Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn Attorney, U.S. Treasury Dept., 1934-41; Asst. to the Attorney General of the United States, 1937-38; Special Asst. to the Gen. Counsel, Treasury Dept., 1941-42; Comdg. Officer, 5th Army Counter Intelligence Corps, 1943-45; Asst. Gen. Counsel, Treasury Dept., 1946-49; Alternate Member, President's Temp. Comm. on Employee Loyalty, 1946-47; Dep. Dir., Office of Contract Settlement, 1947-49; Asst. to the Special Counsel of the President, 1949-50; Administrative Asst. to the President, 1950; and Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission, 1950-53. Washington, D.C. March 21, 1967 (Third Oral History) By Jerry N. Hess [Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional Spingarn Oral History Transcripts] 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. Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview. 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library. Opened April, 1972 Harry S. Truman Library Independence, Missouri [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional Spingarn Oral History Transcripts] Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn Washington, D.C. March 20, 1967 (Third Oral History) By Jerry N. Hess [141] Third Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 21, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. HESS: Mr. Spingarn, we finished yesterday by discussing some of the men who were on the White House staff, and there are a few others that we could mention this morning to get your evaluation of, what their responsibilities were, just how good they were and perhaps some example of something they may have worked on to show their relationships perhaps with the President, with other members of the White House staff, or anything of that nature. How about George Elsey? SPINGARN: Well, George was a young fellow who really grew up in the White House; he came there as an ensign during the war; he was in the Map Room -- as I understand it was a G2 operations room where the President could see at a glance what was happening on all the battlefronts of the world; and, later Clark Clifford came in there as assistant naval aide, and later the naval aide, and then obviously he spotted -- I'm just supposing this -- George as an able young chap and when Clifford went over to the civilian side as special counsel to the President, he took George with him as his assistant, [142] in fact his only assistant. HESS: I've heard that George Elsey helped to make many of the first drafts of the speeches in those early years. Did you hear anything about that? SPINGARN: I am sure that was true. I speak only from hearsay, but I am sure that George participated heavily in the first drafts of those speeches. He was extremely able, lots of ideas, imaginative, and I would rate him very high among the men I knew at the White House. At that time he was somewhat modest and self-effacing in personality, but like anyone else -- he was only twenty-eight, I think, when I first met him in late '47 or early '48 -- but like anyone else, he's grown in stature and confidence in the years since then. Clark Clifford depended very heavily on him, and rightly so. Actually, George was responsible for my coming to the White House on a permanent basis in early '49 because he went on active duty in the Navy for about a year, and I was then brought to the White House to fill his slot as assistant to the special counsel -- Clark Clifford. HESS: Did you work with him any during the years that you were being worked into the White House operation -- before [143] you came to the White House officially? SPINGARN: Before I came into the White House officially, yes. As a matter of fact, it is my impression -- my recollection -- that in early 1948, when I went over to the White House on detail from the Treasury to work on the civil rights legislative program, that it was George who made the first contact with me from the White House, that is my recollection. In any event, I recall close association with him from that time on. We became friends, and we usually thought along the same lines. I had and have great confidence in his judgment and abilities. HESS: Did he help in the writing of that message -- the February 2nd message? SPINGARN: Yes. I can't tell you exactly at this late date how much of a role anyone played. HESS: But he was involved? SPINGARN: He was involved, yes. And he's had a highly successful career since the White House. He became vice president of the American Red Cross afterwards, and then he went into business, and he is now one of the top ten executives of a billion dollar firm -- an enormous business firm. [144] HESS: The Pullman Corporation. SPINGARN: That's not the name. Pullman is one of the subsidiaries, I believe. Pullman is involved in the pot there, but I don't think it is the whole pot. HESS: For awhile the name was Kellogg-Pullman, or something like that. SPINGARN: Kellogg is in there somewhere. I have forgotten the name of the firm, but I know George is one of the ten men on the masthead. Then there is Ken Hechler, who is a remarkable chap; an egghead who has made good as a practical politician. He is a New Yorker, from Long Island, and he's a Ph.D. and a college professor. He has taught at Princeton and other places. During World War II he was a military historian, and he actually participated in the operation that resulted in the crossing of the Rhine at the Remagen Bridge. This was one of the great coups of the later stages of World War II. It was expected that it would have to be a river crossing, which is a dangerous and often costly affair against heavy opposition. The Germans tried to blow up the Remagen Bridge, but they didn't put enough explosives there, and it jumped [145] up a few feet and settled down again and lasted for another week; and, in the meanwhile we poured troops across and established a beachhead and held it, and that undoubtedly speeded things up by some weeks. In any event, Ken was there as a major in the historical division, as I recall, and after the war he wrote an excellent book called The Bridge at Remagen, paperback only I believe, but an excellent book -- I've read it. He went back and he interviewed the people involved on both sides; the allied officers and men, and the German officers and men, and he wrote a book which details hour by hour -- first on the American side and then on the German side -- what was happening during those critical hours and days while we were crossing the bridge at Remagen. And by the way, later when he ran for Congress in West Virginia, he used to tour his district, I am told in a jeep, with stacks and stacks of that paperback, The Bridge at Remagen, which he gave away as souvenirs of the candidate, and I am told that he was a very effective candidate, and I know he is an effective Congressman from the standpoint of his constituents. HESS: Been re-elected several times. [146] SPINGARN: He is in either his fourth or fifth term, and the unusual thing is this: He's a carpetbagger. He went down to West Virginia from Princeton; he went down to Marshall College there and within two years he gets elected to Congress. I thought to myself, well this is just a seven-day wonder, you know, he will serve one term and then they'll wipe him out, but he's held his seat and he's now in his fourth or fifth term, and he might even be Senator from West Virginia one day. Ken is a fellow who goes in for unusual and whimsical, some people might say even eccentric, stunts to attract attention to his candidacies, and his causes, and my impression is they are highly effective. I remember once at a dinner some young Democrats -- a political dinner a few years ago, some young Democrats from West Virginia told me with great pride that Ken Hechler was their Congressman, and they were real proud of that. Ken actually came to the White House as assistant to George Elsey, after Elsey returned from naval duty and became an administrative assistant to the President. Hechler was his assistant, and he specialized in preparing background material on places that the President [147] was going to visit and where he would have to talk, so that the President would have the pitch; the terrain; the political geography; the political, economic and social geography of the place, which any man ought to have when he makes a speech somewhere; otherwise, he is likely to put his foot in his mouth, and he was very good at that. HESS: What other tasks did he have? SPINGARN: I would say that he was the political researcher for the White House. He researched political situations and how the vote had gone, sliced forwards and backwards and every other way you know, and giving areas and places. He also worked on speeches and messages along with the rest of us. He tended to be a little prolix in his writings, a fault which I myself am guilty of, so I can sympathize with him. The hardest thing in the world is to write a short good speech. I am always reminded of the story of the bishop who visits a strange city for a vacation and the congregation of his church in that area, of his denomination, come to visit him and ask him to give them a sermon, and he says he will be delight to, but, "How long a sermon do you want?" [148] And they told him, "Suit yourself Bishop. Any length you see fit to give us." He said, "No, it's important." And they said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, if you want a five minute sermon it will take me two weeks; if you want a fifteen minute sermon it will take me one week, but if you want an hour sermon, I am ready right now." And believe me truer words were never spoken. Well, I think that I have covered most of the people on the staff now. Oh. Harry Vaughan you asked me about. HESS: We have a couple of military men that we might cover, Harry Vaughan and Admiral Dennison. SPINGARN: Admiral Dennison and Harry Vaughan, yes. HESS: How about Harry Vaughan? SPINGARN: Now, Harry Vaughan, of course, was the President's military aide, but he was more than that. He was a very close, personal friend of the President's who had been in Battery D in World War I with him, and was from his home state. He was a lifetime friend. He had been his secretary when President Truman was Senator. Harry Vaughan is a very likable, extroverted chap. [149] I got along very well with him in spite of the fact that I think he regarded me as a pretty liberal fellow, perhaps even more liberal than I really was. But Harry and I -- I liked him and I think he liked me. I remember one occasion he sent me a box of cigars -- good cigars, too. Harry was undoubtedly the best poker player at the White House and whenever we played poker, and that was often on trips to Key West and even on the Williamsburg and on other occasions, Harry was almost always the winner. I was practically always the loser. Fortunately for me they had a rule that you couldn't lose more than a hundred dollars in a week. I used to go down a hundred dollars usually in the first day, but after that you were carried, you see. That wasn't much fun for the others because they couldn't win any more money from you, the only thing that could happen was that you could win from them or stay level at a hundred minus. I have always felt that Harry, who was sort of a whipping boy for the press, was a much maligned person. HESS: Why do you think that image of Harry Vaughan evolved? SPINGARN: Well, I think it evolved for two reasons; one Harry is a rough, tough sort of blustery kind of chap [150] with a sort of outhouse wit which amused the President, and amused me as far as that goes, but some people found it a little too heavy for their tastes. Now, I want to say this -- every President needs a close crony, if you want to call it that, a court jester if you want to call it that, a friend who relaxes him, you know, who doesn't pay him the deference, who doesn't put him up on a pedestal and treat him like a king and a god, but who he can be at home and relaxed with... HESS: A change of pace. SPINGARN: ...a change of pace. President Kennedy had David Powers, and others who I believe fell in that category. HESS: Is there anyone in the White House now that you would place in that category? Getting off the subject just a little bit. SPINGARN: I don't know. I really don't know. I can't say to my own knowledge that there is, but I would be amazed if there wasn't someone -- one or more people with whom LBJ relaxes with his vest unbuttoned, and swaps tales -- swaps lies about old days in Texas, which is what everybody likes to do once in awhile. Franklin [151] Roosevelt had George Allen and by the way George Allen survived; he was Dwight Eisenhower's favorite jester, too. And you can go down the line, I don't know whether Herbert Hoover had anybody or Calvin Coolidge but certainly Warren Harding had plenty. HESS: On the subject of George Allen, he was also around the White House a little bit during the Truman administration. SPINGARN: Yes, he was. HESS: Did you ever run across him in the White House or was he gone by that time? SPINGARN: I never knew him more than just to say hello to. HESS: The only official position that I have is that he was Personal Representative of the President for the Liquidation of War Agencies, August '45 to January '46. As far as I know that is the only official position he had. SPINGARN: When was he on the RFC? I don't remember. In any event, he was a friend of President Truman's, but I think he was closer to both Roosevelt and Eisenhower -- that is my impression -- than he was to President Truman but, I'll have to let the facts speak themselves, I don't really know. [152] However, getting back to Harry Vaughan -- it seemed to me that on the one hand his personality lead itself to attacks from some quarters. It didn't grate on me at all, I found him extremely amusing. And the President enjoyed his company obviously. There was another factor and that is this; that Harry Vaughan, who I believe to be an entirely honest man -- I'm sure that all these charges about Harry Vaughan are enormously exaggerated -- Harry Vaughan I know to be a man who lives on a modest scale, who teaches Sunday school and who lives essentially a blameless life. But Harry Vaughan had this difficulty, he had been secretary to Senator Truman, and a Senator's secretary is supposed to do favors for the constituents. When they come seeking introductions at the agencies -- that's his job. When Harry Vaughan moved to the White House I don't think he quite made in his own mind the change that he should have made. I think he still regarded himself as a Senator's secretary, and the constituents came around and he would introduce them at the agencies, and he didn't realize perhaps the impact, the different impact it had when the introduction came from the President's White House military aide, than when it came [153] from the Senator's secretary. Now, this I think had something to do with it, and of course, human beings being the way they are, certain people certainly abused his friendship. Now, this I think is probably the main ingredient in Harry Vaughan's image. HESS: Did he have any particular responsibilities in the White House other than his military aide duties, and he was also coordinator of veterans' affairs. SPINGARN: As far as I know he had no other responsibilities, but obviously a man who is close to the President and whom the President sits with in his "unbuttoned moments;" and perhaps shares his thoughts with may influence presidential thinking simply in casual conversations in which they discuss matters, you know, on occasions that policy is not theoretically being decided. HESS: In June of 1948, as you know, the President took his nonpolitical trip out west and one of the stops -- unscheduled stops -- was at Carey, Idaho where they dedicated an air field to the wrong person. Did you ever hear General Vaughan make any comments on that? SPINGARN: No. I remember the incident, but I was not at the White House at the time, so I don't have any really firsthand information. Yes, I remember that was always [154] regarded as a horror case of what shouldn't happen, but which can all too easily happen when a man is moving around and making five, six, eight, ten stops a day at different places. HESS: And now Admiral Dennison. SPINGARN: Yes. Bob Dennison was the naval aide. If my recollection is right, he was the captain of the Missouri when President Truman met him at the beginning of his administration, or possibly even earlier. In any event, when I reached the White House he was a rear admiral and the naval aide. HESS: I have it down here that his official date for coming into the White House was January 28th of '48, which would be just about the time they were contacting you. This would be during the time that you were working on the February 2nd message. SPINGARN: When did the President meet him? HESS: I don't know. SPINGARN: I think it was substantially earlier. HESS: Well, he probably knew him before this. SPINGARN: Yes. In any event he was at the White House when I got there, and he was a rear admiral and the naval aide, and he was, from my way of thinking, an [155] unusual military officer. I say that because I was an officer in various grades through lieutenant colonel in World War II, but I was always a civilian at heart as are most men commissioned for brief periods, I mean for three or four years in a war, are. And to be honest, I did not tremendously admire the majority of the military brass that I met as to the -- broadness of their vision and range outside the military field. They seemed to me rather parochial in their outlook. I would make exceptions for men I met like General Gruenther, who was the chief of staff at Fifth Army in Italy and in Africa where I was, and I would make exceptions for men like General Bradley, and for Lawton Collins and others whom I had some contact with. But generally speaking I found the military mind -- from the standpoint of a civilian -- inclined to be rather parochial, outside the military field which was their field of expertise, but Bob Dennison was not that way at all. He was a man of very broad-ranging curiosity and intellect; he had as I recall at least an M.A., I think he had an M.A. in some scientific field, and it may have been a Ph.D. -- I'm not sure. In any event, he was interested in everything and his [156] opinions were well worth listening to on almost anything. He and I sometimes agreed and sometimes disagreed. I remember, for example, on the Basing Point Bill, I happened to be in charge of the White House task force that wrote the veto on the Basing Point bill in 1950, and Bob Dennison and I discussed that at some length. If my memory serves me right, he took an opposing view. He didn't seem to think the bill was so bad it should be vetoed, and he had plenty of respectable support in this area. His opinions were worth listening to. They were not simply the ignorant opinions of an uninformed man, they were always opinions of a man who had done some thinking and knew what he was talking about. I would rate him very high in ability and I think that is indicated by his subsequent career because in spite of the fact -- I don't know how the military service regards the service of an officer at the White House for a long period of time, but it would occur to me that at the Pentagon in military circles that would somewhat tend to identify him politically with the President and the administration for which he had served in that capacity, I don't know, I'm just guessing, you [157] see. In any event it evidently didn't hurt Bob Dennison that he had been associated with Democratic President Truman because under Republican President Eisenhower, he rose to be a four star admiral and the supreme commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and the NATO commander in the Atlantic. HESS: I have a question here on this. When Admiral Dennison and others on the military and naval aide staff would give you the benefit of their advice... SPINGARN: Well this is only informal discussion at lunches and things like that, naturally you tend to discuss your work and this was not in policymaking meetings of any sort. He had no function in this, this was simply friendly discussions, a fellow interested in public affairs perhaps at lunch or on some other informal occasion. HESS: Good. That's the point I want to bring up. SPINGARN: He was not intruding on policy at all. He was just a friend who was discussing an interesting matter in which we were all interested. HESS: It just occurred to me how much of this would be in a formal discussion group. SPINGARN: These were not formal. These were informal [158] discussions. Now, there was also the President's doctor, General Graham, Wally Graham, one of the nicest people you could ever want to meet and I understand an extremely capable doctor. Everybody liked Wally Graham. And then there was Bob Landry -- Robert Landry, Major General Landry -- who was the air aide and he, too, was a very likable and affable chap, though not an intellectual heavyweight by any means. Now, is there anyone else I should cover? HESS: I don't believe so right now. SPINGARN: Well, I would like to talk about President Truman and civil rights. Recently, I have had considerable activity in the field of defending President Truman's record on civil rights. Last fall, I was invited by the American Historical Association, which was holding its annual convention in New York City in late December 1966, to participate in a session on civil rights in the Truman administration. This convention assembled some six thousand historians at the New York Hilton Hotel, and the session on civil rights which was on December 29th, was the first major session that I am aware of that's been held on the subject of civil rights in the Truman administration, [159] at least by the historians. Dr. William Leuchtenburg of Columbia, was the program chairman who invited me, and Dr. Philip Brooks, the Director of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, was the moderator of this program. The main paper was prepared by a young professor at Stanford, Barton J. Bernstein, assistant professor, a young man about thirty years old who has done a considerable amount of research and writing already in spite of his youth. There were to be two commentators. The batting order was this: Bernstein was to present a paper of about forty-five minutes in length; then two commentators, Professor Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University, not Ohio State, but Ohio University at Athens, Ohio, was to have fifteen minutes for comment on the Bernstein paper, and I was to have fifteen minutes. In September 1966, Professor Bernstein called me up in Washington and asked to see me, and we met at the National Press Club, of which I am a member, and spent several hours together. I discovered -- and this is not mere digression because this ties in with what happened later, at least from my way of [160] thinking -- I discovered that Professor Bernstein was an ardent anti-Vietnam man; he is an activist who took part in teach-ins and demonstrations. I, on the other hand, with perhaps less zeal than he, and perhaps less certainty of the perfect purity of my position, support the main thrust of the administration's position on Vietnam, as I understand it's neither dove, nor hawk but owl...I like to say. I think that the administration is doing a very difficult and typically unpopular thing in trying to defeat aggression in a peripheral war -- a border war -- with the minimum use of U.S. military power. Obviously we could wipe out North Vietnam tomorrow but that would be a catastrophe which would very likely start World War III; so, this is a difficult thing to do, to fight a border war with not a maximum but the minimum amount of military power on the part of a great power contending with a little power, the minimum amount necessary to defeat or to deter that aggression. We did the same thing -- I say the same thing -- we had a similar but not identical situation in Korea except that there the aggression was overt, an army marching across a border. And again we didn't bomb China; [161] we didn't drop atom bombs; we didn't unfurl Chiang Kai-shek; we didn't do many of the things we could have done, and which the hawks of that period wanted us to do; the hawks including General MacArthur. I have often thought of MacArthur as the General McClellan of his day, or I think of General McClellan as the General MacArthur of his day. I remember when I was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission, at the opening ceremony where I was sworn in I told this story about General McClellan which I also apply to General MacArthur. McClellan, it will be remembered was a rather prima donnish young general, who took a very haughty view towards President Lincoln -- actually, he was downright rude and insulting to him on a number of occasions. And, on one occasion McClellan sent Lincoln a memorandum which in his typical flamboyant fashion, he datelined, "Headquarters in the saddle," and Lincoln read the memorandum and observed dryly to an aide that the trouble with General McClellan was that he had his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be. So I feel that the Korean thing, although it ended in an inconclusive peace, although we still have troops [162] facing the North Koreans, along with our South Korean allies, across that demarcation line, the thirty-seventh or thirty--ighth parallel, that it was a success. Fourteen years later after it ended, there has been no further aggression there of significance. I think we slowed down their timetable. I believe we are fighting for time in this picture. That internal centrifugal forces within the Communist world are working for us, not against us, and that the longer we can defer a frontal -- a direct conflict between the two mammoth power complexes, the better things are, and that we may be in the position for a long time of fighting inconclusive border wars, the way the British once did. In fact, I would like to go into this a little further because this is a speech, if you like, a statement that I like to give the young people, the people of college age crowd, who are so typically, especially the intellectuals among them -- so typically hostile to what we are doing in Vietnam. I put it this way: I say you are not old enough to remember firsthand the history of the last thirty five years, but I am. Let me recount it briefly for you as I see it and why it is significant today. In 1931 [163] the Japanese moved into Manchuria. In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. In 1936 Hitler moved his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty. We know now from captured German documents that his instructions to his generals were that they were to withdraw if there was any opposition from the French or the British, and the French and the British consulted but they did nothing. And so on down the line -- the whole timetable -- there was Spain; there was the Anschluss in Austria; there was the Sudetenland -- right on down the line. We flunked every test, we and our western allies. We flunked every test. Every time the aggressor moved we let him move. And did that stop a World War? No, it hastened the most terrible war in human history. Now, I say aggression has changed its face. In those days it was armies marching across borders; today it's called a war of liberation. But I say, look at this -- in every country in the world there is a Communist party, or other splinter dissident group. All an aggressor on the outside has to do is to move in leaders, and training cadres, and arms, and ammunition, and money, and propaganda and take over the local dissidents and [164] call it a war of liberation, and that is what they're doing. Now, I say if we could get out of Vietnam tomorrow and we could be sure this was the end of all this thing, I would say fine, let's go -- but I am as convinced as I can be of anything, that if we got out of Vietnam unilaterally tomorrow within six months another government, probably in the same area -- it might be Thailand, it might even be the Philippines because the Huks, the Communist Huks, are rising there again and they are being supplied and supported by the Chinese Communists. I have heard President Marcos of the Philippines say this within the last few months. They were once defeated and they are not yet a major threat but they are on the move, the rise, or so he said when he was here last fall. Suppose we get out of Vietnam and suppose the Philippines turn to us and say, "We are having serious trouble with the Huks, we need your military help, will you help us." Then we'd have the same decision to make over again. Do we move in and help them or don't we? And each time we don't help them our credibility among other countries that are attacked dwindles. This is no mere matter [165] of face, this is a question as to whether you are going to get help in your hour of need, and if you know you are not going to you are going to make the best kind of deal you can with the other fellow, aren't you? And that's the way I look at it -- again we will be flunking tests, just the way we did all through the '30s and it didn't avert a terrible war then, and I do not believe it would avert it now. I think it would probably hasten it. Anyway, that's my theory of the case and another thing I say to them -- in this world there are no one hundred percent choices. It would be nice if everything was black on the other side and white on your side, but that's not the way it is. You have to make up your mind on where fifty-one percent of the truth lies, when you are dealing with jugular matters, and then you have to proceed on the fifty-one percent side. Now there are things that are happening in Vietnam that are unattractive obviously, but let us look at this business of atrocities for example. I clipped from the Washington News last fall two stories in the papers which struck me as so good in the way that they pinpointed the difference between our "atrocities" and the [166] Vietnam atrocities. It showed these two concurrent stories: Our artillery had made a mistake -- a one hundred and eighty degree mistake -- and had fired into a South Vietnam village killing some civilians. On the same day the Vietcong had murdered, deliberately, a group of Vietnam civilians and mutilated their bodies -- that was the difference. Our "atrocity" was inadvertent -- the kind of thing that happens in every war. I say to these young people, have you ever been in a war? I have. I was no combat soldier, but I spent three years overseas -- I was in two invasion landings, I was at Salerno and Cassino and Anzio and I saw a lot of men get killed, near me, too. And I know what death is like, I've seen it, and I know what mistakes are like. I've seen us kill our own troops, and they are doing it in Vietnam occasionally, too. When you fight a war, you can't help that -- you try not to. We are probably doing a better job on that than has ever been done in warfare before, in terms of trying to select targets. And, then there is a lot of talk about how we mustn't use tear gas -- my goodness, we use tear gas in [167] riots in the United States -- I can only say when you are dealing with these underground burrows, these great fortresses underground, I would think that tear gas would be the best thing to flush the Vietcong out from under it, and I don't regard that as vicious at all. And even the napalm. Napalm is a terrible weapon, there is no doubt about it, but I don't know that a man killed by napalm is any deader than a man killed by a bullet -- or a child for that matter. And I noticed -- it was buried on page eighty-four of the New York Times the Sunday before last -- that Dr. Rusk, Howard Rusk, the medical editor of the New York Times is out, or was out in Saigon, and he went to many hospitals to investigate how many civilian casualties thee were from napalm, especially children -- Vietnam civilian children -- and he found there were very few children in spite of all the horrible cries that are appearing, that there are very few children suffering from napalm. There were plenty of children there, but eighty percent of them were suffering from diseases and malnutrition and accidents, not military casualties at all, and of the military casualties, there were [168] very few napalm casualties. On the other hand, he found that on the whole the people who were there were there as a result of Vietcong -- the civilians -- Vietcong atrocities, in the hospital I mean, and these were both deliberate atrocities where they had deliberately murdered people or fired or burned the village. And there were accidental atrocities, if you want to call them that. In other words, where the Vietcong had laid a land mine and a civilian truck had gone over it and blown up a lot of people, and that sort of thing. They found that there were apparently substantially more civilians in the hospitals as a result of the Vietcong than there were as a result of our military operations -- so all this should be judged in context. And again, I say that a lot of Vietcong stuff is deliberate, and ours is never deliberate, except you have some sadistic individual which you have in every army who may do something wrong and criminal, that is a possibility. Now, getting back to Mr. Bernstein -- Professor Bernstein -- so, he came to see me and we spent two hours or so talking at the Press Club one day in December of [169] '66, and I discovered he was an anti-Vietnam, activist. I had written a letter that month. I had written it to the London Times first. I had written it actually to ten newspapers. It was a letter attacking Lord Russell -- Bertrand Russell's so-called trial of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretaries Rusk and MacNamara as human fiends -- war criminals -- Nuremberg style, for atrocities in Vietnam. I wrote to ten newspapers, seven in the United States, one in England, one in France and one in Italy, personal letters to the editor in each case. It was partly an exercise on my part to see how many places I could place this letter, how effective a counter propaganda operation one man could run. Really it was a maneuver and an exercise, in a sense. Also, it had its own merits, and as far as I know four newspapers published it, and the New York Times wrote me that. they would have published it if it hadn't already appeared in the Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times published it, and the Washington Post, and a couple of others. Now, the London Times turned it down, and I had also sent it to France Soir, in Paris, the largest French paper which had published [170] some articles on counterespionage of mine back in '48 or 9. My Saturday Evening Post articles were published in that newspaper. I also sent it to the largest circulation Italian newspaper. I didn't hear from them, so I suppose that the French and Italian newspapers did not publish it -- I'm not aware that they did. Now, the London Times turned it down, but I didn't stop there. I have a first cousin, Lord Walston, who is a British peer, he is a labor life peer. And Harry Walston was until a month or two ago, until January of this year -- '67 -- the British Labor Government spokesman on foreign policy in the House of Lords. So. I wrote Harry and I sent him a copy of this letter and I said, "I don't know much about British newspapers other than the London Times, everybody knows that one, and they have turned it down. Would you be good enough, Harry, to pick a newspaper that might print this letter?" So he did. He sent it to the London Daily Telegraph which he said, "It's rather rightwing but no matter," and was right, they printed it. That was on September 21st. I didn't know that they had printed [171] it when I saw Bernstein. I didn't know it till several weeks later. On the 30th of September 1966, Bertrand Russell replied to my letter in the same newspaper, and I have given you that material. Now, I showed Bernstein the copy of the letter I sent -- I didn't know yet that it had appeared in London, but it had appeared in American newspapers. At one point in that letter I said -- impeaching Bertrand Russell's credibility -- this is the same man who once advocated that we use the atom bomb on the Soviet Union -- back in the '40s he advocated that. Now, he has made a complete switch, he seems to run the gamut, three hundred sixty degrees around the clock. So, young Professor Bernstein looked this over and he said, "I used to think that, but a student of mine came to me recently and showed me evidence that convinced me that that statement about Bertrand Russell is not true." And I said, "I would be very interested in seeing your evidence. When you get back to Stanford," he was returning there, "will you send it?" "Sure." When we parted at the door of the Press Club, I [172] reminded him I wanted to see that evidence that he had contradicting the statement in my letter. And he promised me he would send it. Several weeks went by and I heard nothing from him, so I wrote him a polite letter reminding him that he had promised to send this to me. He then wrote me a letter saying that he had made a search but had been unable to find the evidence which he had referred to; that he would continue to search but with diminishing hope of finding it. I then knew, or believed in my own mind that he had tried to run a bluff on me, and I wrote him back a very sharp letter sayings "Look, you told me a student came to you recently and gave you evidence, well find that student. Why should it be so hard to find him?" He then wrote me a letter which I regard as utterly incredible saying that it wasn't recently it was a year ago, that Stanford was a big university and he couldn't remember who the student was, and so forth and so on. I didn't believe this for a moment. I thought that he had simply tried to run a bluff on me and I have found this sometimes -- whenever I call the bluff [173] of one of these anti-Vietnamese on factual matters, I usually find they are wrong, they haven't got the evidence to support their case. I am willing to listen to their side, I wanted the evidence. I then turned around and I dug up evidence -- I dug up Bertrand Russell's statement, I sent it to him in quotes, you know, the place where it appeared or a reproduction of it. And Bernstein then had the good grace to reply that he would have to accept my facts; he couldn't find his, and he would have to accept mine as correct. Naturally this did not reassure me as to his general historical accuracy. I knew that he was deeply committed on the Vietnam thing and I felt that he had let his judgment run away with him and sort of moved up in the wild blue yonder with some facts that didn't really exist, or he had seen something very flimsy and thin, perhaps, and suddenly he wanted to blow it up into evidence, but then he either couldn't find it or when he looked at it he realized that it wasn't evidence and he wasn't even prepared to show it to me -- that was my theory of the case. Well, this is background. Early in December, he send me a copy of his paper which he was going to [174] read at the AHA Convention on civil rights in the Truman administration, and when I read it I found it so bad, from my standpoint, so unfair on account of civil rights in the Truman administration, that I long-distanced Professor Leuchtenberg at Columbia, at home one weekend -- he was the program chairman -- and I asked him to give me thirty minutes instead of fifteen minutes to comment on Bernstein's paper, and he gladly assented, and I told him the reason and he said it sounded like an interesting session, he thought he would attend himself, and as a matter of fact I think I took nearer to forty minutes when the actual occasion came. I want to say this, that Professor Bernstein apparently didn't think too badly of my personal conduct at the White House because on page fifty-five of his paper -- actually the footnotes to his lengthy paper -- he has this to say about me as a White House staff man working on civil rights -- this is footnote forty-three, and he is talking about people questioning the sincerity of the President and his party on civil rights in 1950; the sincerity of Truman and the Democratic Party's devotion to civil rights. He says this: "On Truman's reluctance to battle for FEPC see Spingarn to Charles [175] Murphy, March 11th, 1950 -- Spingarn to Truman, May 16 and May 19, 1950. All manuscripts in Spingarn Papers -- Truman Library." And then he adds this: "Although the attitudes and positions on civil rights are not clear for many of Truman's assistants and advisers, Spingarn seems to have been among the most ardent supporters of civil rights within the White House," and so on. He hasn't said this about, as far as I know, anyone else on the White House staff. Now this, of course, unfairly exaggerates my position in the matter, and it would only be fair to say that people like Philleo Nash, David Lloyd, David Bell, and Charlie Murphy were every bit as anxious to see civil rights legislation passed as I was. Perhaps it could be said that I documented my devotion to it better than they did, that's about all. So, the great day arose. By the way, this is an amusing episode that I believe deserves historical recounting. The night before the December 29th historical convention meeting, this session on civil rights, I was standing in the pantry of my mother's apartment on 64th and Madison -- in the pantry because that's where the telephone was -- one in her bedroom [176] and one in the pantry. Behind me was a large porcelain sink about eight feet long. I was talking to Barbara Tuchman on the telephone -- it was about ten o'clock at night. She is the author of The Guns of August and The Proud Tower, and so forth and so on. We were making arrangements to meet for a drink the next day -- she was also addressing another session of the historical association convention. I leaned back lightly, as lightly as a fellow my size can, against the porcelain sink, and with a tremendous crashing roar it broke off, fell to the floor, sheered off a pipe. A scalding hot two inch jet of water leaped out and hit me on the leg, I yelled at Barbara, "Disaster has struck," or something like that and banged down the phone, and the next forty-five minutes or an hour was absolute pandemonium. The apartment began to fill up from the bottom, one inch, two inches, three inches, four inches; it was scalding hot water, you couldn't even stay in the place without boots on. The apartment also begin to fill with steam. The superintendent was a new man, he was running around there like a chicken with his head off, with diagrams, he didn't know where the water controls were [177] and couldn't find the place to turn them off. I had the presence of mind -- my eight-four year old mother was screaming and I was yelling like a bull and the elevator men and the doormen were all thronging around, everybody was bumping into each other -- and I had the presence of mind, I claim, to throw the furniture out of the dining room and pull a huge rug up and dike it against the door on one side of the pantry and kitchen complex, and do the same thing on the other side, and diked the water in there you see; so, it didn't get out into the main apartment -- just the kitchen, pantry and the cook's room. Well, it kept rising though, and pretty soon it was going to roll over the dikes and into the main apartment. I thought myself of an all-night plumber, and I ran to the yellow book and I found one -- days, nights, holidays, always -- I called him up -- it was ten o'clock in the evening -- "So sorry, but we are not working tonight." Then I called the fire department -- this was no time to equivocate. And, just as I started to dial the fire department the superintendent got the water controls turned off. I have said many times that was the worst hour I've had since World War II. I remember I rushed down to -- we were up on the ninth floor -- and, of course, the water ran [178] through the floor and into the apartment below where a judge, who fortunately was away for a couple of weeks, lived. I ran downstairs and I assembled everybody working in that apartment house, the doorman and elevator men and people downstairs, and I shouted, "Everybody get a mop and a bucket up to my apartment," I said. "Everybody will get paid," I shouted. I mobilized the troops and we got a whole platoon up there and they cleaned it up within an hour or two, and so it did a surprisingly small amount of damage, but it was an exciting hour. The next day I saw Barbara -- had drinks with her -- and I said, "You write about history; last night I made it, and I made it in your presence, too. You were on the other end of the phone when I made it." That was quite an amusing episode. At least it's amusing now. Well, the next day in the afternoon, we had the session and Professor Bernstein read his paper for forty-five minutes, and the main thrust -- he blew hot and cold on Truman and civil rights -- but it came out of the horn this way: He said at the end that Truman had left an ambiguous legacy to the next generation on civil rights, and he said that President Truman had to bear a heavy share of the responsibility for our present racial [179] violence and trouble. Professor Hamby then had fifteen minutes and he, in polite and scholarly academic style, criticized the thesis. My style is not academic nor is it particularly scholarly, but it's my style; and, I want to summarize what I said on that occasion because no record was made of it and I didn't write it out, I was just talking from notes and there was no transcript or recording of it, and I think it belongs in the Truman Library. I said, "Professor Bernstein is a conscientious historian within the definition of that term by Herodotus only twenty-five hundred years ago -- the father of history as he is often called -- Herodotus said, 'Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects."' I said, "Professor Bernstein is a very conscientious historian and he has corrected a hell of a lot of defects." I said, "I have read his paper several times and I find it shallow, two-dimensional and self-contradictory. I do not quarrel with his facts, as far as I can judge from memory they are substantially correct. I do quarrel with his conclusions which I find more ambiguous than [180] the legacy he says President Truman bestowed upon the generations which follow, and I find them something less than penetrating and perceptive," and I described what his conclusions were: "All this seems to me to blow hot and cold, but I come up with the final conclusion that President Truman carries a major responsibility for the difficult racial situation in which this country now finds itself. This to me seems absolute nonsense, and pretty pernicious nonsense at that. Our present trouble stems from three and a half centuries of stupidity and bigotry, by this nation, by all of us, and particularly from the last century of the same stupidity and bigotry plus indifference and apathy, without any sense of the terrible injustice that we have done a whole segment of our population since emancipation. Professor Bernstein admits that men, at least liberals, should not be judged anachronistically but in the context of their own times, but he seems to me, when he is blowing cold on HST, to judge him by 1966 standards -- I was talking then in December of 1966 -- though he admits that no President in the Twentieth Century, up to President Truman, has done as much to promote civil rights. I'll go a step further; no President since Lincoln has done as much, up to and [181] including John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Lyndon Johnson alone perhaps has done more, and, of course, that includes all Presidents before Lincoln. Thirty-four men besides Harry Truman have been President; and, he has done better than thirty-two of them. And perhaps he did as much as the other two. Let us put the blame on those thirty-two before we start kicking Harry Truman in the rump. As to President Truman's personal views on civil rights and racial relations, he was a real liberal by the standards of his own origin and environment, and that's the way you judge a man -- a game fish who swam upstream against the current of his own society -- a much harder thing to do than to be a liberal in New York City, or Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. President Truman is not as liberal on civil rights as I am, or Professor Bernstein, I assume. I equate myself somewhere near the views of Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, but I am not as liberal as Martin Luther King, and he's not as liberal as Stokely Carmichael, and perhaps he's not as liberal as Mao Tse-tung, and so on -- so what? I do not think highly of the kind of New York City or northern liberal who [182] damns a Hodding Carter of Mississippi, but loses his liberalism when there is a threat that real open housing legislation will bring a flood of Negroes into his neighborhood to live; he's very staunch on liberalism in Mississippi, but he may not be that staunch in his own neighborhood. Even the real liberals can be pretty naive about who are their friends and what helps the liberal position. And then I recounted an episode: "In 1963 -- November '63 -- I was invited to be one of four participants at a three-day panel on civil rights at the University of Vermont in Burlington -- it was an annual students assembly affair. The others were James Farmer who was then the head of CORE; Louis Lomax who writes the books, The Reluctant African, and so on, has a television program; and John Lewis who was then the chairman of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I was the only white member of the panel and believe me I was low man on the totem pole as far as the students were concerned; they weren't the least interested in what I had to say, but I was impressed by Farmer and young John Lewis, and I found Louis Lomax insufferable, arrogant and snotty. [183] One thing that interested me was that Farmer and Lewis didn't know the score on who was their friend, in an actual political situation, and who was their foe -- that was '63 -- and they recounted a situation in which the House Judiciary Committee had reported the less liberal bill before them. I said to them, "Are you really serious? Don't you know that the people promoting that more liberal bill, that the votes for it were southern Democrats and Republicans mostly, because they knew that the best way to kill civil rights legislation was to get a bill on the floor that couldn't be passed, and that would be recommitted. Don't you know that? It's all in the New York Times," I said, "Look at the votes." James Farmer said to me, "Have you got that New York Times clipping with you?" "Yes," I said, "I have," and I showed it to him. Now, James Farmer is an honorable and a good man, I'm not denying that, I'm just saying that sometimes people -- liberals, civil rights liberals -- don't know who their friends are and who their enemies are, because in this situation he really believed the people who voted for the moderate bill, which could get through the House, and did eventually, were his enemies; and he [184] thought that the people who voted for the more liberal bill were his friends, but he had the situation exactly reversed -- the people who voted for the more moderate bill wanted civil rights legislation and were putting a bill on the floor that could pass, and the people who voted for the more liberal bill were deeply opposed to civil rights legislation and wanted to kill it. Now, there is one thing I learned -- my father used to quote Voltaire to me, "The best is the enemy of the good." This is a profoundly wise political policy, and thesis and credo. Those people who will not compromise, who will insist on one hundred percent perfection will always fail because all politics, and in fact all human existence, of every kind, is a matter of compromise. Edmund Burke said something like that two hundred years ago, that all politics and all life was a matter of compromise and barter, and this is true. If everybody is agreed on something then there is no need to compromise, but that never happens on a controversial matter. Wherever there are opposing points of view, you have to compromise, and the art of politics is to compromise at the highest possible level of good from your standpoint. But I have no sympathy with the [185] ivory tower liberal, however idealistic he may be, who seems to have a death wish. He would rather go down to defeat striking a noble posture for a hundred percent perfection, than win with sixty or seventy-five percent, which is the best he can get. Another example is right here in the District of Columbia. This is in a sense a digression, but not entirely so. In 1964, I was a participant -- I was a candidate in the Democratic primary in the District of Columbia, and incidentally, I am proud to say there were a hundred and seventy-eight Democratic candidates in that primary, I was the only one who had the personal endorsement of President Truman,. and I have a newspaper clipping that evidences that. Joe Rauh didn't have it -- he and his slate won -- but I had it. This is rather interesting. I had lived in the District since I got out of law school in the mid-thirties. The first half of that period I voted from Arizona, where I started voting, and the second half I voted from New York which is my original native heath. Then the twenty-fourth amendment was passed which gave the District a presidential vote and I said to myself, "My goodness you have been living here all of your adult life [186] practically, you ought to vote where you live." So, I transferred my voting affiliations to the District, where they now are; and, I joined my precinct organization and went around and did my chores, rang doorbells, and so forth. But I was a Johnny-come-lately, in terms of District politics, and District politics were, until recently, presided over by Joe Rauh -- Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. Joe Rauh is a liberal Democrat. I have known him since at least 1941. In fact in 1941 he and I did a chore together which was sort of a bond between us. We were working on the first war powers bill, the bill that was to give the President -- this was right after Pearl Harbor, December of '41 -- the bill that was to give the President and the Government the powers necessary to wage war successfully and effectively. And one night a week or two after Pearl Harbor -- I would place it around the 20th of December '41 -- there was a night hearing of the full House Judiciary Committee to consider and hopefully report this bill -- a night hearing. The attorney general and other bigwigs were to be present, but at the last moment they were called to the White House, and Joe and I -- he was a young lawyer in [187] lend-lease and I was a young lawyer in the Treasury -- were the Government's only witnesses at that hearing on the most important bill before the Congress and we spent the whole evening, two or three hours there, and at the end of our explanation they reported the bill unanimously, and I always thought that was a bond between me and Joe Rauh, that on that occasion we had done a good job together, and we were friends, not close, but friends. But, in 1956, I was working in the campaign, I was director of special activities for the vice-presidential campaign -- that was Estes Kefauver -- and I was very busy, and I was a little irritated by ADA, Americans for Democratic Action; an excellent organization but one which I have found often too "ivory-towered" and perfectionist -- and I equate at least a large segment of the ADA group -- not all, but a large segment with the "ivory tower" liberal that I speak of who insists on going down to defeat with perfection rather than winning on an effective compromise. So, I was doing a little needling of ADA and apparently it had gotten back to Joe Rauh who was national chairman of the ADA at that time. And one day, about mid-December of '56, the National Capitol Democratic Club, of which I was one of the founding fathers, or [188] sponsors, and of which Charlie Murphy was the sparkplug and the first president, and of which President Truman is the honorary president to this day, I believe, along with Lyndon Johnson; and they were, having their housewarming -- had just opened their doors -- and I arrived and Joe Rauh was there and I went up to the group he was in, and I said, with my tongue in my cheek, "Hello Joe, I didn't know you were a Democrat." Joe snarled something at me, which I didn't quite catch, but he repeated it several times and I finally get it, he was saying, "You dirty yellow-bellied son-of-a-bitch." I thought he was kidding. I was kidding and I didn't think he would take it that seriously, so I continued with my needling. I said, "I'm starting a new organization, Joe, it's called "NADA." That means "nothing" in Spanish, you know. "It stands for "No ADA." He bellied up to me, and he repeated those words that I have just said, and he repeated them over and over again, and there was a group forming around us and he said, "Come on out in the alley, I'm going to beat you, you son-of-a-bitch. I'm going to lick you." [189] There were about fifteen people around us watching this circumstance, and my girl was with me, and a lot of ladies, and it was a rather embarrassing moment, and I suddenly realized that Joe was dead serious -- he meant it. At first I took a light tone, but after awhile after he had repeated those insults long enough, I began to get annoyed and I said, "Okay, come on out." So, he turned and left the room and I started to follow him, but friends said, "Don't pay any attention. He's been drinking," and this and that and the other thing, so I said, "Oh, hell, I'll forget it." So I stayed and he never returned and that was the end of the episode. And later, I wrote him a note saying I thought it was silly for us to quarrel, that after all we had been friends and so forth and so on, and he replied in friendly fashion and that was healed over. But in '64, I wanted to get into the primary here, and Joe was Democratic chairman of this city, and so I kind of suggested myself for his slate, but there was no interest whatever. And I could understand this, I was a Johnny-come-lately, and there were plenty of people who had done their political chores here for a long time -- this was understandable. There were three slates in that primary and, by the way, it is interesting, [190] they were all balanced ethnically exactly the same way -- the leading male candidate was a Negro and the leading woman was a white woman. On Joe Rauh's slate E. Franklin Jackson, the Reverend Jackson, was the candidate for national committeeman, and Polly Shackleton, the incumbent, was the national committeewoman candidate. There was a second slate which was called the Reeves-Lanahan slate, and I hung around the outskirts of that slate looking eager until they invited me aboard. Our head man was Frank Reeves who was then the incumbent national committeeman but who had split with Joe Rauh and was therefore on this other slate. He had been special assistant for awhile to President Kennedy. He's a lawyer, teaching at Howard now and practicing law. And our woman candidate was the delightful Scotty Lanahan, who was F. Scott Fitzgerald's daughter, and who writes a column for the Washington Post now which is first-rate; in fact, it's too good for the woman's page, it belongs out in the general circulation pages. She's got a good deal of her father's ability, I think. And then there was a third splinter slate -- the Dedmon-Thompson slate, I believe it was called -- they had no chance. It was between the Reeves-Lanahan and the Rauh-Jackson-Shackleton slate. [191] I took a very vigorous part in the campaign, and I had sound equipment installed in my car and toured the city making sound speeches all over and, of course, at night went to rallies and made speeches. And I didn't overlook Joe Rauh. I took my car with the sound equipment to his block on Appleton Street; it's kind of on a hill and I parked my car at the top of the hill and I made a speech against Joe Rauh in his own block, you see -- I wasn't mean or bad, I didn't say anything personally obnoxious -- I said Joe Rauh was a nice fellow personally, but he was running the Democratic Party in the wrong city, he was running it like a closed club for his friends and acquaintances, and we were going to open it up and make it a broad base, hard-hitting party. That sort of thing, you know, that was the idea. Then I walked down the block and I knocked on every door, and I gave them "poop" attacking Rauh and company and if they weren't home, I would put it under the door sill. When I got to Joe Rauh's house his wife and one of his sons, I think it was Carl Rauh who is now an assistant U.S. attorney here in the District, he was then a young man of twenty-three or four, were out in [192] front. If looks could have killed, I would have dropped dead on the pavement. And his son bellied up to me and he said, "Aside from the fact that you are a big fat slob and a jerk I have nothing against you." I said, "Assuming for the purpose of argument that's true, I don't quite see how it affects the primaries, but let me say this -- I have been a soldier and I have been in combat, have you?" I knew damn well he hadn't -- he was twenty-three or four years old. "And I served in invasion landings under old blood and guts Patton, and if there is one thing I learned it is that when you are in a war you carry the attack to the enemy; you don't sit on your dead rear end and wait for them to come to you. Now what have you got to say to that?" Well, what could he say? He walked away mumbling and I felt that I had won that round. Then I went over to Polly Shackleton's block in Georgetown and I made the same kind of speech on her doorstep and somebody leaned out of a upper story window and shouted, "How dare you. Right in front of her own house?" As if that was important you see. I had a good time. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot about pavement politics -- but we lost. [193] It was funny. There was three slates, and the only real issue in the campaign was who loved Lyndon Johnson the most. Now, a year earlier -- and this was part of my literature -- in February of 1963, Joe had made a speech, reported in the press, in which he said that Lyndon Johnson, then Vice President, had once again shown that his first loyalty was to the southern racists – snarl -- that was Joe Rauh a year earlier; now he was the head of a slate which called itself the United Democrats for Johnson and he loved Lyndon Johnson so much that he got misty-eyed every time his name was mentioned, and that was the only real issue in the campaign, who loved Lyndon the most. We shouted -- I put out a press release -- I spread it all over, and so did others -- that our group had a record of support of Lyndon Johnson -- none of us had been against him. Joe Rauh and Polly Shackleton had to be dragged screaming off the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960 when Lyndon Johnson was nominated for Vice President after John Kennedy had given the nod to him, because they opposed him after he was approved by everybody, and they were circulating around the floor carrying anti-Johnson posters -- [194] placards -- and they wouldn't leave the floor when they were told to and they had to be dragged off. This was the team that was leading the United Democrats for Johnson -- well, politics is a funny and ironical business to put it mildly. In any event, needless to say, after Joe's group was elected I never received any political chores or assignments in the local arena -- I was not asked to do any work, although I wrote letters to the newspapers, which the Star headed "Good Loser," saying I accepted the results and was willing to help in any way I could and they had just to call on me, but nobody called. And Polly Shackleton, whom I had known on casual but friendly terms, for twenty-five years, Polly Shackleton would hardly look me in the eye, she would cross the street to avoid seeing me, and she was very hostile. But I finally solved that. Last fall I got sick and tired of having her snub me, arid walk the other way and not take my hand at political parties and things like that for two and a half years, over the mere fact that I had campaigned against her. So, I ran into her in a stationery store near my home, and the store was so small she couldn't avoid me, and I went up and I shoved [195] into her hand a fact sheet I had written for the Democratic National Committee on high prices and inflation, and she tried not to take it, but I said that Esther Peterson and the whole Cabinet and the White House had called me up and said it was the greatest thing that had been done since the Bible, and so forth, and she finally reluctantly took it. But she was very haughty. So, I went back home and I wrote a letter, a snotty letter to her -- snotty nice -- and I said, "Polly," I said, "you are a lousy politician." She's the national committeewoman. I said, "There is one thing you ought to know in politics, that you are gracious and kind to a defeated foe, you may want to make him an ally later. For two and a half years, you've been snubbing me just because I campaigned against you." I said, "Now, Joe Rauh, he's a good politician. Joe wouldn't give me the time of day politically, but he is always friendly and we talk when we meet. He's a good politician." I said, "Polly, why don't you uncoil and learn a little about politics?" So, to rub salt into her wounds, I didn't send the letter to her, I sent it to Joe Rauh and asked him to forward it to her, and you know something? Polly Shackleton [196] does exactly what Joe Rauh tells her to. I got a long friendly letter from Joe, and then I got a long friendly letter from Polly which he had evidently told her to write, and she said very humbly, "You're right, Steve, I'm not a very good politician and Joe is." I then called up Joe and took him to lunch, and we again healed the breech. In January he resigned as chairman and Ted Dudley was named chairman of the Democratic central committee here. Ted Dudley I have known for years; he's the chairman of the speaker's bureau of the AFL-CIO. He's a lawyer -- a good man -- and he and I have been on friendly terms right along although he was on the Rauh slate, and within a week after he was named chairman, he called me up and asked me to do a chore, the first time anybody in the city had asked me to do a political chore. He said -- it was Monday night, one day in January, and he called me about four thirty in the afternoon and said, "Steve, would you work up a consumer protection program for the District of Columbia?" I said, "When do you want it?" He said, "Friday. I want you to present it to the D.C. citizens advisory council." This is a group of [197] twenty-five people appointed by the District commissioners as sort of a sampling cross section of the population, to advise them on all policy matters they want advice on. I said, "That's awfully short notice, I haven't even thought about such a thing for a long time." Well, he said, "Get together with Sarah Newman, she was the chairman of the D.C. advisory council, and she is a professional consumer protection woman; she is the general secretary of the National Consumer's League. Before I looked up Sarah, I called up Esther Peterson's office, and I called up the Federal Trade Commission and I prepared my consumer protection program to my satisfaction, and then I took Sarah Newman to lunch and she bought my program, and Friday I went before the council and I discovered that Sarah was chairman of a committee which was making a report of their consumer protection program. She wasn't present; but she had authorized me to say that she approved mine. And, her committee, the vice-chairman presented the report, and the committee was split several ways, and there was a somewhat confused situation. There was a majority and a minority and this, that and the other things -- and then I presented my report and there [198] seemed to be pretty general acceptance of it, and then the whole thing was referred back to the committee for further consideration and report. But, I only mention this because that committee had been working for months, you see, and they couldn't agree on a report and of course, one man can always agree, and I thought my report made a good deal of sense and I bet a nickel that they'll buy it, they may take other things, too, but I bet they'll buy my report when they get through. But I did it in three days, you see, because I wanted to prove to Ted Dudley, the new chairman of this city, whom I had lunch with recently after this episode, that I was able and willing to do a political assignment. Anyway, this is a long digression, I was talking about ivory tower liberals. It had been my opinion that Joe Rauh, at least at one time fell in that class: (a) he insisted on perfection, and (b) he was too quick to denounce in very intemperate terms the people who were against him, which is a mistake. I mean there are moments for denouncing people, but you shouldn't do it as a rule of thumb; you shouldn't immediately say that the other side are racist and fiends, you know -- that [199] doesn't help anything. There may be moments for this, but you should be very selective and not do it regularly. But I will say this, I think that Joe has moderated with the years and I think he is a better and more effective politician than he was, that's my opinion. Oh, here is the Edmund Burke quote that I was speaking about. "All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act is founded on compromise and barter." And that and the other saying, "The best is the enemy of the good," I think form the main stem of any effective political philosophy. And I say, that's why the perfectionist liberal always fails. He is more interested in posture. I'm going back to my civil rights speech at the convention. "He is more interested in posture than results; hence, he loves a Stevenson who opposed compulsory FEPC, or a John Kennedy who flirted with McCarthyism, and weaseled on civil rights, and lost his legislative battles with great style and grace; he prefers them to a Lyndon Johnson or a Harry Truman who won without style or grace; and a Jackie Kennedy to a Lady Bird." The difference between them is that Jackie Kennedy thinks in terms of beautifying the White House and [200] Lady Bird thinks in terms of beautifying the nation. I mean Jackie is a beautiful and talented woman but as the President's wife -- as a first lady -- Lady Bird is worth five or ten of her in my book. Then I told some of the aspects of the Truman presidency which I thought .... I said that Bernstein has presented a shallow and superficial picture. Any real picture of Truman on civil rights would have to go a lot deeper. First, there was his allergy to arm twisting, hence there was no high-powered staff operation along the lines that Franklin Roosevelt had, and that Lyndon Johnson has, and other Presidents have had. HESS: Congressional liaison. SPINGARN: Yes. HESS: We'll get into that just a little bit later. SPINGARN: Yes, but I want to get in to it right here. HESS: Fine. SPINGARN: The thing is that Harry Truman, as I understand him, had rankled sometimes at the pressures that had been placed on him when he was a Senator and he was determined that when he was President that he was not going to place that kind of pressure --at least this is my evaluation of the case -- that kind of pressure on his fellow Senators; so, it was a low keyed operation basically. [201] HESS: How was it carried on? SPINGARN: Well, we had two legislative liaison people -- there was Joe Feeney who covered the Senate and Charlie Maylon, a colonel then and later a brigadier general, now dead, who covered the House. HESS: They were both brought in in 1949. SPINGARN: Yes. HESS: And there was no one on the White House staff who had a comparable job before that time, was there? SPINGARN: Not to my knowledge, no. HESS: Why was it thought necessary at this time to... SPINGARN: I don't know. I don't know. HESS: How did those two men operate? SPINGARN: Well, they operated in a very low key way. They simply seemed to me to be head counters, and liaison people. Neither one of them knew much about the merits, the substantive merits of legislation, and neither one was equipped, as I saw it -- to argue with a Senator about the merits of legislation. They were just up there to tell him what the White House position was, if it was recorded, and to find out what their position was. Of course, that's not the way a Larry O'Brien operates, and that's not the way Tommy Corcoran, or [202] Charlie West, or Sherman Minton, or the Roosevelt era people operated, obviously. However, we had another type of operation in which I sometimes participated -- on civil rights to be specific. In 1950, we tried twice for closure on the FEPC bill -- twice to limit debate so the bill could be passed. There was a majority for the bill, but you had to limit debate and that took two-thirds -- I've forgotten what the rule was at that moment -- but I assume it was two-thirds of the total membership at that time. In any event, it was difficult. Now, here is what we did: I was in charge of this operation and twice -- once I think in May and again in July I may have the dates wrong but it was twice in the spring and summer of '50 -- we made an organized effort to break the filibuster. I assembled in my office -- I had a large office in the Executive Office Building, I believe that General Eisenhower and General MacArthur had once had that office when it was the old State-War-Navy Building. It was very large and we assembled there, representatives of the interest groups that supported civil rights; labor, Negro and civil rights groups, ADA, AFL and CIO, [203] they were still split, machinists, and the various other groups that were interested. I had a list of the Senators and we had classified them in four or five categories; those who were definitely against us, forget them; those who were firmly for it, forget them; those who were leaning against us, those you did not forget; those who were leaning for us, those you did not forget; and those you didn't know -- unknown. The last three groups obviously were the ones you worked on; and we went down the list and we would say, "Now who knows him? Who has done him a favor lately?" And somebody would speak up and say, "Well, we have good contact with him," okay, "See him," -- and maybe he would ask two or three to see him. We would go down the list that way and we would agree on who saw whom. HESS: Do you remember any examples of that? SPINGARN: No. It was a long list. How do you look for examples twenty years later. This is the way it was done. I can't remember individual names, but actually I think you have all this in -- you see that big gray folder there? Those are my White House manuals -- they were Xeroxed and they are all in the Truman Library and they contain checklists of the sort that we used. [204] at these meetings, checklists rating the Senators in different categories. I don't know whether they actually show who approached whom but they do show how the operation was organized. Now, that was what we did, and we did it not once but twice that year, you see we tried. The votes weren't there, the votes simply weren't there. It was impossible, nobody could have broken that filibuster; no President could have in 1950. That was the thing that the Bernsteins don't realize, they are judging 1950 by the 1960s when things are different. Well, we've moved a long way you see, but nobody could have done it then. HESS: Did Charles Murphy take an active interest in congressional liaison? SPINGARN: Damn right. He certainly did, he was very active in it, he was intimately involved in it. HESS: Did the President rely on Lester Biffle, or Sam Rayburn and the other members of the Big Four? SPINGARN: Well, yes. Charlie Murphy could give you a better picture, and the President himself, of course, I shouldn't really be saying how much he relied on him -- that's a judgment for the President to make, but certainly Biffle was close to the President and I am [205] sure that as a source of intelligence, and possibly .... I didn't actually see Biffle being used to corral votes, but I can't say it wasn't done -- I don't know that it wasn't. I remember one interesting experience I had with the Speaker. I was in charge of preparing the Defense Production bill immediately after the Korean war broke out. We had to put through a bill -- it was a mobilization bill to ....it was like the War Powers bill back in '41, in a sense, although the provisions were different. It was really an economic mobilization bill to put the government in a position to mobilize its resources and also stand-by price control legislation and other things, so that it could wage the Korean conflict effectively. Well, this was a terrible driving period. We put that bill together .... we had advance drafts of legislation, much of which turned out to be useless by the time we needed it. It had to be totally revamped. We had sort of stockpiles of emergency legislation but I recall it wasn't too good. And the real bill had to be thrown together in a matter of five or six days -- I think it was five days, and that was over a weekend, too. And I can remember it was just a blur. [206] I was sitting there and I had task forces stacked all around the Executive Office Building, on different titles of the bill and I was sitting there, making snap decisions on what went in and what went out night and day there for five days, and of course, checking the very important things to the President. But on the minor things you couldn't check everything and you had to make snap decisions. Well, in any event, we got a bill together in a matter of five days, or something like that, and then I took it up to the Congress to give it to the leadership for introduction, and I remember I took it to the Speaker; I took it to John McCormack, he was the majority leader; I took it to Senator Lucas, he was the Senate majority leader; and I tried to call on the Vice President, but I missed him, and thereby hangs a tale which I will mention later. In any event, when I went in to see the Speaker -- I mean I had phoned in advance and he knew I was coming, he had Deschler, Lew Deschler, the House parliamentarian with him. One of the things that we wanted was to get this bill to the Banking and Currency Committee. Senator Maybank was the chairman and he was well disposed on this, rather than the Armed Services Committee -- I've forgotten who [207] was chairman of that -- I beg your pardon, Brent Spence of Kentucky was the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, and he was a liberal Democrat and close to the President, and the House Armed Services Committee -- I can't remember who was the chairman, but we knew that we would have trouble with him in that committee. The question was a parliamentary one, where would the Speaker refer it, and I made the mistake of telling the Speaker that the President hoped -- this was true, but I shouldn't have said it, the Speaker bridled -- the President hoped it would go to the Banking and Currency Committee, and the Speaker bridled visibly. He said, "Young man," or words to that effect, nobody tells the Speaker of the House of Representatives where legislation is to be referred. That is the prerogative of the House of Representatives," and so forth and so on -- "Yes sir." He and Deschler went over the bill, and then he looked at me owlishly and he said, "You fellows have rigged this bill so I can't send it anywhere but the Banking and Currency Committee." That's where it went. And the Speaker said to me, "I want one provision added to the bill, a termination provision. I want this thing to terminate automatically in two years unless extended by act of Congress." [208] "Yes sir." We put that in naturally. Well, that is a typical example of relationships with the Speaker. I mentioned Vice President Barkley because there was a little contretemps in which unwittingly I annoyed him. I didn't realize it. As I say, there was a Cabinet meeting that afternoon at four o'clock, let's say, to go over this bill, and Vice President Barkley was to attend; so, I called his office and said that I was going to bring a draft by, but I hadn't intended to suggest that I wanted to see him, because I knew he was going to be down at the Cabinet meeting later, so I just wanted to leave a copy in his office so if he wanted it he could look it over. I went to the House side first. I saw John McCormack, and while I was in McCormack's office the Speaker came out of his office and buttonholed me and brought me into his office and I was delayed, and when I got down to Barkley's office, his assistant came out and he said, "The Vice President waited for you, but he had to leave," and I discovered later he thought I was coming to see him and he was irritated because I was late -- I hadn't intended to see him and it was not my fault, it was only because the Speaker delayed me. Later this seemed to assume some significance, this [209] little episode, although I'm not sure how much. In any event, I saw Lucas and I went back to the White House. I attended the meeting and the President explained the bill, and at some point the question arose about where it would go in the House and I knew because I had heard the Speaker and Deschler say, and I said I had talked to the Speaker and that he had said that the bill was so drafted that it would have to go to the Banking and Currency Committee in the House, and I turned to the Vice President, and I said, "I brought some copies by your office, too, Mr. Vice President, but I missed you," or something like that. And he said rather snappishly, "Yes, I waited for you," or something like that. So, I could see that he was a little miffed, and I waited around until after the meeting to buttonhole him and apologize, but he got into a conversation with the President, I thought it wasn't that important, and I never did. I mention all of this because later I was kicked upstairs to the Federal Trade Commission under circumstances for which to this day I don't know the real reason. I didn't want to go, I wanted to stay at the White House, but the President decided that the [210] Federal Trade Commission was the place for me. Obviously something had happened. There are only two episodes I can think of in this connection and one unexplored one, which is only a speculation. The only two episodes I could put my finger on; one, is this Barkley episode, which seemed to me so trifling that I couldn't understand how the Vice President would really seriously regard that as a major thing. Unfortunately I never got around to explaining it to him, but the fact was there had been simply a misapprehension, I hadn't intended to see him, and I had been delayed by the Speaker and I had done nothing obviously very bad. It might have been a minor irritation, but I don't think he would say you have to fire the guy, or move him out of the White House, on this account. I couldn't believe that, because Mr. Barkley was an awfully nice fellow and a very decent, generous sort of fellow. The other thing was different. It was on the Internal Security bill. The White House was against it and we had prepared our own bill, which by the way, I drafted, and the message, too, which went up in August of '50, because you can't beat something with nothing we had a bill of our own, but the Internal Security bill -- [211] this was mid-McCarthy, and you could have labeled a piece of toilet paper a security measure and passed it; anything would go by if it was labeled as internal security. In any event, one day Leslie Biffle called me (or, come to think of it, it may have been Senator Kilgore), and he said that a number of Senators wanted to hear the administration's opposition to the Internal Security bill -- this was August, 1950 -- would I come up to Leslie Biffle's office and explain it to them -- sure. And I went up, and I took Bob Ginnane of Justice with me; he later became general counsel of the Interstate Commerce Commission; he'd done a lot of work on constitutionality of the Internal Security bill; we went up together; and I've forgotten, for certain -- Biffle himself didn't attend the meeting -- it was in a back room of his office. Hubert Humphrey was there, as I recall; I remember Senator Lehman was there; Senator Graham of North Carolina was there; there were several administrative assistants, and probably Senator Kilgore and one or two other Senators, I can't think of -- and Senator O' Conor, now dead, of Maryland. Now, O'Conor was the only one who was likely to be for the Internal Security bill -- [212] that didn't mean that the others would vote against it, but who personally might favor it among this group -- the others were liberals, you see; they might feel politically they had to vote for it, but they weren't for it. So, I went through the bill explaining the thing, and there were a lot of immigration provisions in it, and I turned to Senator Graham I remember, and I said, "Senator, you know" -- the Senator had been charged with belonging to a number of front organizations, and some of them he had belonged to, they were the kind with worthy motives that people belonged to in the '30s -- and I said, "Senator, you know, it is perfectly possible that under these immigration provisions, if you were an immigrant, you couldn't get into the United States, they are so stringent," and so on and so forth. And Senator O'Conor got mad and he started to swell up and he got purple in the face and he said, "These immigration provisions were reported favorably by a judiciary subcommittee of which I am a member, as a separate bill," and he said, "I am not going to sit here and listen to twaddle like that," and he stormed out of the room in a rage – mad -- and there was a long pause, naturally. [213] And I said, "Maybe I better fold up and go back to the White House,. I. seem to be losing ground here." And the others said, "Oh, don't pay any attention to him, go on." So, I went on with the explanation of the bill. After the session was over, I went down to the floor of the Senate, and I sent in a note to Senator O'Conor, saying I wanted to apologize to him, that I didn't intend to hurt his feelings, and so on, but he wouldn't come out. And I went back to the White House and I wrote him a nice note saying I hadn't intended to anger him and I was sure like the good sportsman he was he would accept my apology, and so on. He didn't answer it. The whole thing was this: O'Conor carried actually no weight at the White House, the President had no special regard for him, he was not a power at the White House in any sense, but what he may have told Leslie Biffle, and what Biffle may have told the President, I don't know. It may not have been anything .to do with O'Conor, personally, but there may have been some thought that I was tactless, or that my modus operandi was not good, or something like that, I don't know, although again that didn't seem to be enough. I have never known to this day why I went to the Federal Trade Commission, although [214] as I look back it was a good thing from my standpoint that I did. I'm not sorry that I went, but I didn't want to go at the time. One interesting thing. There is a speculative factor in all this. You mentioned Max Lowenthal before, and I started to talk about him and I think didn't finish up. Max Lowenthal was a good friend of the President's from the days in the '30s when the President was in the Senate and a member of the Interstate Commerce Committee, and on the Railroad Reorganization Subcommittee, and Lowenthal was one of the lawyers for that subcommittee. They became friends at that time, and he had total access to the White House. During the McCarthy period he was there all the time, almost daily; he used to hang out in Matt Connelly's rear office. I had had an encounter early in my White House career with Max Lowenthal. Clark Clifford told me that Max was worried about an Internal Security bill -- that was the one that I told you about that Justice had put up, on which I had written the Treasury's report and the bill provided for wiretapping. The Treasury report, which I wrote, said that with certain safeguards added we would favor it, and the safeguards were that it had to be limited to a certain [215] category of cases. There had to be written approval in each case by the attorney general, and they had to get a court order, in each case. Clark Clifford told me that Max Lowenthal was concerned about that bill and I should get in touch with him, but before I could, Max Lowenthal called me up at home one day -- I place this in '49 sometime -- and we had about an hours conversation. He was shocked to find that I favored any kind of wiretapping under these restrictions, and Clifford later told me that he told him that I was a Fascist, you see. Max was prone to these rather violent terms, and he is one of these black and white people, I was a Fascist. Max was very secretive; he was the kind of guy who would make a big cloak-and-dagger operation out of buying a dozen oranges. I remember one day I wanted to give him a report I had written -- it was unclassified, it was mine personally, it had nothing to do with the White House -- it was something I had written on how to improve U.S. counterintelligence; it was a unclassified, personal memorandum I had written on the basis of my wartime experiences. He wouldn't take it. He said, "Is it classified?" "No." But he wouldn't take it. Somehow or other, [216] I don't know why, I can't imagine why, it wasn't that he objected -- we were having a friendly chat, it wasn't anything unfriendly, you know, it was just somehow or other he seemed to think I was planting something on him -- or I don't know what he thought. That was the kind of character Max was. [A portion of page 216 is currently restricted NLHST] It's funny, when I learned about this -- it happened as a complete surprise -- Charlie Murphy called me in one afternoon and he told me that the President had decided [217] I should go to the Federal Trade Commission, and I was unhappy but I knew that there was no alternative if the President decided that; so, did I want the appointment? I said, "Well, there is no alternative -- sure." So the appointment went up that day -- the nomination -- and the next day or a few days later I lingered after a press conference -- not after press but after a staff meeting with the President -- I lingered after it and talked to him, and the only things I could think of were the Barkley episode and the O'Conor episode, I tried to explain my version of them, and he listened patiently for five or ten minutes, and then I could begin to see he was beginning to twitch his fingers a little, and I knew that there was no point in going on, so I thanked him and left. To Charlie Murphy I said, "Charlie, I never understood why, in a sense, I got the rigid digit there." And he said, "Well I never have either, and nobody has ever told me even if anyone knows." He said, "One of the problems is that there was no matter of principle involved." The President was strong on principles, but there was no matter of principle involved here. And I know that the President didn't personally -- I mean I have had many letters from him of the kindest fashion. [218] He wrote me a beautiful letter when he left in January of '53, January 16th when he left office, I was still serving, and I have had many letters through the '50s and '60s from him, and I have a historic letter from him in '56 about how his views on civil rights were shaped -- it's never been published, someday I'll publish it. And, also, at that time he wrote me a series of letters and in one of them he said in '56, "That if you and Dave and Charlie stick together we will win the next election," -- he meant Dave Lloyd and Charlie Murphy; so, I know that the President wasn't personally aggrieved against me. But at that time in 1950 for reasons which I don't know and probably never will know, he felt that it was best for me to leave the White House. But, of course, White House staff men are expendable by nature. You offend somebody important and... HESS: Someone else has to be brought in. SPINGARN: ...someone else has to be brought in, but I would naturally be interested to this day finding out what the real facts were of the situation. I'll probably never know. It's just curiosity now, it makes no real difference. HESS: I have one other question here on congressional liaison. [219] Do you recall working with John Carroll on legislative matters? SPINGARN: Well, not really. John Carroll (who had been a Senator from Colorado), in effect replaced me at the White House; I mean he took over the slot that I had and he was the legislative pivot man at the White House afterwards. I used to drop in and see him occasionally, but I can't say I worked with him. Why? We weren't there at the same time. HESS: He was just called in to replace you, is that right? SPINGARN: That's my recollection of the situation, yes. I wanted to get on with this civil rights situation -- I hadn't finished that. As I've said, one of the aspects of Truman was his allergy to arm twisting. He had no high-powered staff operation and he didn't seem to want one. Another was that he inherited David Niles from Franklin Roosevelt, and that Niles who nominally had the civil rights assignment really didn't do anything about it except .... the only civil rights matters he seemed to deal with were Jewish civil rights matters, and New York City politics, as nearly as I could see. And, of course, Israeli matters. Philleo Nash feels differently about it and maybe he's right. He was closer to Niles, but this is the way I saw it, this is the way it seemed to me. [220] I have talked to Philleo about this, and I know that he would not agree with me on this, but that's the way I saw it -- to the extent that anything that was done it was by Philleo. Now, this is all very well, but Philleo didn't have the job, didn't have the title, and didn't have the status to do what a man who had direct access to the President had. So, what I am saying is that if the civil rights man, the official rights man, had been more active and aggressive in the job, and needled the President more about it, done more about it, I think that would have made some difference, and this was not altogether President Truman's fault because he inherited Niles from Franklin Roosevelt. Now, finally I went on to say that as far as President Truman is concerned -- this brought down the house -- this is what I told a group up there at New York. I said, "I'll bet a dinner at Le Pavillon," that's the best and most expensive restaurant in New York City, an average dinner there would cost maybe thirty dollars a head. "I'll bet a dinner at Le Pavillon for this entire American Historical Association Convention." [221] Phil Brooks interrupted there, he said, "There are six thousand people here." I said, "Yes, for everyone -- one dinner -- everyone of the six thousand. I will bet a dinner that in 2066," they will have to dig me up, "historians will rate Harry Truman above Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson:" I pointed out first of all before I said this, that a few years ago, I place it around '62 or 3, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. took a poll, a sampling poll, of representative historians and they rated all the Presidents of the United States, in their opinion, in their order of greatness as Presidents, and as I recall Harry Truman was eighth on the list. First was either Washington or Lincoln, and then the other one, then Jefferson, Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Wilson, and strangely enough Polk, and then Harry Truman; Dwight Eisenhower was the twenty-sixth, I think, or somewhere in that area. I said, "In 2066, I will bet that he rates above Franklin Roosevelt and Wilson." I said, "Wilson was a brilliant man, but he was a poor politician and he could have gotten a League of Nations if he had been a better politician and been willing to make some compromises. And I said, "Franklin Roosevelt is sometimes [222] described as a lion and a fox, but more fox than lion, on civil rights, for instance, he was pretty much of a weasel." I said, "My own father told me often," now my father was president of the NAACP all through the '30s until his death in '39 -- when he went in to see the President, and Walter White told me this, too, when my father or Walter White, who was executive secretary, sometimes they went in separately, sometimes together, when they went in to see the President, typically the meeting would go like this: The President would hail them jovially as they came in the door, "Oh, by the way, Walter or Joel .I want to tell you a story," and he would then launch into an anecdote and he would talk for fifteen minutes telling stories, and then Marvin McIntyre, the press secretary, would come to the door and say, "Your next appointment is here, Mr. President," and they would be ushered out never having reached the problem they wished to discuss with him; this was typically the way Franklin Roosevelt evaded issues, you see, on civil rights. There was more, but this gives the substance of what I had to say in my speech, and the whole thing was that when I got through Bernstein had ten minutes rebuttal [223] and he was mad; he got up angry, obviously, and he then proceeded to describe -- I also mentioned in my speech the things that had been done, the things that could be done, and Bernstein had mentioned these, too, that the Army had largely been desegregated. I said that the Government had done things that it could do, short of legislation which it couldn't do at that time, and one notable thing was the amicus curiae brief which had evolved under Truman. whereby the Department of Justice interceded as amicus curiae in private litigation, typically in cases the NAACP brought, in support of the NAACP, the civil rights position -- this had been done in other fields but it had not been done in civil rights before as far as I am aware of until the Truman administration, and Phil Perlman was the Solicitor General who spark plugged this. Well, when Bernstein got back up again for his rebuttal, he was mad and he did a foolish thing, he fabricated or distorted facts. He told about an interview he had with Philip Elman. Now, Philip Elman was one of Phil Perlman's assistants in the Solicitor General's office in the Truman administration. He is now Federal Trade Commissioner, as I once was; I know him slightly. [224] Bernstein said he had an interview with Elman and Elman had told him that Phil Perlman was basically a racist and a bigot who said things like, "There is a delegation of 'coons' waiting to see me," that Perlman had no interest really in civil rights, but just in personal publicity; and that the White House was almost never in touch with their office on civil rights matters, and so forth, for ten minutes. This didn't make sense to me, and I got up and I asked Phil Brooks for two minutes I wasn't entitled to, and he gave me two minutes for rebuttal, and I said, "Now look, I, don't know what you're talking about that the White House wasn't in touch with the Solicitor General's office -- you mean that they weren't in touch with Phil Elman, Phil Elman was way down the line, he was a third or fourth echelon lawyer, he wasn't a first or second assistant to the Solicitor General; we naturally didn't deal with him." I said, "I had many talks with Philip Perlman during that period, and the President and Charlie Murphy had many more than I did. What do you mean we weren't in touch?" This was nonsense. Well, I couldn't deal with the other quotes at that time, but when I came back to Washington ... .by [225] the way, before I left New York, I called up Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, and a wonderful guy, and I told him what Bernstein had said and he laughed, "Well, that is absolute nonsense," he said, "old Harry Truman got the civil rights wagon rolling again after it stalled under Roosevelt." That's what Roy Wilkins said. All right, when I went back to Washington I called up Philip Elman, and I told him what Bernstein had said, and I suggested to him he ought to write Bernstein and get this settled. I had some trouble convincing him -- Elman didn't understand -- he thought that I was denouncing him for having said these things -- it took some time for him to understand. I was trying to get him to say what he had said, and find out whether Bernstein was correct, you see, and when he finally realized it, he said, "Of course, I didn't make any such denunciations of Phil Perlman." And I then said, "If I were you I would write this young professor out at Stanford and get things straight with him." And he said, "Well, I'll think about it." And I said, "If you write him, will you send me a copy of your letter?" [226] Well he said, "I'll have to think about that." I could see he was a man in the middle; he didn't want to get between me and Bernstein on this thing. Then I called up Arnold Raum -- Arnold Raum is now a judge of the United States Tax Court -- and he was number one assistant -- Phil Perlman's dead -- he was Perlman's number one assistant. Elman was down the line, unranked. Raum said this was absolute nonsense. He said, "You could say Phil Perlman died for civil rights," because in 1960 he was leading the fight for a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, and he worked so hard and he had a weak heart that he died a few months later. And he said, "Now, Phil Perlman was born and raised in Baltimore. He was born in the Southern tradition. He may have used terms sometimes that a Bernstein might seem outrageous. But he became a dedicated civil rightser and it is absolute nonsense to say that he was a bigot or racist." And he said, "Furthermore, I was a personal and social friend of Phil Perlman's. as well as a colleague and his first assistant." He said, "Philip Elman wasn't; so, I know him much better than Elman does." And I then talked to [227] Abe Harris who was assistant solicitor general under Perlman, and he told me the same story. They both praised Perlman as a dedicated man who believed in what he was doing in the civil rights field. I called Elman again, and this time he said he was going to write Bernstein, and he said he agreed in principle with what Raum and Abe Harris had told me. So, in other words, what I am saying is that I have confronted Bernstein twice and each time he had fabricated or distorted his evidence. That's my opinion -- once on Vietnam and again about Perlman; so I have a very low opinion of him as a historian. He may be brilliant and he may be able, but a man who has committed himself to an opinion so strongly that he has to fabricate or distort facts in order to support that opinion is not much of a historian. Maybe someday he will be, but he is not now, and I hope you send a copy of this transcript to Professor Bernstein. HESS: I rather imagine that he will read it one of these days when he is at the Library. SPINGARN: Right. I think I would like to talk about a program for the Democratic Party which I have just succeeded, I'm [228] happy to say, in persuading the Democratic National Committee to adopt after only ten years and three months of effort. I call this program KOED -- K-O-E-D -- and that stands for Knock on Every Door, an acronym; actually it's only a rather gimmicky title for promotional purposes