Truman Library - Robert G. Nixon Oral History Interview, November 23, 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 23, 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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, at the end of our last interview we were discussing Mr. Truman's return to Jackson County at the end of his term of office.

NIXON: Yes. When a President leaves the White House, the door behind him is not completely closed. He may be President one day and ex-President the next day, but the obligations of the Presidency, to a considerable extent, go with him. The authority is gone, but many obligations remain. While he is no longer President, there is a tremendous holdover from eight years in the White House. He needs offices of his own. He needs a staff, secretaries, and so forth. He continues to get a vast volume of mail which has to be handled and answered. He continues to get requests for help from people all over the country. In a sense, he has to carry on. He still has a great deal of work to do.

With this in mind, the President rented an office suite in the Federal Reserve Building in Kansas City. He had a private office for himself and one for his secretary Rose Conway. There was a large outside office for other members of the staff assisting Rose Conway.

The morning after his arrival in Independence from Washington, the President was able once more to drive his own car. While in the White House, he had driven a car on a couple of other occasions, which caused great consternation in the press.

We had gone to visit Stan Woodward and his wife near Charlottesville, Virginia. They had a beautiful home in the hills, not far from Thomas Jefferson's famous home. Coming back from there on a Sunday morning, the President insisted on taking the wheel of an open car and driving it at an 80 to 90 mile an hour clip, over these narrow, winding, high crowned Virginia roads to Washington.

On another occasion, he did the same when we were out in Washington State visiting Mon Walgren, then the Governor of Washington. We drove up to Mt. Rainier and coming back the President drove himself in an open care at a very rapid gait around those mountain roads. As I say, both of these two occasions caused some consternation when they were duly reported in the Nation's news media.

The norm, for any President, is that he never does these things for himself. They are all done for him. A Secret Service man is assigned as the driver of presidential cars. A second Secret Service man is always in the other front seat of the car.

Once back in his own home town of Independence, the President found that he, now, could do these things again. The morning after his return to Independence, he got into his open car and drove the fifteen miles or so into Kansas City. He parked his car in a parking lot adjacent to the Federal Reserve Building and walked across the street to the entrance where I was waiting. With him was one Secret Service agent who was assigned to the ex-President for security reasons. We all walked into the Federal Reserve Building, got into the elevator, and went up to the floor where the President's new offices were located. The Secret Service agent was a few steps ahead, and, as usual, he started to open the door. The President said, in a loud voice, "Please, wait. Let me open my own door. This is the first time in eight years that I have been able to open my own door, and I'm going to do it now." The Secret Service agent smiled and drew back. The President swung the door open, with a big broad smile on his face, and we all trooped into his office.

HESS: Approximately how many interviews with him did you have, or, what do you recall about that period of time? Just how often did you see Mr. Truman during that week or ten days?

NIXON: I saw him every day. Through a long period of frustrations over such things as the Krock interview, I had been determined to break the door down myself. Now this was an extremely difficult thing to do, because I represented one of three press associations. That meant that the other two press associations were my competitors. For a President to extend a privilege to one, and exclude the other two, was almost impossible to achieve.

Several weeks before the President was to leave office (this was after the election), I figured that the time was now ripe, finally, at long last. So, I wrote the President a letter and gave it to Roger Tubby.

No, I'm mistaken. Let's erase that. I didn't trust Tubby. I didn't give it to him. I gave it to the President direct.

NIXON: For the reason that I just explained. The competitive nature of the representatives of the three press associations. I was about to say I had entrusted this letter to Roger Tubby to give the President, but my recollection is that I did not for this reason I've just explained.

NIXON: He was Press Secretary to the President. As such, he had to guard against favoritism. In other words, if I gave the letter to him to give to the President, I would have to let him read the letter. I couldn't because, in this letter, I was pointing out to the President that he was now virtually on the point of leaving office and that I would like an exclusive interview. I sent my letter directly to the President. After he read it, and gave it some thought, he called in Roger Tubby. Tubby apparently said, "You cannot give an exclusive interview to Bob Nixon. You can give him an interview if you wish, but if you do so, you must also call in the other regulars." So, Tubby upset my apple cart right there.

That evening I received a telephone call at my residence from Tubby. He said, "The President will see you at 9:30 tomorrow morning for a half hour."

He had arranged for me to come in a private entrance so the other newsmen covering the White House wouldn't know anything about this. So, I went to the White House the following morning, having communicated this to my office, in the belief that I was finally getting an exclusive interview.

I sat down with the President in his office that morning, with Tubby leaning over our shoulders. I questioned him about his administration and his tenure in office. Frankly, I didn't probe too deeply. The fact that this was an exclusive interview clothed it in rather regal array.

I had only thirty minutes to talk with him. Covering the events of eight years in thirty minutes was not a simple thing to do. This was all off-the-cuff, I hadn't prepared written questions ahead of time. The nature of the interview did not call for that.

As I was leaving, with my "exclusive" interview, the President said a strange thing to me. He said, "Bob, you're going to have to go along with me on this." Frankly, I didn't know what he was talking about. As I later learned, it was this tunneling by Tubby that he was referring to.

In getting this interview, I had agreed with the President that I would turn my story over to Tubby for clearance. That meant to me, that Tubby would take my story, go over it himself, and take it in to the President. They would then tell me if they objected. In other words, this could not go on our wires until they released it.

A day went by after I had taken this down to Tubby. My New York office was screaming, "When are you going to get that interview?" Another day went by, not a word; another day went by, still not a word.

I went to Tubby and I said, "What in hell is going on? The acetylene torch is right up against my backsides."

Tubby replied something to the effect, "Well, we're not quite ready to release it yet, but the story's all right. I'll let you know when you can have it back."

Finally, he did release it to me. It was put on our wires as an exclusive interview with the President. Meanwhile Tubby had not intimated that I had opened a door, not only for myself, but for all of the regulars around covering the White House: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Star, the AP, the UP, even down to news representatives of the Mutual Broadcasting Company, who regularly covered the White House.

I will admit that they at least granted me the privilege to get the interview out, but then like a drum fire these interviews began spilling out all over the place: in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, in the Washington Star, and on the radio. You can imagine what happened to me. My New York office was outraged. But how could I tell them what I didn't know. Tubby had given me no intimation of this whatsoever. The only thing that I had was this rather cryptic remark from the President when he said, "Bob, you're going to have to go along with me."

I think I was treated very badly by Roger Tubby. In a sense, I don't blame him because again, he was trying to keep the heat away from himself. If my exclusive interview had hit the Nation's press, alone, he would have gotten the same heat that the President got when he gave that exclusive to Krock several years earlier. So he was trying to protect himself. The thing that I did resent and resent to this day, is the fact that he did not intimate to me what was going on. He pulled the rug out from underneath me. I had found that I had opened the door not only for myself, but for my competitors. Now, this was a dirty deal.

NIXON: That's right. This was a dirty deal. I was burning, and I burned for weeks. I was determined that I was just not going to have it rammed down my throat and take it.

When the President left office I knew that Tubby was no longer around. I didn't have to deal with him and his machinations. He couldn't do me dirt again. So, I arranged with my New York office, to go on the train with Truman back to Independence and write the stories about an ex-President's return to his home town.

On the train going to Independence I got Rose Conway aside. She knew what had been going on. I talked to her, and I pointed out what had happened. I also pointed out that I was sure that Mr. Truman did not want, over night to become a forgotten President. He was completely overshadowed, at the moment, by the adulation of the Nation's news media for Eisenhower. I felt, that in justice both to the President and to myself, that I still was due an exclusive interview of my own, unconnected with any of my competitors. I said, "Rose, will you please take this word to the President?" Which she did. It was arranged. I forget whether Rose got in touch with me or the President got in touch.

I saw him every day following his return. I would sit up in his outside office half of the day writing stories about an ex-President back home. In any event, the President set up an exclusive interview, and this one was a real exclusive. This was picked up by the New York Times, which we didn't serve, even though I had copyrighted it. I guess my New York office permitted them to use the guts of it. This was the interview in which the President said that the Russians did not then have the atomic bomb.

In the interview, I said, "Mr. President, you announced sometime ago that the Russians had exploded an atomic device. The wording struck me as rather odd. I wondered why the word "device" was used and not "atomic bomb."

The President said, "They haven't got the bomb. They exploded, as far as we know, an atomic device. We do not believe that they have the bomb because they don't have the know-how. They set off a device, but that doesn't mean they have the bomb."

I had my story. I covered some other areas, but this was the big story. This was the eight column headline. So, away I went to my telephone at the hotel to tell New York. I had, again, agreed that I would let the President see what I had written before it went on the wire. So, instead of dictating a story flat out on the long distance phone, as I would normally do, I sat down and very carefully wrote this interview. The President went over it, word by word, and approved it.

This frankly, was a self-protective device, as well as a protective device for the President. He approved it, as near as I can recall, without any change whatsoever. This time I was able to quote him directly. There were no longer any bars on that, as there had been when he was in the White House.

I then went over to the main office of Western Union and stood there while the girl on the teletypewriter transmitted the story to New York, protecting it right down to the last moment.

This thing created a sensation. It was eight column headline all over the country. There were speeches on the floor of Congress in both the House and Senate. Even President Eisenhower had to get on the national network, TV, and say, in effect, "They do too, have the atomic bomb"

Eisenhower felt that Truman had pulled the rug out from underneath him, and that a matter of major foreign policy between this country and Soviet Russia was involved. If the Russians did not have the atomic bomb, and we did, we were the sole power in the world with this incredible weapon. This could completely change our conduct of foreign policy vis-a-vis the Russians. If they did have the atomic bomb, they were on an equivalent basis with us. While we perhaps had more atomic bombs than the Russians had, they, if they had the bomb, still had the power to use this frightful and devastating weapon. So, this was really a can of worms.

HESS: Were you still meeting daily with Mr. Truman while all this controversy raged?

NIXON: He just sat back as pleased as could be at the sensation he had caused. I have felt at the time, and have been sure ever after, that he was pleased to do so. He did so intentionally. He was not going to become overnight a forgotten President. That is the psychology that I used in opening the door to this exclusive interview. On top of it, I then got, day after day, for about a week, a series of additional exclusive interviews. On about the third one of these, the Chicago Herald-Examiner, on its front page, ran a headline which read, "More White House Secrets."

I would like to say one thing that I was very careful to do. The regular UP White House reporter had jumped ship, he did not...

NIXON: That's right. He had gone over to Eisenhower. As he'd jumped aboard the Dewey train, as previously chronicled. He did not go out to Independence aboard the train taking Truman home, but the AP man did. Tony Vaccaro stayed on for about three days.

NIXON: No, nothing. This was a complete exclusive. Apparently no one else was even thinking of this. Remember I said I was burning. I was still burning, and I was not going to let this thing go down without another try. I got this atomic bomb interview, but I was very careful not to hurt Tony. I like Vaccaro; he was a very nice fellow.

HESS: Even though he was a competitor, was he somewhat easier to deal with and be around than Mr. Smith?

NIXON: Of course, he was. But let's face it, these characters team up on you. If there's one worm in the apple, there's a tendency to team up against the third individual, and that's the way Smith operated. Tony did work with Smith, but I liked him anyway. I mean he was never in my way. This Smith character was.

But I waited. I knew when Tony was going back to Washington. I wanted just to protect Tony as an individual, knowing the bombshell that this would be. So I waited before I filed my story with New York. I made sure that he was aboard a plane returning to Washington and would be back in Washington when this story appeared, which was protective on my part for him.

If his office said, "Well, why didn't you get this story?" Tony could simply say, "Well, this happened after you ordered me back to Washington." I was trying to protect Tony, which I was always glad I did. I didn't have to. This is a highly competitive business, but I just felt that was the decent thing to do.

I filed this story late in the afternoon. It went on the night wire for the following morning paper. The next morning around 8:30 or 9, I walked over to the Federal Reserve Building to go up to the President's office. I wanted to see what was going to happen. Outside of the building I ran into the Washington reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch whom I knew quite well. He was...

NIXON: No, Pete was in charge of the bureau. This young fellow's last name was Wood, his first name escapes me, but it's in the Directory. I ran into him, and he was waving a paper in the air with an eight column headline. He said, "Bob is this story right? You didn't just make this up did you?"

We went on up to Truman's office. He had been there since the crack of dawn as usual. There were a bunch of other reporters in the outside office clamoring to see him. Finally the President came out of his office and sat down with us. They started firing these questions away at him. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat, pleased as could be at the sensation that he had created. And he said, "Well, fellows, I guess Bob Nixon just scooped you."

NIXON: And I said, "Well, young fellow, don't feel bad, I've got twenty or thirty years experience on you, and I guess you just have to accept these things."

As I say, I kept right after Truman, and he cooperated. I turned loose more than this one exclusive story. The other reporters had to do the follow-up. They were free to follow-up and write stories saying, "Yes, this is what the President said," which gave it very wide coverage and use. I might add, it polished a few apples for me. I was able then with Truman's cooperation, to set up the series of interviews, day after day.

Finally, after several of these had come out, my New York office finally sent me a wire and said, "That's enough of those exclusive interviews."

Mind you, Truman would never have done this himself. He played things very fair and square. This was Tubby's doing. I suppose the President felt that he should take the advice of his Press Secretary. The President was never as knowledgeable about the nuances of news coverage as a Press Secretary would be. Anyway, I retrieved all the ground that had been lost.

HESS: Do you recall what other items of interest were raised in the subsequent interviews? What was discussed?

NIXON: I would have to find the clippings. There was a very broad area of coverage. Memory serves me on the big one, because that is the one that made the real nationwide splash. You don't write a story every day in your life that makes Senators and Congressmen get up on the floor of the Congress and make lengthy foreign policy speeches. You don't write every day a story that makes a new President get on a national network to answer an exclusive statement by the former President. So, that was the bombshell, and I'll be glad to try to find the clippings, but...

NIXON: Yes. The others came along, and they were highly readable and full of interest, but memory...

HESS: Do you recall if Mr. Truman had anything to say at this time about any plans that he may have had for his future? The first week to ten days out of office?

NIXON: He didn't know quite what, if anything, he would do. This was a tentative thing, but he knew he was going to prepare his Memoirs. This of course, meant a tremendous amount of work for him and the people assigned by the publisher with whom he had a publications contract.

His heart was really in the future of the Truman Library. He was to have an office there and devote himself to whatever functions were required in setting up a library of that sort. He told me that he was determined that no one should exploit the Presidency. He was a man with the utmost regard for the dignity of the Presidency, of the power of the Presidency, and of the obligations of the Presidency.

I'm sure people who didn't know him on a first person basis might snicker a little when I say this, because they would recall certain times when his administration wasn't too dignified. Nevertheless, he had a tremendous, deep seated feeling about the Presidency. So much so that he never referred to himself with a first person pronoun. It was always in the third person. He used the term "the President." He wouldn't say, "I have decided." He always said, "The President had decided." This was the phrase that he used when he was riding up to Capitol Hill with Eisenhower the day of his inauguration.

Come to think of it, I may have misquoted him to the extent of the use of the first person. When he told Ike why he brought his son back from Korea, Truman said, "The President ordered him back. The President felt that a son was entitled to attend the inauguration of his father as President."

This part of the picture. He was determined that no one should hire him just to exploit his name and the fact that he had been President. He was offered a job, as a figurehead, let's face it, with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company at a hundred thousand dollars a year.

This was kept very hush-hush, but I finally pinned it down with Matt Connelly. The President turned that down. That was a lot of money to turn down, but he did so because he knew that this offer was being made only for his name and for them to make use of a former President.

I believe he also received an offer from Collier magazine to do some articles. This probably came to him through Bill Hillman, who with Dave Noyes was helping him to put together the two volume Memoirs. Hillman had some connection with Collier magazine that had existed for several years. He was their sort of wheeler-dealer in Washington, their representative there.

HESS: Do you recall if Hillman and Noyes were in Kansas City at the time that you were?

NIXON: Oh, yes, they both were there. One of the reasons, I remember Bill being there, was that Hillman, very agitated, went to the President and said, "Mr. President, would you please stop giving those exclusive interviews to Bob Nixon, there won’t be a thing left for our book."

NIXON: The President told me. That amused me and pleased me. Bill knew I was getting an awful lot of stuff. I saw him afterwards and I said, "Look, Bill, get that hanged dog look off your face and forget about it. Remember, these stories that I have been writing are read today and forgotten tomorrow. They'll never interfere with the President's Memoirs." (I assumed they would be a step by step relation of what went on in the President's tenure.) "You'll find sensation enough that I've never revealed. So, quit worrying."

HESS: One obvious question I should ask about the interview. Do you think that Mr. Truman thought that they did not have the atomic bomb, or did he make this comment thinking that they did have the atomic bomb for controversy?

NIXON: How can you put your finger on it? I have often wondered. I never asked the President. That's something you just didn't do. That would be making a liar out of the President, wouldn't it? Of course, we know, the President was mistaken. The Russians did have the atomic bomb.

The President was a very honest man. He was a very forthright individual. He didn't have the devices of subtleties, dealing under the table and that sort of thing. So, I wondered quite frankly, at the time, "If you have an atomic device why don't you have an atomic bomb?" To me it was that simple.

I've explained what he said, he said, "They have a device, but they don't have the know-how to build the atomic bomb." It had cost us 2.6 billion dollars to bring the first atomic bomb into being.

Even though I had had little doubts in the back of my mind when I got this interview, if this was what the President said, that was enough for me. Mind you, he had just come from the White House where he had day-to-day access to all the top intelligence in the Nation. He had everything that was fed into the Pentagon and State Department. If he was saying this, that was good enough for me. I was very careful to be sure that I wrote this story from notes that I took carefully when I was interviewing him. I took the precaution of taking this written interview, back to him so that he could cross every T and dot every I.

NIXON: He read it with extreme care. He may have suggested little changes. Memory doesn't serve on a tiny detail of that sort after so long a time, but if he made any suggestions for changes, I would have made them right there. He probably did make some changes. In other words, I was going to be very sure that this was not my story. This was his story.

I realized the dynamite it held. I knew I had a terrific story. I wanted to be sure that there was no comeback on it. He knew what he was saying. There was no possibility of a denial. This was too explosive. I protected both him and myself right down to the line.

Truman was always a very fair, square, honest person. He knew the sensation he was going to create, and he wanted to create a sensation because he didn't want to be buried under the Eisenhower avalanche like poor President Hoover when he left the White House. Truman was determined that this was not going to happen.

HESS: I thought we should discuss that a little further though, because President Eisenhower was quite sure that the Russians had the atomic bomb, or he would not have gone on nationwide radio during the first few days of his administration. If the new incoming President had this information during his first few days, the outgoing President would have the same information in the last few days, at least.

NIXON: Seems perfectly logical. Of course, it's possible the President was playing a little game. Yet, when you think of the enormity of this thing, you wonder.

He was angry with Eisenhower; there's no doubt about it. This breach was such that when years later Eisenhower went to Kansas City to make a speech, Mr. Truman got in touch with a top staff member of Eisenhower's...

NIXON: Just a moment, I'm going to have to dismiss that for the moment to complete what I'm going to say.

The ex-President wanted to call on the new President, Eisenhower, as a matter of courtesy, but Eisenhower refused to see him.

Now, as to who this was, I don't recall. I'm not sure whether it was the Press Secretary James Hagerty or Jerry Persons. I knew at one time who it was, but my memory just doesn't serve me. In any event, Truman got a turn-down. This was a rather unheard of thing.

Good heavens, when I opened the door at the White House for all of my competitors, the President began seeing these characters one right after the other. This is why the release on my interview was being held up by Roger Tubby. They wanted to get all these other characters in one by one to talk with the President.

NIXON: Why, sure! While I was on tenterhooks waiting to get Tubby to turn my interview loose.

HESS: During this period of time you knew nothing about the others going in at all?

NIXON: Of course, they did. I dare say that each one of these characters thought that he was getting an exclusive interview, so he wouldn't whisper it.

NIXON: Yeah. Anyway that's the way it went. By the time a half a dozen, or a dozen of the regulars had been called in and...

NIXON: They had pretty well covered it. The only sensations left were the things I knew. I knew that the Russians had tried to get a base in Libya.

NIXON: At Potsdam. They wanted to open up the Mediterranean to the Russian fleet.

It was just things like that, that I had come by one way or another, either by the use of my own mind or by some things the President had told me privately. Anybody else might have known these things and kept them in their mind.

I made a point of squirreling these things away. When I would get hold of something, I didn't forget about it the next week. I had these tucked away for future reference.

When I brought up this atomic bomb thing, Truman knew the explosive nature of what he was saying. My God, this was a sensation. Everybody had accepted the fact that the Russians had the atomic bomb and had for two or three years. Here was a man just out of the White House saying, "No, they don't."

HESS: I believe that announcement was made in September of 1949, but we can check on that?

NIXON: I know it was September. I think September 21 or 23, but '49 makes sense too.

HESS: We mentioned Bill Hillman. Do you recall seeing Mr. Hillman around the White House at the time that he was working on the book Mr. President?

NIXON: Oh, yes. Bill was an old friend of mine. During the thirties he had been chief of our London bureau. Sometime during 1939, he began making occasional broadcasts for NBC.

In those days the radio networks didn't have the huge news organizations that they now have. They had a few commentators, but they depended upon the press associations for news.

Bill began making occasional broadcasts from London. He shouldn't have done that because in this business you don't work for two masters. Apparently, this didn't make him too popular with our head men in New York.

During that summer of ‘39, he left INS and continued to do his broadcasts from London for NBC. (I believe it was NBC, later it was Mutual Broadcasting when he was in Washington, but I think it was NBC at that time.) He also made a connection with Collier magazine, not to write articles, but to do their contact work in London where he had been head of our bureau for several years. That was an important post. It was important to the British because of American opinion. So he had fairly broad contacts, among the British Government, our Embassy, and so forth. He was a colleague. He and I worked together in London through a good part of the blitz.

After May '40, Britain was shut off from the rest of the world. It was completely isolated. There was no way of getting in or out. The last ship had gone home to America taking what Americans were in England back to the States with them. The only Americans there were a half a dozen or a dozen foreign correspondents. The U-boats had completely shut off Britain from the rest of the world.

In other words, if you were in England, bless your heart, you were there for the duration, the importance of your work required that you come back to the United States. This was more or less confined to the Embassy people and the British Government representatives.

Anyway, Hillman wanted to come back to the United States. So he got cozy, very cozy, with Joe Kennedy our Ambassador. At this time, Kennedy was having considerable differences of opinion with President Roosevelt. Joe was convinced that England was done. Come an invasion, which the Germans were certainly going to announce at any time, it was all over. He disagreed with Kennedy. This led to Kennedy's resignation, which was requested by President Roosevelt.

I should add that there were a great number of people who agreed with Joe Kennedy's viewpoint. Roosevelt preferred to take the boarder view, and he was correct. Joe Kennedy was on the ground and took the shorter point of view.

On the ground, in England, there was considerable evidence to support Joe Kennedy's fears. This was not only, as Churchill said, "England's finest hour," it also was England's darkest hour. The fate of England was touch and go. Had the German Luftwaffe been able to overpower the very small RAF fighter force, it would have been all over.

Anyway, because of this difference of opinion between Roosevelt and Kennedy, Kennedy was coming home to see the President. This was late December '40, or early January of ‘41. Bill Hillman prevailed upon the Ambassador to get him a seat aboard the plane so he could come back to the United States too.

Much later, I eventually returned to Washington. Bill was here in Washington doing sort of handy man work for the Collier publisher, and doing a weekly broadcast one evening of the week for Mutual Broadcasting Company. So he became, again, a colleague whose face was familiar.

It was on this basis that I would see him at the White House, as I saw my other colleagues. Only a handful of us were there every day, the others came and went. In representing Collier magazine, he arranged each year with the White House for the President to receive the winners of the Collier trophy.

This was a trophy sponsored by Collier magazine, as a publicity gag, I suppose. It was awarded each year to the person or persons making the most outstanding achievement in the field of aviation. The winner or winners, would be received by the President at the White House. Hillman, representing Collier magazine, would make these arrangements. That was the means by which he made his contacts with the President.

NIXON: It had at the time some interesting though, I thought, trivial material. It was really a hodgepodge of personal material, taken out of the Truman files. It was not written in any consecutive way at all. It was filled with rather static posed photographs of the President with the Cabinet, the President with members of his staff, the President with Who Shot John. The interesting thing, to me, was that someone had been able to get direct access to some of the personal things, without touching upon the conduct of the Presidency as such.

HESS: Are there any other items that we should cover about the period of time that you spent in Kansas City after Mr. Truman's administration? Any other events of interest that occurred during that period of time that we haven't mentioned?

NIXON: I don't recall anything beyond what I've related that here was an ex-President who was, again, his own man. He could come and go as he pleased. He was no different one day from what he had been the week previous, except as regards his surroundings. He was no longer accompanied wherever he went by a whole troop of Secret Service men, instead he had one. He was free to drive his own car. He was free to open his own door.

HESS: It's sometimes said that a majority of the working press are Democrats, or vote the Democratic ticket, what would you say about that?

NIXON: How can you know what lever a person pulls when he goes into a voting booth. I doubt if many Washington correspondents vote. In the first place, they are residents of the District of Columbia. If you are a resident of the District of Columbia you have no vote. Unless you have maintained a residence outside of Washington, you could not vote. If you came from Illinois to Washington representing a paper or a news service, unless you maintained your residence in Illinois and then went home each year to vote, you had no vote in the District of Columbia. If you worked in the District and your residence was out in Maryland, then you could vote. But on top of it (and I use myself as an illustration), my hours of work were so intense, so lengthy, that there would be rarely any time to go to the polls. There was another factor involved. If you were with the President, as I was, you were in Independence, Missouri with him when he voted on election day. How could I vote in Maryland and be in Independence, Missouri?

Now my situation, in a sense, was unique, but the other things that I have related more or less apply to all correspondents. So, as I say, I doubt if many of them voted. I doubt if many of them were even registered.

As far as their political viewpoint went, I would say that they were more of a Democratic complexion than a Republican complexion. Most correspondents have a rather liberal outlook. This means that the outlook would be more Democratic than Republican. The two parties have been separated for many years on that basis. The Democrats have the liberal point of view, and the Republicans have a conservative point of view. Some of the correspondents political point of view was affected by who they worked for.

Take Dick Shoop, just as an example. If you worked for a dyed in the wool Republican, like Roy Roberts the publisher of the Kansas City Star, and you were his representative in Washington, if you were of a Democratic outlook rather than a Republican, you damn well kept it to yourself. The nature of the beast, under those circumstances, was that you had the same outlook as your boss did, and that applied to a lot of other people.

Look at the representative of the Chicago Tribune here. I don't need to recite the history of Colonel Birdie McCormick, but I would doubt very strongly that his bureau manager here in Washington had a different point of view.

But by and large, I would say, the preponderance of the political beliefs of the correspondents in Washington would tend more toward the Democratic rather than the Republican viewpoint.

Truman used to say that it was the publishers and editors who were Republicans and his opposition, but their reporters in Washington were all Democrats. Now this was just one of those remarks that he frequently made. I believe he may have made that comment in the last speech of the '48 election in St. Louis at Kiel Auditorium where he lit into people like William Randolph Hearst and Birdie McCormick. I'm not sure if it was then, but I remember he did make a point of this in some other speech he made earlier out there in Missouri.

HESS: In summation I would like to ask your opinion of Mr. Truman's major accomplishments and his shortcomings. Surely in the series of interviews that we have had, they are probably quite well chronicled, but how would you, in a nutshell, enumerate or elucidate on Mr. Truman's major accomplishments? What do you see as Mr. Truman's major accomplishments?

NIXON: Probably the overriding consideration in his entire administration was in the foreign field. It was the meeting of the cold war with Soviet Russia. His domestic accomplishments were far overshadowed by this. This was a compelling and dominating thing throughout his two terms in office. It grew larger and larger as the threats of Communist Russian expansion and Chinese Communist expansion increased as time went by. What he did to meet this threat was the primary achievement.

This was a policy formed by necessity. We were under direct threat of a third world war, despite the fact that we did possess the atomic bomb. Because we possessed the atomic bomb, we built a Maginot Line around us in the mistaken belief that we had the one weapon that would prevent a new world war. If a new war did come along, we believed that would mean sure victory. We let ourselves become almost completely disarmed in every other category.

The Russians were not fools. They knew this was going on. They kept their enormous army (two hundred divisions more or less), while we were supine and helpless by comparison. So, this enabled them to push, push, push.

Despite the fact that we had disarmed, Truman had to formulate a policy to meet his Communist movement. He had to try to hold it in check, and if possible to push it back. So there were a series of things.

One of the three major avenues of supplying the Russian armies had been through the Persian Gulf and Iran. (Iran bordered on southern Russia.) Another avenue was the northern sea route, which was constantly beset by German aircraft bombers from Norway and by U-boats at sea. The convoys were depleted every time they tried to go through.

The last avenue was from this country. This was all by air from a huge air assembling point out in Montana, up to Alaska, across the Bering Sea, and on into Russian Asia.

Incidentally, this was a key to the strangeness of the character of the Russians. In sending them all these supplies by air, our pilots could only fly them to Alaska. The Russians wouldn't let us fly any planes into Russia. The Russians would take our planes into Russia. They had an incredibly suspicious mind.

Because of the almost impossibility of getting supplies through the Arctic route to Russia, we built a railroad from the Persian Gulf to the Russian border. Our ships taking supplies to Russia were virtually free to come through the Indian Ocean. There was nothing to bother them. There were no German aircraft. This was an awful long distance from home for any U-boats to be operated. So, it was pretty clear sailing.

This became a mutual effort. The Russians came about half way down to Iran and took the supplies which were brought in back to Russia. This was a wartime thing. At the end of the war the Russians were supposed to get out of Iran, and eventually we were to get out. Well, the Russians stayed put. They wouldn't go home.

One of the first things that Truman did after he came into office was to send a note to Stalin which was in effect an ultimatum, get out or else. An ultimatum, of course, meant that they had a certain time to do something. If they failed to do it, the shooting began. Truman confronted Stalin with this, and the Russians backed down.

This was the first of a long series of such things. Then came Greek-Turkish aid. The British finally told us that they had to take their troops out of Greece. Greece was under very extensive Communist attack from Bulgaria to the north, and it looked for a time that Greece, and perhaps Turkey, might be lost to communism. The Greek-Turkey aid was a thing in which we provided money, weapons, and our own armed forces to train and to prevent Greece and Turkey from being taken over by Communists. Of course, when I say communism, that means Russia. These puppets were doing their dirty work. They were under guidance from Moscow.

Then we have the seventeen billion dollar (as it started out), Marshall plan. This again was to try to try to prevent the Communist takeover of all of Western Europe. This was a retrieval of a very bad mistake that Truman made when he first came into office. He had not realized what he was doing by abruptly terminating lend-lease. This Marshall plan was to fill the vacuum that had been left by this error.

Then the Russians abruptly denied us access to Berlin. Some of our statesmen or high military people, apparently overlooked an obvious thing. We had gotten no agreement, with the Russians, as to access by road to Berlin. When the Russians, as part of their thrusting out movement in Europe, abruptly terminated access to Berlin, Truman had, here again, a very bold decision. He agreed to supply Berlin by what had become known as the "Berlin airlift." Since access was prevented on the ground, by the Russians, the only way they could prevent them from flying into the Berlin airports, was to shoot down our planes. This would mean war.

Their fighters, constantly harassed our transport planes carrying supplies into Berlin, although our planes kept within a previously agreed upon air corridor. It was this Berlin airlift which prevented West Berlin from being taken over by the Russians and becoming part of East Germany.

NIXON: Now let's get along a little further before we get into the shortcomings, to bring in a picture of the overriding things of his administration in the field of foreign policy.

We then come to the Korean conflict. There we were beset by Communist expansion, not only in Western Europe from the Russians, but in the Far Asia by a puppet of Red China and/or Russia. Later we were, of course, beset by Red China itself. It was all aimed at taking over the entire Far East, Japan, the Philippines, etc. We've seen the courageous manner in which Truman handled this, despite the fact that in the end it threw the Democrats out of office. So, I would say, by and large, those were, really, the outstanding achievements of his term.

As to the domestic phases, he had the courage to stand up against the labor unions, the railroad brotherhoods, and to prevent chaos and anarchy that would have been brought on by a national railroad strike, which he did not, permit. There were many, many things of a domestic nature of that sort which he faced and handled very well.

NIXON: I think before I say anything about short comings I should say something additional in real fairness to Mr. Truman. He was basically a grassroots American, his whole background and environment made for that. He never pretended to have statesmanlike qualities. What guided him throughout his years in the White House, less so in the first few months, was his native intelligence. He was able to recognize right from wrong.

He had a tremendous native courage. He had, what really gets down to the word, "guts." He had no fear of anything. He had a tremendous sense of patriotism and an awe of the Presidency. He never dissembled. He never hesitated. He tried to find out from his advisers the pros and cons about a given problem. He never shrank from, or hesitated to make decisions based upon the knowledge that they had imparted to him. This was a tremendous quality for a President. If you hesitate, the world can come out from under your feet. It all depends upon situations and circumstances.

By this I don't mean to say that he made abrupt decisions without ample consideration. This was his tendency when he first came into office, the lend-lease termination for instance, which he later realized was a bad, bad mistake.

He also was able to learn. While his first year in office was dreadful in many respects, he learned as he went along. On the major decisions undertaken during that cold war period, aside from the termination of lend-lease, he didn't make a mistake. Every decision he made, no matter how it might have appeared at the time, always turned out to be correct.

He was a warm, human individual. He liked people. He was the absolute antithesis of a stuffed shirt.

NIXON: His shortcomings were more of a personal nature. By and large, he did all of the big things right and all of the small things wrong. That, of course, is a generalization. The major reason his administration got a bad reputation with the American public, were these little personal things that he did. By instance, the letter that he wrote the music critic.

NIXON: This was a matter of temper. It was one of those things that he should not have done, not with the responsibilities of the Presidency. But this was a detachment from his other decisions, for his big decisions. This was a personal matter, and it fired off his temper.

Paul Hume worked for one of the Washington newspapers and made this public with great glee. It was a feather in his cap, I suppose he thought. The public reaction to it was a normally expectable one. If the President can fire off his temper like this on a relatively trivial matter, what about his temper when he was to make decisions to great importance to the Nation? And so it went.

There were other incidents of a different nature, but they all stacked up. Here's a man who on personal things does have a temper and lets it be known.

You will recall that when he gave that interview to Krock, he really chewed out the Washington press at his news conference, because he resented the natural, normal reaction of the whole press corps that had been left out of this exclusive, given on the basis of the prestige of the New York Times.

Along with this, was his inability to recognize the failures and foibles of some of the people around him. Granted, it was very difficult to one day be a Vice President with nothing to do but to chair the sessions of the Senate, and the next day to be President of the United States. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to cut yourself loose entirely from all of the connections that you may have had previously. Some of these friends went back to the First World War: Harry Vaughan, John Snyder, that fellow from Omaha...

NIXON: These were friends that he had gone with to Reserve Officers Training camp every summer from shortly after the First World War until he came to Washington. They were his buddies. Some people called them cronies. They were his intimate circle of friendship. They were the poker players at the various camps.

Matthew Connelly had been employed as an investigator on the Truman war investigating committee. When Truman became Vice President, Connelly was made his Appointments Secretary.

There were others that Truman knew. It was perfectly natural that when he went down from Capitol Hill to the White House that he had to have along a few people close to him that he knew and could trust.

So he moved his office from Capitol Hill down to the White House. Without mentioning names, it's all in the record, some of these people did Truman harm in one way or another. Some padded their pockets at his expense.

There were these almost unbelievable incidents like Vardaman accepting the gift of a Ford for the President. These things, when they came to light, harmed the President. Those opposing him tended to make the most of these things and inflated them far outside of their actual worth.

There were others in the so-called crony circle. It's understandable that Truman had to have people around him that he knew. But he did not have the ability to recognize the shortcomings and foibles of some of these people that he surrounded himself with. Once they came to light, he was too kind a person, and too loyal a person, to do anything to get rid of these people, which he should have done. But he was loyal to his friends, and that is not a shortcoming, that is certainly a very fine characteristic. This was an area in which he hesitated to do anything, to remove the people who were harming him. Those who were attacking Truman used these people around him as a lever through which to attack him. They exposed the foibles of these people.

The mink coat incident, which I've said was inflated far out of its actual meaning, would never have occurred if Truman had been able to keep this Merle Young, this parasite, out of the White House area. The President had no faint idea, I'm sure, of what was going on, but the damage was done before anything could be done about it.

If you watch a person, you know what's going on. You know something is not right. Somebody on his staff perhaps should have acquainted him with at least a suspicion of this thing. On the other hand, as I say, he was a kindly man. The wife of this fellow was one of his assistant secretaries in Rose Conway's office. She was a nice, sweet, pleasant person. It was just a happenstance that couldn't be controlled.

One of the columnists, Drew Pearson, almost made an institution out of attacking the foibles of Harry Vaughan. Vaughan, instead of protecting himself from these things, was prone to right out in public, blurt things out. He would do things that would bring him to the attention of other people. By the time they got in Drew Pearson's column, why, they were really something.

In summation I would say again that Truman's shortcomings were measured in terms of the personal effect of small things on him, his reaction to them in temper, and his inability to get rid of the people in his close circle who were taking advantage of his position, with all the power of the Presidency.

NIXON: The thing that makes a President either great or a nonentity are circumstances and events, and how the individual reacts to them. We have many Presidents in our history whose names no one can remember. They are nonentities for whatever the reasons, mainly because nothing happened in their administration. They had no great decisions to make. There were just no events that required decisions in vast crises. They were nonentities by circumstance. What they would have turned out to be had there been a great crisis, a great war, is entirely another matter.

Truman will certainly shape up in history as an able President. I don't say a "great" President, because I simply don't like the word. It does not apply to most situations. I prefer to say a very "able" President.

In the first place, world events made for this ability and greatness (there I've used the word, but I guess it's all right). He had the qualifications that would make him one of the standout Presidents. I don't believe in these invidious comparisons: was Lincoln greater than Franklin Roosevelt; was Franklin Roosevelt greater than Wilson; was George Washington the greatest of all? Those things are meaningless. We've been fortunate, that in our very critical times, we have had extremely able men in the White House: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and perhaps, Truman. It seems to me that I recall that sometime ago, two or three years ago or more, one of these polls made a selection of the ten great Presidents, and Truman made that list.

As I have said, events and how one meets them, make for a President being in the top category. Certainly postwar events provided all the basis of greatness that anyone in the White House could possibly want, really too much. The measure of Truman's ability is good. He met these responsibilities and met them ably and well.

Fortunately (forgetting the cronies), he had very able advisers. Chief among them, he would measure, George Marshall. But there were others. Dean Acheson (despite the criticisms which were heaped upon him by the Republican leaders in Congress),apparently, was a very able Secretary of State. This was recognized before he ever became Secretary of State.

I remember being in Cordell Hull's office once in 1939. (I was interviewing him or talking to him about something.) This young man came into the office with some papers to show him. Hull excused himself and looked at the papers and conferred with him. He introduced me to him, and it was Dean Acheson. I had not known him before that time. He had just recently joined Hull's staff, having been a top attorney in some firm in New York. When this young fellow left the office, Hull turned to me and said, "Bob, I advise you to keep your eye on this man. He is a comer. He has great ability."

So, Acheson was one of Truman's able advisers, and there were others, of course. As I say, he was quite fortunate in having able advisers. He regarded Stimson as a very able man and relied to a considerable extent on his ability, and experience, and all that goes with it.

HESS: Do you have anything else to add concerning Mr. Truman or your career as a White House correspondent?

NIXON: Only in the sense of a little tribute to Truman. He was a fine, warm personality. Heaven only knows he treated me with the utmost respect and friendliness.

In 1956 at the Democratic convention in Chicago (if I may be permitted a little modesty), he told a breakfast gathering that during his eight years in the White House there were only three correspondents that he could trust. He said in Washington it was Bob Nixon. Then he named two others who were in Kansas City, not in Washington at all. One was the political reporter in Kansas City for the Kansas City Star; the other was a news reporter on one of the Kansas City radio stations--both names escape me at the moment.

This, of course, was an almost overwhelming, and incredible statement by the President, to me, but one which I very deeply appreciated. It illustrates the warmth and closeness of our relationship. I had done things to merit his trust.

His qualities as a human being were the sort that anyone should be proud to have. They were basic Americanisms. He was honest. He was fair. He was decent. He was not in any way like, occasionally, his public figure came to be known. He was a man of few words, but always to the point. He nailed things down in ten word sentences, and never beat about the bush. As I've said he was just the absolute antithesis of a stuffed shirt. This was a quality which not too many people had. He never, in any manner, showed any evidence, that he thought he was a great fellow, a big guy.

I remember at one point he said to me one days, "Bob, the only thing I know is what my advisers tell me. I don't claim to be an expert about anything. I rely upon my advisers who are properly placed, in the Pentagon and in the State Department, where they are acquainted with what the problems are. I rely upon them to tell me when I question them, and when problems come up. Then," he said, "I make the decisions, but I make them on the basis of the information and advice that was given me." And he said, "That is the way you have to run the Presidency."

HESS: This will bring our series of interviews to a close. On behalf of the Library, let me thank you for your assistance and cooperation.

NIXON: You, of course, are quite welcome. I appreciate the opportunity that has been given me.

Oral History Interview with Robert G. Nixon

Oral History Interview with
Robert G. Nixon