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 23, 1967 (Sixth Oral History) March 23, 1967 (Seventh 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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 23, 1967 (Sixth Oral History) By Jerry N. Hess [510] Sixth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 23, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. HESS: Mr. Spingarn, what would you like to discuss first this morning? SPINGARN: Well, first of all, I'd like to say something further about the role or the nature of an effective President as I see him. I'm thinking at the moment of Lyndon Johnson, but the same considerations, in my opinion, apply to all Presidents. In the context of what I spoke of yesterday, or earlier, anyway, about the unfortunate stigma that is attached in the minds of the American public to the words "politics" and "politician," in fact, in the minds of the people of the world everywhere. I said something -- I quoted Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift and I could give a dozen other quotes on that, or a hundred for that matter, which show that for centuries men have spoken disparagingly of politics and politicians, even great men who should have known better. Now, I referred to a lecture which my father made, a series of six, at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1931, which was reprinted after his death in the Atlantic Monthly of [511] November '42, with a long introduction by his friend, Lewis Mumford. I have some excerpts from this and I want to read them. They're short. I didn't have them before me when I mentioned this because they pinpoint my father's political credo and mine too. Here is the quote from him. I want to add, remember this was written in 1931 and some allowances for anachronisms have to be taken into account. But basically, what he says seems to me to be timeless. Here's what he said: I know that politics are out of fashion today among the intelligentsia of the world. We are told that politics no longer counts, that the important thing today is economics. But the truth is that poetry and philosophy and religion and politics are the four noblest occupations of men, and that all of us who have not some profound realization of the meaning of each one of these, misses something from the life of the spirit. Now, poetry and philosophy and religion belong to the realm of theory, and I take politics as the highest form representative of the practical spirit; that element of utility in life which is present in every act assumes its noblest form in politics. I wish to make clear that politics is a spiritual act exactly in the same sense in which poetry and religion and philosophy are spiritual acts. When the politician governs men, which is the hardest job known to humanity, the hardest and noblest, when the politician governs men, he is to be judged first and foremost by his success in governing men, just as in the case of a bridge, you want to know whether it is a good bridge according to the standards of engineering [512] and not whether it is a moral bridge. The first test of the politician is whether he governs well, not whether he governs morally, that is a later question. Unfortunately, those who sit on the sidelines and don't realize the innate character of government, are always terribly troubled by the rottenness that goes on in politics, and I don't mean to imply that there are not times when that rottenness should be our main concern, but what I mean is that always the man outside of politics sees it as a matter of rottenness and evil and people tricking and scheming. He confuses the weakness of the statesman's materials with the corruption of Government itself. And so the man who hasn't a philosophical view of life will take a life like Lincoln's and just rip it to pieces as if the art of governing men were the work of a saint. Now, the politician doesn't feel that sense that all is rotten in politics. He feels that the evil and good in the world are the very material with which he has to deal. He feels like the poet. The real poet, the great poet, doesn't say, 'My heavens, look at all this hard, prosy material I have to conquer and transfigure.' The outsider who hasn't the poet's creative flow thinks that, 'How can you ever make a poem out of this story? It's impossible, there's too much in it.' Another one says, 'This is the machine age; how can we make poetry out of machines?' The poet doesn't bother about those questions. So, the statesman, the politician, isn't worried as mere outsiders are worried by the clash of passions and the fact that some men are not to be trusted, and the fact that others will stab you in the back. That is all part of the game of politics. That is the material with which the statesman works -- human nature and its passions. In exactly the same way the poet deals with stubborn material of the world and makes out of it a poem, so the politician makes his poem which is in the government of the state. And it is a noble poem. And that's the end of that quote. [513] Earlier I referred to giving that, talking about that to President Truman, and also giving him some excerpts from Sandburg about some political shenanigans by President Lincoln that some people, especially those who see politics as tricky and dirty business, might have looked at askance if it weren't Lincoln involved. And I remember I also gave him another quote, I don't remember from what source it was, but it was also about Lincoln. And it also dealt -- it was not by Sandburg -- but it dealt with the same episode in a somewhat different fashion. That was the episode involving the statehood of Nevada, in 1863 when the statehood bill was before Congress. And according to this account, some of the Republican congressional leaders came to Lincoln and said it was a close thing and they needed some votes and that they thought they knew where they could get them but certain things had to be done, certain promises had to be made in order to get those votes, and what should they do. According to the account, Lincoln looked out of the window and he said something like this: "My name is Abraham Lincoln, I am President of the United States, and I wield immense power. This Nevada statehood bill is important [514] not only to millions of Americans alive today but to millions still unborn. It may be decisive in what happens in connection with the abolition of slavery by constitutional means," or words to that effect. "So, I don't know what you have to do, and I don't care. All I say to you is, 'My name is Abraham Lincoln. I am President of the United States, and I wield immense power,'" and according to the account they understood him and they went back, made whatever promises were necessary, and the statehood bill passed, which may or may not be true, but that was the account. Now, bringing this a little up to date. Last fall I came across a series of articles in the New York Times, four articles on air pollution, its effect on national life and what it being done to produce clean air, to make the air clean. These are written by Gladwin Hill and appeared in the New York Times. I have before me the second article in that series which appeared in the New York Times of Tuesday, September 27, 1966, starting on page 1 of the Times, it's datelined Los Angeles. I will read the first few paragraphs: In a large city in the Middle West a few weeks back, a nationally respected air pollution [515] official concluded a disquisition on the nation's mounting smog problem by abruptly sweeping aside his slide rule, charts and tabulations and exclaiming: 'That's the official story. Now, do you want to hear the truth? 'The truth is that the critical ingredient in smog simply is politics. By that I mean people and their instruments of government, and their attitudes about a community problem. 'We know how to cure smog. It's not unduly difficult or expensive. The problem is getting the people in the community to support a cleanup program. 'The most important part of a program is not technical expertise. It's having a wheeler-dealer politician who can put it across with the political establishment in a community. We are long on engineering and short on wheeler-dealers. That's why our air is a mess.' Now, if anything more perfectly pinpoints what I have in mind, that's it, and the importance of politics, and the wheeler-dealer, if you like. Lyndon Johnson is often stigmatically called a "wheeler-dealer," you see. Well, if he's wheeling and dealing for the public interest, I'm for him, and I believe he has been. So, here you have it, a great national problem. Everybody nowadays recognizes that air pollution is a great national problem. And here's an expert saying, "It isn't the expertise [516] we lack; it's the type of politician that can put it across, the real wheeler-dealer that can knock heads together, can make effective compromises, can bring the opposing views into line, and get the community together on a program and the willingness to pay for it. That's what we need, and that's my concept of presidential politics too. And that's why I think that Harry Truman was an outstanding President, and that Lyndon Johnson is an outstanding President, and that both men may go down in history as great Presidents, but it's too soon to make a judgment of that sort. That takes quite awhile, certainly another twenty-five or fifty years before men will be making considered judgments, I suppose, on either Truman, or Johnson. Now, the next thing I'd like to talk about is Vietnam. For over a year, since approximately November, 1965, I have been researching this matter. When I say "this matter" I mean not the Vietnam policy itself, but the question of the presentation of our case for Vietnam involvement to the American people and to our allies abroad, not merely the Western world -- the whole free world. I have come to the conclusion, and I believe I can [517] document it, that our case is being presented most ineptly and most ineffectively, and that this is a major weakness in the whole Vietnam story, because as I look at the picture, we are "spending," and I put that in quotes, five or six thousand, or more, lives a year: twenty to thirty billion dollars a year on Vietnam, and we are slowly, I think, militarily, winning the war out there, the military war on the ground, but we seem to be losing, slowly, perhaps not so slowly, the other war, which is the war for the opinion of the American citizens, whose support to some degree or other, is indispensable to continuing that war to a successful or at least an effective conclusion. The American people are notoriously impatient with long continued inconclusive border wars. Witness what happened in Korea. The American people hailed with enthusiasm the first move when we went into Korea to resist the aggression when the North Koreans marched across the border. But by 1952 they were heartily sick of the whole thing, heartily sick of it, and it was a major factor in the defeat of Adlai Stevenson by General Eisenhower in the '52 election, and one of [518] Eisenhower's most exceptional gambits or gimmicks or whatever you want to call it, was that famous statement which I believe Emmett Hughes wrote for him: "If elected, I shall go to Korea." And I predict that if the Vietnamese war continues in '68 that there will be a candidate, a Republican candidate, who will say, "If elected, I shall go to Vietnam." And perhaps with equal success. However, the fact remains that we should be paying comparable attention to presenting our case effectively because I believe it's a good case. I do not say that a hundred percent of the truth is on our side; I know that it isn't. The perfectionists look for one hundred percent truth. There is no such thing in any controverted matter. In all human existence, you have to determine where fifty-one percent of the truth lies, or more, and then proceed on that basis. And I think that a good deal more than fifty-one percent of the truth is on our side though. I'm certainly aware that we, are not utter saints nor are the enemy utter sinners. Well, briefly, in November '65, I wrote the State Department, and I identified myself as a former responsible Government official, said that I supported the Administration, its basic thrust, as I understood it, [519] on Vietnam, which is as I understand, is that we are trying to deter aggression with the minimum use of our great military power that is necessary. It would be easy, of course, to end the war tomorrow, and just escalate up and wipe out North Vietnam, but that would be a catastrophe, which might very well start World War III, and in any event would produce hatred for the United States all over the free world. And it would be easy to pull out too, and that would be a disaster too, because if we pulled out unilaterally, I am confident that within six months or a year, another government:, probably in the same area, perhaps Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, would turn to us and say, "Local Communists supplied and trained and funded and led by the Chinese Communists are attacking our villages and towns and are making a great deal of trouble for us and we can't handle them. Will you help us?" We'd have to make the same decision again, whether to help them or not. And if we didn't make it, each time we didn't do it, our credibility around the world with persons who were willing to do something to deter aggression would go down another big notch. And I don't think that would be good either for the world or for [520] us, but I don't want to get into an elaborate exposition of the Vietnamese case, which in any event, I gave more attention to yesterday or the day before. In any event, I wrote to the State Department and said would they send me whatever material they had. I was thinking of making some speeches on the matter, so would they send me whatever material they had for supporting the case for Vietnam involvement. A month or six weeks went past, and I received a large envelope, very sloppily packaged, containing a huge mishmash of materials. There were speeches by the President, speeches by Secretary Rusk, speeches by Secretary McNamara, there were background papers, there were committee prints, there were all sorts of things. It would have taken a fellow a week to wade through that stuff, and there was no single coherent statement of the case. I should add that in that first letter I had also raised a specific question. I find that from time to time the people who oppose our involvement in Vietnam raise a new question which they hammer hard for a while and then pass onto another one. It seems to change from time to time. At that time a question [521] that I heard a great deal from my friends who were opposed to Vietnam involvement was that the United States was responsible for persuading the Vietnamese government not to honor the Geneva convention and hold those free elections in 1956. So, in addition to asking for the general presentation of the case for our Vietnam involvement, I asked for a specific answer on that question, "How did you answer that question?" Well, as I say, a month or six weeks later I got a package of mishmash, no coherent statement, and no answer to that question. I wrote again. This time I wrote, I believe, to Dixon Donnelly, who was and is the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, I specifically addressed it to him. Another month or six weeks went by, by this time it was about three months since I'd first written, and I did get a long, I mean, a four-page, single-spaced letter from a minor State Department official, answering to my satisfaction the question I'd raised. It had taken me three months and two letters. And as for my main thesis, why are we in Vietnam, what's it all about, what's the background [522] of it, as I say, I had not gotten anything that was satisfactory from the standpoint of any average busy man who wants this thing presented in some coherent fashion so that he can study it quickly and easily. I wrote Secretary Rusk my thoughts on the matter, that I thought this ought to be done; I wrote some suggestions on how I thought it could be done more effectively, I got no answer from the State Department. I let the thing sit for a while, and in early September, '66, since I was then about to do some campaign work, and possibly make some speeches (I didn't in fact make any), I again wrote the State Department, I wrote Dixon Donnelly, I think it was on September 8, and I also wrote Secretary McNamara because I hadn't gotten much satisfaction from the State Department in the past, and I thought that McNamara might be interested. I wrote him a letter making the same points that I'd made earlier to the State Department about the ineffectiveness it seemed to me their material was from the standpoint of a man who wanted to defend the case. I never got an answer to the letter I wrote Mr. [523] Donnelly; he has subsequently written me that they have no record of having received it. All I know is my return address was on the envelope so if they didn't receive it it would have come back to me. It probably just got lost in the bowels of the State Department. That can happen, but it happens too often. I have written the State Department on many matters over the years and I find that either the letter never gets answered or it takes weeks and months to answer. In any event, the situation with Mr. McNamara was different. On September 28, 1966, he wrote me that my ideas made sense to him, and that he was going to try to put them into effect, "Your grassroots approach," he said. In late October I got a letter from Arthur Sylvester, who was then, he recently resigned, but who was then and had been for years, Assistant Secretary for Defense for Public Information. He said that Secretary McNamara had sent my material to him, that he had farmed it out for comments to interested agencies and people and would be in touch with me later. On November 8, I think it was the 8th, I received a phone [524] call from a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, named Harold Kaplan, whom I had never heard of, and he invited me to have lunch with him at the State Department. I discovered that I had gone around Robin Hood's barn to get to him. What had happened was, Sylvester had sent my material over to State and they now thought it was worth hearing my story, although I had been able to have no impact writing to them directly. I had lunch with Mr. Kaplan, on November 14th as his guest in the State Department, and we spent two hours discussing this matter. I told him of my views, and I will go into more detail about them when I get through this statement of chronology. He listened and said -- oh, there's one thing that I should mention that I overlooked. Since I had received no reply to my September '66 letter to Mr. Donnelly, asking for their up-to-date material on Vietnam involvement, I went down to the Superintendent of Documents Bookshop on North Capital Street. For the benefit of Government officials who just have to push a button and tell their secretary to bring them any [525] government publications, this is the place for people who aren't in the Government have to go to buy it. However, it is a very good bookshop and the material is very well displayed. The State Department has whole racks of their material there. I went over their material and bought everything on Vietnam. Everything, and the other stuff too. I remember all the poop I bought cost me thirty-seven dollars that day, although it wasn't all State Department by any means. I went home and looked over the State Department materials. There were only three items that seemed to me to be of much value and they were pretty good, but they weren't up to date. This was September '66, and the Government was selling these publications in its own bookshop, September '66. Of these three publications that I'd say were worthwhile, two were thirteen months old and one was twenty-five months old, two were over a year old, and one was over two years old. Now, I have the one that was over two years old before me here. This is a real horror case. It's [526] a pamphlet of questions and answers called "Vietnam, the Struggle for Freedom," issued by the Department of State in August, 1964; it's Department of State publication 7724, Far Eastern Series 127, Office of Media Services, Bureau of Public Affairs, and sells for 25¢ at the Government Printing Office. It is, as I say, a series of questions and answers, it's thirty-one pages long, and question 22 on page 21 is as follows: Why not send U.S. combat units to fight in South Vietnam? And I will quote one paragraph, there are two paragraphs. I'll just read the second paragraph. This is from the answer to this question in the State Department pamphlet. It is being sold in September '66, and it was published in August '64, two years and one month earlier. The Vietcong use terrorism in armed attack as well as propaganda. The Government forces must respond decisively on all appropriate levels, tasks that can best be handled by Vietnamese. U.S. combat units would face several obvious disadvantages in a guerilla war situation of this type in which knowledge of terrain, language, and local customs is especially important. In addition, their introduction would provide ammunition for Communist propaganda which falsely proclaims that the United States is conducting a white man's war against Asia. [527] Now get this: The United States Government is selling this thing in 1966 when they have several hundred thousand ground troops in Vietnam fighting. They are selling this to the American public. I took this down to the White House on January 5th when I spent an hour with John Roche who is a special consultant to the President and who works on Vietnam among other things. And his eyes bugged out a little and he said, "May I have that to show the President?" And I said, "Sure, if you'll give it back to me." And I gave it to him and he sent it back to me later so I assume the President has seen it too. This is only one example. It is one example of many horror cases. Here is another thing: One of the main focuses of attack by the anti-Vietnam people today is the horrors of the U.S. atrocities in Vietnam. We are murdering little babies with napalm, and women and children and old men and we are war fiends and war criminals. We are doing awful things. Bertrand Russell, Lord Russell, who is now 94 [528] years old, and who has been one of the world's great philosophers, there is no question about that, is sponsoring a war crimes trial, as he calls it, or a tribunal which purports to be going to try President Lyndon Johnson and Secretaries Rusk and McNamara as war criminals for these atrocities, a Nuremberg-style trial trying our top leadership as human fiends. He has assembled, or non-assembled, a group of illustrious judges from countries all around the world. Sometimes they come on his panel and then withdraw. I'm not sure who is there at the moment, but he has had, and I think still has, Simone de Beauvoir and her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre; and former President [Lazaro] Cardenas of Mexico; .Isaac Deutscher of the United States; for awhile, Danilo Dolci of Italy, the Italian reformer was there, but I believe he's resigned from that tribunal; Peter Weiss of Germany, and others, all distinguished intellectuals. And I might note parenthetically that I wrote a letter to the London Times last August or September denouncing the Bertrand Russell war crimes trial. I wrote it to ten newspapers around the world, seven in the United States, one in France and one in Italy [529] and one in Britain. Four have printed it to my knowledge, perhaps others that I haven't seen. The London Times politely declined my letter. I then wrote my first cousin, Lord Walston, who is my maternal aunt's son. He is a British labor life peer, and was until a month or two ago, the Labor Government spokesman on foreign policy in the House of Lords. I asked him if he would select and send my letter to a newspaper that he thought might print it. He sent it to the Daily Telegraph, and they did print it. His judgment on that was good. They printed it on September 21, 1966, and on September 30, 1966, the same paper published an answer by Lord Russell. Among the papers I've given the Library are his answer and my reply. I then wrote my friend, Lewis Mumford. Lewis Mumford is one of the great American intellectuals. He is a philosopher, a civic planner, a deep thinker and a man of superb talents. He has been president of, I think it's called The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In any event, it's an inner group of only fifty, which is supposed to represent the cream of the intellectuals [530] of the United States, the top fifty. And he's been president of that. He's a brilliant man. He was my father's great friend from about 1920 on, and my father converted him -- he was an idealistic pacifist in the twenties. My father persuaded him that that didn't make sense with the rise of fascism. And Lewis became an all-out interventionist in the thirties. Then an event happened, I'm just guessing, that may have changed his mind back again. In 1944, his son, Geddes, a handsome boy of nineteen, was killed in Italy: He was an infantry rifleman, and he was serving as point man for his platoon. He was a volunteer in that capacity. A rifle company is the most dangerous assignment in the Army, and the point man is the most dangerous assignment in a rifle company. He was mowed down while out in front of his platoon by German machineguns. My mother wrote me in Italy about this and said that Lewis asked if I would inquire into the circumstances, the details of his death, since he'd only gotten a general letter from the War Department. [531] I did so. I sent some of my men down to the company with which he had served, it was then November, 1944, two months later, to talk to anyone who had known him. But the circumstances of war are such, that even on the so-called quiet Italian front, the attrition in an infantry rifle company are so great, that there was practically no one there who even remembered him. I think my men only found two people who remembered him. But in any event, I wrote a nice memorandum, somewhat embellishing the facts, but not, I think, not misrepresenting the essential nature of the situation in any way, but the general idea was something that would be pleasing to a father, of course. I quoted the men who would talk about it, praising Geddes as a fine soldier, and a brave soldier, who had always done his duty and so forth and so on. I sent it to my mother who gave it to Lewis Mumford. After the war he wrote a book called Green Memories, which was the account of the life of Geddes, who died at nineteen. It was a beautiful book, and among other things he reprinted excerpts from my memorandum: [532] It may be that the death of Geddes has something to do with where Lewis stands today on war. In any event, Lewis is deeply opposed to our involvement in Vietnam. He has been for years, and had been, in fact, opposed to things like NATO before that. In the fifties he thought we should withdraw from Europe, whatever that might entail. He's an idealistic pacifist, again, as he was in the twenties. He thinks anything is better than war, even surrender. At least that's my appraisal of what he thinks. He bought his house from my father some thirty-five years or more ago in the country. It was next to our country place, but it's Lewis' year around home except when he is away at some university. This is in a little hamlet called Leedsville in the township of Amenia. It's about two and a half miles east of Amenia, and right on the New York-Connecticut line, halfway between the villages of Amenia, New York, and Sharon, Connecticut. So, in the summer, when I visit my mother, as I usually do once a summer, Lewis and I usually have at least one argument about Vietnam. This has gone [533] on for several years, so I know his position pretty well, and he knows mine. But in September I wrote him and I said, in effect -- well, I have it here. This is my exact statement: I realize that this [that is, Lord Russell's trial] is a propaganda exercise in support of a position with which I understand you to be in full agreement. But for my own part I am revolted by this flat out attempt to equate U.S. leadership with Hitler and company. I'd be grateful if you could find a moment to write me, a line or two would be enough, of your opinion of the propriety and wisdom of Lord Russell's trial. I wrote on September 27 last. He replied two days later. He didn't waste any time. Here's what he says, this is an exact quote. Some old and valued friends share your extremely naive interpretation of American policy in Vietnam. As to Russell's proposed tribunal over war crimes and atrocities committed by the United States, it does not concern me nearly as much as the fact that you [myself] show complete lack of concern over the fact that we have committed them, though no one can read the news or look at television without being brought face to face with these atrocities. So that unlike Hitler's accomplices, we cannot pretend that we are ignorant or innocent. The methods that the Government has employed there have degraded our country, wrecked every pretense to being more humane than Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. The 'propriety and wisdom' [those were my words] of the American people tolerating these crimes, not Russell's investigation, is what I question. [534] That was in September. I mulled that over for a long time, and on February 13, 1967, I wrote a memorandum, which I headed "Is Lewis Mumford a mirror image of McCarthy, a liberal McCarthyite." I started with his background: Bertrand Russell and others, mostly intellectuals of world rank, propose a "trial" of President Johnson and Secretaries Rusk and McNamara as Hitlerian-type war criminals on the basis of alleged U.S. atrocities in Vietnam. This is a classic exercise on McCarthyism. Bertrand Russell and company want a debate on Vietnam. Fine, but they want to frame the debate in the context of a 'trial' of the leaders of the opposing viewpoint as Nazi-type human fiends. This represents a central element of McCarthyism, namely, never engage your opponent in rational debate, instead vilify him. Then I say that I have known Lewis Mumford since my childhood, admire his great talents, always liked him personally. I could not believe that he could stomach tactic like that of Lord Russell. I then refer to my correspondence with him in September 1966, quote from it, and then I come to my conclusion. Though a man of many talents and virtues, Lewis Mumford is not living up to his own principles in this matter, though himself once a target of McCarthyism [this is true] he appears to accept without protest McCarthyite tactics when they are used on his side. I believe unfortunately that this is typical of the attitude of many idealistic [535] liberals here and abroad on Vietnam. They are so deeply committed to their thesis that they are prepared to violate a basic liberal credo, that ends do not justify means, I am sending a copy of this memo to Lewis Mumford for comment. That was on February 13th. Lewis is a fast correspondent, because on February 15th, he replied to me. Dear Stephen: Your libelous memorandum in the best style of the discredited master speaks for itself and answers itself. Of course, the discredited master he is referring to is Joseph McCarthy. So we are trading insults, as it were, I say that he's acquiescing in McCarthyism; he goes a step further and says I am a McCarthyite. Continuing his letter: If you have the faintest glimmer of insight into the essay I sent you on the morals of extermination, you would not have made such a preposterous comment on my criticism of the atrocities that our Government has committed with the connivance of the Congress and the passive consent of the American people in Vietnam. We are all involved in this infamous policy, even those who, like myself, have protested against it, and we are morally degraded by it, as every decent German was degraded by Hitler's extermination camps. Only the ignorant can pretend to be innocent. Faithfully yours, Lewis Mumford. [536] Dear Sir: You Cur! That's my own addendum. I also sent a copy of this to Douglass Cater, at the White House, who is one of the President's speechwriters, because it seems to me that Lewis Mumford typifies an important element in the intellectual community and their willingness to see always the beam in our eye, but not the mote in the other fellow's, and their willingness to acquiesce in McCarthyite tactics, and that's the only thing I can call Bertrand Russell's trial, because this is not an attempt to get the truth on the thing, it's an attempt to smear the American leadership, and thus stigmatize everything we do. I'm going to give you this to Xerox and return. Now, continuing my story about my efforts to get something done in Vietnam, I had this lunch with Harold Kaplan and he said that I'd shaken them up -- that story about the publication that the Superintendent of Documents was selling, denouncing what we were doing at the moment -- and that they were reconsidering, canvassing their whole approach. [537] He said also that they were thinking of getting out as I had proposed (and I'll get into my proposals in a moment), a loose leaf booklet on Vietnam which would cover the back ground and then with tabs would cover the important questions that are being raised about it, which could be loose leaf and could be kept up to date. They were not going to do it in quantity, a few thousand copies was all. I note that he told me that on November 14; in March, four months later, the State Department began to issue these. It actually put out the first three, they were dated February but they did not come out till March. I got them promptly. The first three little fliers or brochures dealing point by point with aspects of the Vietnamese struggle and why we are there. I understand that about fifteen to eighteen will be put out. How long that will take I don't know. It took at least four months, because they told me that they were going to do something like this in November, to get out the first three, which do not seem to me, by any means, to be overwhelming documents. Moreover they apparently are not going to be put out in a loose leaf package in any event. [538] I understand that about nine or ten thousand of them will be put out, that about nine thousand of those will go to individuals who have shown interest by writing the State Department or by appearing in State Department seminars and panels on this subject around the country, their mailing list of interested people, and the other eight or nine hundred will go to institutions which want multiple copies, libraries, colleges and so forth. None apparently are going to newspapers and magazines or abroad as far as I'm aware. In any event, I had two hours with Harold Kaplan, who is a bright fellow, very intelligent, he had just been made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Public Affairs Bureau, and he apparently has had and I think still has, prime responsibility for the presentation of the Vietnam story. He was at the Manila conference with President Johnson, and before that he was for two years public affairs officer in Saigon, so he certainly knows Vietnam. On December 7, 1966, I had an hour with Assistant Secretary of Defense Sylvester at the Pentagon presenting my case and what should be done. I made [539] notes in longhand for my presentation to him, which took about forty minutes, and then we spent another twenty minutes discussing them, something like that. Here is a copy of my notes which I give you. I also have here copies of some letters which I wrote the State Department, particularly Dixon Donnelly, and Dean Rusk. I also wrote a letter to Mr. Katzenbach, the new Under Secretary on this subject. All these letters were answered by Dixon Donnelly on the first of December, 1966. My letter to Katzenbach was rather sharp about my opinion as to how good a job the State Department was doing in the presentation of our case. Mr. Donnelly says: As for your letter to the Under Secretary, we are indebted to Assistant Secretary of Defense, Arthur Sylvester, for having referred your proposals to us, an action which led to your luncheon meeting with Deputy Assistant Secretary, Harold Kaplan, on November 14. As my Deputy, Harold Kaplan is responsible for directing the Department's public affairs efforts concerning Vietnam, and by discussing proposals with him you are in the right channel. Mr. Donnelly thought that reassured me. On the contrary, that was what I was afraid of. He was making that statement, I suppose, because I had sent copies of my correspondence, to the State Department and told [540] them that I was sending it to the White House and other places. In the Government, the bureaucrats like to keep you in channels. When you're dealing with routine that's the place to be, but when you're dealing with non-routine matters that's the wrong place to be. Get out of channels, you'll never get anywhere in channels. So, Mr. Donnelly thought he was reassuring me, but quite the contrary, I knew that I was in the wrong place if I was in channels because that's not where you get out-of-routine matters handled effectively. Now, I give you this too, this Donnelly correspondence. And by the way, the first three pamphlets that they put out in March, one is "Basic Data on South Vietnam," two is "Why Vietnam, the U.S. Commitment," and three is "Negotiating Peace in Vietnam." And I understand that a considerable number of others are projected but are not yet put out, four "The Fact of Aggression by North Vietnam." These are not out yet. Five, "Legal Basis of the U.S. Commitment," six, "Who are the Vietcong and their Front," seven, "Terror and Atrocities in South Vietnam," eight, "Air Strikes Against North Vietnam," nine, "Elections and Political Developments in South Vietnam," ten, "Wars of [541] National Liberation: The Communist Plan for Takeover," eleven, "The Geneva Accord," twelve, "Free World Assistance for South Vietnam," thirteen, "The Other War in South Vietnam," that's the reconstruction and pacification, and fourteen deals with "Asian Support and Asian Programs," and fifteen, "The Military Struggle in Vietnam." Now, getting to these atrocities. The Lewis Mumford type of intellectuals and the college kids too, talk continuously about atrocities. And when they see President Johnson and McNamara they call them war criminals and fiends. This is done all the time. Hubert Humphrey had the same charge leveled at him recently. So. I would think that we ought to be dealing effectively in the counter propaganda department with this atrocity question. In that material I just gave you is a Photostat from the Washington News of some day last fall. In a single issue they had two stories, they were so juxtaposed in the same issue, they made such an impact on me that I clipped them, mounted them and had several hundred copies run off. One told of an error in U.S. artillery firing, where they made a 180 [542] degree error (in other words, it was exactly opposite -- this happens sometimes), and they fired the wrong direction and hit a village and killed some South Vietnamese by mistake. It was the artillery sighting that was wrong. This happens in all wars, unfortunately. The other report, the same day, the Vietcong murdering deliberately hostages that they had captured and mutilating the bodies, hacking them to pieces. So, our "atrocity" was inadvertent killing of innocent civilians through error in artillery firing; theirs was deliberate murder. That seems to me to pose the difference. I received a pamphlet of some forty-eight pages, called "A Study, Vietcong Use of Terror," dated May, 1966, issued by the U.S. Mission in Saigon, Vietnam. It contains actual cases, I mean, paragraph by paragraph it lists dozens and dozens, the date and the place and what happened, of atrocities, by the Vietcong, most of them involving civilian Vietnamese; bombs planted, throwing of grenades, deliberate murders, mutilation of bodies, dates, places, and what happened, dozens of these cases. [543] And it has statistics over the years, you see, from '57 up to '66, on terror acts, assassinations, kidnappings, and so forth, by the Vietcong. This is good stuff. I pointed out (it's dated May 1966), I pointed out that it should be brought up to date because there was a wave of Vietcong terrorism in September, 1966, to attempt to deter the elections, which were held and in which over eighty percent of the people voted in South Vietnam, but they had a wave of terrorism and many of these attacks were against civilians to try to deter them from voting. And I pointed out that there was another wave in October, when Lyndon Johnson went to the Manila Conference, and that was supposed to associate terrorism and perhaps deter him from going to South Vietnam, which he did do, however. But there was a wave of terrorism at that time. And I said this thing should be supplemented and updated with those things brought in, and that it should be sent all over the free world, to every opinion molder, every government. You can hardly get a copy of this thing. When [#544 was omitted in numbering the pages.] [545] I tried to get a copy they had to Xerox a copy for me. It's apparently for internal distribution. When I wrote Harold Kaplan and asked for ten copies he could only send me three. What sense does this make? They have the document, why don't they use it? Well, I give you this only as an example. I want to keep that, but I've given you the quote on that and the reference so that anybody who wants to look it up can get it, presumably from the State Department if they have any copies to distribute. Now, I also have discussed this subject with Leo Cherne, who is the sparkplug of, what's it called, the Institute of Public Affairs or something of that sort, which is a large organization which attempts to advise businessmen in understandable English how to deal with their Government on taxes and labor and in other fields. Leo Cherne is a hell of an operator, he's got more hats than you can shake a stick at. Among his other hats, he's chairman of the executive committee of Freedom House, and he supports the Administration position on Vietnam. I had lunch with him in New York [546] in December 1966. I had been trying to get in to see John Roche at the White House for some time, and it turned out that Leo was a good friend of his and he gave me an assist there, and on January 5, 1967, I spent an hour in the White House, with John Roche going over the same ground that I'd gone over with Sylvester and Kaplan. And John Roche is a very able and savvy fellow, but I don't know just what the situation is, but I regret to say that I do not see any significant change for the better in the presentation of our case. I'm not trying to pin the blame on anyone. Actually what I think is needed is centralization of responsibility. Basically, my program amounts to this: I say, one, this is a war. The State Department is running this thing on a nine to five, weekends off, basis, like a scene from Tea and Sympathy. They are minding the store so poorly that outdated material is being sold by the Government to its citizens, which is not only obsolete, but pernicious, I mean, in terms of present policy. And they simply are not hitting the tack on the head with their material. I say: One, a war should be [547] run like a war. This front, call it the counter-propaganda front, is almost as important as the military front in Vietnam. Believe me, they're running that like a war. There ought to be a generalissimo with full authority. Maybe it shouldn't be in State, maybe it should be somewhere else. State doesn't seem to be able to handle it. And my experience with State over thirty years or more is rather frustrating in these things. It always seems to me that it's like punching a pillow. Everything is rather languid, no sense of urgency, even when there is urgency, and you often are confronted with, "We simply don't do things that way at State, we never have." My theory is that anything that you have done a certain way for a long time probably should be changed. So, I would say, first, you need a savvy, prestigious official in charge, with the President's confidence and with authority. Second, you need a wartime G-2 or G-3 command tent operation, no nine-to-five stuff. There should be a twenty-four hour shift on this. There should be [548] shifts of men around the clock. They should be reading the cables and writing the stuff for the big men to see in the morning or to handle in other ways. It should be on a round the clock basis, the way any G-2 or G-3 operation is run during a war, the way it's being run in Vietnam today. This is not a nine-to-five, weekends off job. And obviously they're not paying much attention, they're not scrutinizing. I mean, somebody isn't even reading their own material or seeing how it's distributed effectively. Well, I've already covered that. And third: The material itself: (a) a coherent story should be told. They're not telling a coherent story. Mishmash is not good enough. Don't send them pots of stuff. Send them a compact kit carefully planned out. (b) Then too, it should be at different levels of understanding and intelligence, because there are different levels of understanding and intelligence. Most of the State Department stuff is geared, let us say, to the college level of understanding. There should be, I say, as a rough rule of thumb, maybe others might disagree, but this is a good place [549] to start for purposes of argument. I say there should be four separate kits, one I would call the grade school level of understanding, one is the high school level. The median education of American citizens is 11th or 12th grade -- the median. Third, the college level, and fourth, the Ph.D. level. These should be in compact kits, loose-leaf, so that they can be changed because there's a fast-moving situation. It should start off with a background story of the chronology and why we're there and then it should have tabs for the major questions that arouse controversy, like atrocities, and what we're doing to negotiate peace, and so on and so forth. And it should be compact all in one volume. And this should be put out in large quantities and it should go to every newspaper in the United States, every daily newspaper, every magazine and every daily newspaper and every magazine in the free world. Since I didn't see any notable change in the situation, on February 6th, of this year, 1967, I wrote a memorandum to Walt Rostow at the White House. He is the President's chief assistant on National Security matters. The first [550] paragraph gives the tone of the memorandum. The subject is: "Specific Proposals for Making a More Effective Presentation of Our Case for Vietnam Involvement Here and Abroad." For over a year I have been researching this subject and the main fact that stands out as far as I'm concerned is the shocking ineptness, the languid 'who's in charge of the store' fumbling with which the State Department is conducting a vital aspect of the war in which we are spending five thousand lives and twenty to thirty billion dollars a year, and which we are slowly winning on the ground where the fighting is taking place, and it seems to me, losing here at home and among our allies by default, by the failure to present a good case with maximum, or indeed with even minimum effectiveness at every level of public understanding from the grade school to the Ph.D. level. And I go on to explain what I've done on this. And I said: May I talk to you on this? Although these [mentioning all these men I've talked to] are able and enormously busy men, I can't see signs of significant improvement. The buck doesn't stop anywhere. Let me interject there that President Truman had a sign on his desk that said, "The Buck Stops Here," a famous slogan of his. I said: Please note the attached copy of my February 2 memo to the President, a copy of which I placed in Mrs. McNamara's hands for her husband. [551] I went around to the McNamara house one Sunday and rang the doorbell and Mrs. McNamara, whom I'd met, opened the door and I gave it to her and talked to her a few minutes. May I talk to you on this, (this is to Rostow). I'm a former Administrative Assistant to HST, later FTC Commissioner and Acting Chairman, and in World War II I commanded a counterespionage outfit that captured five hundred and twenty-five German spies and saboteurs SD and Abwehr. I wrote the civil rights bill in 1948. He doesn't know me and I'm trying to prove that I'm a responsible citizen whose views should be listened to. Spingarn High School here is named after my father who is a founder and national president of the NAACP. Hubert Humphrey, John McCormack, Charlie Murphy, and of course, HST can vouch for my bonafides and abilities. Now, I talked to Mr. Rostow on the phone about March 1st, and he said that he thought that Bill Borden over there was the fellow I should talk to. But today, I have a letter from Donald Ropa of the National Security Council Staff. It's dated March 21st and I received it today. Dear Mr. Spingarn: Pursuant to your telephone conversation with Mr. Walt Rostow earlier this month, Mr. Rostow has asked me to make myself available for any further elaboration of your views on the public relations aspect of Vietnam that you care to undertake. If this is agreeable to you, please [552] call me in care of the White House switchboard, to arrange a time to meet that is mutually convenient. So that brings it up to date. I will meet Mr. Ropa and will give him my forty minute lecture, I hope, and hopefully something may someday happen. HESS: Does that bring us up to date on that? SPINGARN: Yes. HESS: Fine. I have a question because there's such a close correlation between our intervention in Vietnam in the sixties and in Korea in the fifties. Of course, you were in the White House when the North Koreans invaded. Do you recall any discussions at that time about what particular actions we should take, just how strenuous our actions should be at that time. SPINGARN: I went over this with you. I've tape recorded that about how I made this proposal at a staff meeting at the time of the Korean war break out, of what we should do. HESS: That's correct, yes. I asked you if you had discussed that with the President, and you said... SPINGARN: I told you I rushed in where angels fear to tread and gave him a memorandum and then he opened up and [553] told us what he was going to do. That's all on tape, I believe. HESS: Fine. All right, you mentioned a few days ago that you had some additional things you'd like to say about a secret session of... SPINGARN: I don't want to go into that yet. HESS: What would you like to discuss? SPINGARN: Let's see. Well, I have here, I told you about letters I wrote President Johnson which covered both my view of the ineptness of the Democratic National Committee during the 1966 campaign, a view, by the way, which I think was widely shared by everybody who had any dealings with them during the campaign. I mean, I've heard this criticism almost universally. The governors are criticizing, every Congressman and Senator I've talked to has said it, I mean, it's a universal opinion that the Democratic National Committee stunk during the 1966 campaign, with only a few bright spot exceptions. I also covered in four pages, this was written at 4 a.m. on Saturday, November 5, 1966, three days before the election, to the President down in Texas, my views [554] briefly on the Vietnam situation and there was a one page cover letter in which I said, "Mr. President, if you don't read anything else, please read the last paragraph." And I asked for an opportunity to sit down, after the election with him or with anyone he named, to give him my views on these matters. I never got a reply on that. And I also told you about a letter for the President which I gave to John Roche who said he would give it to the President on January 5 when I saw Roche at the White House, which in one page goes over the same situation and suggests reorganizing the Democratic National Committee from stem to stern and suggests for its chairman Neil Staebler, Democratic National Committeeman from Michigan, former Congressman, former state chairman, who put "Soapy" Williams in for six terms as governor, former candidate for governor himself against Romney. He lost in '64 against Romney, and a remarkable combination of both a political thinker and a practicing politician. In the middle '50s, for five years, he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee's committee on organization, and he wrote the [555] plan for field work, field organization for the Democratic National Committee which was put into effect and which I believe played a major role in the successful campaign we had in '58. Of course, I realized there were many other fine choices whom I hardly needed to mention to the President such as Larry O'Brien, Jim Rowe, and Ed Foley, but in any event, the President made his choice which was to retain John Bailey, but what is particularly gratifying is that the President has obviously given the green light to reorganize and revitalize the Democratic National Committee, and it is being reorganized and revitalized. On March 10th, I think it was, it was two weeks ago tomorrow, it was a Friday, I attended a meeting of the full Democratic National Committee here in Washington, at which the plans and programs for the forward program were put before the full committee. And they look fine. And they have new men. They have a man named John Criswell who has been there a while but hasn't been given the green light before, and he seems to be running the show as acting executive director and [556] acting treasurer. He's bright, young, imaginative, and savvy. I had a talk with him and I think it looks pretty good to me. They have brought in Bill Phillips, who has been for many years the staff director of the Democratic Study Group over at the House of Representatives, one hundred and eighty -- well, it was one hundred and eighty -- liberal Congressmen, House members in the 89th Congress, somewhat less in the 90th, and there's probably no better voter education and political research man in the country. They brought in former representatives Charles Weltner of Georgia, a fine Georgia liberal who is going to run a youth drive, and they brought in former Congressman [Billy Sunday] Farnum of Michigan, an effective politician with a labor background who is going to run the old Matt Reese operation, registration and get out the vote. So, it looks pretty good. Criswell bought my program, KOED, to harness the intellectuals of the 2000 campuses, the active Democratic professors on the 2000 campuses of the United States, not just the [557] prestige schools, to work for the party within their expertise, to write speeches, write key position papers for our members in Congress, our officeholders at all levels, our candidates, our party organizations at all levels, to make their own speeches, to do political intelligence, market research, all sorts of things, and around the clock, all year around, not just in campaigns, home based to the Democratic National Committee with an experienced, politically savvy political scientist running the show. So I am very much encouraged by what's happening and reports that I get from others such as Neil Staebler, confirm that things are moving and looking well at the Democratic National Committee. And to me at least, subject to the acid test of whether it all works out, this proves to my satisfaction that Lyndon Johnson is a great politician, because he made a mistake and now he's man enough to realize it and change his course, and things are looking up. Here are the communications to be Xeroxed and returned to me. By the way, I didn't have these yesterday, but here are a couple of other letters from Speaker McCormack about [558] the KOED program. Here's one of February 13, 1967: Dear Steve: Just a few lines to let you know I received your message with enclosures of February 11. I am very glad to note the progress made by you. That's on getting KOED adopted by the National Committee. I certainly admire not only your sound judgment but your determination, fighting as you have throughout the years for the best interest of progress and victory of the Democratic Party. If you have not got a hold of Congressman Lee Hamilton as yet, I hope you will. And another letter of February 11th from the Speaker which I put in there. Apropos of Congressman Lee Hamilton, when I talked to the Speaker by phone, when I had a long phone conversation with him on February 6th, he said, "You ought to get together with Congressman Lee Hamilton." And I said, "Where's he from?" The name didn't mean anything to me. And you know, the Speaker after all has several hundred Congressmen and he couldn't remember what state he was from himself. He had to ask. He's from Indiana, and he's a young fellow, about thirty-five, he's the son of a Methodist minister, I believe, and he's quite a charging, dynamic [559] type guy, and the fact that he's thought well of by his peers is evidenced by the fact that he is chairman of the 89th Congress Democratic Club. That means the 89th Congress Democratic House members elected him their chairman, and that was the best class we've had in a long time, so it's a pretty good recommendation for him. In any event, I called up Lee Hamilton and had lunch with him, and he told me that he had an idea that the Democratic Party was not reaching the campuses, the college youngsters, and that they were not getting our message at all. His idea was to organize congressional teams, particularly of the dynamic younger Congressmen who communicate effectively with college students, to have them make commitments to the Democratic National Committee that they would give some of their weekends on an expenses paid, no honorarium, just expenses paid basis, and they would fan out around the country in teams to college campuses, and there they would sit down, and it wouldn't be addressing mass groups, it would really be, as I understand it, having powwows with student leaders, the influence-molders on the [560] campus, a dozen, fifteen, twenty, or maybe more, but not a huge crowd, sitting down unshirted, as it were, with your vests open, and talking back and forth, not just a speech, but a dialogue, in an effort to tell these young people what the case is for the Democratic position on various national issues, including Vietnam but not limited to that, many other things. This makes a lot of sense to me and I'm glad to say that the Democratic National Committee is going to do it. They have decided to launch a program they call "Congress on the Campus." Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin is going to head it up on the Senate side, and Lee Hamilton on the House side, and they've got fifty teams of Congressmen organized to go out on the campuses on this job. It's going to start soon. It all ties in with KOED, too, I think, because KOED is leveled at the faculty, you see, and this is leveled at the students. Obviously, the two can be meshed to some extent. And Lee Hamilton and I have agreed that at some later time we will get together with Charles Weltner and Criswell at the National Committee and see if we can't figure out some way of meshing [561] gears on all this stuff. Here is an interesting piece of material, it's a profile of an able woman Democratic politician, Ann Branscomb, who has just been made vice-chairman of the Democratic Central Committee of Colorado. I had lunch with her yesterday, saw her for the first time in ten years, she's had an interesting and successful career, she's still in her thirties, and I wouldn't be surprised to see her Senator from Colorado some day, anyway in Congress. In the 1966 campaign I was invited by David Chewning, the National Director of Operation Support of the Democratic National Committee, to do some writing for them, and I decided to do it. The hottest domestic issue was rising prices, high prices and inflation. It may already be forgotten, but prices did rise much more rapidly than they had previously for some years in 1966, and '65 too. This was a very itchy matter on the domestic front. The housewives were screaming like crazy, and it was a serious liability politically to the Democratic Party in the '66 campaign. [562] I thought I would do some writing on that, but when I went to the Democratic National Committee I found that they had nothing whatever that was adequate, no adequate writing on the subject, although it was the most important and itchiest domestic issue. It seemed absolutely ridiculous. It was another example of how poor the National Committee was. I cannot understand how a national committee wouldn't have good writing on the worst issue domestically. So, I decided to write on it myself. But that meant I had to do the research too. I spent two days on research. My style of research is grabbing a telephone and calling an official, I mean, I called officials at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Department of Labor, at the Commerce Department the Council of Economic Advisers, and Agriculture, maybe one or two other places. In each case I would ask a lot of questions and when he answered I would say, "Can you send me your poop documenting those statements, the tables and statistics." So, two days of that and I collected a lot of material and I sifted through that and on Sunday, [563] October 9, I sat down and I wrote fourteen hours getting up at about four or five in the morning, and I finished a fact sheet of ten pages. It was ten tables of statistics, and it was political argumentation geared, I hope, to the level of understanding of the average housewife, or her male compeer. I covered it with a little memorandum: My theory is that humor always attracts attention, and focuses interest. So here was my cover memorandum to transmit this thing. This is to whoever the addressee might be for that particular copy. Subject: GOP Formal Charge that Ours is the Irresponsible and Cruel Party of High Prices and Inflation. That's the exact quote from the Republican document on this subject. On October 13, the Republican National Committee [I wrote this thing a few days after this cover sheet. I had written the basic document and in the meanwhile the Republicans had put out their document] roaring like an African lioness in the last stages of her accouchement brought forth on this Continent a new document conceived in ignorance and deceit and dedicated to the proposition that all Americans are created stupid. This winsome ten-page document which is sponsored by Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater [564] and all the rest of the GOP leadership, charges that the Democratic Party is the 'irresponsible, and cruel' party of high prices and inflation [snarl] and that this 'breach of the public trust will rightly be a prime issue in 1966. Attached is a magnificent ten-page document of the same date as the GOP opus (we Democrats move fast), which proves conclusively (I admit it), that the correct answer to this false and dastardly charge is the pungent word which General McAuliffe hurled at a sullen foe at Bastogne, or better still, Le mot de General Cambronne, which is describe in my pocket encyclopedia in this fashion: 'Cambronne, Pierre, French General, 1770-1842, commanded Old Guard at Waterloo. Replied to British invitation to surrender with a brisk vulgarism which has gained him immortality.' [That's the encyclopedia.] I have been coining brisk vulgarisms ever since in the hope of gaining immortality. If I may intervene there, Le mot de General Cambronne is Merde. That means "shit" in English. This is the word which made him immortal. Today in France when a Frenchman wants to insult you elegantly, he says, "Je voux donne le mot de General Cambronne." "I give you the word of General Cambronne." General Cambronne was made immortal by only one thing, that one word he used at Waterloo. Well, continuing my cover sheet: This paper is, I hope, geared to the understanding of an average alert housewife with a high school level education and her male [565] counterpart. By the way, I would like to insert parenthetically, I hope no prissy prims are going to delete any vulgar words that I use. I hope those words go into the historical record. They should. I would deeply resent it if they were deleted. You pass that on, please. HESS: You have done so. SPINGARN: I have done so. I mean, there is a prissy prim thing that thinks that dirty words are not usable. But when a dirty word is relevant it should be used. This paper is, I hope, geared to the understanding of an average alert housewife with a high school level education and her male counterpart. I have tried to give simple and meaningful explanations of economic matters and to make key points and statistics leap to the eye rather than remain sternly imbedded in the page. I obtained all my facts from official and other responsible sources and a highly competent authority who read my paper in final rough draft on October 10, assured me that he saw no bloopers in it. I am a former Commissioner and Acting -- Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and before that Administrative Assistant to HST. That's the cover sheet. Now, that highly competent authority: I got much help in collecting the research on this from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, naturally, which does a lot of this work. I talked at some [566] length to Arnold Chase, assistant, or Associate Director for Prices, and on October 10, 1966, I took him to lunch at the National Press Club, and I asked him to read my draft and I said that I only wanted to ask you one question. I don't want any details, I just said, "Do you see any bloopers in it?" He read it and said, "I don't see any bloopers in it." So on that basis I went to bat. I gave the Democratic National Committee a copy that day, but I knew they weren't going to do anything with it for a long time because they moved so slowly. So, I went and had three hundred copies made at my own expense (it cost $110), and I immediately -- it was dated the 13th, but it was actually off the press on October 12 -- and I then started sending it out. I sent it to everybody at the White House, from the Beagles up, including Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, and the whole staff and the President; I sent it to every member of the Cabinet, except, I think, one Republican member, I sent it to every leader of Congress and many other Congressmen, I sent it to activist Democrats from here to Alpha Centauri, or at least to Hawaii. [567] In the District of Columbia I sent it special delivery, when I sent it outside of the District I sent it air mail special delivery. In every case I put in a personal letter to the man explaining how important this document was, how badly we were being hurt by this issue, and how we should be pounding on it, and some personalities too, relevant to his own situation, if possible. And I put these in fancy envelopes which I festooned with magic markers and special delivery stamps and all sorts of stuff so they would get through the outer defenses. I received a letter immediately from the Speaker, saying that he thought it was so valuable he had written to John Bailey and asked him to send a copy to every Democratic member of Congress. Later the Speaker wrote me, sending me the original of the letter from John Bailey saying he was going to do that. Actually, although I gave it to Bailey's people on the 10th, it wasn't issued as a committee document until the 27th of October, which was, what, about ten days before the election. Here's a letter from Orville Freeman, Secretary [568] of Agriculture: October 28, 1966 Dear Steve: I appreciate receiving your fact sheet on inflation. It is well done and I hope it is being widely circulated. We are doing some checking here to see what we can do to move it out on an even broader front. I agree with you. We have been hurt the most on this issue politically. We do need something new, hard-hitting, and effective to counteract and gain back some of that lost ground. Sincerely yours, Orville Freeman Here's a letter from Joseph Califano, Special Assistant to the President. October 31 Dear Mr. Spingarn: Many thanks for your letter of October 12. We appreciate your taking the time to put together such a hard-hitting fact sheet. I have asked some members of the Council of Economic Advisers to review your papers and they believe it is a worthwhile document. Many thanks. I note with pride that all the council members are Ph.D.'s in economics. I had one semester in economics as an undergraduate. I know nothing about it. My theory is that it takes a politically experienced [569] ignoramus to write stuff of this sort, because he knows what the other ignoramuses want to know. He knows what they want to know, so he writes what they want to know about. Here's a letter from Robert Kintner, Secretary to the Cabinet: November 10 Dear Mr. Spingarn: I had intended to write and thank you for your fact sheet on inflation, which we found helpful some weeks ago. I am equally grateful for your subsequent memos and suggestions. Be assured that they have reached the right people and will always be welcome. Here's Robert Weaver, Secretary of Housing and. Urban Development. I note that he is a Harvard Ph.D. in economics in the class of 1934. October 18 Dear Mr. Spingarn: Many thanks for your note of October 13, and the attachments. I have read the fact sheet with great interest and I think it is an excellent job. I hope it will get wide circulation and I shall probably steal from it from time to time. It was good to see you the other night and I do hope that you will transmit my warm greetings to Arthur. That's my 88 year old Uncle Arthur who has been, [570] until last year, for 26 years the national president of the NAACP, of which Robert Weaver was for a long time the chairman of the board. A letter from Wilbur Cohen, the Under Secretary of HEW. I read the material very carefully and found it particularly useful. A letter from Esther Peterson in longhand. I sent her a copy just before she left for Denver. She wrote me: Bless you, Steve. Your paper came just in time. It's good. Thanks. Esther. She went out to Denver, you know, to head off the housewives who were storming the Safeways out there. I got a letter from Claiborne Pell, Senator Pell, saying he was stealing some of it in speeches he was doing and many others. And here's one I especially appreciated. I sent a copy to Sylvia Porter, the famous woman economist and popular writer who is syndicated in hundreds of newspapers and who in my opinion writes the best simple English on economic matters in the United States without regard to sex. She is the outstanding simple English [571] economic writer in the United States -- economic and financial, without regard to gender, in my opinion. I don't know her. November 21 Dear Mr. Spingarn: Thank you for your letter of October 23, which I have just seen on returning from a trip out of town. The material came in too late of course for an answer before the election. Actually you have done a wonderful job. And so on. I have also attached hereto my fact sheet, the Democratic National Committee's reproduction of it as their document which came two weeks or more after I put three hundred copies out at my own expense. And obviously too late. I sent my draft out about the 12th of October. Even mine was too late, but it wasn't my fault because I didn't know I was going to write it until I found out they didn't have one. I have here the official Republican pronouncement on this subject, dated October 13, 1966, which by coincidence is the date mine had on it, although I actually got it out a day earlier. I hadn't seen their document until after I wrote mine, of course. It had been formally approved by the Republican Coordinating Committee on October 3; that's the high [572] command. It includes Eisenhower. Nixon, Dewey, Goldwater, Bliss, Dirksen, Ford, everybody. And I want to make one comment further. It's only half the job to produce good political material, I mean, fact sheets and campaign material. The other half and maybe the harder half is to get people to use it. It isn't good enough to mail out routinely through big mailing lists. You have to do it the way I have done it here, I believe, and that is to send it to key people, send it special delivery, air mail, have personal notes in each case, and tell them why it's important and how it can be used. And then, if you send it to these key people, they will see that it gets reproduced all right. The Speaker of the House turned it over to Chairman Bailey of the DNC, you see, and said, "Will you send a copy to every Democratic member of Congress." Well, if the member of Congress likes it, he's going to see that it's reproduced locally in his own area. So that's the way you do it most effectively. I mean, mass mailings may be all right in addition, but not instead. This is the way you really do it, I think, politically. [573] Seventh Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 23, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. SPINGARN: In 1956 at the beginning of the presidential campaign, I was scheduled to make speeches under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee Speakers' Bureau. On October 15, 1956, I wrote President Truman and I gave the letter to Dave Lloyd that same day to carry out to Kansas City. He was going out to see the President. This is the text of the letter. His reply, which I will also read, has never been published, and I think it is a most interesting letter expressing in the President's own words how his views on civil rights were formed. This is the text of my letter of October 15, 1956: Dear Mr. President: I was most sorry to miss you when you came through Washington recently en route to Boston. I got down to the Mayflower about 9 o'clock having been told you would be there till noon, but the weather changed your plans. However, I had a nice talk with Mrs. Truman who long ago earned my eternal respect and affection by the way she made a freshman member of your staff feel at home. I am making speeches under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee Speakers' Bureau, either general speeches, [574] Small Business speeches, or before Negro audiences. You may remember that my father was president of the NAACP the last ten years of his life, and that Spingarn High School in Washington is named after him. Perhaps more important in this connection is the fact that you assigned me back in 1948 to the task force which helped prepare your civil rights message and program February 2, 1948. The reason I write is this: Negro and other friends of mine sometimes ask me how President Truman with his Southern roots and traditions could be such an ardent exponent of civil rights and civil rights legislation. They want to know whether it is sincere or only political. Naturally, from my contacts with you I know how sincerely you felt about this, and I've always told them that. But it would be most helpful to me now if you could find the time to send me a few lines indicating why you felt so deeply that civil rights legislation, and civil rights measures generally, were vital to the country. From recollection and from discussions with Philleo Nash, Charlie Murphy and Dave Lloyd, it is my understanding that your views are based first on the wave of intolerance and bigotry that swept this country after World War I, notably the fight which you made against the Klan and which they made against you in the early 1920s. I understand that you were fearful that the same thing would happen after World War II, and that several terrible events in 1946 brought the matter to a head as far as you were concerned. These, as I understand it, were particularly the brutal beating of Isaac Woodward by a police chief in South Carolina which resulted in Woodward's permanent blindness. [He was a G.I. returning to his family after a long absence in the Pacific.] The other event of 1946 that I understand influenced you strongly was the lynching of four [575] Negroes in Monroe, Georgia [two men and their wives]. These events, as I understand it, coupled with your experiences after World War I, were the principal things that motivated you in creating the President's Committee on Civil Rights and recommending the Civil Rights Program. These, and of course your deep conviction that it was morally right. If I'm not asking too much, I would be most grateful if you could find the time to send me a few lines indicating whether I have the story straight, together with anything else you wish to say on this subject. My best regards always to you and Mrs. Truman, and please say hello to Rose Conway for me, too. Most sincerely, Stephen J. Spingarn. Rose Conway, of course, was and is the President's Secretary. This is addressed to the Honorable Harry S. Truman, Federal Reserve Building, Kansas City, Missouri, where he then had his office. Now, that letter was written on the 15th of October. On Friday the 19th of October, 1956, President Truman came to Washington and I went down to the Mayflower to see him. I've written a little longhand note to myself about that meeting. Here is what I wrote on that same day. President Truman handed me this letter [and his letter is dated October 18, 1956] today [that's October 19] about 6 p.m. in his suite, number 666 at the Mayflower. [576] He said laughingly he had carried it to Washington from Missouri to save postage. He told me I could use it in any way I saw fit where it would do the most good. [And I want to insert parenthetically that in the letter he had actually said at the end 'all this is for your personal and private information' which wasn't very helpful to a fellow who wanted to use it for speechmaking. But when he spoke to me afterwards, he, in effect, broke the sound barrier and said I could use it in any way I saw fit. However, I have never actually used it. That's just happenstance because I didn't make those speeches.] He added [I'm reading from my contemporary note] if I wanted anything else I had only to call on him. I spent about forty-five minutes with Mr. Truman. Present also were Dean Acheson, Harry Vaughan, Dave Stowe, a Mr. Lamb, and one other man whose name I'm not sure of. Here is the letter of October 18, 1956 that the President wrote me: Dear Steve: Thank you for your letter of the 15th. It contains most of the facts relating to the stand I have always taken on civil rights. Equal rights is probably a better phrase. The Southerners, you know, have always tried to cloud the issue by talking about social equality, which has nothing at all to do with the right to education or the right to economically fair treatment in the business world. The two incidents you mentioned had a great deal to do with my getting steamed up over the matter, but I had always been of that frame of mind. When [577] I was presiding judge of Jackson County, I worked to see that the people of color received the same treatment as everyone else in our county homes and schools, and they received it as long as I was presiding judge. About the time we started on this the Louisiana and the Arkansas Railroad and the Southern Pacific Railroad had Negroes working as firemen in Louisiana and Texas. Their engines were coal burners and the job was a terribly backbreaking one. When they went over to oil and the firemen could wear white collars and clean overalls, the inhabitants of the states along those two roads used to shoot the Negro firemen as they went by. This and the incident of the Sergeant and the assassination of the four Negroes in Georgia showed the lengths to which people would go. In West Texas, Arizona, and California, however, they are just as mean or meaner to their Mexican laborers as the Southerners ever were to black ones. In the New England states people of color are treated just as badly as the Ku Klux Klan would be treated in Boston. [Incidentally, I note parenthetically that in the typewritten draft it was written as the "Ku Klux Klan was treated in Boston," and the President crossed out was and wrote in in longhand "as the Ku Klux Klan would be treated in Boston."] In the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Idaho, the same attitude is maintained against the Indians. You may remember the Indian serviceman with all sorts of medals who was sent home for burial at the cemetery in Huron, South Dakota. He was refused burial there just because he was an Indian. I sent a detail of soldiers out there and had him brought back to Arlington Cemetery for one of the finest funerals anyone ever had. All this is for your personal and private information. Sincerely yours, Harry Truman. [578] And I note again that he wrote it and he said, "Use it any way you wish." HESS: That helped. SPINGARN: Yes. But I have never used that letter. As I say, I intended to, but it just turned out and I got into another activity, speechwriting rather than speechmaking in that '56 campaign. I thought someday I might write about it, I didn't know what I would do with it, but I thought it would be a good thing to put it on the record for the Truman Library anyway. I have here some other letters from the President of this 1956 period that are short and I think I'll read into the tape. I might get them chronologically. Well, on January 16, 1953, four days before he left office, the President wrote me a letter. I was then Federal Trade Commissioner. I had been appointed to the Commission by him in 1950. My term extended into the Eisenhower administration, it lasted for another eight or nine months after he left office. Dear Steve: [he wrote] As my term of office draws to a close, I want to thank you for the service you have given the country during my administration. You showed energy, ability and devotion to the [579] public interest as my Administrative Assistant. When I asked you to serve with the Federal Trade Commission you immediately proved effective in helping the needs, purposes, and accomplishments of that body. I particularly want to commend your recent efforts to spotlight unethical pressures on the independent quasi-judicial commissions. This is beyond partisanship and I hope that members of both parties will join in the fight which you have launched. I wish you every happiness in the future. Very sincerely yours, Harry Truman* What he was referring to was this: I had (as the result of attacks, unfair, scrotum-level attacks on the Federal Trade Commission by the oil industry, the International Oil Industry, in connection with the publication of our staff report on the international petroleum cartel in 1952, and in addition a lobbying outfit injunction to its members to get to work on the Hill and get members of Congress to insist on the Federal Trade Commission killing a proceeding that was before it, a case in which a complaint had been filed and the Commission was in the process of its quasi-judicial deliberation), launched a campaign, a crusade, whatever you want to call it, to try to place the focus on ethics in Government, and on both ends of the ethics business. Everyone is very angry with the bureaucrat who betrays his trust, and [580] so they should be, but there doesn't seem to be enough attention paid to the fact that for every corrupted man there has to be a corrupter. And the corrupted man is guilty but he's not really quite as guilty as the fellow who corrupts him. Perhaps they're equally guilty but certainly he's no more guilty. I would say that the corrupting force is a little worse than the corrupted force. HESS: He starts it. SPINGARN: Yes. In any event, I wrote to most of the major national organizations, or many of them, anyway, that might interest themselves in business, labor, civic, church, and so forth, and presented the facts of the cases involved and tried to stimulate some discussion and consideration in context of the issues of ethics in government, with the idea, perhaps, of mobilizing public opinion against unethical pressures. In December I held a luncheon at the Willard Hotel, and I had the chairman and ranking minority members of all the regulatory agencies as my guests, that is, Republicans and Democrats, and I had representatives of the White House, and of the Republican and Democratic [581] National Committees -- well, here's the guest list. I was the host and from the Federal Trade Commission we had Chairman [James M.] Mead, Commissioner [John J.] Carson, Commissioner [Lowell B.] Mason, Earl Kintner, who was my legal assistant, and later became chairman of the Commission, and Corwin Edwards, who was the chief economist; from the Federal Power Commission was Chairman Thomas C. Buchanan, Commissioner [Dale E.] Doty and Bradford Ross, the general counsel, who, by the way, is the son of Nellie Tayloe Ross who was the Governor of Wyoming and later while I was in the Treasury was Director of the Mint for a long time; from the Federal Communications Commission, we had Chairman [Paul A.] Walker and Vice Chairman [Rosel H.] Hyde. In most cases the chairman was a Democrat still and the Vice Chairman a Republican. It was still the Truman administration until December '52. From the Interstate Commerce Commission, we had Chairman [J. Haden] Alldredge and Commissioner [Hugh W.] Cross, and Commissioner J. Monroe Johnson. From the Civil Aeronautics Board, we had Commissioners Josh Lee and Warren Baker, legal assistant to Vice Chairman [Oswald] Ryan, or maybe he [582] was chairman, I'm not sure; National Labor Relations Board, we had Commissioner [Paul L.] Styles and Commissioner [Ivar H.] Peterson; SEC, Commissioner Roland and Commissioner Adams; there were two congressional staff men there, Frank McCullock, who was then administrative assistant to Senator Paul Douglas and is now the chairman of the National Labor Relations Board; Elmer Bennett, who was secretary to Senator Millikin, a Republican; from the White House was Kenneth Hechler who is now a fourth or fifth term Congressman from West Virginia; from the Treasury was Ed Foley, the Under Secretary; the Democratic National Committee sent Tom Yarborough, who was assistant director of publicity; the Republican National Committee sent Douglas Whitlock who was assistant to the chairman; and others present included Clark Clifford, who had been special counsel to President Truman; Felix Blair of the New York Times, Frank Delany, who had been solicitor of the Post Office Department, and Stanley D. Metzger, assistant legal adviser of the State Department. And here is a New York Times story about that luncheon. I held a number of press conferences and went on [583] TV and radio. I went up and visited Eisenhower's headquarters and saw Gabriel Hauge, who became his chief economic assistant. I wrote letters to both Eisenhower and Truman, and I wrote letters to the Republican National Committee, and the Democratic National Committee, and I got a beautiful letter back from President Truman, not the one I read, but a long letter dealing with that specific ethics business, and a nice letter from Stephen Mitchell, who was the Democratic chairman, and I got bland, say-nothing letters from the Republican chairman. And it was quite a lively thing for a time, especially in connection with the oil fights. I think I have told something of that, but maybe I should go into it more now, because what happened was this: And I have here, by the way, a copy which I will give you and which the Library can keep, of the famous oil report, the International Petroleum Cartel Report which was transmitted to Congress over my signature as acting chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in 1952, I think it was August. Yes, August 18, 1952 I transmitted it to Congress, actually to Chairman Sparkman of the Select Committee on Small Business in my capacity as Acting Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. [584] This report was prepared by our staff. It was based on the subpoenaed records of the oil companies plus investigatory hearings that had been held all over the world. It contained no conclusions, no recommendations, it contained only factual statements. It is, as I recall, 478 pages long, perhaps that was the original typescript, but anyway, it was a long report, and was prepared by the staff. It had not actually been formally approved by the Commission in the sense that a staff report, you know, becomes a Commission document when there's a formal statement or vote by the Commission to approve it. But, in any event, it was an important staff paper and originally when it was prepared it was sent to the White House and other agencies. And this had been, I think, in ' 51, and at that time there was a lot of trouble in Iran because Premier Mosadeq had nationalized the British and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company which was mostly British, and there was great ado about that. There was some feeling at the White House and in State Department circles that our report (which did have factual evidence of skullduggery on the part of the oil companies vis-a-vis their host countries), might throw some fuel [585] on a troubled situation. So we were asked not to publish it at that time by the President. But there was considerable pressure for publication too. I want to emphasize that it was purely factual. It didn't purport to make any conclusions or recommendations, but the facts revealed were that the oil companies were collaborating to fix prices and divide up markets all over the world and that they were doing many other anti-competitive, anti-consumer things, and as far as their host countries were concerned I mean, the countries where they had concessions to drill, there were instances where oil companies had deliberately drilled dry wells because they had some kind of an agreement that they had to drill a certain number of wells during a particular period in order to keep their concession, and they didn't want to increase the flow of oil in the world, that would unsettle the market apparently, and yet they had to meet the requirements of drilling. So they took the geologists out with what you might call reverse instructions, "Don't find oil," they said, and they deliberately drilled in places where they [586] believed there would be no oil, so they would meet the terms of their contract with their host country, but they would not find oil. Now, obviously, they did this unknown to the host country, which would receive royalties if they hit oil, and brought it up, you see, and would not be very happy to know they were not looking for oil. They were looking not to find it. Well, so finally certain deletions from the report which as I recall represented no more than five percent or so of its content, but certain deletions of perhaps the more provocative, vis-a-vis Iran at least, the more provocative statements or facts involved in the report, were deleted from the report, and it was then agreed with Senator Sparkman that his committee would publish it if we would send it to him, and I was acting chairman at the time and I did send it to him and they did publish it. That was August '52. And immediately an outcry broke out in the oil industry, and they fell on the Commission with fury and they found this report a terrible document from their standpoint; they felt that it was not just merely the intrinsic report itself alone, but they felt it was [587] the root of all their trouble with the Department of Justice, which was then bringing two great cases against them; one was a civil suit to recover, oh, sixty or seventy million dollars of claimed overcharges by the oil companies in connection with the sale of oil abroad, or to the purchase of oil for foreign aid purposes; and the other was a grand jury investigation to determine whether there had been anti-trust violations by these oil companies. And they felt that our document underpinned these legal proceedings, that the facts presented by it were a basis. Of course, those facts would have been known to the Government regardless of whether the report was published to the public or not, but still they wanted somebody to beat over the head, so they fell on this report. I collected, I don't know whether it was sixty or seventy-five or a hundred, a large number of instances over a period of only a few weeks, I think, of attacks in the press, and in speeches by the oil industry, or on their behalf, against this oil report of ours. And our position always was that if there were any factual mistakes in the report, we invited them [588] to write in and tell us, we would correct them. But if you'll give me that volume back a moment, my recollection is, that the only errata we found in the whole thing -- I think that this sheet in the cover which runs half a page which has been stapled inside the cover, represents the only errata that we found in the report, it's a half a page of a report that in this version runs 378 pages. We always invited them to write in to give us their documentation on any factual error in the report. We invited them, but they didn't want to do that. We said, "Let's have a hearing on that matter before the congressional committee in which you come in" -- the Senate Small Business Committee invited them to come in and make their attacks on the factuality of the report. No, they didn't want to do that. What they wanted to do was just the way Bertrand Russell doesn't want to argue the question of Vietnam, he wants to vilify Lyndon Johnson and Secretaries Rusk and McNamara. And so they didn't want to argue with us, they wanted to vilify us. It was the era of McCarthy, of course. And, editorials appeared in the trade press, the oil industry [589] press, and they called us a bunch of cheap, Pendergast-type politicians, and that it was typical Pendergast politics, sleazy and corrupt. One beauty said, "Remembering Alger Hiss we suggest that everybody at the Federal Trade Commission that had anything to do with the oil report should be investigated by the FBI." As I noted in a reply to that, we had been investigated, and we had the cleanest record in the Government. I had been counsel to the U.S. Secret Service. We had never had any occasion in which we had to prefer charges against an employee for disloyalty, and we had the Loyalty Review Board right in our own building as tenants looking down our necks, as far as that goes, so that this was a lot of nonsense, of course. Well, it was a long struggle and I have documented it pretty well. I mean, I did at the time, and I think there's a great deal of literature in the Truman Library archives of my press conferences, television appearances, and radio and speeches and letters to the editor and news story coverage and so forth and so on, [590] if anyone is interested in further analysis of the situation. It seems to me that it does represent a typical situation in Government where an interest aggrieved by some Government action, but knowing that they can't meet the facts because the facts are against them, goes out and tries to vilify and thus intimidate the agency which has had the temerity to publish those facts. There's an old saying in the law and it goes back about 2,000 years, if my recollection is right Cicero said this: "If your case is weak on the facts, argue the law; if it's weak on the law, argue the facts; but if it's weak on both the facts and the law, all you can do is pound the table and yell bloody murder." That's not exactly the way Cicero put it, but that's the general idea, stigmatize your opponents. That was the oil case. By the way, here are some other Federal Trade Commission documents which I'll give you and which the Library can keep. Here is a report that also went over my signature to Congress, "A Staff Report of the Federal Trade Commission on Monopolistic Practices in [591] Small Business." This is an interesting item. First of all, here is testimony of mine at a hearing of the Small Business Committee of the House on the "Organization and Procedures of the Regulatory Commission and Agencies and their Effect on Small Business." And I testified with respect to the Federal Trade Commission on that. This is an interesting situation: Shortly before I came to the Federal Trade Commission President Truman had sent to Congress a reorganization plan, I believe it was Reorganization Plan #8 of 1950, that's my best recollection on it. That plan, which was pursuant to a recommendation by the Hoover Commission, had reorganized the Federal Trade Commission and had provided for what is known as a "strong chairman," and the chairman had many of the functions of the Commission, that is to say, the chairman appointed all members of the staff alone except for the Bureau and top chiefs and these were nominated by him to the full Commission and they were voted on by the full Commission but even there he made the nomination. He appointed them with approval of the full Commission. Also he was responsible for the [592] organization of the Commission, and was responsible for the administration of the Commission, and this made the FTC, you see, sort of one giant and four Pygmies, relatively speaking. Well, Jim Mead was chairman, he was there before I got there, and he was the chairman during the entire period I was there. Jim Mead had been Senator from New York State for a long time and Congressman before that and he had run unsuccessfully for Governor of New York and then President Truman appointed him to the Commission, and he made him chairman when this reorganization thing went through. Jim was a wonderful chap, one of the finest men you could possibly ever know; he had had a limited education, and he didn't have a legal education, and on that side he was a little deficient, but he made up for that by judgment and sense that many able lawyers might not have had. In any event, he was a fine chap and he and I got along very well until I began to get a little restive under the "strong chairmanship" concept. I had nothing against Jim. It was only that, it seemed to me that the other commissioners had responsibilities without authority, you see, because, in [593] effect, although we sort of put the final licks on things in terms of our approval, we really didn't put the stones together and so that we were approving things that we weren't really able to shape very much. That's kind of an oversimplified explanation, but there were difficulties, and I'm trying to think of actual examples. But I can't at the moment. There were plenty, but it's just that it's so long ago I've forgotten what the specific examples were. HESS: Anytime one comes to mind we can cover it. SPINGARN: I think that in some of the files I've given you you'll find them because there are a lot of FTC files and I think you will find samples of them there. In any event, another problem arose between Jim Mead and me and that was this: I was the junior member of the Commission, when I was appointed, naturally, but Lowell Mason was a Republican; John Carson was an independent and Bill Ayres was 80 years old. But still, Ayres, as I recall, was automatically acting chairman when Mead was absent. But then Ayers died after I'd been on the Commission a year or so. Then Albert Carretta I believe was appointed to replace him. In any [594] event, I then became the ranking Democrat, because Mason was Republican and Carson was an independent, after Mead. In any event, Jim made me acting chairman, he had that right, when he was away. In '52 and early '53 he was sick quite often for long periods of time, I think all told several months, so I was acting chairman for long periods of time relatively speaking. And during this period of time, my fight began with the oil industry. And that attracted a good deal of newspaper publicity and my name was going out always -- they dropped the "acting" you see, and they just said, "Chairman Spingarn," that's the way it went. And Jim's friends began to tell him, "Aren't you chairman anymore." And to make a long story short, it got under his skin. HESS: He didn't like it. SPINGARN: He didn't like it, and one day he exploded at a meeting of the Commission and the gist of it was that "an acting chairman was supposed to be seen and not heard." I was just there as a formality, you see. HESS: Fill the chair or something. SPINGARN: Just fill the chair, that's right. It was to keep the chair warm, and I shouldn't be doing all these [595] rambunctious things, you see. And he actually said, "People have been asking me, 'Are you still chairman?"' Well, I know how he felt, Looking back I can see it was perfectly understandable that he felt the way he did. In any event, Jim naturally supported the concept of the President's Reorganization Plan #8 for a strong chairmanship. He was the beneficiary. How could he do otherwise. But the interesting thing is he changed his mind later. Like me, he served into the Republican term, only he served a couple of years longer than I did. His term ran, I think, until '55, yes. And mine expired in September, '53. So he had a Republican chairman who was Edward F. [Jack] Howrey. Now, Jack Howrey was personally an extremely amiable and likeable fellow, very personable. But on the one hand he was a conservative Republican, and on the other hand, he had been an anti-trust, shall I say, an anti-anti-trust lawyer. He had been a lawyer for private litigants in trouble with the anti-trust authorities most of his adult life, for twenty years or so anyway. So, if you believe that the way to catch a thief is to set a thief [596] on him, why, he was the right man. I'm joking. Ed Howrey was no thief, but his thinking was shaped by the fact that he always had been fighting the anti-trust agencies for his clients. HESS: He was a big business man. SPINGARN: All his life, that's right. And furthermore, the Republicans had been out of power for twenty years and there was tremendous pressure to "Let's get those damned Democrats out of those jobs and get good Republicans in, and to hell with the Civil Service laws," That was the pressure. And there was a lot of skullduggery went on, I'll tell you. And Jim Mead and I were fighting, you see, to see that nothing illegal was done in some sly way. You know, there are plenty of ways to skin a cat when you want to. We were there to try to see that the laws and regulations were observed as far as filling jobs or replacing people in jobs were concerned. And I can remember Howrey bursting out in anger one day at a Commission meeting. I think Mead was there too, I'm sure he was. And we were critical of some appointment at top level he was making and he said, "If you fellows want to play rough [597] I can play rough too," or words to that effect. He said, "You don't know the pressure that's on me." He said, "Why, the Republican National Committee has got six thousand or eight thousand (I've forgotten the exact number) of people who they want to feed into jobs. The pressure on me is enormous. I'm doing the best I can but you fellows don't know the pressure on me." HESS: They had a list of job-seekers. SPINGARN: That's right, yes. There had been a long famine, they felt. Well, so, Jim Mead began to bridle -- I mean, Howrey exercised the powers much more ruthlessly than Mead had, you see. And since Mead and I were both liberal Democrats of the same orientation, we usually voted together on Commission cases. It wasn't like it was with Howrey, who was a Conservative Republican of a totally different orientation as far as our cases were concerned and our policies. HESS: Was Mr. Mead's health better now? SPINGARN: Yes. HESS: He was back full-time? SPINGARN: Yes, he was back full-time. He seemed to have [598] recovered by this time. He was a very vigorous man. He was a fine looking man, very handsome, erect and vigorous, you know. He was then about late sixty-eight or seventy, I would guess. Somewhere between sixty--even and seventy in the time I knew him, during the years I was on the Commission. And he died a year or two ago. So, Jim began to feel restive under the strong chairmanship. And eventually he came to the conclusion that this was a bad arrangement, and that we should have five commissioners selecting their own chairman, perhaps on a rotating basis the way it had been before. And an executive director responsible to the full Commission who would be the administrative officer for the agency. And that was the way I felt. Well, in 1955, Jim Mead's term expired, and it was a Democratic spot, however, because the basic law for the Commission provides that not more than three of the five members can belong to the same party. So, a Republican could not be appointed to this spot. Jim Mead wanted to be reappointed. As I recall, he had just hit seventy then; I think that's the way it was, he [599] had just hit seventy. And that or other things may have been a factor, I don't know, but I think it was other things. That's my impression. I think that the Administration wanted a Democrat who might be more tractable, might be more likely to follow the guidance of the Republican chairman, Jack Howrey. I'm just guessing, this is just speculation on my part. Jim Mead, obviously, was not going to be that kind of a commissioner. In any event, William C. Kern was nominated by the President. Now, Bill Kern, whom I knew quite well, I mean, tolerably, was a senior staff man at the Commission during my period there, a senior lawyer. His father, by the way, was Senator from Indiana, and I think was Senate Majority Leader, and once a Democratic vice-presidential candidate. His brother, John Kern is judge of the tax court, and has been chief judge and mayor of Indianapolis, if I'm not mistaken. In any event, Bill Kern was a good lawyer and a good Democrat. There was no question about that, but he was also a close friend, a personal friend, of Chairman Howrey. And Howrey had promoted Kern from simply an upper-middle [600] level spot on the staff, to one of the top positions. He had made him assistant director of the Bureau of Litigation, as I think it was now called. It had changed its name since my time. In any event, this was the outfit that tried all litigation. So, what I'm saying is that (a) he was the personal friend of the Republican chairman, (b) he owed his most prestigious promotion to the Republican chairman. I'm not saying that there was anything wrong or bad with Bill Kern. He was a good man, he was a liberal Democrat, he was a real Democrat, but it just seemed to me that he had given certain hostages to fortune and that while I'm sure he would vote his own mind on the individual cases, when it came to policy matters affecting the Commission, I wondered if he wouldn't be a little more likely to be guided by the chairman's views than Jim Mead who owed nothing to the chairman. HESS: He might feel he was under some obligation. SPINGARN: Yes, that was the way I felt. In any event, whatever the case may be, Jim Mead came to me, he asked me to come down to the Commission for a powwow, and I did. And he asked me if I would go before the Senate Commerce Committee which would consider the Kern [601] nomination, and oppose it on legal grounds, and his legal assistant, John Wheelock, who is now executive director of the Commission, suggested that there might be a legal or constitutional disability here, under the Administrative Procedure Act or Statutory Disability anyway, because Bill Kern had been for the past year the assistant chief district attorney, as it were, trying all the cases and reviewing, you see, and now he was going to sit on the Commission, and the question was, could he decide the cases that he prosecuted. And he had been prosecuting all of them, you see, because they all went through him. He may have only had a scattering knowledge of many, but still... HESS: They were still in his department. SPINGARN: They all went through him, every case passed across his desk. He had to approve, the prosecution. Wheelock just raised the question and I went to the law books and I spent several days in the library, and I satisfied myself that this was a real and valid objection. I mean this was a good objection and that there was real merit to it. But I said I wasn't going to go up as a volunteer. [602] If somebody asked me to go, if Senators asked me to go, I would go. So Jim had been a Senator, and that was no problem. Immediately I began receiving telephone calls, and letters and telegrams from Senators asking me to appear. I remember Joe O'Mahoney of Wyoming called me on the telephone and asked me, and I got a letter from Senator Lehman of New York, and from others. Four or five Senators phoned or wrote me and asked me to appear, so I was not a volunteer, you see. And I did appear, and I did make my legal argument with much citation of law cases and so forth and so on, and here it is -- this is the "Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee Hearings on the Nomination of William C. Kern to be a member of the Federal Trade Commission" on June 16, 1955. By the way, I made a lifelong enemy out of Bill Kern, as a result of this, which I was sorry about. I mean, he was unable to understand, you know. I tried to explain to him. I'm sure it sounded very ironical to him but there was nothing personal in it. And there wasn't anything personal. The only thing personal about it was that I would have preferred to see Jim Mead on it rather than Bill Kern. I had a right to [603] have a preference, and secondly, that there was, it seemed to me, a real legal obstacle here. Of course what he objected to was that while I praised Bill Kern to the skies, and I said he was an excellent lawyer, good Democrat and all that, I also said that he was a good friend of the chairman, the Republican chairman, and that he owed his last promotion, an important one, from the upper-middle deck to the top deck, to Howrey, the Republican chairman. And I said, "Jim Mead doesn't owe Howrey anything." And then I also pointed out, here or elsewhere, it was a fact, I have forgotten whether it was at this hearing or somewhere else, that the request that Kern be nominated didn't come from any Democratic source. It came from a Republican source. In other words, the Republicans were deciding who the Democratic nominee should be. I don't mean merely the President, of course, he had to decide that finally, but I mean the recommendation came up from Republican channels from below. That is the way it works, you see. It didn't come from any Democratic source below; it came from a Republican source. Of course, this is not, I must admit, too unusual. In [604] any event, notwithstanding my objection, Bill Kern was nominated and confirmed. And here is the hearing on that. I have here a number of letters from President Truman, some of which are of some interest, and since they're short I think I'll just read them in. Here is one written just after I left the Federal Trade Commission written on October 13, 1953. Dear Steve: I certainly appreciated your good letter of September 23, and I read the enclosure with much interest. It gave me a great deal of satisfaction to know I had appointed a Commissioner who was a real commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Sincerely yours, Harry Truman. I naturally take some pleasure in reading this kind of a letter because as I have recorded for you earlier I was bumped upstairs somewhat willy-nilly to the Federal Trade Commission, and the fact that Mr. Truman and I have maintained a warm relationship all these years since and that he still seems to think well of me and as recently as '64 endorsed me as his only choice among 178 Democrats, a large pack, indicates [605] that there was nothing personal in what happened back in 1950. It's an axiom, in White House circles anyway, that White House staff men are extremely expendable. Here is an interesting letter from President Truman dated November 20, 1956: Dear Steve: Thank you very much for your good letter... [Oh, I think I'll read my good letter because I have it here. It's rather amusing.] On 16 November, 1956 (now this is right after the defeat of Adlai Stevenson for the second time by General Eisenhower), I wrote the President: Dear Mr. President: (that is, to President Truman) It looks to me as if the prevailing political slogan this year is "Don't change an incompetent, bungling administration that has hopelessly fouled up our foreign policy in mid-stream." At any rate, the country repudiated the Republican Party even if it elected a kind, friendly gentleman with a wide grin. From my father and from you I learned not to look backwards at defeat except to analyze the reasons for this so that they can be corrected, but to look forward to new battles and ultimate victory. It is not too early to start working toward 1958-1960 right now. Naturally, I am doing my feeble best. I am working on a little operation, which for laughs I call Operation KOED. The [606] KOED stands for Knock On Every Door. It is an operation which if put into effect, I believe, will tremendously beef up our effectiveness in 1958 and 1960, and vastly improve the presentation of our case to the American people. Charlie Murphy and Dave Lloyd can tell you about it, and I would welcome the opportunity to do so too when you are next in Washington or in New York. If you can ever spare time from your many commitments it would be mighty interesting to hear your analysis of the election. Most sincerely, Steve. HESS: Did you ever talk to him about his analysis of that election? SPINGARN: Well, I got a letter from him. By the time I saw him it was long afterwards, it was ancient history. Dear Steve: (this is November 20, 1956 from the President) Thank you very much for your good letter of the 16th. I do not understand the people and their viewpoint. It would seem that they were completely fooled on two or three matters which I will discuss with you the next time we see each other. Your idea for 1958 and 1960 [that's KOED] seems as if it might be a good one and if you and Charlie [that's Charlie Murphy] and Dave Lloyd stick together, you should be able to work out something that would make us win in both years. Sincerely, Harry Truman. I have here a letter of November 1 from him too. This is interesting; this is before the election. [607] Dear Steve: (this is '56) Thank you very much for your good letter of October 22. I have been out of town, otherwise there would have been no delay in answering it. I enjoyed my visit with you and appreciated all the things you had to say in your letter. [I think he's talking about now that civil rights letter, but I'm not sure. That was in October, you see. This is about two weeks later.] The situation [now this is interesting] looked good until the Middle Eastern crisis appeared. [Remember this is right after the invasion of Suez and the Hungarian uprising and just before the election.] I really do not know what affect it will have on Tuesday's elections. We can only hope for the best while we work like the devil to put the Democrats in. Sincerely, Harry Truman. And then November 17, 1956: Dear Steve: I have been a long time answering your letter of the 5th, but I did appreciate your suggestion and I think you have something. I had a long talk with Dave Lloyd and one with Charlie Murphy over the telephone, and I am disappointed that the Advisory Committee was not properly received by the Democrats in Congress. Things may work out all right however. You could be of great help to the Democratic National Committee if we could ever get it organized to work for the benefit of the Party and not for individual members who work for the Committee. You may figure that out the best way you can. Sincerely yours, Harry Truman. [608] Now, this was a time when the Democratic Advisory Committee had been set up and the members of Congress, the leadership of Congress didn't like it one little bit. The idea was that they regarded themselves as the spokesman for the Democratic Party, and they didn't want -- the idea of the Democratic Advisory Council was to establish party policy on the National issues and propagandize it. And they established different task forces in the different areas, the subject matter areas with experts, you know, and important former office-holders in them, arid they worked up position papers, which were supposed to become party policy. Well, Lyndon Johnson didn't like it, and John McCormack didn't like it and they regarded themselves as the fellows who made party policy when the party was out of power, that is when we didn't hold the Presidency. That was what the big ruckus was over at that time. HESS: They thought they should be the leaders of the party opposition. SPINGARN: Right. I, by the way, was a candidate at this time, when he's talking about, to be deputy chairman [609] of the Democratic National Committee. He's saying that, "You could be of great help to the national committee if they were straightened out." Well, I’m not sure what his position vis-à-vis -- in 1956 Paul Butler was chairman, and I'm just not sure what Mr. Truman's relationships with Paul were. I may have known at one time, but I don't know now. I mean, I've forgotten if there was harmony or not. I really don't know. Let's see, oh, since I'm dealing with elections, here's a couple of letters I had from Adlai Stevenson, one in '52 and one in '56. These may be out in the Library, are they, I don't know? HESS: I'm not sure. SPINGARN: Well, one is addressed to me in November 1952 right after the election by Adlai Stevenson, Governor. He was of course Governor of Illinois and had been defeated for the Presidency. Dear Mr. Spingarn: Thank you for your letter. I think you are quite right that we must support the administration when we feel it is the public interest [that's the Eisenhower administration] and reserve our criticism for intellectual and constructive use. I think you are quite right about the importance [610] of the National Committee in a new role and I hope to have a little something to say about that, particularly the Research and Publicity Division. [I had urged a strong research organization so that we could document our side on the issues through the national committee since we no longer have the Government agencies to help us on that sort of documentation with their experts, which you would ordinarily have if you have the Presidency.] I think also you are right about developing some positive means of combating McCarthyism, which will evolve in new forms of attack to discredit individual Democrats, and I should welcome an opportunity to see your memoranda. Cordially, Adlai Stevenson. And that was '52. Here's his letter of '56. December 7, '56 Dear Mr. Spingarn: I know from Arthur [that's Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.] how helpful you were during the campaign and want to say to you, inadequate as this has to be, how very grateful I am. I know that the campaign as well as the election fell short of our expectations and yet I hope that we are entitled to the satisfaction of having at least made as hard a try at it as we could. Ever so much obliged. Sincerely, Adlai Stevenson. Well, that leads naturally into the McCarthy thing he talked about in '52, because yesterday or earlier. I taped for you some comments on a project for the Democratic National Committee which Charlie Murphy and Averell Harriman and I were interested in. And it was proposed that I should head it up in the national [611] committee, and Charlie Murphy, if my memory serves me right, asked me to prepare this memorandum which I found since I talked to you, to the tape, and I did prepare a memorandum which is dated December 15, 1953, indicating what such a project, what such an anti-McCarthy unit in the national committee would do, what its program would be, how it would operate and what it would do. And I'm going to lend you that to be Xeroxed and returned to me, including this little buck slip explaining it, which I wrote this afternoon here on top. HESS: Fine. That will become part of your papers at the Library then. SPINGARN: Yes. Now, I want to say this: To my recollection this thing came to a head -- I'd been propagating for something like this in or out of the committee somewhere, you see, ever since I got out and before. I mean, ever since I got out of Government. Well, this wasn't so long after that, actually, I got out in September, and this was December 1953. But in November '53, the thing that brought this to a head, as I recall, was this. In November '53, I think that's the right date, Attorney General Brownell [612] launched an attack on President Truman's handling of the Harry Dexter White case, and this became a cause celebre. And J. Edgar Hoover got into the act, and the thesis that Brownell was propounding was that Harry Truman had been notified that Harry White was a no-good subversive and he still put him in this International Monetary Fund, executive directorship or whatever it was, an important post in any event, representing the United States Government with this international organization, and he had the facts before him when he did this, that was the thesis. And the House Un-American Activities Committee tried to get into the act and they sent a subpoena, they subpoenaed President Truman to appear before them and explain this whole thing. And I was up in New York and I went down to, was it the Waldorf Astoria, I'm not sure, whatever hotel it was Mr. Truman was staying at, and I remember spending hours there, in a skull session with the President, Charlie Murphy, Sam Rosenman was there, and others. I remember particularly Murphy and also Rosenman. And as I say, Charlie Murphy and Sam Rosenman were there and the President, and we discussed for hours [613] what the President's position should be on that subpoena of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the question, I mean there was obviously a constitutional question, as to whether a congressional committee could subpoena an ex-President. There was no question they couldn't subpoena an incumbent President, but could they subpoena an ex-President to make him defend his stewardship. And the general opinion was that they couldn't but then the question was whether procedurally he had to appear and refuse to testify, but answer the subpoena and then refuse on constitutional grounds, or whether he should just write them that the subpoena was a nullity and he was not going to honor it or something like that. Well, to make a long story short, the latter course is what he followed. He did not appear; he simply refused to honor the subpoena entirely. I don't know what the great constitutional authorities have said about the situation. I haven't read anything on it since, really. There was some journalistic discussion of it at the time, but I haven't seen the real constitutional authorities on the subject and I don't [614] know what their opinion is. I feel certain that at least an ex-President cannot be compelled to testify, but whether procedurally he should honor the subpoena and then appear and say, "I stand on my constitutional rights," that would be rather embarrassing, you know, in a way, because it would look like he was claiming some kind of Fifth Amendment. I think it would be better for him, I mean as far as the appearance of the thing is concerned, I would prefer to see him simply write back and say, "You have no right to subpoena me and I simply will not honor it." Well, anyway, here's the document which I prepared. For some reason or other, this thing never materialized. I do not remember why. My understanding is that Averell Harriman was willing to put up the money, and that the money was in sight, but I'm not sure of that, it's all so long ago. That's my vague impression of the situation. It simply may have been (let's see, that was 1952), that Stephen Mitchell decided against it. I have here another document. I tape recorded [615] yesterday or earlier, the fact that in 1952 I was asked to prepare on short notice, on 24 or 48 hour notice a speech to be delivered by Senator Estes Kefauver, answering McCarthy. McCarthy was going on a nationwide radio hookup, over five hundred stations, on the night of Monday, the night before the election in '52. And he was going to denounce Adlai Stevenson in his usual McCarthy fashion -- "Alger" Stevenson, as he liked to call him -- "Oh, pardon me, Adlai," he would say. And the idea was that immediately following his broadcast Estes would appear on a nationwide radio broadcast and answer and light into McCarthy. And I was asked to prepare the speech by Larry [Laurence G.] Henderson who was staff director of the Senate Small Business Committee and was working in the campaign. Larry had optioned the time. He had the radio stations lined up and I wrote the speech. And my notes show that the Springfield group, that is, the leadership of the Stevenson campaign had approved this project. But on Sunday the day before the broadcast Steve Mitchell, the Democratic National Committee Chairman, cancelled [616] it out. The next day he reconsidered and decided he wanted it, but it was too late. The time had been given up and had gone elsewhere; we couldn't get the air time back; so it was never given. But here is the speech, which I wrote for Estes Kefauver to give, and which I would also like back. Now, I want to add to my material in connection with the '66 campaign. Here are some further letters. I mentioned the fact that Speaker McCormack had liked my fact sheet on high prices and inflation so much that he wrote Chairman Bailey asking him to send it to every Democratic member of Congress. Here is a second letter from Speaker McCormack sending me a copy of Bailey's letter, in fact, he sent me the original, actually, saying that Bailey would do so. And letters from a couple of other sources, congressional, Representative [Morris K.] Udall of Arizona, and Representative [Frank] Thompson of New Jersey who, by the way, is the chairman of the House Democratic Study Group, which composes, or did in the 89th Congress, 180 of the 295 Democratic members of the House, and I give you those to Xerox and return. Perhaps....here's one more. Here's a letter from Senator Claiborne Pell. [617] Dear Steve: Many thanks for the speech you sent along together with the memos to the Vice President and various Cabinet officers. I must confess that I've already lifted large sections of the speech and included some in one I delivered this weekend. Deep down I feel a little plagiaristic but I guess your permission negates that sin. Really, I'm immensely appreciative of your help. Warm regards, Sincerely, Claiborne. Well, this was the speech on high prices and inflation, how to answer that charge by the Republicans. Here's one I rather like -- a humor item. In the middle thirties, 1935 to '38, I was a young lawyer fresh out of the University of Arizona law school in the Treasury Department in the Legislative Section of the General Counsel's office. And in the very same room, room 170, a large room, sat a young lawyer from Northwestern University Law School, Stuart Tipton. Tipton and I sat in the same room for three years. We used to go over to the YMCA and play handball about three times a week. I claim that I always beat the tar out of him but he has a different memory, he sees it differently. In that office was drafted, but not by me, Stuart Tipton and another lawyer there named George Neal [618] worked on it under the supervision of our assistant general counsel in charge of that operation, Clinton Hester, C. M. Hester, the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, and as a result of that Hester, Neal and Tipton all went over to Civil Aeronautics. Hester became the administrator of the Civil Aeronautics Authority, and Neal became general counsel and Tipton the assistant general counsel of the CAB. And then, Tipton went to the Air Transport Association, that is the trade association of the scheduled airlines, and he became general counsel there, and a few years ago he became the president. This is a job, I suppose, pays $100,000 or so a year. You know, it's a very pecunious job. I'm just guessing, but I know it pays very handsomely. I have a Republican friend named Louise Gore, who is a Goldwater Republican and a very nice gal except that she's nutty on politics, you know. She's been brainwashed by the Goldwater types. On individual human issues she's sometimes quite sound, but if she talks about national issues, she just parrots the Goldwater slogans. But she's a very effective politician. [619] She's now Maryland State Senator from Montgomery County. She was in the House of Delegates until last fall, and she ran for Congress once against the state chairman, and in the Republican primary came within a hundred votes of beating him, on a statewide basis. So she's a pretty good politician. By the way, she owns and runs the Jockey Club which is probably the most expensive restaurant in town, aside from the Rive Rauche. Well, one day in the summer of '64, I went out with Louise at a Republican Goldwater rally. I wanted to see what it was like. I was a Democratic spy you might say. In fact, it was out at Mrs. Tankersley's farm. She's a niece of Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, and a very conservative, Goldwater type lady. It was kind of a big rodeo, you know, it was a fundraising drive for Goldwater. I went out there to see what it was like and I remember they had a book you signed and I signed myself, my name, and after it put "Democratic observer." But anyway, to my amazement, I found Stuart Tipton out there and he was no observer, he was with them. He was wearing a Goldwater button. I said, "Stu, you couldn't be." You know, we sat in the same room for three years, [620] I don't remember any political discussions we had, we must have had them, but I'd always assumed that he was a New Deal Democrat like myself. It never occurred to me that he was anything else, you know. He said, "Why, I've always been a Republican." Well, he was pretty quiet about it in the thirties I'll say that. But anyway, a day or two before the election last fall in November, I telephoned Stu Tipton and I said, "Stu, I will make you a bet. He said, "Name it." I said, "I will bet you anything you want to [we finally agreed on a good lunch] that we Democrats don't lose more than thirty net seats in the House of Representatives." I said, "Twenty-nine or less I win, thirty it's a Mexican stand-off, thirty-one or more you win." He didn't even argue. He said, "It's a deal." I thought I had a good bet, but he was right. HESS: You lost. SPINGARN: I lost, and we lost forty-seven net seats, that was a stunning blow, you see. And here is a humorous memorandum I wrote him admitting my liability. And I [621] took him to lunch at the Democratic Club which he was pleased to attend, he'd never been there before. And this is, I hope, humorous. There should be fun in politics. I mean, after all, the opposition are not fiends with horns on their heads, ordinarily anyway. There may be moments when you feel they are. Well, now, what do I want to deal with next? I've told you that my brother's father-in-law, that is his wife's father, is Admiral Morison, Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard, the naval historian, and I've told you about my correspondence with Sam:Morison because I was disturbed over his view of the corruption of the Truman administration, and particularly the source from which he got it. I don't seem to have the whole correspondence here, but here is one letter which I wrote him defending the Truman administration against these charges, the corruption and vulgarity of the Truman administration, for example, which I will give you and ask you to return to me in due ordinary course eventually. Here is a copy of a letter that President Truman was replying to in the letters that I read you before. [622] Here is the letter that upset me so much from Sam Morison. It's dated November 8, 1956. Dear Steve: I voted Republican again this year. I voted for Ike in 1952 for the following reasons: 1. Disgusted with the corruption and vulgarity of the Truman administration. 2. Admiration for the character of Eisenhower. 3. Hope for checking further inflation. 4. Winding up the Korean war. Sincerely, Sam Put this letter with the letter I gave you. That's the answer to it, you see. HESS: That was short and itemized. SPINGARN: Yes, short and itemized, yes. And that's one of the country's greatest historians. That's what disturbed me, you see. And he was going to write a one volume history of the United States. He had already written several two volume histories or more. However, I kept plugging him with material, and I was glad to see when he wrote his one volume history, I only saw it within the last year, that he has a much higher opinion of Truman now, and that he damns Eisenhower with faint [623] praise. So, things have changed in his mind anyway. Here is a letter that is of perhaps no interest to anyone but me. It was written to me by my father in 1918 when he sailed for France on the AEF. Perhaps a lot of people today would think it was very corny, especially the people who don't like Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman, and think they're corny. So, he says: (I won't read the whole letter) Goodbye dearest boy and good luck. I know you will grow up to be a strong, good, brave man and love your country as I love it. That's it. I mean, there's more, but ....that kind of patriotism is considered almost obsolete. HESS: It's considered old-fashioned. SPINGARN: Very old-fashioned, it is. And, of course, don't misunderstand me, patriotism can run amuck. I mean, patriotism has its virtues and it can have its vices too, excessive, you know, where you become nationalistic and jingoistic and think that only your country has anything to offer and all other countries stink. These are White House files of mine I'm looking through to see if I have anything. Here's one from Margaret Truman. This might be [624] interesting. It's dated February 23, 1953. Dear Steve: You were so grand to send me the beautiful volume of Lear. I have been holding my sides continuously. I took it home when I visited Mother and Dad and we all laughed. Many, many thanks. The three of us are leaving for Hawaii late next month, and I must say I'm glad. Mother and Dad are fine but they need a complete change. Of course, they had to twist my arm to get me to go! Being by the ocean won't seem the same without our volleyball team. [She and I played on the same volleyball team down in Key West.] Thank you and the best to you and yours. Margaret. I want to say this, you know, about Margaret and Mrs. Truman. They were wonderful ladies to the staff members. I mean, Mrs. Truman is a very intelligent and a very warm and a fine person. She was awfully nice to me and you know, when you're a new man on the team and sort of low man on the totem pole you appreciate that. Her problem as a First Lady as I see it was this: She's very shy and she hates the spotlight, so she always shied away from the spotlight, and therefore, she didn't do some of the things that other President's wives do because she preferred to remain, as nearly as possible, [625] and it really isn't very easy, you know, for a President's wife, she preferred to remain in as much obscurity as possible. And yet, she was an intelligent woman. She had been his secretary in the Senate, and she was a woman of very sound judgment and a lot of wisdom. I know the President depended on her a lot, there's no doubt about it. Her public image, therefore, I suppose was not nearly as good, it wasn't bad, I mean, but it was sort of neuter, you know, there wasn't much public image, but the image she had with the people who knew her was great. I never saw anyone say anything mean or bad about Mrs. Truman. Everybody liked her and she was good to people. She was just naturally good. And Margaret was a surprisingly unaffected girl when you consider that she was the President's only child and all that. I admire the way she led her own life and did the things she wanted to do and didn’t let the brickbats of music critics, or others, deter her, and it seems to me that she was and has become a very constructive and useful citizen. There was nothing spoiled, there was nothing pompous, there was nothing [626] affected about Margaret Truman. She was just as natural as a young woman of her age can be. She was what, she was twenty-five or six when I came to the White House, I would guess. Somewhere on that order. Let me discuss the Federal Trade Commission, I think. I mentioned how I was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission. I was probably one of the more reluctant appointees to that Commission. Usually men are delighted to be appointed to a regulatory commission, but I would have much preferred to stay at the White House, but that was not to be. The funny thing was this, actually, the President had nominated a man, I think it was Martin Hutchinson of Virginia, a liberal Virginia Democrat, and Senator Byrd of Virginia said that he was personally obnoxious. He exercised senatorial privilege, and the Hutchinson nomination was defeated. He was defeated and rejected by the Senate on the basis of Byrd's objection to him. It was a vacancy caused by the death of another commissioner, a former Congressman from Tennessee named Davis. And that left a vacancy with about three years to run on the Commission. There are five commissioners and they have terms of six years [627] each, and they're staggered. So, I was told one day that I was to be nominated and that's the first news I had of it, and it went up that day. There was one rather ironical thing, or several perhaps: I had been working that spring, I think it was in May or thereabouts, on a veto message on the Basing-Point bill which was a very controversial bill that had passed Congress and which the President had to yea or nay. I was in charge of the task force that wrote the veto message, and I had the assistance of a few people, including Joe [Joseph S.] Wright, who was assistant general counsel of the Federal Trade Commission. And there were others. I was much impressed with Joe Wright in the course of our conferences and powwows on this which lasted for some days, on the Basing-Point bill, on the preparation of the veto message. When the vacancy appeared, I recommended that Joe Wright be considered for this vacancy, you see, just on the basis of my connection with him on the Basing-Point message. I didn't tell him and he didn't know that. After I was nominated for that vacancy, to my surprise, [628] not long after the nomination, another Trade Commission lawyer named Dan [Daniel J.] Murphy called me. He was assistant director of the Bureau of Anti-Deceptive Practices, that covers false advertising, and after congratulating me on my nomination, he then went into another spiel and I soon realized that he was really mad at me. He thought I had betrayed him. The gist of what he thought had happened was this: He reminded me, I don't remember it, that we had met up in Speaker McCormack's, it was then Majority Leader McCormack's office. I didn't remember. And he said that in the Speaker's office, someone there, I think he mentioned the man, it wasn't Mr. McCormack, it was someone else, had told me that Murphy had his hat in the ring for that vacancy. And this fellow had told him that I was working for him at the White House to get him the nomination. Well, you know, this is standard political palaver. Murphy was from Boston and he was a constituent, and one of McCormack's people was giving him a little jazz, that was all, about how hard they were working for him and he had me, unbeknownst to me, lined up for him, you see. [629] So Murphy was mad at me because he thought I'd sold him out to advance my own interests. But he was wrong, McCormack's office had never mentioned him to me and I hadn't even heard of his candidacy. It was just a rather typical bit of, shall we say, exaggeration by someone as to how hard we're working for you. See, "We've got him lined up, we've really got him lined up..." HESS: It's not that way at all. SPINGARN: It's not that way at all. So, then, my nomination was sent up one day and the Congress adjourned the next day, and so the President gave me a recess nomination and I went to the Commission on a recess nomination, but of course, I still had to be confirmed by the Senate. So, I appeared in December, I had then been a couple of months on the Commission, and by the way, one of the most vivid memories of the first few days on the Commission, on November 1, 1950, we were having a hearing, an argument in the Commission, and I was sitting on the bench with my fellow Commissioners, and all of a sudden we heard police whistles and sirens and they went on and on and on, and it sounded like this was [630] a terrible, big thing, you know, but we didn't interrupt our hearing and we heard later in the afternoon that that had been the attack by those Puerto Rican nationalists on the President at Blair House and they had killed one White House policeman and one of them had been killed and all that; but to us it just sounded like the place was going mad with sirens blowing so hard while we were trying to listen to that case. In December I attended a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on my nomination, and it was a surprisingly uneventful hearing. I didn't know what was going to happen, and I want you to remember that the Basing-Point bill was extremely controversial. There was an enormous lobby for it. They were extremely disappointed when it was vetoed. It wasn't public knowledge, but these things can't be kept unknown, I was in charge of the task force that wrote the veto message; I assumed that the people who wanted to know about such things knew it, and what kind of a reception was I going to meet? One of the Senators on that committee favored the Basing-Point bill, you see? That was the kind of thing. [631] Well, I consulted with friends as to what my position should be, and I took a position which may not have been utterly courageous, but still seems to me to be the sensible position to take. When they asked my views on the Basing-Point bill, I said candidly that I had been in charge of the task force who wrote it, and that I was merely a technician. That the President had decided he wanted to veto the Basing-Point bill, I had been assigned to write a veto message and I had done my job. That was it. I didn't pretend that I was a great authority on the subject. I had the assistance of experts and that I was legislative draftsman and that was the kind of work I did all the time and that was my job and I had done it. If they wanted my own personal views on the Basing-Point, I hoped they would wait a few months and let me get my feet on the ground and study the matter more carefully and so forth and so on, then I'd be glad to give them my views. This was a tactful answer anyway. The hearing went very well. There was no opposition, and Senator [Warren G.] Magnuson was the chairman then as now, wasn't he? I believe he was. Senator Magnuson has been a [632] friend of mine, I don't mean a close friend but I had known him since the thirties when he was a young Congressman, in the late thirties or the early forties, and there were other friends of mine on the Committee. Several of them spoke up and said nice things about me and none of the Republicans interrupted to say nasty things. And then it seemed that the hearing was over and I began to think, "My goodness, there hasn't been much said about who I am, what I've done or anything." So, I piped up and I said, "Would the Committee like to hear a little more about my background," or something like that? And Senator Capehart from Indiana, a conservative Republican, said, "Young man," or words to that effect, "I'm a salesman and there's one thing you know in the sales business, when you have a prospect ready to sign with his pen in his hand you don't interrupt him." And I said, "Senator, that's good advice, and I accept it." So, my nomination went through swimmingly and ....oh, there was one other thing. But George Dixon, the columnist, first for the Washington Times-Herald and then the Post, now dead, wrote a column [633] about this nomination hearing of mine, which I hereby give you, and he makes me -- well, here it is. This is December 21, 1950, in the Washington Times-Herald: A burning desire to show off his erudition almost blocked ex-White House assistant, Stephen Spingarn from a seat on the Federal Trade Commission. Mr. Spingarn has since been okayed and should ascend his throne as a lordly commissioner after the first of the year, but he almost high-browed himself out of it. The newest FTC grand vizier has long been one of those hush-hush White House inner circlers with a passion for anonymity, but like most of that strange coterie he considers himself an intellectual. [That is not true.] When President Truman nominated him to the FTC post, Mr. Spingarn was nominated before the Senate's Interstate Foreign Commerce Committee for questioning as to his fitness. The interrogation was led by the committee chairman, Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado. [He was the chairman.] The whole thing was pretty perfunctory because the committee had already made up its mind to o.k. Spingarn. But instead of just answering a few routine questions like could he read and write and what is the capital of the United States this week, and name the last two presidents in consecutive order, the nominee began displaying his erudition. He dropped legal pearls from Blackstone and Justice Holmes [This is a lot of crap, you know. He's exaggerating enormously.], worked in a dose of Plato and referred offhand to Justice Brandeis and Socrates. [It is fascinating, the only one [634] of those I mentioned was Brandeis who had made some famous statements about how the Federal Trade Commission should operate in its incipiency back in 1915.] In this fascinating pursuit, he found a ready playmate in Senator Johnson who loves to toss around a little erudition too. The two played a wonderful game matching intellects, but they got badly on the nerves of the other Senators who had never had no schooling to speak of. Time and again these low brow legislators tried to bring the nomination to a vote and get it over with but each time Mr. Spingarn interrupted with a gem of learning. Finally, our finest example of a self-made man, Senator Homer E. Capehart of Indiana could take this punditry no longer. The homespun solon snarled: "Mr. Spingarn, one of the fundamentals of salesmanship is that when you have a customer sold, the contract before him and the pen in his hand, you shut up." And the other item in Dixon's column is about that great American, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. I'll give you that. Put that in the Archives. Now, going on with the Federal Trade Commission story, at first, as I say, I wasn't terribly happy with the Commission. I hadn't wanted to go there and it took me a while to get interested, but after a while I began to see that there was a lot of interesting work there too, and I began to get my nose rubbed in [635] it and I became more and more interested. While it's really for others to say what I did or didn't do, I don't pretend that my career there was very distinguished, I don't think it was, but I enjoyed it. I believe that the Federal Trade Commission could perform an enormously valuable service. I'm not sure that it has, but the problem has been that there are powerful forces that don't want it to perform a valuable service. The Federal Trade Commission and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice have in a sense jugular roles in our economy. They could make sweeping changes in the economy which if you believe in the elimination of anti-competitive practices, and if you believe in vigorous competition, presumably would improve the economy. But they have never been given the money, the staff, the backing, that they need to do that kind of a job. To give you an example, when I left the Trade Commission it had, as I recall, about 600 employees, less than 700 certainly, and it had an appropriation of between four and four and a half million dollars. Now, the number of employees then was almost the [636] same as it had been thirty-five years previously. In its first five years it had had about the same number of employees, and the only reason the appropriations had gone up, was because the average salary paid to a Federal Trade Commission employee had gone up from $1800 a year, back in the early days to $6500 or whatever it was in 1950, something on that order. But in the meanwhile, in the intervening years, the economy of the country, the gross national product in real terms, not in inflationary dollars, but in dollars of the same value, had grown something like eight to ten times, and the Congress had passed statute after statute devolving more duties on the Federal Trade Commission but not giving them, in effect, more hands to do them with. Obviously, you can't run a store that way and expect to do a lot of good. And then one of the troubles with the Commission, it seems to me, has always been that it tends to take the work that comes in on the tide, whatever reaches it, and that means that it takes a lot of small fry stuff, you know, and mishmash, and [637] instead of advertently looking for the important areas and searching out the really jugular cases that are going to make the big difference, it's always swamped with little cases, skip tracer and hair tonic cases, and lottery cases and things like that. A thousand of those is not worth one Basing-Point, one major price conspiracy case, I mean in terms of impact on the American economy and on its competitiveness. So, that is the big problem, and one of the strange things is that I found out that our worst enemy it seemed to me was the Bureau of the Budget, worse than the Congress. Those technicians in the Bureau of the Budget -- I remembered making my presentation at the Bureau, Jim Mead was sick and I was in charge of the presentation. Of course, I had a team with me, but I mean, I did the talking and farmed out special areas to the men who had special expertise. I remember starting off by saying that the Bureau of the Budget reminded me of the story about the small town banker who was blind in one eye and it was said of him that you could always tell which one was the [638] glass eye because it was the one that had the kindly gleam in it. And that's the way the Bureau of the Budget has always impressed me, you see. Well, this is just joking of course, but the fact of the matter is that I researched this and I found that over a period of ten years the average hack by the Bureau of the Budget on our estimates had been eighteen percent, if I remember my figures correctly, and the average subsequent cut by the Congress was only eleven, twelve, or thirteen percent. In other words, we got our stiffest cut on the average from the Bureau of the Budget. And it seems to me that the Bureau of the Budget approaches our problem exactly as if they were dealing with appropriations, say for oyster forks for naval officers mess. Everything is equal on the appropriation level, and there's no attempt to determine, "Is this a function that is jugular and central and needs reinforcing?" No, the approach is always, "They must be asking for too much money, let's hack them." On the contrary, we could have used ten times what we were getting and well, easily. [639] It just depends on how real an anti-trust and pro-competition thrust you want in this country. Heavens knows all you have to do is to read the public press to know that there's a lot of skullduggery going on. Take the case of General Electric. They have the slogan, "GE, where progress is our principal product." I would say they ought to amend that slightly. I would say, "GE, where progress and price fixing conspiracies are our principal products." General Electric has probably the worst anti-trust record, or did in my time and I don't think it's gotten any better, of any major company in the United States. They had had then, as I recall, forty or so anti-trust cases against them over the years. And you know, in the Eisenhower administration, at the end, they called them to book in a big price fixing conspiracy along with all the other major companies in the field, Westinghouse, and so forth, and so on, and for almost the first time in history, senior officials were sent to jail, only for thirty days or so, but it really shook them up, I'm told. [640] They should send more of them to jail. The thing has been that violation of the anti-trust laws has been respectable and when an official's company is fined, and he gets a fine, do you think his neighbors in the country club think there's anything wrong in that? No, but you send a man to jail even for thirty days and then they know this is wrong. If these were simply, shall we say, different interpretations of the law situations, that's one thing, but this was not that. In this case, I'm talking about at the end of the Eisenhower administration, by the way, it was the Eisenhower administration that brought the case, these were cases where these men were conspiring knowingly. They were using false names, they were meeting under assumed names in motels; they were using codes and phase of the moon things. I mean, it was cloak-and-dagger stuff, so that there could be no doubt that they knew they were violating the law by the way they were going at it. A book has been written called The Gentlemen Conspirators, and that's what they were. Well, this is all background on the Federal [641] Trade Commission. When I came on the Commission, there was Jim Mead and I've already spoken of him; there was Lowell Mason, who was a Republican member. Lowell was a delightful fellow personally, he was very conservative, he was a Taft Republican, and he had been appointed by Mr. Truman, with whom he was on the best of terms. In fact, every year, Lowell Mason gave a baseball party at the opening of the baseball season, which the President attended, and it was a big thing. It was the first game at Griffith Stadium. And I was fortunate enough to be invited to one of those and I will always remember it. I went and somehow or other, I was directed to a seat far away from the presidential party, you see, all by myself. I wondered why that was, but who was I. I thought there just weren't enough seats up there. HESS: What year was this, do, you remember, do you recall offhand? SPINGARN: Well, it was either '51 or '52, I don't know which. HESS: When you were a Federal Trade Commissioner. SPINGARN: I was a Federal Trade Commissioner. It was [642] either '51 or '52, I don't remember which. And suddenly the loudspeaker system burst into flame and it said, "Will Commissioner Spingarn please report to the presidential box," and by gosh I went up there and I discovered it was all a big mistake and I was supposed to be up there with the presidential group. Well, Lowell Mason, one of my first memories of him is this. I mean, he and I disagreed strongly on policy, but he was a very likeable fellow, and he had many good qualities personally. For instance, shortly after I came on the Commission, Lowell, as I recall, had been overseas during the summer for a while. In any event, there was a ceremony in the main hearing room at which Lowell in the presence of the other Commissioners presented a beautiful ministerial gown with a velvet lining to one of our elderly colored messengers, who was also a preacher. Lowell had had this specially made for him in the best shop of that sort in London. Now, this was a darn nice thing to do. You couldn't help saying that a fellow who would do that couldn't be all bad, and so forth. Lowell was quite a character in many ways and he would probably say the same of me. He was a great boatsman, and he had [643] a motorboat and he used to take the Commission down the river on that. I remember one occasion when we went down the river and he tied up at the amusement park down the river, whatever it's called, some miles down, anyway. And, oh, who is that fellow who used to run that radio program? I've forgotten, but he had a motorboat and he had a bunch of Senators including Hubert Humphrey on it, and others. I remember we tied up and the parties merged. And I remember having a talk with Hubert Humphrey on that occasion. Hubert Humphrey is a pharmacist and the son of a former pharmacist, and the fair trade legislation was rampant in Congress at that time. The Commission historically had always and always should oppose, in my opinion, fair trade, and this is true of Republican and Democratic Commissioners. It's always been opposed to fair trade, because fair trade is a Madison Avenue name for a way of fixing prices, and fixing them at a higher level than they should be fixed. And the theory is that you're putting up an umbrella that will protect the small businessman so [644] that he can meet the competition, but you are screwing the consumer in the process, and you're taking a lot more money out of the consumers' pocket than you're putting into that small businessman's pocket. And anyway, I have my doubts whether he needs that kind of protection. And it is a fact that every study that has been made shows that in non-fair trade areas prices are much lower than they are in the fair trade areas. HESS: Did you discuss the fair trade issue with Mr. Humphrey? SPINGARN: Yes, I discussed it with him and we always argued about it, you see, because, as I say, all the small druggists are strongly for fair trade. They say they can't compete with chain drugstores, or the groceries who sell their products too, unless they get fair trade, because on the fair trade items, they just can't cut the prices down the way those fellows can. And if they could sell Pepsodent or Crest, or any of the standard products at any price that they chose, I mean, if anybody could sell them at any price that they chose, then big chains would be underselling them all the time on these highly advertised products. You'd never [645] convince Hubert Humphrey that fair trade isn't o.k., but you'll never convince me that it is either, so there you are. Anyway, every great man is entitled to one small failing, and I see Hubert Humphrey's as fair trade. He'd see it differently. But to get back to Lowell Mason. It was rather amusing because Lowell was the enfant terrible of the Federal Trade Commission. He made speeches everywhere. He made an enormous number of speeches. And he was always attacking the Commission. He had a standard speech and he had variations on it. It was an attack on the Commission. And the general idea was that we were a terrible, dangerous, powerful bureaucracy that was "at your throat, Mr. Businessman, watch out," and he talked about some Russian commissar of justice whose procedure was to convict them first and then try them. And it wasn't quite clear in my mind whether he learned that from the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Trade Commission learned it from him, but it was one way or the other according to Lowell. Krylenko, I think this fellow's name was, and he was an ogre and we were associate ogres, you see. [646] Well, you know, he was going around the country yelling about how awful an ogre, and how dangerous the Federal Trade Commission was. All the time he was sitting on the Commission, but of course he was usually writing dissenting opinions. The funny thing was when the Republicans came in in '53, Lowell was still on the Commission and there he was high and dry, you know. He'd lost his pet song. How could he attack his own administration, which now had a majority on the Commission. That must have hurt him. Now, I said that we ought to answer Lowell. The other commissioners had been sitting and letting Lowell do all this yelling about what an awful thing the Commission was, it seemed to me that we ought to make some speeches, a counter barrage. And I wanted to develop a speech program, but I never could get it off the ground. Nobody else was interested in it. And I was so busy with other things. I mean, if I stayed on the Commission long enough I would have done it but I just didn't have time. By the time I got interested in it which was the last eighteen [647] months or so, you see, there was just too much to do and too little time to do it. But I always had the feeling that the Commission was not putting its best foot forward in terms of public understanding of its work and its mission. I thought that one of the troubles was that so much of its language was wrapped in obscure legal and bureaucratic gobbledygook. I thought it ought to be put in more simple-to-understand English. And I still think so. And that's true of most Government agencies, I think. Well, I remember too, speaking of Lowell Mason, that Lowell got very angry at me once because at a press conference on this oil cartel thing I referred to Lowell as a "Taft Republican." Now, this was after the election. Lowell had been a Taft Republican; he had wanted Taft to get the nomination. I did not realize that this was a secret. I thought, I just assumed that this was known, but of course, I should have thought of the fact that Eisenhower had won, Eisenhower was now President, Lowell wanted to be reappointed and he probably didn't think it was advisable from his standpoint to publicize the fact that he was a Taft man. [648] So he got quite angry at me and he accused me of violating Commission meeting confidences. He had spoken frankly of how he favored Taft, you see. I didn't even realize it was a confidence. I thought it was just normal political talk. But as it turned out Lowell said it was a confidence and I shouldn't have divulged it publicly. But that was just one of those things. When I left the Commission, there was a big affair, both when I arrived and when I left. I was sworn in at a public ceremony by justice Robert Jackson of the Supreme Court, whom I had known at the Treasury. He had been a Treasury lawyer back when I was a youngster. He had been a senior Treasury lawyer. I had known him though. And we had a big crowd of 500 or so people, I mean, of course, the Commission and staff was there, but I also invited everybody in the city that I could think of. When I left they threw a jamboree and Lowell Mason was the master of ceremonies, and he did himself proud. He's very good. He had taped a humorous record for the occasion. He started off by a brief introduction [649] and then he went into the record, and the record started off with the "Hi-Ho Silver" theme song of the Lone Ranger, and it took off from the springboard that I had been a ranger in the Mesa Verde National Park for five summers during my college and law school days. It talked about Steve the Lone Ranger and he had looked up some dope on Mesa Verde, because he talked about Mancos Canyon and Lookout Point. He knew something about it. Maybe he had been there. He knew some details about it. The trouble (said Lowell) , was that I had left the lone prairie and Mesa and come to the big city and gone wrong, you see, and he kidded me about being an ADAer, which I never was, and that a bird couldn't fly on one wing only, and so forth and so on. Well, I had been ready for a little ribbing from Lowell. And I prepared myself for it. S. Klein's the big S. Klein's on the Square, they're now down here in the Washington area, but they used to be the big, cheap department store in New York on Union Square. They had made enormous buttons saying, "I like Lowell," because of some speech or something that Lowell Mason [650] had done that they favored, that the management favored. And they put out these huge buttons and I had somewhere gotten one. It was huge. While Lowell was off on my right, I surreptitiously put this big button on my left lapel, and the whole crowd could see it but he couldn't, and they started to snicker and to break into laughter, you see. While he was beating me over the head, you see, I put on this, "I like Lowell. " HESS: He didn't know what was going on. SPINGARN: He didn't know what was going on for quite a while you see. But all the while he was giving me this ribbing of my liberal politics and whatnot. Lowell was conservative and from my standpoint he was wrong on practically every policy issue before the Commission. But a very likeable fellow. HESS: One question on fair trade, when an issue like that was before the Commission, would you receive very much public opinion mail? SPINGARN: No, the public opinion mail on that would primarily go to Congress when the legislation was pending. The Commission didn't receive much. [651] HESS: The Commission wasn't bothered too much by that. SPINGARN: Not on that, they might be on other things, but this was legislation, you see. The question is what would our view be on legislation. If you were a member of the public, why should you present your views to us, we weren't going to write the legislation. You would present it to the congressional committee and the Congressmen on that committee. They would be the operating people you would address yourself to. Well, there was John Carson. John Carson called himself an independent, but he was a liberal and really a more Democratic type. However, it is true that he had a Republican background, I guess, because for many years he had been the Senate secretary to Senator Couzens of Michigan. He was a newspaperman, no legal training. He had had a lot of work in the consumer protection field, and he was a liberal and a very dedicated crusading sort of chap. He told me once and I'm sure that it was true, because that's the kind of guy he was, that Senator Couzens had wanted to leave him an enormous sum of money, a million dollars I think was the figure [652] mentioned, and he had declined. That was the kind of guy John Carson was. He started off, I think, with a bad view of me, I hope I changed it, I don't know, but I was told by Earl Kintner who was my legal assistant, who later became chairman of the Commission, that before I came to the Commission (Kintner was a lawyer there when I came), Carson had told him that he had heard from Max Lowenthal that I was a scoundrel and a Fascist and all sorts of other nice things. So I hope I changed his mind before I got through. I don't know. He'd have to speak for himself on that. I personally liked him and got along well with him. The other member was old Bill Ayres who was 80 or more years old. He was sort of a liberal Democrat from Kansas. A fine old gentleman, he died about the middle of my term. He was liberal, his mind was clear, but he was very old and he was awfully deaf and a little hard to work with. He had been a Congressman from Kansas. And then A1 [Albert] Carretta replaced him, and he was a lawyer and had been taught law, and worked for [653] the SEC. He and I often disagreed on matters but there was always a good, friendly relationship between us. [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional Spingarn Oral History Transcripts] For questions, e-mail truman.reference@nara.gov Return to Truman Library Oral History Finding Aid Return to Archival Reference at the Truman Library

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