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 22, 1967 (Fourth Oral History) March 22, 1967 (Fifth 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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 22, 1967 (Fourth Oral History) By Jerry N. Hess [336] Fourth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 22, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. HESS: We are recording for this morning's session, sir, what would you like to start off on? SPINGARN: Well, I want to continue on the Larry King article in Harper's Magazine of October, 1966, "My Hero, L.B.J." When I read this article which was October 6th, I grabbed my phone and I called John Fischer, who is the editor-in-chief of Harper's Magazine in New York. He was away that day so I was referred to the executive editor, Willie Morris. I explained who I was and asked him for fifteen hundred or two thousand words in the next issue to answer King's article. Mr. Morris was very friendly and he offered me seven hundred and fifty words as a letter-to-the-editor in the December issue, two months off. It seemed that it took that much lead time. He said that because of their lead time situation I would have to get the letter to him by the following Monday -- this was Thursday I was calling him. I said I would do that and in fact I did better. I got up early Friday, October 7th, and knocked out a long version of [337] some eighteen hundred words and a short version of about a thousand words of a letter to Harper's on the King article -- two alternative versions. I completed both versions by early afternoon the same day and mailed them, air mail special delivery, to Mr. Morris about five p.m., Friday, the day after I first contacted him. This wasn't as difficult as it sounds because I had done quite a bit of research, or perhaps I should say my style of research which would make any Ph.D. shudder, on the subject of L.B.J. and the liberal establishment long before I ever heard of Larry King. I sent such long letters because I hoped against hope that my singing Pulitzer-level prose would melt Harper's hard heart, and its editors would rise and in a single voice cry, "We absolutely must publish in our next issue this brilliant man's superb demolition of the Larry King or Dr. Fell syndrome on L.B.J." On October 17th, I received from an assistant editor, Mrs. Wolf, a friendly letter saying that Mr. Morris had given her, my "witty and informative commentaries on Larry King's article," I'm quoting her, but she went on to say that because of unavoidable space problems it [338] was necessary to cut my letter and she enclosed for my approval her cut version which ran around four hundred and twenty-five words. Mrs. Wolf had done a good job of cutting it to four hundred and twenty-five words, but it seemed to me that a large part of my thesis had been eliminated, obviously and inevitably, in cutting it to that small proportions. So, on Tuesday, October 18th, I got up at four o'clock and I wrote John Fischer, the editor-in-chief, a long letter and sent it to his home. I wrote a letter about two thousand words going over all this and asking him first to print my long letter or to commission me to write an article for the January or February, 1967 issue, without pay, if desired, on L.B.J. and the intellectual establishment. In length, I said, whatever you regard as a standard length Harper's article. If that's impossible, I said, will you print my letter in about seven hundred fifty or so words, as Mr. Morris first said he'd give me, and if that's impossible well go ahead and print Mrs. Wolf's version. I receded each time down to a lesser position, and I realized that the magazine had no equal time obligations but it seemed to me that there ought [339] to be room in Harper's for a voice of dissent from the prevailing intellectual verdict on L.B.J. I said I didn't regard myself as a sycophant of his, he had his faults, y como, but that it seemed to me that the idealistic liberals and intellectuals often set standards of conduct for L.B.J. which they spurn for their own guidance. For instance, one of the things that Larry King despised about Lyndon Johnson was that Lyndon hadn't used his great powers, and political influence in Texas to move the Texas political and socio-economic establishment into a more liberal climate; that he had gone along with the big oil and the big steel and big cattle interests down there. Well, I noted that Larry King himself had for a considerable number of years, six or eight I think, maybe more, been the chief assistant to a Congressman from Texas named Rutherford who was very much more conservative than Lyndon Johnson was -- I looked his voting record up. If Larry King was such a dedicated liberal why did he use his talents to work with such a conservative. He was setting standards it seemed to me for Lyndon Johnson that he hadn't set for himself, [340] but that is only a detail I suppose. The main thing is that this type of liberal seems to set style above substance. He would rather lose with a Kennedy than win with a Johnson. He would rather strike a noble posture and go down to defeat than do a little corn pone arm twisting and win, and things like that. This simply doesn't make any sense to me. And, as to the question of Lyndon Johnson blowing his stack from time to time, being oversensitive to press and other criticism, and being mean to his staff, well, let's take the first count to begin with, about the sensitivity to newspaper criticism. Thirty-five men have been President of the United States including Lyndon Johnson -- he's the thirty-sixth President, but Cleveland had two numbers, and Lyndon Johnson is probably the thirty-fifth President who has blown his stack over press and other attacks. George Washington was the first. Jefferson described an explosion by George Washington at a Cabinet meeting, an outburst which, by the way, was no novelty to Washington's associates, in the following terms -- I'm quoting Thomas Jefferson: [341] The President was much inflamed. He got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself. Ran on much on this personal abuse which had been bestowed on him. Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he's been in the Government which was not done on the purest motives. That he'd never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office and that was every moment since, that by God, he would rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That's George Washington. On another occasion in June 1793, Jefferson reported to Madison that Washington was ill with a fever and, "He is also extremely affected by the attacks made and kept up on him in the public papers. I think he feels these things more than any person I ever yet met with." But, of course, Jefferson had never met Lyndon Johnson, I could go on with similar statements about other Presidents. By the way, I referred earlier to what the intellectuals of Lincoln's day thought of him; here's a quote from a history by Perkins and Van Deusen, written in 1962, quoting from them: It was a smart thing for intellectuals in general and writers in particular to hold the President up to ridicule thereby providing that they themselves were sophisticated. They called him timid and ignorant, a man of no education. They shouted that he was nothing [342] but poor white trash (and so forth and so forth). Most of the outstanding newspapers at the beginning of his term of office were opposed to him and remained so throughout. Indeed many mercilessly berated him calling him such names as a half-witted usurper, a simple Susan, a buffoon, and the head ghoul of Washington. Hans Morganthau, where are you? This was the man that Hans Morgenthau says was the perfect combination of truth and power, but the Hans Morgenthaus of the 1860s didn't think so. Now, as to how hard L.B.J. is on his staff. Recently, I saw a book published in 1966 -- I saw this last fall sometime for the first time. It was written by a senior British civil servant named George Mallaby called, "From my Level" and he says of Churchill, I don't have the exact quote before me, but he says of Churchill that he was absolutely impossible as a boss, cantankerous, mean, abusive. He didn't know any members of his staff except those who were closest to him. He didn't even know their names. He was everything that was wrong and bad and abominable in a boss, "and we loved him." So, as I said before, hard-driving executives are not easy on their staffs anymore than they are on themselves, and yet you don't want your [343] President to be too easygoing. Maybe he shouldn't be too hard-driving, but he shouldn't be too easy-going either. Now, I am going to turn over to you, Mr. Hess, the material I have here which are the original letters written in The New Republic and the Washington Post, that two thousand word letter to John Fischer, I don't have them here with me at the moment but I'll dig them up and send to you when I find them, the long letters I wrote to Harper's -- I mean the two long letters of which they printed only four hundred odd words. I would like these back though. HESS: We will have these Xeroxed and return the originals to you. SPINGARN: Right. HESS: I have a couple of questions here about the Truman period events. One was on the Negro voting strength and item number forty-three in your scrapbook at the Library is, "Letter dated March 19, 1957 from Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP to Spingarn..." SPINGARN: Executive director, executive secretary then of the NAACP, not the president. HESS: "...regarding the drop in the number of Negroes [344] voting for the Democratic Party in 1956." Of course, this is a little past the Truman administration but it does bring up some interesting questions. Did the staff members during the Truman administration think that there was any particular Negro leader who could sway large numbers of Negro voters? Was there a Negro voting bloc, in other words? SPINGARN: The Negroes until the New Deal came along voted predominately Republican, but they switched after Roosevelt brought the majority of them into the Democratic Party by his New Deal program. I recall that when my father campaigned for Roosevelt in 1936 among Negro audiences, one of the things he said to them was that the Republican Party had been rattling the bones of Abraham Lincoln for seventy-five years, but that's all they'd ever given you, and I think this is true. Well, Negroes, like any other group of people that feel some common identity naturally tend to vote for those whom they think are going to help them. Now, there may be a question -- every man has a great many identities. I mean, he is a member of the race or ethnic group or national origin group to which he belongs. He may be a member [345] of a religion, he is a member of a political party, he lives in a town, in a county, in a state, in a country, he has a family and friends who have affiliations. He's a businessman, or he's a union man, or he's a professional man, or he's something else. All of these are identities he has and all of them have some effect on his thinking. No one can say with assurance how the Negroes will vote, the Negroes like any other group vote for what they think are their own best interests in the context of the whole situation and that's the way practically all people vote. HESS: I was just wondering if the NAACP or the Urban League had any special following? SPINGARN: In the first place the NAACP is bipartisan, nonpartisan, it never as such – never -- tells people to vote Republican or Democratic, or at least, I think it might have in the '64 campaign because Goldwater was so repugnant to Negroes, but generally speaking its tradition has been that since it embraces large numbers of Republicans and Democrats that it doesn't ....when my father, for instance, participated in the political campaign of '36, he made it clear that he was speaking as an individual and not on the behalf of the NAACP. [346] Now, you ask me whether -- actually there is a single Negro leader who, or even any group of leaders, who can direct huge blocs of Negro votes. Politicians naturally like to simplify things. They like to think in any group that there are certain key people who influence huge bodies -- if you just line them up you've got everything made, but things are not that simple, and they certainly aren't among Negroes. There are many types of Negro constituency, there are different people who speak eloquently to those different types and some who try to speak and don't make it, don't communicate, and so anyone who claims that he owns a large Negro bloc, I don't think is representing the thing correctly. But it is true, as I say, that Negroes like everyone else tend to vote for what they think are the best interests of their group and since Negroes are an underprivileged and have been traditionally an underprivileged, heavily discriminated against group, and since they have a visibility identity, they have been given a cohesion I suppose that other groups don't always have. But, I will say this, that I think that the upper middle class, the well-to-do upper middle class businessman [347] and professional man is likely to vote differently than the poverty-level Negro on any given issue, just as the upper level man of Irish or Italian or almost any other origin you could mention is quite likely to vote differently than the man in the bottom ten or twenty percent economically of that group. HESS: During the time that you were in the White House, during most of the Truman administration, in fact, there was an effort to get a permanent FEPC, legislative FEPC through, which they didn't get through. What were your activities in relation to that -- during the period you were in? SPINGARN: I told you yesterday. I told you about the task force which we ran. HESS: I knew that you had but I didn't know if we had covered it all. The question sort of ties in here. During that time did any leaders of the Negro community come in to speak to you? SPINGARN: Roy Wilkins is a friend of mine. When he came to Washington we might have lunch or see each other, but the Negro leaders didn't need to come to me, they went to the President. I mean when Roy Wilkins came down with something important he would have a talk [348] with the President. They would be talking to themselves I suppose if they were talking to me because in general I would agree with them, and I'm not saying Mr. Truman wouldn't too, but he was the man they needed to influence, not me. HESS: I knew that we had covered part of that but I didn't know if we had covered it all. SPINGARN: Of course, there was much less activity and agitation in the Truman administration than there has been in recent years when the racial problems have become a permanent fixture on the front page of American newspapers. In the Truman administration they were rarely on the front page of American newspapers. There were rarely major demonstrations, in fact, hardly ever that I can think of. I can remember before Truman that A. Philip Randolph and others; Walter White and others, but I think Randolph was the key man, persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to establish a wartime FEPC by Executive order, on the threat, if that's what it was, that they were going to stage a huge march on Washington by the teas of thousands. Now, that was FEPC by the way, here's one of the things that I have always felt, in [349] line with my thesis, that the best is the enemy of the good, and that by taking impossible positions of perfection you never win, you never win, you are bound to lose that way. It has always seemed to me that if the proponents of FEPC in '46, or in the '40s right at the end of the war, would have accepted an FEPC without enforcement sanction, so-called voluntary FEPC, without the enforcement sanctions which were in later bills, that they could have gotten it through Congress at that time, and that the experience with the sort of toothless act might have demonstrated a need for sanctions and that somewhere along the line they would have gotten them, if the thing was demonstrated that it couldn't work without them. I have always felt that would have been possible and that it was a mistake on the part of the civil rights leaders not to do that, but this is hindsight, of course, and water over the dam. I want to emphasize again that the people like Professor Bernstein who downgrade Mr. Truman because he didn't get civil rights legislation through simply don't know the political facts of life of that era -- no President, I [350] don't care who he was, not John Kennedy, not Lyndon Johnson, not Abraham Lincoln could have gotten civil rights legislation through the Senate at that time. It's said that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose hour has struck, but in this case the hour had not yet struck. Now, I want to add this while I still remember it. I talked yesterday about KOED and the evolution of that. A little personal postscript; yesterday I told how this thing evolved from a project I did in the '56 campaign, speechwriting project, and I had the assistance of a number of able young women. One of them was a lady named Ann Branscomb; she was about twenty-six or seven then, a strikingly beautiful girl from Georgia and very, very bright. She had an M.A. in political science, she was happily married to an able physicist who is now one of the Government's top physicists, I believe, Dr. Lewis Branscomb, who is head of one of the Government's big laboratories out in Boulder, Colorado, and she was studying law. Ann has been living out in Colorado with her husband. She has become a lawyer and she is practicing, and last Saturday she was elected Democratic [351] Vice-Chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party, that's the highest female rank -- by party law, the chairman is a man and the vice-chairman a woman -- and she is here in Washington and that phone call at the end of yesterday's conference was from her, and I am having lunch with her and her husband today. This is interesting because here is a talented woman who carpet bagged, in a sense, into Colorado, she has only been there a relatively few years and now she's got the highest political Democratic woman's job in the state. I have a great belief in the abilities of the able and politically savvy woman. They can accomplish miracles and in fact if you could line up a few thousand Ann Branscombs around the country on your side I think you'd win all of the campaigns -- a few thousand around the country, that's all it would take. Because they work harder and they are more effective than their male compeers, if they have the talents and the personality that is required to do the job, Mrs. Branscomb certainly has. I predict that she may, if she wants to be, be Senator from Colorado one day. HESS: You mentioned that perhaps the FEPC could have [352] eventually got through if they had accepted a compromise in '46 pr '47. Did you ever hear Mr. Truman make any statements on compromises on things of this nature, on civil rights matters? SPINGARN: Well, I can't remember at this late date. I don't remember. Whenever you talk to anybody who says they remember specifically what somebody said fifteen, twenty years ago he probably is lying, unless it was something of very deep significance to them at the moment so they would remember it all through the years. I heard Mr. Truman say many, many things, but I don't remember most of them. HESS: We have talked to some extent about the loyalty and security matters, and your duties in the White House in relation to loyalty and security matters. Have we covered that adequately or are there other things to be put down? I have a few questions here just on the writing of the message and on the writing of the veto message. Did you write the veto message? SPINGARN: As usual it was a team job. HESS: I should have expressed it differently and said did you write the first draft? SPINGARN: No. I'll tell you what I did do. I wrote a [353] first draft, and I also asked my colleague, my former assistant at the Treasury, Don Hansen who was still at the Treasury and who knew a lot about this field to write his version of it, and I think there were one or two more drafts in the picture, and these were all turned over to David Bell who wrote, what I suppose you could call, the composite first draft. I mean he had the benefit of my draft, and Hansen's draft and possibly one or two others, you see. I would say that -- well, we all wrote first drafts if you like, but David Bell took the several that were already written and wrote a composite first draft and we climbed on top of that and I wrote lengthy memoranda and suggestions for revisions. I sent Dave Bell lengthy memoranda commenting, "strike this, and insert these paragraphs," you know, that sort of thing, pages and pages, and other people made their comments and the drafts evolved until finally we got the final draft, so I don't know who wrote the first draft. It all depends on how you look at it, but I would say that more than anyone else probably it was David Bell, but we were all in the picture. I remember that Hubert Humphrey -- the President made [354] some statement at a press conference, he was asked if he was going to veto the Internal Security bill and he said that he couldn't tell until he saw it. This was his standard statement, because after all, it could always be changed. It was in a news conference I think when he was asked that question. It was not final, and it could always be changed and it is obvious that a President shouldn't commit himself on a controversial bill, ordinarily at least unless there is some special circumstance, on what he is going to do. The bill hadn't even reached final shape. So, he said he would wait until he saw it. Well, Senator Hubert Humphrey phoned me then and he said the liberals who opposed the bill were disturbed by that statement because they thought it meant a weakening of the President's position, because he had talked adversely about this bill along the way. I said I didn’t see it that way at all because this was just the standard reply of the President on such matters, and that the bill was in conference and theoretically could be amended into a proper bill because some of the provisions in the bill were approved by the President, some of the provisions in the bill [355] were in the President's own message to Congress, I think it was August 7th or 8th somewhere like that, the message and bill that I prepared, the President's own internal security bill -- I'm talking about August 7th or 8th, 1950, in there or thereabouts. So it was theoretically possible, we all knew it wasn't going to happen, but it was theoretically possible that the bill could be revised into the proper shape. I remember this: The President did something unusual, it's never been done before or since as I recall; he attached to his veto message a little buck slip memo in which he said something to the effect that he urged each member of the Congress to read this thing carefully, he emphasized its importance and urged each member to read it carefully, something like that. It will be in your files, the exact wording. It was just a little gimmick you might say, but it was unusual and as far as I know it had never been done before, and there was some press comment on that. Well, the message went up and the House overruled the veto, hardly leaving its seat to do so, without leaving the jury box, you might say. It went to the Senate and there was substantial debate, and [356] they debated -- I think it was a Friday -- and they debated all Friday night, and old Senator Langer, he was the only Republican opposed to it, if my memory is right, and he collapsed finally and had to be carted off to the hospital. And sometime, I think it was Saturday morning, that is my recollection anyway, and the Congress was going to adjourn or was scheduled to adjourn that day. Senator Humphrey's legislative assistant, who I think then was John Sims, phoned me and said that the Senator wanted to know if the President thought they should continue the filibuster and not let the thing come to a vote, should they continue their support of the veto... HESS: Blocking the vote. SPINGARN: ...blocking the vote to override the veto by continuing the debate. I took this message to the President, I think it was at a staff meeting that morning, and I told the President about this phone call and asked him what I should advise Humphrey. The President said -- this was a rather typical statement on his part -- that, of course, it was up to the Senator, but that his own opinion was that, if by continuing the debate they could avoid a final vote before [357] adjournment, then he would be for it, but if they were going to have a final vote anyway he thought they should continue only until they thought they had gotten all of the possible publicity in the newspapers that they could out of it, and then let it go to a vote, that's my recollection. I have written all this up in a memorandum at the time, a contemporaneous memorandum, which is in the Truman Library; and again anything I say is subject to revision by the memorandums I have written in the past because they are more accurate than what I recollect now, obviously. I am quoting from memory of long distance events, so I defer to my own contemporaneous memoranda, on everything -- everything. So. I relayed that message and they let it go to a vote, and oh, there is another thing. The President told Charlie Murphy and me at one point that day -- I've forgotten whether it was Friday or Saturday -- that he had gotten some report from the Hill, Leslie Biffle or I don't know whom, I've forgotten, maybe a Senator -- saying that they had been very much impressed with the cogency of the arguments in the veto message, and that they had been surprised, some of the Senators, [358] who were on the fence or who were for overriding the veto, were somewhat shaken by it; and the President was encouraged by this statement and he told Charlie and me to do what we could, to make phone calls and so forth and see what we could do to mobilize support for the veto message, and I remember Charlie and I made some phone calls. I remember talking specifically to Brien McMahon who was a friend of mine, a Senator from Connecticut, now dead, and I didn't get to first base. Brien was committed to voting to override the veto, and there was no possibility of changing his mind. Charlie made some calls, and I think he called the Democratic National Committee and asked them to help, but it all didn't prove very effective because when the final vote came it was overwhelmingly to override. My recollection is there were only ten or eleven votes to sustain the veto in the Senate, and only thirty or forty in the House, something on that order. HESS: Do you recall offhand if Joseph Feeney and Charles Maylon also worked with you on this, in your relations with Congress? SPINGARN: In this particular thing? I don't remember any [359] connection they had with it, if they did I'm not aware of the fact. HESS: One point I failed to ask yesterday when we were discussing them, just what was their relationship to you. Who did they report to? SPINGARN: As far as I know they reported to Matt Connelly. That was my impression. They certainly didn't report to Charlie Murphy and they didn't report to me. They reported to Matt Connelly, that was my impression. HESS: Do you know why they would have reported to Matt Connelly? SPINGARN: No, I don't. Their whole position in the thing was a little obscure as far as the lines of control went, I'm not sure I was aware at the time exactly. My impression was that they reported to Matt Connelly. And, as I say, it was a very pedestrian sort of operation, it seemed to me, which was possibly consonant with what the President wanted. There was no arm twisting or heavy pressure that I was aware of. It was more a matter of communicating what the White House position was without any argumentation, and reporting back what the Senator or Congressman said. And, neither man, as far as I knew, ever knew much about the substance of [360] the measure so that he could have argued effectively in any event, you see. HESS: Also did you write the message of August 1950? SPINGARN: Yes. HESS: Did you work with any particular staff members on that? Anything come to mind? What were the problems in writing the August message? SPINGARN: Well, the problem was this: The problem was you can't beat something with nothing, and so that was my thesis and the President's thesis and I think I was the one who proposed the message, that's my recollection, but as I say, go back to the files, I don't know really now -- it's all lost in the haze of many years. HESS: That's quite some time ago. SPINGARN: Well, it's seventeen years. My recollection is that I proposed simply on that basis that since a bill was rushing through Congress, the Mundt-Nixon bill, that we opposed much of it, and that they were yowling about the need for greater internal security, that we should get up an internal security measure which would incorporate those provisions of Mundt-Nixon, or other bills, that we thought were worthwhile, commendable or at least not bad, and that the President should [361] submit his own message and that then you would have something, instead of nothing, to fight Mundt-Nixon with, and that's the way it was done. Now, I might say, as I said before, in 1950 which was the very height of McCarthyism, you could write the Ten Commandments on a sheet of paper and pass it as an internal security measure, or you could write anything. Anything you labeled internal security was going to go through. That was the way it was. Now, the main provision -- the big central provision -- which encompassed the majority of the whole bill in the Mundt-Nixon bill, were the so-called Mundt-Nixon provision, which provided for the registration of the Communist Party, and certain requirements that it had to fulfill in reporting on its membership and finances, and it also provided for a registration by the so-called front organization. Now, that was seventeen years ago. This bill became law over the President's veto in September 1950. Seventeen years later the central target of that bill, the Communist Party, has not yet been required by law to register under criminal sanctions for failing to do so, and the Court of Appeals within the last [362] couple of weeks has held unconstitutional the attempt to penalize them for failure to .... and now it goes to the Supreme Court and I haven't the least doubt that they will affirm the Court of Appeals and therefore the Mundt-Nixon provisions will presumably become a nullity for all practical purposes. That's my impression. Let's put it this way: If the safety of the Republic stood in jeopardy and seventeen years have gone by without doing the things the Mundt-Nixon bill wanted done, boy, we must have been in terrible shape back in 1950. Joke. This was a stupid and absurd bill, which didn't make sense, and which was passed in a hysterical moment, of which we shouldn't be too proud, and the proof of the pudding is what has happened to that bill in the seventeen years since, and I think Mr. Truman has every reason to feel satisfaction over his veto of the Mundt-Nixon bill. HESS: What about the Defense Production Act of 1950? What was your involvement in that? SPINGARN: Well, my involvement was -- and again I have elaborately documented this because one of the best files in the Truman Library I feel sure is the Defense Production bill file. I mean in technical [363] terms and in terms of completeness. HESS: That's what your papers start off on and it contains -- it's in several boxes, but I thought that there might be a few items here... SPINGARN: I want to make this comment first. The White House files are the worst files I've ever seen in any Government agency in my life. When you called for a file, a mish-mash of loose papers, literally loose papers, maybe with a string around them, came over, and they were not indexed, there were no tabs, there was no sorting, no collating of them under subject matter -- nothing, just loose papers mostly. It was fantastic. I had never seen Government files in that bad of shape. In the Treasury, we had had a very able archivist, Miss Helen Chatfield, and by this time she was the Budget Bureau archivist, so when I had major projects I turned the files, I would turn a tubful of files and papers over to her, and ask her to put them in good shape, and she would do a beautiful job. And the two I remember particularly she did for me were the Defense Production Act of 1950 and the Small Business Bill of 1950, both of which I was in [364] charge of preparing. HESS: Those are probably very well documented, and they are in your files and not your papers at the Library -- the Defense Production Act are in boxes one through four, and Small Business in seven through nine. SPINGARN: Recently an Englishman named Martin Rudd, who is a senior British civil servant, and who was studying for the British Government what other governments are doing to help the small business with the idea of the British Government seeing which of these ideas they can borrow, use, came to see me after spending some days, or more, out at the Truman Library. The reason he came to see me was that he had seen the Small Business Bill file of 1950 which I was responsible for, and he told me that he was so impressed with it that, I am sure it was partly the presentation in the file as well as the material, that he thought he ought to see me, although this is pretty ancient history basically I mean when you are dealing with what to do in 1967 going back to a proposal that didn't even reach the status of law in 1950. Anyway, on the Korean war bill, the Korean war as I recall broke out, Washington time, June 24th, 1950, [365] I think it was June 25th out there and June 24th here, and the United States reacted immediately. First of all the President ordered air cover for the troops in southern Korea, and then within a very short time, a matter of two or three days, he moved in troops. I can remember doing something very brash, rushing in where angels fear to tread, for these were parlous times. I remember at a staff meeting, oh, it must have been around the 27th I would guess of June, 1950 --and this was none of my business, you understand, it wasn't my function to advise the President on what to do in Korea, but I did, at least I prepared a memorandum making certain suggestions which I presented to him at a staff meeting, and my suggestion was that we ought to get a UN force under a non-American, that was my thesis. A United Nations force under a non-American general would be the best answer to the North Korean aggression. Well, of course, they got a UN force, but not a non-American commander, but it was interesting that the President at this point, I mean when my suggestion was made to him at the staff meeting, he then unbuttoned and told us what he was doing, what he was going to do, and this [366] was the first news we'd had, most of his staff I mean, of what he was doing, which is actually what happened, of course. Anyway, we had to prepare a bill to put the Government in a position to wage war, and there were two main schools of thought as to how far we should go; one, I'll call the Symington school, because Stu Symington was probably the major proponent of that within the circles of Government, and that was -- he was then the chairman of the National Security Resources Board, and they had responsibility for preparing the Government's mobilization plans, and they did have drafts of bills but they were outmoded, I mean they just weren't particularly applicable to the situation we found ourselves in, and Stu Symington was an all-out mobilization man. He wanted to mobilize the country, put it on a war mobilization basis. And my recollection is that the opposing school was probably led -- I may even be wrong on my protagonists, but this is my recollection at this late date. I want to emphasize -- I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Mark Twain said, "As I get older I remember less and less of past events and most of what I remember isn't [367] true." So, for the historians who may read this just remember that I am speaking from memory, and that to the extent that my own contemporary records are different, they are right and I am wrong, and to the extent other contemporary records -- on facts, I am entitled to any opinion I want, but on facts -- differ with me, they are right and I am wrong. HESS: That's one of the accepted tenets of oral history. SPINGARN: Yes, but it needs to be said over and over again. As I recall Leon Keyserling, who was then chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, represented the limited mobilization school and, of course, he was right, and that's what prevailed. Well, Stu Symington is a very energetic and dynamic chap. I remember attending meetings in his office and Stu would charge around the desk and pound on it and shout and they were very dynamic meetings. He was a very forceful proponent of his point of view, and sometimes you would come out of there and you would be terribly impressed by the whole meeting but you'd come out and say, "But what did he say?" It was mostly that charge of energy that got you in [368] there, you know. In any event I was asked to produce a bill, and there was also a message, of course. Now, a different team worked on the message, and I suppose -- well, I've forgotten -- of course, it was Charlie Murphy and Dave Bell and Dave Lloyd, I assume, and who else was in on it I don't know, but I was in charge of drafting the bill that would accompany the message. I remember that this was done over a very short period of time, very short, as I recollect about five days and over a weekend, too, and the five days included Saturday and Sunday. It is just a blur to me now, but we were working night and day for five days, and so many agencies were involved, there were different titles on this thing to promote the defense production. Don't ask me any details about the bill because I've forgotten them all now. You'll have to go to the files. But, I do remember this: We had little sub-task forces stashed around the whole building so that the people involved could talk on different problems. There would be one here, one down the hall, one on the next floor, they were all over the building for five days, [369] day and night, and I was sitting there and I was feeling very important, I'll tell you that, because Cabinet officers were calling on me -- I mean Charlie Brannan came over to see me, and I think [Maurice J.] Tobin came over to see me, because everybody had a major interest in that bill obviously, it was the most important bill before the Government at that time, and tremendous decisions had to be made on what was going into that bill, and what was not going into it, and how it was going to end up. And, of course, the very big decisions were all checked to the President, but there are an awful lot of intermediate and minor decisions that you can't bother the President with, somebody has to decide them, and I was the man that had to decide them at that point, and it had to be done so damn fast. Anyway, we got the bill together and I recounted previously how I took it up to the Hill, and gave it to Speaker Rayburn, and how I told him that the President hoped the bill would go to the House Banking and Currency Committee. Brent Spence of Kentucky a liberal Kentuckian, and a good friend of the administration, was chairman. The House Armed Services Committee I [370] think was the other possibility. I can't remember who the chairman was, but it was a hostile chairman, a chairman from whom we would have trouble we knew. The Speaker, Speaker Rayburn, withered me with a glance and said, "Young man," or words to that effect, nobody, not the President of the United States, no, nobody tells the House where it refers its legislation. That's my prerogative, or our prerogative." "Yes, sir," I never made that mistake again. I thought I had done it very tactfully. But in any event, he had the House Parliamentarian, Lou Deschler, with him, and he had Desehler look over the bill and then he looked at me and he said, "Well, you fellows have rigged this bill so that the Parliamentarian tells me we have to send it to the Banking and Currency Committee." So it went where the President wanted it to, where we hoped it would. I remember going down and giving McCormack, he was the majority leader then, a copy, John McCormack, the Speaker now, and a wonderful man who I have known since 1935, and who was one of the principal and most important supporters of this KOED program, which I finally sold to the Democratic National Committee [371] last month, and his support is a major factor, I believe, in its going into orbit at last. Well, anyway when I was emerging from McCormack's office, the Speaker came out of his office and he buttonholed me and brought me back into his office, and he wanted us to add a provision to the bill which would provide that the bill would automatically terminate, all the powers in the bill would automatically terminate, at the end of two years, unless extended by an affirmative act of Congress. I think we had a termination provision that was the other way around -- it would continue until terminated by Congress, or Executive order of the President, or something like that, I've forgotten, but anyway, he wanted an affirmative provision that would automatically end it in two years, unless the Congress extended it. I assured him we'd put it in, I mean, that wasn't worth arguing about, and we did, of course. And then, I went over and saw Senator Lucas, who was the Senate majority leader, and I left a copy with the Vice President's office, and I have gone into that little matter. Then, the bill was in Congress for several weeks, I've forgotten exactly how long, [372] and I kept in close touch, but the fellow who did a terrific job on that bill and who I want to mention right now was Matt Hale, Matthew Hale, who was the Acting Solicitor of the Department of Commerce, and who had worked closely with us in the drafting of the bill, and who we arranged to go to the Hill and work with the committees in the processing of it, and did such a good job and made himself so invaluable that the committees really brought him inside their caucuses as a member of their own staff, you see, so that he was working right inside the club, as it were, and, of course, that gave us a perfect liaison on what was going on. I remember I used to call Senator Maybank of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, he's dead now, and I used to call him at his home every morning about eight o'clock, and check with him on what was happening on the bill, and communicate to him things that the President wanted his views on, how the bill was going, and how he wanted it to go, and hear from the Senator what he thought and how the thing might turn out, and what the vote was likely to be on this or that controversial provision, that sort of thing -- the usual legislative [373] liaison. So, it was a very busy season, but it went through all right and that's about all I remember. HESS: Mr. Spingarn, what were your duties in regard to labor matters in the White House? SPINGARN: I had no substantive duties in regard to labor matters, but you must remember that I was in effect the pivot man on legislation -- what the Treasury would have called legislative counsel -- and on the legislation that went through Congress every bill came through me to the President. That is, it went to the White House, it was sent to the Bureau of the Budget to farm out and get the agency views, when they came back from Budget they always had to be done in the space of less than ten days -- quickly, of course, and it was handled on a highest priority expedited basis. The Budget sent it to me. Roger Jones was the Budget assistant director for legislative reference, and he has had a distinguished career by the way in Government since then. Roger is actually a Republican from Connecticut, a Connecticut Yankee and a Republican. He has been in Government since, I think, '33. Everybody likes him. He's a good man. And, he was Budget's assistant director for legislative reference at that [374] time. Later Eisenhower appointed him Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, and then Kennedy appointed him Deputy Under Secretary of State, and now he is back in the Budget as special assistant to the director, and sort of top level trouble-shooter. He would be the man responsible for collecting the agency views and seeing that the bill got to me on time, and then I would study it and make my own recommendations, which normally would go along with the Budget, and take it over to the President personally, and explain the matter. If there were, for example, no problems at all -- everybody agreed, you know -- then I could simply take it to Bill Hopkins, who was executive clerk, and say everybody is agreed on this and, it's a formality to sign it, because there is no opposition; but if there was a difference of opinion, that was when you had to talk to the President obviously, and say to him that agency "A" and "B" think the bill should be vetoed, but "C" and "D" and the Budget think it should be signed, and I think it should be signed -- whatever the situation was. Now, as to labor, that would include labor bills and anything else. [375] HESS: I just have a short question here. Did the President usually place quite a lot of strength on what the Bureau of the Budget approved or disapproved -- their opinion as opposed to some of the other agencies? SPINGARN: Yes, I would say that the views of the Bureau of the Budget ordinarily would have a higher value than the view of the particular agency, because the Budget theoretically had no axes to grind, they were not an interest group. They were above the fray, you might say, whereas the agency, after all was in a sense an interest group with its own constituency, more or less, and, therefore, you had to look on them as -- from the President's standpoint they were a proponent of a point of view, you see, and the Budget was not a proponent of any special point of view, they were the judge attempting to weigh all sides and arrive at a fair verdict. I personally would have placed a higher value ordinarily on the Budget view and I think the President did, too. HESS: Fine. I didn't want to interrupt your chain of thought but I did want to throw that out. SPINGARN: But that didn't mean that we always agreed with the Budget, but usually more likely than not. [376] One of the things, by the way that was a little frustrating, was a tendency of agencies to settle matters entirely on precedent without regard to the actual equities of the individual case. In other words, you would get a case that seemed terribly sympathy compelling -- I mean a real injustice had been done -- but if you permitted this bill to be signed then you would open the door for this whole classification, that was the idea. You had set a precedent. Well, that's an argument that has to be considered, that's true, but sometimes a case is so bad, the injustice so great, that you have to say, I don't care what its classification -- all classifications exactly like this should be signed, there should be something done about it. Let's try to distinguish this from the general category. But the tendency in the agencies was to give you that boilerplate answer, this would open the door to ....you know, so many other similar situations, and quite often the Budget and I would take the opposing point of view, and the President would almost always go along with our point of view, as I recall. These were usually on private bills dealing with the situation of one particular individual, an immigration bill or [377] something of that sort. Actually the functional lines at the White House in the Truman era were very loosely defined and that was best, it was flexible. You had the two big compartments, as I say, between what you might call operations under Steelman, and program and planning under first Clifford and then Murphy. I can't speak for Steelman's area, but within the program and planning, things were very loosely defined and you might get a job that was not at all in your ordinary bailiwick, just depending on who was available, and what the exigencies of the moment were. Nobody ever said to me, "Steve, you are the big internal security and loyalty man." It was just that I was very deeply interested in that field and I gravitated toward it and so naturally the work on it gravitated toward me, you see, that was naturally the way it worked. Charlie Murphy knew of my relationship to this work so that it was natural that whenever anything like that came up it was likely to be farmed to me. In the same way, David Lloyd, was the acknowledged master of speechwriting, and most of the big first drafts came from him. [378] David Bell, on the other hand, was the acknowledged master in writing messages to Congress, which is a more precise and formal terminology. David Bell has one of the clearest and sharpest and most precise minds I have ever met, and he was therefore the guy, not always, but he was the guy most likely to be handling a message to Congress, as distinguished from a speech, on the first draft of it, at least. But, this wasn't always the case, so it was all very informal. Now, there is this to be said; at the White House, you either have a small, informal, flexible organization at the top or as it starts to grow it is bound to institutionalize, and then it becomes less flexible, and there are great advantages to that flexibility, that rapport between the men at the top who were working intimately together without any hard and fast hierarchical and institutional lines. Anything that gets too big has to institutionalize, and then you have to establish hierarchical lines that are rather rigid. This has its value from an administrative standpoint, but it has its defects from the standpoint of, I think, producing the best work. So, we had a very small staff. [379] Now, there were only about a dozen people who attended the President's staff conference in the morning and several of those were ceremonial. I mean the three military aides, military, naval, and air aides all attended. They weren't functional in the ordinary sense of the word. Charlie Ross, who was the press secretary, attended, and so did Eben Ayers, the assistant press secretary -- that's five. Then there was Steelman, Murphy, Clifford before he left, there was Matt Connelly, Bill Hassett, and all the administrative assistants except David Niles, as I said, he never attended; that is Dave Stowe, Donald Dawson, George Elsey and me. And, I have told this story, too, on tape I believe, I wasn't invited to attend I just infiltrated finally and stuck. The question of who attended the staff conference was never sharply defined, but it was indispensable to the man who was working at the top level, you simply couldn't do your job without being there. HESS: You wouldn't know what was going on. SPINGARN: You wouldn't know what was going on and since the President's time was very limited for your own solo approach to him, this gave you a daily opportunity. [380] Actually, I found as I went along and sort of got my feet on the ground, since I was handling legislation and since everybody, of course, Matt Connelly was the guardian of the gate as far as getting in to see the President was concerned; but since I handled legislation and I was often carrying enrolled bills and Matt knew that these had to move, I never had any trouble getting in to see the President. I mean I would go over there and there would be people in the anteroom, and I would say, "Matt can you put me in between a couple of appointments?" And he would always do it. I'd say, "I will only take three to five minutes of his time," or something like that. That was the way it worked. And that was principally because I was working on legislative matters and the enrolled bills particularly which had to move. There was a time limit on them. HESS: You could get the President's attention just about anytime you needed to? SPINGARN: Yes. HESS: Well, the subject of labor also brings up the subject of unemployment, and in the President's midyear economic report of 1949 one of the items touched upon was the areas of heavy unemployment in the United [381] States, and this has been regarded as one of the first acknowledgements of this taking place after the war. Did you help write that message? Do you remember anything about that? SPINGARN: To tell you the truth I don't recall that I did and I expect I didn't, but my recollection is that a little task force was set up under John Steelman, headed by Houston, John Houston, and I'm sure David Stowe was in the picture, too, and I don't know who else. I don't know whether they worked up that program, but they were assigned to see what they could do about bringing help to the distressed areas, the special pools of heavy unemployment and depression. You know there was -- not a depression, but a recession in '49. I remember a lot of discussion on that, but I can't focus on it. I don't know. You have to remember that you are working so hard and so many things are happening ....now you asked me, not on tape, but you asked me one day if you could describe a typical day at the White House. Well, there were no typical days at the White House -- there were no typical days. Here is an example; one of the things I did every day, and I still do it, was to make lists [382] for myself of the things I had to do, and I have here two big volumes which I call my White House manual. And actually this was a kind of modus operandi book, I don't know what you want to call it, this is for my own benefit. HESS: Now, this has been microfilmed? SPINGARN: It has been microfilmed... HESS: And, it's out at the Library. SPINGARN: ...and it's out at the Library, two volumes of my White House manuals. And I picked out copies of memoranda I wrote and anything that I thought was of interest enough to go into this. Of course, I may have overlooked a lot of things, too, because I was too busy to always do it with care. But I used to write to my secretary, "Copy to WH manual," you know, and she would put it in here. Whether or not I caught everything, I'm sure I didn't, of course, but every day I would write notes to myself, and some of them are in here. Usually these were longhand notes, but sometimes I had my secretaries, Mary Jones, or Margaret Anderson, type them. By the way, you were talking about civil rights votes. Here, for instance, is a memorandum, "Re [383] second FEPC cloture vote," and it discusses the next vote on FEPC as scheduled for July 12. They had had a first vote on cloture a couple of months earlier. It discusses the composition of the Senate on this thing, how we think they are going to vote; it had the following -- the thirty Democrats that should be present and voting on July 12. And for instance it has asterisks after several of those names and says the asterisk means they were absent on May 19th, 1950 cloture vote; that means these fellows were not present on the last cloture vote, we should try to get them to be present on this next one, and so on. HESS: Those were the men to work on. SPINGARN: Those were the men to work on. And here is the past record of the whole Senate, Republicans and Democrats, on previous key civil rights votes in '49 and '50, which might give some indication as to how they would be voting, you see, and so on. For instance here is a memorandum of July 5, 1950, by me, a memorandum for the FEPC file: Charlie Murphy and I presented to the President today our joint memorandum of July 3 recommending that every effort be made to get a maximum vote in favor of cloture when this comes up for the second time on July 12, 1950. Enclosing the memorandum analyzing the records [384] of all Senators and the three key votes relating to this issue during the 81st Congress. The President told us to go ahead on this matter. Charlie was to call Senator Lucas and Bill Boyle and arrange for us to get together with them to coordinate our work. Now, you see this shows that we were trying -- doing our best. Here are more like this. Here is a memo, for instance, from Philleo Nash to me giving some breakdowns on the votes and what we might expect in the cloture vote, and there's lot of these, you see, many, many memos like that. But I had in here somewhere, I thought -- I know ...here's something. It's a memorandum for Murphy from me dated June 10, 1950, the subject is, "The presidential reply to Attorney General McGrath's June 6th letter about the fine record of Solicitor General Perlman." I raise this because in my discussion of Professor Bernstein's paper on civil rights in the Truman administration at the American Historical Association Convention on December 29, 1966, I told how he cited Philip Elman, who was one of Phil Perlman's lesser assistants at the time Perlman was Solicitor General, as saying that Perlman was a racist and used all sorts of obnoxious words -- that he said, "There's a delegation of 'coons' waiting to see me;" that he wasn't really interested [385] in civil rights, that he was only interested in publicity for himself, and so forth. Well, here is a memorandum which I call -- it's tab number fourteen in my White House manual -- and I write to Murphy: I have mingled feelings about this matter [that is whether the President should reply to the Attorney General's letter and release the correspondence.] On the one hand Perlman's nomination was bitterly fought and the basis of the arguments against him were neither true nor honorable. The fine record he has made as Solicitor General is a strong answer to those who opposed him, as well as to all of those who say that the administration is putting mediocre people in high office, and people who were not primarily devoted to the public interest. On the other hand it does seem like something of a precedent for such fulsome praise to be broadcast by the President and the Attorney General about an incumbent Federal official. Other Cabinet officers and agency heads may fell that they owe it to their best subordinates and particularly those who have been subject to attack to secure a similar exchange of correspondence with the President. However, balancing both arguments I conclude that a presidential letter and the release of the correspondence is probably justified. And the last sentence of the Attorney General's letter reads as follows: I have, therefore, undertaken to write you this detailed report so that I may eventually hand a copy of it to Mr. Perlman as a token of my esteem and appreciation. The Attorney General should certainly be requested to rewrite the [386] last sentence so as to delete the bracketed material [that part I had included] so that I may eventually give it to Perlman. It is much too obvious and I must say I gag on it [and so on]. I also have some doubts about the third and fourth full paragraphs on page two which I have marked. Many people who are sincerely devoted to civil liberties will probably feel that Mr. Perlman was on the wrong side in these cases. However, perhaps it is best to leave this material in since when you couple it with his victories in the anti-segregation cases it may tend to show a balanced viewpoint in the field of individual rights and civil liberties. I think that the President's letters should be short, moderate and not too fulsome. I attach a memorandum of June 9 which Dick Neustadt prepared for me on this matter at my request giving some background on it, after I discussed the case with him and indicated my general views as outlined above. I suggest that the body of the President's letter to the Attorney General read as follows: "A slight revision of Dick Neustadt's draft to tone it down a bit;" and here's a letter I suggested for the President to write the Attorney General, McGrath: 'Thank you for your letter of June 6th summarizing Phil Perlman's fine record as Solicitor General. This is good to know. Mr. Perlman's work brings great credit to himself, the Justice Department and the United States Government. I honor him for it and I want you to tell him so. This record should be carefully read by those people who spent so much time three years ago casting doubt on his fitness for the post."' I'll have to stand on the record, but I think that that's what went out, or something like that. [387] HESS: Fine. That will be available at the Library if any of the researchers striking this point want to refer to it and read the whole memo. SPINGARN: Here is a bill that I really don't remember at all. It's a memorandum from me to the President, June 16, '50. "Suggested items for discussion with Congressman Brent Spence, Friday afternoon, June 16th." In other words I gave it to him in the morning because he was going to talk to him. And it is on the rent control bill and, also, on reorganization plan number twenty-four, transferring the RFC to the Commerce Department. Well, now, one thing that I haven't mentioned, I still haven't found, during a lull, I'll look. Oh, here's something. I told earlier -- yesterday or the day before -- I told about giving him an excerpt of a speech by my father about politics and the poet, and about the excerpt from Carl Sandburg on Lincoln as a politician. Here is a memorandum referring to this. HESS: What tab number is that? SPINGARN: This is tab... HESS: Tab number twenty-two. SPINGARN: Tab number twenty-two in my White House manual. [388] "Memorandum for the President from Stephen J. Spingarn, Subject: Politics and the Poet," and I start off, "You may be interested in seeing this article which I mentioned to you on the Williamsburg this weekend." The Williamsburg was, of course, the presidential yacht, and I had gone up with the President to Valley Forge where he had made a speech to the Boy Scout encampment, there were some fifty thousand scouts, there and we returned on the Williamsburg -- it was an overnight trip. And then at the end I say (I had talked to him you see on the boat about this), "There is also attached an excerpt from Carl Sandburg's work on Lincoln which seems to tie in with the thesis of my father's article." This was perhaps not too Machiavellian on my part. Every Monday the Big Four met with the President, the Big Four being the congressional leaders, the Speaker of the House, the Democratic Majority Leader, the Vice President, and the Senate Majority Leader. In my time these were Speaker Rayburn, Majority Leader John McCormack, who is now the Speaker of the House, Vice President Barkley, and Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois. Every Monday morning Charlie Murphy and I gave the President a memorandum of items which we suggested [389] he might wish to discuss with the leadership. Murphy and I normally signed the memorandum jointly. HESS: Did any of the members of the White House staff sit in on those meetings? SPINGARN: No. HESS: Did the President usually relate to you or to Mr. Murphy after the meeting was over what had transpired? SPINGARN: Let me say, only if it seemed to him something that we ought to know. I can't speak for Charlie Murphy, he'll have to speak for himself, but I didn't ordinarily hear what had transpired except that if I was greatly interested I might ask the President on some particular point, if anything had been decided on this or that, but ordinarily I wouldn't. Usually what we were doing was to suggest to the President that he gently influence the legislative leaders along a legislative course, to push his program at this or that point, you see. HESS: Do you think this meeting on Monday was one of the President's prime contacts with the Congress? SPINGARN: Oh certainly, certainly. I mean, for instance, here is a memorandum of July 10th, 1950. HESS: Tab eighteen. [390] SPINGARN: "Suggested items for discussion with the Big Four on Monday, July 10th. The President may wish to raise the following matters," I'll just read a few so you can get the idea, "with the congressional leaders; one, point 4 appropriations. The President may wish to emphasize his determination as to the full thirty-five million dollar authorization be appropriated, and his intention to confer later in the week with the ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Appropriation Committees." I'll skip two, that's on point 4, too. Well, now let me give point two, "point 4 investment guarantees. The House is scheduled to vote this week. The President might wish to reiterate his support for this measure and the importance of a strong favorable vote." Three, campaign of truth, "The Budget will have the appropriation estimate ready by tomorrow, the President might wish to ask the leaders when they would like to see the estimate sent forward pointing out that he can have it up before the weekend." Oh, here is five, "Cloture vote on FEPC. This comes up to July 12th. The President may wish to emphasize again the great importance of obtaining the maximum showing of Democratic support. Reference might be made to [391] Boyle's statement on Sunday," that's Bill Boyle the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and so on. The Sumner Pike nomination was coming up, and there was a lot of opposition, and the President was strong for it. I remember I did some work on that, too. Alaska and Hawaii statehood. Amendments of the Clayton Act, that was the anti-merger bill which became law later that year. The Department of Health Education and Security. HESS: What do you recall about your involvement in some of those points you have just been reading off? SPINGARN: Not much. Here's one I remember though. Hastie nomination. I mean obviously I was involved in almost all of them in some degree or other, but I don't remember much about -- there were too many things to remember fifteen to twenty years later. The Hastie nomination -- here's one I remember. I remember the cloture vote on FEPC, of course. I don't remember anything about those point 4 items. I remember a little about the Sumner Pike nomination, because I wrote some material on that I remember. I think I wrote a message for the President, or a letter of some sort. Hastie nomination -- that was William Hastie who has been [392] nominated for the Court of Appeals in the third circuit up in Philadelphia, whatever circuit that is. "Senator Magnuson and other pro-Hastie Senators who will be back sometime this week in connection with the debate on the omnibus appropriation bill. Magnuson would like a vote in the full Senate Judiciary Committee on the Hastie nomination on Monday, July 17. This would be an excellent time, and the President may wish to mention this to the Senate Judiciary. Senator [Forrest C.] Donnell appears to be the only one dragging his feet on this matter although he says he is not against Hastie." Donnell was a Republican, or was he -- yes, I think he was. Well, anyway, William Hastie was, I think, the first Negro Court of Appeals judge. He was a wonderful guy -- was and is, he's still a Court of Appeals judge up there, a very able judge -- as I recall he had been on the Harvard Law Review. He was the special counsel of the NAACP and a friend of mine, and a splendid chap. He had been Governor of the Virgin Islands, and he had been a judge down there. That had been a Federal job but not on the level with the Federal district or appeals court judge in the United States. He had been dean of Howard Law School, he was an outstanding man, and the President nominated him to be Court of Appeals judge, and naturally [393] since he was a precedent breaker, in a sense, there was opposition from southern quarters, and some of the opposition attempted to make Hastie -- this is 1950 remember -- to make Hastie out a Communist fellow traveler -- link him up with fronts. But the fact of the matter was that Hastie not only was not that, but that he had been a strong opponent of Wallace in '48, and that he had done very effective work in pointing out the Communist domination of the Wallace Progressive Party in '48, this is all a matter of record; made speeches and all that sort of thing. In any event, at my suggestion, Bill Hastie got together a dossier on these things, you see, to prove his record, and I placed them I remember in the hands of key people on the Hill, Senators and so forth. I remember a personal phone call I made to Vice President Barkley on this matter because I, of course, had a special interest in seeing that the Hastie nomination went through, and I remember a special phone call -- I've forgotten the details of the call that I made to Vice President Barkley -- I think it was at his home one day about expediting, and about the problems of the Hastie nomination, and what could be done about it. I [394] was much interested in that and, of course, it did go through. And, Hastie has been an excellent judge, President Truman has every right to be proud of that nomination. There are many other items here. HESS: Those will be out at the Library so the researchers can go through them. SPINGARN: Yes. Dick Neustadt is very much in the news these days because he is director of the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard. Here is a memorandum ....I won't read the whole thing, but I'll mention that it's tab number twenty in my White House manual. It was dated October 9th, 1950, I was to leave the White House about two weeks after that. It was a memorandum for Donald Dawson, who was an Administrative Assistant to the President, and who was in charge of personnel matters: "Subject: promotion recommendation for Richard E. Neustadt," and I go over the fact that Neustadt had come to the White House staff in May 1950 from the Budget to serve as my assistant. He was in grade fourteen and I was recommending him for a grade fifteen promotion. I said I had intended to wait until he had been six months at the White House, but in [395] view of my imminent departure I was making the recommendation now a few weeks early. And here's the operating part: Neustadt has completely justified the confidence we had in his ability when we asked him to join the White House staff. There was probably no one in Washington better qualified than he to step into the legislative job which was his assignment here, since for more than two years prior to the transfer, he had been the Budget's liaison man with the White House staff on matters relating to presidential legislative recommendations. He therefore had very little to learn about our way of doing things when he came over here, but what there was to learn he learned very quickly, and more important he demonstrated a capacity to grow in the job. His mind is quick, alert and imaginative. At the same time he has those superior qualities of good sense and good judgment which do not necessarily go with superior intelligence. His approach to problems is down-to-earth and practical. His knowledge of Government and what makes it tick is exceptional. He knows and has the confidence of key men in almost every agency in the Government as well as on the Hill, and he is able to get the necessary staff work done on any given problem and place it in a position for policy decision by the President or other appropriate officials with a minimum of fuss and feathers and a maximum of dispatch. He is extremely effective in dealing with people and in securing their cooperation. Neustadt has been invaluable to me in the job I have had and I do not think anyone stepping into that job has much to fear about the quality of the supporting staff work if he is lucky enough, like me, to have the assistance of Neustadt. [396] It is almost unnecessary to state that Neustadt has worked tirelessly not only during working hours but nights and weekends in carrying out this important job. As I think you know, Neustadt's educational background and previous work record has also been uniformly outstanding. To refresh your recollection I attach a copy of a brief personal history statement prepared about him at the time he came to the White House. Incidentally, while in the Bureau of the Budget he wrote and submitted as a Ph.D. thesis to Harvard University a five hundred page account of the executive branch legislative clearance process. I have no doubt that this will be regarded as the definitive work on the subject which it covers, Stephen J. Spingarn, Administrative Assistant to the President. I sent that to Charlie Murphy with a note: "Charlie here is a promotion recommendation on Dick Neustadt which I am sending Don Dawson. If you agree, I should be very happy if you would cover it with a memorandum to Don with any comment you care to make on the subject." And, Charlie Murphy, the same day, October the 9th, wrote to Dawson: "I have examined the attached recommendation for promotion for Dick Neustadt which is being sent to you by Steve Spingarn. I want you to know that I agree fully with what Steve has to say concerning Dick's outstanding ability and the exceptional quality of his work." Well, here is an epilogue to this which casts [397] another light on Dick Neustadt, though not on his abilities, which are tremendous. In October about two weeks after I wrote that memorandum I went to the Federal Trade Commission as Commissioner. Dick Neustadt had been brought to the White House by me and was my assistant. I never had any trouble reaching Charlie Murphy or other people on the staff by telephone but Dick Neustadt was the hardest man for me to reach by telephone on the White House staff. Sometimes he wouldn't answer a call for three days. I commented rather bitterly on this on occasion but it didn't seem to do any good. In '63 or '64 Dick Neustadt was -- by this time had written the book Presidential Power which Kennedy used as his Bible. He was professor at Columbia, and he was a special consultant to the White House on various matters. I was again trying to promote my KOED program. Dick Neustadt had a pipeline to the President and I wanted his help. I had great difficulty even getting a reply. I mean he wouldn't reply to my communications on the matter; he came to Washington almost every week, but he never called me. So, one day he was staying at the Dupont Plaza, which is right across the street [398] from here, and one day about seven forty-five or eight o'clock in the morning I went over to the Dupont Plaza and rapped on his door, and when he answered I impersonated the voice of a foreign waiter -- I said, "Ya, ya," something in an incomprehensible foreign voice, he came to the door and opened it, he wasn't wearing anything but the lower half of his pajamas and I infiltrated and pinned him down and spent an hour or so with him and finally got a little help from him, but it was a rather hard way to do it. So, whatever the components of Dick Neustadt's nature, I would say that gratitude is not one of them. But the longer I live the more I realize that gratitude is not a very common ingredient in any of our natures. Gratitude as someone has wisely said represents a lively expectation of favors to come, among most people, and I suppose it is true with me, too, though I hope not. So, that represents perhaps a more interesting footnote to my account of Dick Neustadt's outstanding ability. HESS: I have a question about international affairs. SPINGARN: All right, go ahead. HESS: Could you tell me what your duties were in the [399] White House involving international affairs? You came in shortly after the President's inaugural, address in which he made the statement on point 4. Did you get into the formation of that? SPINGARN: No, I did not. I can only say that on international affairs, I had no responsibilities on international affairs except that I was a member of the speechwriting team and I got in on most of the speeches during my era there, to some degree or other, and these included the foreign policy speeches, of course. The chap at the State Department who was Dean Acheson's principle speechwriter, if I'm not mistaken was Marshall Shulman, who was very able, and he was usually the guy who would start off on these -- I don't know that even that's true -- anyway he worked with us on the foreign policy speeches. Butch Fisher, Adrian Fisher, the State Department legal adviser was another guy who might, and perhaps others, but there was no compartmentalization on speeches. HESS: Do you recall any particular problem that arose? SPINGARN: No, I don't. What sort do you have in mind? HESS: The Palestine refugee problem. SPINGARN: Oh, gosh I don't remember. [400] HESS: The Marshall plan, the operations of the Marshall plan? SPINGARN: I remember vaguely. I can't remember the details so it's not very helpful but I remember somebody, of course, Dave Niles was the fellow who was supposed to be responsible for anything relating to Israel or Palestine, but I remember receiving some letters or memorandum of some sort, I can't even remember the details of it, making some proposals, I remember writing some memorandum about it and giving it to Philleo Nash or perhaps to Dave Niles. I don't remember the details so this is not very informative. You know actually as I look this book over I realize that one of the best ways to stimulate my thinking processes is to go down these entries here because each one of them almost brings back memories. HESS: What do you have in mind? SPINGARN: Well, I don't know. Let me think about it, because these are the things, you know, it takes stimulation of past events to give you any real memories. It seems to me what would be most useful is if I spent an hour or so, perhaps this evening going over this [401] if I have time and noting down the ones I would like to comment on. HESS: That's a good idea, to get some background. SPINGARN: Yes. That to the extent if I can add anything, you see to... HESS: To what's already down. SPINGARN: ...to what's already down. Here is something that might be of interest. I am very much interested in it today, as the President was then, and is now, I hope. Here's a memorandum for instance. This is tab number forty-five, dated August 16, 1950: Memorandum for the file on D.C. Home Rule. I told the President this morning at staff [this is by me] that there are over two hundred signatures on the petition to discharge the House District of Columbia Committee from consideration of this bill, two hundred eighteen being needed to discharge the committee. If the remaining signatures are not obtained before Monday, August 21, the bill could not be considered in the House until September 11 when Congress will probably be in recess; otherwise, it could be considered on the next discharge day which is Monday, August 26th [or 28th, it's a little blurred]. The President said go ahead and do whatever we could to get the necessary signatures on the discharge petition. Dave Lloyd and I are working on the matter together with Charlie Maylon. You see there is a reference to Maylon. I sent copies of this memorandum to Mr. Murphy, Mr. Dawson, Mr. Connelly, General Maylon, Mr. Feeney and Mr. Niles. [402] HESS: Both Feeney and Maylon are mentioned there. SPINGARN: Yes. You see, Maylon was the House man and this was a discharge petition in the House, so he was the theoretical operating man there. HESS: Any particular problems come to mind on the D.C. Home Rule question? SPINGARN: Well, the problem always was... HESS: Anything that might not generally be known? SPINGARN: Yes. Well, I don't know whether it is known or not. The problem always was as I recall in the House, it passed the Senate over and over again, if my recollection is correct. It passed the Senate five times or something like that, up until recently I mean, but the House always killed it. Now, the reason I'm particularly interested is that I am now a voting resident of the District of Columbia. I have lived here ever since I got out of law school in 1934, except for the four war years. Up until '63, I voted the first half of the time from Arizona, where I went to college and law school and started voting, and the next half in New York which was my native heath. [403] Then when the constitutional amendment giving the District a presidential vote went through in '62 or '63, I decided I should vote where I lived, so I transferred my voting residence here, and I have been trying to be active in Democratic politics here, not too successfully because I was on the losing slate in a Democratic primary here in 1964 in spite of the fact that I was the only one of a hundred and seventy-eight Democratic candidates in that primary who had President Truman's endorsement. But, recently I seem to be making a little progress. I had some differences with Joe Rauh, whom I have known for a long time, who was the Democratic chairman of this city for many years, but we made up last fall. But in January 1967 Joe resigned as Democratic chairman and Tilford Dudley, Ted Dudley replaced him. He is a very able and fine chap who is chairman of the speakers operation for the AFL-CIO; a good lawyer and a good Democrat. Ted Dudley and I have been on closer terms than I have been with Joe Rauh, and he has already given me at least one chore to do. I have had lunch with him and I talk more freely and easily and have better access to him than I have had [404] in the past. I am also a member of the Home Rule Committee here, and I have been working with Sturgis Warner who is a lawyer, a Washington representative of a big Cleveland law firm, a very able lawyer who is really "Mr. Home Rule" in the District, except that Sturgis does his work behind the scenes. He knows more about the Home Rule thing than Joe Rauh does, although Joe Rauh's been the public figure, but Sturgis works tirelessly night and day and he's always organizing, writing memoranda, analyzing, seeing people at the White House, on the Hill, but all this behind the scenes. In any event, Sturgis and I have had many talks in the last few months, and we have both agreed that the only thing constructive that is likely to go through in the 90th Congress is the non-voting D.C. delegate legislation. The Home Rule bill will not go through the 90th. It failed in the 89th Congress, which was a liberal Congress, which should have passed it, and the reason I think it failed was because the local political leaders here, Joe Rauh and company, weren't willing to accept a compromise that would have been a little less [405] than they wanted, but would have gotten them the bill. And I believe if they would have accepted and endorsed the Sisk bill in the House, which was not an immediate Home Rule bill at all but a referendum bill under which, if the bill had been passed, there would have been an election here to decide whether we wanted Home Rule. Well, I am sure that would have gone through, and if that were true, a constitutional assembly would have been selected to write the Home Rule charter, and then that Home Rule charter would go up to Congress like a Reorganization Plan to be voted up or down, without amendment. That could have been all done within the 89th Congress. We could have gotten the vote on the up or down within the 89th, if they had moved fast and accepted the Sisk thing, but they didn't and it locked between the Senate and the House then and nothing happened. Now, in the 90th the Democrats lost forty-seven seats net in the House of Representatives and they are a substantially more conservative Congress than the 89th, although I don't mean to say it's a reactionary Congress by any means but it's substantially more conservative. [406] It is not in the cards, as I see it, that there will be a Home Rule bill in this Congress. But, there is one thing that's been in the Home Rule bill all the time which could be detached and put through separately and which would be enormously valuable, and that is a non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives for the District of Columbia. This man would be like the non-voting delegate the territories of Alaska and Hawaii had until they became states. This man would have every right of a Congressman, a member of the House, except vote. He would have the same salary as a Congressman, thirty thousand a year. In addition he would have the same pay and allowances for his staff that a Congressman from a state of the same size as the District, that is about eight hundred thousand people, that would roughly run another eighty to a hundred thousand for staff hire. And, he would have office space and telephone and all that. In other words, you would have a paid lobby of somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, federally paid, to lobby for the District, in the halls of Congress. And this fellow would be inside the club. He would not be like Walter [407] Tobriner or Charlie Horsky, going up there with his hat in his hand, he would be inside the club. If he were an effective guy, he would make alliances up there that would help. For instance the former delegate from Alaska is now Senator Bartlett of Alaska and so it goes. Now, furthermore, at present we have an election in this city every four years, presidential year only. Aside from the vote for the Presidency, there are only phantom elections locally, we vote for people to fill phantom unpaid jobs, the national committeeman and woman, the delegates to conventions, that sort of thing. Under the delegate thing we would have a real vote every two years, for a real job -- paid thirty thousand a year with real powers. That would mean that you could keep the precinct organizations together, it would run a political ramrod up the spine of the city, with a vote only every four years you can't keep precinct organizations together -- the whole thing dissipates, you see. You'd have a real political organization in this city, on both sides, Democrat and Republican. And, then, here is another thing, this fellow would be kind of an ombudsman for the city. [408] Everyone with gripes could go to him and this would make service on the District Committee of the House much less onerous. Most Congressmen hate it, because it does them absolutely no good at home, and on the contrary it is likely to hurt them, it has hurt them if they spend too much time on District affairs. And they get all the gripes from people who want jobs or welfare or have police problems, or what have you. Under this setup they could shove it over to the D.C. delegate, he would be on the committee, of course, and he would have the staff to handle it, and you could go on and on. There are many features. Now, the thing that has to be laid on is an agreement that nobody will load Home Rule amendments on this bill because that will kill it. In other words, there would have to be some kind of an agreement that the bill will go through without Home Rule on it. This is not Home Rule, I want to make that clear. This fellow exercises no sovereign functions in the District of Columbia, he simply is a non-voting representative in the Congress. But it will represent a first move toward Home Rule because this fellow can help organize an alliance in Congress and in the [409] country, if he is a good man, that will help us get Home Rule eventually in the 91st Congress, let us say. President Johnson within the last few weeks sent a message to Congress on the District of Columbia, and one of the things that he recommended in addition to a reorganization plan which hasn't yet been sent up but which presumably will go up soon -- one of the things he recommended was the D.C. delegate -- that's good. At the end of the last Congress Congressman Mathias of Maryland, a Republican, and Congressman Udall of Arizona, a Democrat, a good friend of the District of Columbia and a fine Congressman, he and I both went to the University of Arizona law school, but at different times, sponsored separate bills, one Democrat and one Republican for this D.C. non-voting delegate, and I am very hopeful that it will be possible to put that through. I am also hopeful -- here is another interesting thing -- the President of the D.C. Home Rule Committee is a lawyer here named David Carliner. Mr. Carliner wants to establish a national committee on Home Rule in the District of Columbia, with people all over the [410] country. In other words to establish alliances around the country, because the trouble is now that nobody outside the District gives a hoot, so we need influential people around the country to get on this committee, and he asked me if we could get President Truman as a honorary co-chairman, along with President Eisenhower, and I said I would try. I told him -- this is within the last two weeks -- I told him to write a letter to President Truman and give it to me, to write a letter stating what it was about and why they needed him, stating that there would be absolutely no work because the President's health is not the best now and we don't want to load him down with any work, but this is just an honorary, a symbolic thing, and remind him of his own major efforts to get Home Rule for the District of Columbia because the President tried over and ever again. I, myself, when I was at the White House, can remember writing messages or letters for him on Home Rule for the District of Columbia. I told Carliner to write that letter to Mr. Truman and give it to me and two or three days ago I called Charlie Murphy, and the reasons I wanted a letter to President Truman was [411] for this reason: Because Charlie Murphy is going out to Independence on April 1st, which is only ten days off or so, and he is going to make a speech out there to the Truman Library Associates, so this will be the ideal time. I will give the letter to Charlie and I've already discussed this with him and he has agreed to take it and see what the situation is and whether Mr. Truman is agreeable to serving. I am hopeful that in this way we can get Mr. Truman to take the symbolic leadership on the Democratic side of a national committee for Home Rule for the District of Columbia. HESS: Do you remember any particular problems that came up on that subject while you were in the White House -- when you were writing the messages? SPINGARN: Well, the problem was to get the bill through the House, this was the principal problem. It is epitomized in that memorandum there, I suppose, which deals with the question of getting a discharge petition. The problem has been typically that we have absentee land lordism in the District. Today we have a Congressman from South Carolina named John McMillan who is chairman of the House District of Columbia Committee, and has been for a long time. I've forgotten who was [412] the chairman then, it couldn't have been McMillan because that's too far back, but he is rather representative of the people who have been chairman though. Now, Mr. McMillan is a conservative person with strong conservative Southern views on the race question, and to be honest with you, as I see him, he is not the least bit interested in the welfare of the District of Columbia. He is only interested in turning to his own constituency and saying, "Look how I'm beating these niggers over the head up here. Look how I'm kicking them in the rump," you know. That seems to me the way he handles the legislative business of the District of Columbia. He's interested in making a whipping boy of the District of Columbia for the benefit of his constituency back in South Carolina. HESS: Has that been pretty typical of people in his position? SPINGARN: It seems so to me, yes. Now, it isn't that way on the Senate side, fortunately, where you have a sensible and moderate decent chap. Senator Bible of Nevada is chairman of the Senate District Committee, but the problem has typically been in the House. The House District Committee has been the major stumbling block, [413] was then and is now, to doing anything constructive for the District of Columbia, legislatively. HESS: Anything else? I have marked off everything that I put on the list down to the Federal Trade Commission, but we have a few others. SPINGARN: I have several things that I want to get to. HESS: A couple of the things that you have mentioned were the secret session of the President's temporary commission which you said would be quite lengthy, perhaps. SPINGARN: Yes, I guess it would be. HESS: And, also, you said that you might have something that you would want to put down about Mr. Clifford. SPINGARN: In sort of a classified area, yes. HESS: We may want to get to that later. I checked off most of the other things that came up. SPINGARN: I had some notes for myself and I may want to make more but ....well, you asked me about distressed areas and I see now a note which indicates I did something on it, but I have no idea what. It is tab ninety in my White House manual, it's a note for John Houston dated October 23, 1950 -- two days later I left the White House to go to the Trade Commission. "Subject: File on distressed areas program. Since I am leaving I am sending this file for your use or destruction," [414] I write John Houston who was working on the distressed areas program. What was in my file I have no idea. This is a typical disposition. Here is a memorandum of October 18, 1950 to Dave Bell. "Subject: SJS file on CVA," that's the Columbia Valley Authority, this was the bill that we had worked on in early '49 but which never got anywhere. HESS: When you first came to the White House. SPINGARN: Yes. "Dave. Here is my CVA file from almost two years ago. If you can call such a horrible conglomeration of papers a file. I am sending it to you for your disposition including destruction if you care to pass the penalty of death on this poor innocent file. There may, however, be a few papers and memorandum in here which you may wish to save." HESS: Regarding that 1949 unemployment and back to Bernstein's paper that he read last December, I would like to read a paragraph and see what you have to say. SPINGARN: All right. HESS: This is on page twenty-five and twenty-six of Bernstein's paper: What most liberals did not realize was that these welfare measures did not effectively [415] assist the neglected millions suffering in poverty. Ironically, while the liberals chafed at Truman's limitations and believed that another President might lead Congress and rally the nation to a crusade, they frequently failed to recognize the shallowness of the Fair Deal proposal. Like the President and his advisers, most were unaware of the extent of poverty in America, or of the economic plight of many Negroes; they did not urge special programs to assist the Negroes left unemployed (at roughly double the white rate), in the mild recession of 1949-50. Do you think you were unaware of the plight of the Negro? SPINGARN: I certainly do not. I mean I have been steeped in this all my life. I was certainly not unaware of it. It seems to me that Professor Bernstein although he piously states that a man should be judged in the context of his own times and not in the context of a generation or half a generation later continually does just that. Today we have had, and we have only had it for three or four years, a poverty program, or anti-poverty program, and we have been especially gearing it at the poor Negro, I mean, many of its aspects are especially designed to assist him, but in those days this concept had never been evolved. I suppose that in the most enlightened circles that it was, but I mean as an actual function of Government it simply [416] wasn't -- I never heard it seriously discussed by any responsible person during my time in Government. And I don't remember that Negro leaders like Roy Wilkins were seriously saying that you ought to put five billion dollars a year into some kind of special program aimed primarily to help the poor Negro. The general concept was at that time that we should have programs to help the lower end of the stick people, and we tried to help them with programs, with minimum wages, and public housing, and social security, and unemployment insurance, and public works in times of depression, and things like that, these were the' concepts of that time. You can look back on them and say they weren't enough, that's true, but judging them by ....they were far ahead of the program for the previous generation. HESS: Well, I want to ask you a question on your opinion of that some of the other people may have been thinking. He says, "Like the President and his advisers most were unaware of the extent of poverty in America." SPINGARN: I'm not going to think for anyone else; let them think for themselves, and talk for themselves. HESS: Fine. That ends that. [417] Fifth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 22, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. HESS: We are ready for our afternoon session, sir. What would you like to start on? SPINGARN: Well, you asked about ECA, foreign aid. There was one interesting episode that I remember. It probably came during May 1950 while Mr. Truman was out on a whistle stop trip and I was backstopping at the White House. I had been at the White House since the beginning of '49, but I had only been Administrative Assistant to the President since February 1950 and I was feeling my way cautiously, as one does at the White House. No one really gives you instructions as to what the limits of your perimeter of authority are and things like that. HESS: You have to sort of feel out and see what they are. SPINGARN: Right -- you have to kind of feel them out and see what they are -- test for strength. As I pointed out, nobody invited you to attend the morning staff meeting but it was very important to attend. But, during this whistle stop trip I was backstopping, and I was talking to top people in Government, both at the Cabinet level and congressional leaders, because I was sort of liaison [418] between them and the train. I remember there was some kind of a hassle over the foreign aid appropriation -- it was being cut by the House committee and I had some calls from Congress and I'm not sure now who it was who called me, I think it's in my White House manual somewhere, but I remember I had talks, I think with Paul Hoffman who was then the foreign aid administrator and with William Foster, who was his deputy, and with Speaker McCormack, he was then the majority leader, and others. A principal problem in the picture was Congressman Clarence Cannon from Missouri, from President Truman's own state who was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who had long been a supporter of foreign aid but had suddenly turned sour on it, and was trying to greatly reduce the appropriations, that as I recall was the big problem -- Chairman Cannon of the House Appropriations Committee. I ran across at that time a personal letter that President Truman wrote Clarence Cannon, I don't know whether it was then I saw it or a little later but it was about that time, and it was an absolutely delightful letter, I have it somewhere, I'm not sure where, but [419] it was a very tart and "no punches pulled" letter, from one old friend from Missouri to another, and the general idea was that he couldn't understand how his old and valued friend from Missouri who had so long been a supporter was now turning tail and running and was crippling the very appropriations that he used to support. I've forgotten the exact terminology, but I only remember the main thrust of the letter which was a "no punches pulled" letter from Truman to Cannon. HESS: The President was disappointed in him. SPINGARN: The President was very much disappointed in Mr. Cannon, that's right, and he was telling him in no uncertain terms about his disappointment. HESS: During the years that you spent in the White House did you ever hear any discussion of where the idea for the Marshall plan originated? Was that discussed? SPINGARN: Well, I have heard it discussed, I don't know whether it was at the White House, it probably was. My recollection is that it really originated with Dean Acheson and that he first introduced the idea at a speech he made in Mississippi, of all places. HESS: Cleveland, Mississippi. SPINGARN: Cleveland, Mississippi, that's the name. And [420] the speech attracted no particular attention. It wasn't until George Marshall, who was then Secretary of State, made a speech at Harvard, I believe, in which he threw out this idea, and then suddenly it was picked up and became front page news, that's my recollection of it. And, also, there is an interesting story but I don't have it really in focus about the point 4 program and where that came from. George Elsey knows that story because he is the fellow who told it to me as I recall, but it was some relatively junior official in State, whose name I cannot recall at the moment, who brought forth that idea and got it into the President's State of the Union, I think it was, in 1950 -- '49 or '50, I've forgotten which, probably '49 come to think of it -- and it was point 4, the fourth point in... HESS: The inaugural address. SPINGARN: …was it the inaugural address? In an address that Mr. Truman made and that's how it came to be given the shorthand name of the point 4 program, but the idea I believe originated with a relatively minor official of the State Department. Anyway, George Elsey would know more about that than I do. [421] I remember I had one idea -- I was full of ideas, whether they were good or bad is another story. I had one