the basis of his record, was a very headstrong man. He felt that as Commander in Chief in that area of operations he should make his own decisions, political impact or not. This was what got him in trouble. There had been some evidences of this before. Earlier he had simply ignored the command sent him by the Chiefs of Staff in Washington. He made his own decisions, and carried them out, even though they were counter to his instructions. He had feuded with General Marshall, who had just been made Secretary of Defense, and with General Omar Bradley, the Army Chief of Staff. That later led to MacArthur's recall to Washington by the President, and his dismissal.

After the Inchon end run was carried out successfully, it began to appear that the police action was nearing its end and that victory was in sight. President Truman decided on the advice of his top advisers: Marshall, Bradley, Acheson, etc., that MacArthur should come into Washington. This would have been the first time that he was in Washington since the Pearl Harbor attack.

NIXON: Yes. He refused to come home, for anything. He was running his principality in Japan. He didn't want to come down to the lower level of Washington government. I say lower level, this apparently was what his attitude turned out to be. The President sent MacArthur an invitation requesting that he return to Washington for a conference (which was a normal thing to do), and MacArthur refused.

A commanding general in a theater of operations doesn't refuse the request of a President. Even though you may be a five star general, and the current President of the United States was only a captain of field artillery in an earlier war, the President is Commander in Chief. His authority is above anyone else's authority and his wish is a command. MacArthur responded that he was too busy running the conflicts in Korea to come back to Washington for a conference with the President. He was working on all of the problems of victory which seemed to impend.

President Truman went back at him again, very politely. This time he invited MacArthur to come to Hawaii for the conference. Truman told him that he would fly out to Hawaii and bring along the Chiefs of Staff and the other important people in the Pentagon, such as Frank Pace, the Secretary of War, and representatives of the State Department because political questions were involved in the after victory. Again MacArthur told the President that he was sorry, he was just too busy.

Unless there are overriding reasons because the conduct of the war at the moment is critical, you just don't tell a President that. I might add that the President wasn't the only one. There was a chain of command. If this request had been made (and when I say request, it's a command), by the Chiefs of Staff, MacArthur should have responded. The Chief of Staff is over the field commander. Even though in MacArthur's case, he was really a wheel, five stars and all.

President Truman, who was a patient man and a reasonable man, said to his advisers, "Well, if he's too busy to come to Washington, and he feels his responsibilities are such that he is too busy to come to Hawaii, I'll fly up to Wake Island and meet him there." Wake Island is about twelve hundred miles by air from Tokyo.

The President went back to MacArthur again, for a third time, and told him, "I'll meet you half way. Your flight from Tokyo down to Wake Island takes only a few hours. We can confer. I'll bring all of my top people with me, the Chiefs of Staff, etc. This conference shouldn't last more than a few hours, a morning at the most, and then you can hop in your plane and fly back to Tokyo and you will not have been away from your responsibilities of the conflict for more than a day at the most. I'll meet you half way."

Actually it was much more than half way. This was just a Truman expression, a Trumanism. Wake Island is something like four or five thousand miles from Washington.

Finally, MacArthur was put in a situation where he could not say no. He would not be away from his responsibilities as long as the President was.

In early October the President and his advisers, plane after plane load of people (including myself) took off from Washington and flew to an Army Air Force field near San Francisco. The name that sticks in my mind is Hamilton Field. We refueled there and flew the more than two thousand miles further to Honolulu where the plane was again refueled. Everybody was briefed by the Air Force (and mind you these were Air Force planes) on survival, what to do and what not to do if the plane came down in this vast ocean. How to get rubber rafts out, inflate them, etc.

We stayed outside of Honolulu, at some portion of the Pearl Harbor naval installation, for a few hours while all these technical things took place. The President visited around the island, conferred with the Governor, and observed the amenities. Then we took off for Wake Island.

These were four engine prop planes capable of a normal cruising speed of about 220 miles an hour, not the jets of today. They were the best that we had at that time. We flew, and flew, and flew. Three or four thousand miles is a long way. We flew all day and all night, and landed early the next morning on this tiny little Wake Island, a small strip of sand with virtually no vegetation. It was just a barren island in the far reaches of the Pacific.

Again, the personalities came into show. A President is entitled, by his very authority in the position he holds, to be received by whomever he is visiting, but that didn't happen at Wake Island. MacArthur let all of them arrive first, then the great general flew in, and his plane landed. Mind you, Wake Island was, in a sense, in MacArthur's bailiwick. He should have been the host. Certainly his authority was lesser than the President's and many of the others there, the Chief of Staff, Omar Bradley or Frank Pace the Secretary of War.

When the great general arrived, it was they who had to stand at the bottom of the ladder and receive the general who should have been their host. He should have been there to receive them, but that wasn't MacArthur's way. He wanted to be top dog. This, I suppose, was not an accident. He knew when the President would arrive at Wake Island. He knew exactly what the weather conditions were that can have an effect on these long flights. This was deliberate. This was to show what he considered his vast authority, vaster than the President of the United States, vaster than the Chief of Staff, who was his commander, or anybody else. This was an unspoken thing to put the President and the others in their proper place.

The MacArthur plane landed on the strip and taxied up, and the usual things were done. The tall ladder was pushed up to the side door, then the great general stepped out on the upper platform (with his assembled uniformed staff behind him) and viewed the scene. He halted there for moments, and looked down upon the President and these other top military people, who were standing humbly at the bottom of the ladder waiting for him to descend. I repeat, it should have MacArthur at the bottom of the ladder. MacArthur made it the reverse.

The President shook hands with MacArthur very cordially. MacArthur hardly glanced at him. Some photographs of this event were taken by news photographers who were along, Air Force, Navy, and what all photographers took pictures as a matter of news and record. MacArthur’s face was turned toward the cameras.

This was the sort of atmosphere it was, and the setting and the way it happened. The President was cordial, after all he had admiration for MacArthur. MacArthur had proved himself as a soldier. MacArthur never smiled once to show any cordiality. His face was like it was cast of stone. He lacked the simple cordiality that you would expect.

The President had arranged to meet with MacArthur alone. To confer with him where they could talk with privacy. Meanwhile, the others in his party, the big wheels from the Pentagon and State Department, would confer with their "opposite numbers" on MacArthur's staff. Some of the problems involved were postwar problems. What did you do to rehabilitate South Korea, which was devastated by this conflict? What did we do about preventing another incursion by the North Koreans? What did we do about returning our forces to Japan, and/or the United States? There were many such technical matters to be threshed over and views put forward and given later decisions, in addition to some few overriding things affecting the war itself, which appeared to be about won.

The President and MacArthur climbed into a staff car. They sat in the back seat together, and went off to a little one-story cinder block house, off to the side of the air strip, for their conference. This conference was supposed to be a private matter in which both the President and MacArthur could converse and talk freely with no record of their actual conversation. It was the President's understanding, and it was MacArthur's understanding. But, unknown to either, in an adjoining room, with a lattice door through which sound penetrated as though the door were open, there was a young lady secretary named Vernice Anderson. She was a secretary to Ambassador Philip C. Jessup, the Ambassador at Large. Apparently without instructions being given to her to do so (and frankly I have never been sure of this), Miss Anderson took it for granted that if she had been placed in this room, and she was a stenographer, that the reason was a simple one; that she was there to make a record of the meeting and what went on. In any event, that is what she did.

This conference, between the two, lasted a good part of the morning. Meanwhile the staffs were conferring. Once the meeting was over with between the President and MacArthur, everybody packed up and the flights were started back to Hawaii and Tokyo.

As it turned out, the few reporters, including myself, who were along ran into an absolute shambles as far as communications were concerned. They were almost nonexistant, as we found out after we got to Wake Island. Before we left Washington I had gone to Charlie Ross and asked him about communications facilities. Charlie had assured me that the Navy had "adequate" communications facilities on Wake Island, and that was what would be used to send our news dispatches back to Honolulu, from there they would be relayed to San Francisco. I had my doubts.

I told Charlie that in view of the importance of this meeting and the large volume of the news copy that would come out of it, that I would appreciate it very much if he would run another check. I had learned fast how inadequate Navy or any other kind of communications could be thousands of miles away from normal facilities. I also asked Charlie if additional communications facilities couldn't be made available. These were readily available through the Army Signal Corps or the Navy.

I remembered that when we had been aboard a destroyer, that a great deal of additional radio equipment, radio operated teletype-writers and so forth, had always been taken along, and we were in good shape. Either Ross was assured by the Navy that the communications were adequate, or he was too busy thinking of other things and just didn't take any action. When we got out there, we found that there was one single sending facility to take care of thousands of words from a group of reporters. This facility also was used for Navy communications, and naval communications took priority over news dispatches.

We were in a bad fix. We had to settle on something that reporters never like to agree to, because they want to compose and write their own reports and their own dispatches, with their own name over the story. We had to agree that there would be two stories written, both were what were called pool stories. This meant that the three press association correspondents together would write one dispatch. My recollection is that this was limited to five hundred words at the most; it may have been longer. The several other reporters that represented the individual newspaper press, not only of the United States, but of such things as the Reuters agency, pooled together on a single story themselves. It had to be done, so we faced it. Then we found out that in addition to these two stories, that Ross had agreed with the representative of the New York Times (who had apparently raised enough Cain to make him finally say okay), that he was to be privileged to write his own individual story. Well, all hell-fire broke loose!

NIXON: What Ross' reasons were, who could say. The New York Times as I've said before, has great prestige, and this may have been it.

All in all, it was not a happy situation. The representatives of the other newspapers who felt they were just as important as a reporter from the New York Times, got onto him. So much Cain was raised, that my understanding is, that this was rescinded. The place was in an uproar in either event. The circumstances wound up so that the Truman-MacArthur conference was very poorly and very inadequately covered.

NIXON: No, I didn't. The circumstances were such that there was just no opportunity. They got off the plane behind MacArthur. They stood around with him while he was greeted by the President. As soon as the President and MacArthur got in their car and were driven off, they piled into staff cars and went off for their session with the other wheels from Washington. When it was all over, and they were getting in their plane to go back to Tokyo, I was having to write the pool story for the three press associations.

NIXON: No, we weren't. This was a really closed affair, top secret. As I have related, Miss Vernice Anderson, who made the verbatim record of this meeting and conference, wasn't supposed to be around. No record was supposed to be made of the critical questions. At the end of the conference, a communiqué was written on an agreed basis between the two conferees on what it should contain, and what it should not contain. A relatively brief communiqué was typed and handed to us. Ross very probably gave us a little background color on the conference itself. That is, where it was held, etc. I am sure he did, but I just had no recollection of that now at all. That was expected, and so I'm sure Charlie did his job and did that. It's difficult to remember because we were fighting everything at the moment, mostly time.

This was the critical element, because we were going to have to pile back into an airplane and return to Honolulu, not at our convenience, but at the convenience of others. This battle was also going on between the special correspondents (those representing the other newspapers), over the idea that one should be given the privilege of sending a separate dispatch while the others were having to pool. Correspondents can be a very angry and insistent lot when they feel that they are being abused and misused. I listened to all this heated conversation and shouting that was going on out of one ear while I was writing the pool story for the press associations.

HESS: I believe the meeting was held in two different sessions; one where there were several people present, Mr. Truman and General Bradley and the others with General MacArthur and his people; and then the session where the young lady was listening behind the door was the private session between President Truman and General MacArthur, alone in a room, just by themselves, and that was the critical meeting.

HESS: Did you get a chance to speak to the people who were present in the first meeting, where there were several people? Did you get a chance to speak to, say, General Bradley or some of the others who may have been there?

NIXON: Precisely. Now, that you mention it, I'm sure that is the way it took place. The President and MacArthur in a first meeting with…

NIXON: ...these other top people, like Omar Bradley, and then the private session. That is the way it had to be. That is the way it would be. But my memory has concentrated upon this single session out of which so much later grew.

This relatively brief communiqué that we were handed at the end of the conference, said very little if anything. It had no bearing in reference or content to the what we later learned were the real problems that were discussed. It had something to do with Japan; this was a cover up. You see MacArthur was the Commander in Chief of our occupation forces in Japan. So, it seemed logical that...

NIXON: This meeting with MacArthur was the first time that anyone on that level had even laid eyes on him since Roosevelt conferred with him several years earlier in the middle of the Pacific war against Japan.

There were problems with Japan concerning the occupation, but this communiqué was issued to draw attention away from the critical questions in Korea, which were the real reasons for discussions.

There was this reference to Japan. I wish I had a copy of the newspaper that I saw when I got back to San Francisco, and the eight column headline over my dispatch, my name. I just remember that Japan was one of the words in the story about the communiqué. Then the communiqué also (if my memory is correct), had some reference to the rehabilitation by the United States of devastated South Korea.

The burden of the whole thing was that we were on the verge of victory, the conflict would be over in a few weeks time. I might add that President Truman later told me that General MacArthur had assured him that the conflict in Korea would be over by Christmas. Here it was in the middle of October. The war would be over in two and a half months, and he would be able to send two divisions back to the United States.

HESS: Do you recall Mr. Truman saying anything about General MacArthur's statement that the Chinese Communists would not enter the war?

I have related how misleading the contents of this communiqué were. With the exception of color, a picture description of Wake Island and the whole circumstance of the meeting, that communiqué just was barren and very misleading. Nobody was talking. All were, I'm sure, pledged to secrecy by the President.

It was much later that the President told me the second thing of critical importance. He was assured, he said, by General MacArthur, that the Chinese Communists would not come into the war under any circumstances, including the pursuit of the South Koreans up to the Yalu River, Korea's border with Communist China. This in a very short time, did bring the Communist Chinese into the war, and enlarged it immediately into such a perilous situation for our forces, that our army was nearly wiped out at the Chosen Reservoir, near the Yalu River.

This was mid-winter, everything was frozen which made movement of Army vehicles very difficult and precarious. Only very valiant fighting, permitted our forces to escape annihilation, and finally to fight their way back to a port on the Korean coast, where there was an evacuation, as the saying goes, "in the nick of time," because the Communist Chinese army had swarmed in across the Yalu River into North Korea in massive force with very short lines of communication and supply, and they were there to lick us.

Oral History Interview with Robert G. Nixon

Oral History Interview with
Robert G. Nixon