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 24, 1967 (Eighth Oral History) March 24, 1967 (Ninth 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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 24, 1967 (Eighth Oral History) By Jerry N. Hess [654] Eighth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 24, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. SPINGARN: First of all this is going to be in the nature of a memorandum or letter to Dr. Brooks, Director of the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. However, I would like this to be part of the Spingarn files, too, the archival records because at least the second part of this letter I think will be of general interest to historians. The first part of my letter to you, Phil, is specific, and the second part will be general. First, the specific. This is Friday morning, March 24th, 1967, and I am in my fifth day of tape recording my memories of the Truman administration and related matters as well as more up-to-date memories of political affairs that I have been involved in. I am doing this at the invitation and the instigation of your Library. I have turned over to your able oral historian, Mr. Jerry Hess, a substantial number of papers which I have asked him to Xerox and return to me. In addition, yesterday, I turned over to him four boxes which I would estimate contain four or five [655] cubic feet of my files which I understand will be shipped out to the Library. Now, with respect to the stuff that is going direct to the Library; that is, the four boxes or however many there are when they are shipped, I have no record or inventory of what is in those. I simply shoveled files from my White House and Federal Trade Commission periods into boxes and I couldn't even tell you what the titles of those files are. I would, therefore, like you to do the following: I would like a detailed listing of each file by the name that I placed on it with some description of what is in it and particularly a description of how much of it is printed or mimeographed material and how much is in the form of copies of my own letters and memoranda or letters or memoranda to me or other typewritten documents or copies of typewritten documents. In principle, I would like to get a Xerox copy of every typewritten document or carbon thereof in those files sent back to me in files under the same tabs or the same listing -- as I sent them to you. It is also [656] possible that I may want copies of some of the ephemeral printed or mimeographed material which I am sending you and which I could not possibly reproduce, there would be no way of getting it now -- I don't even know what is there and even if I did it would be a terrible task and probably impossible to duplicate that material, so I am asking you, in effect, first, to give me an inventory -- a listing -- showing the name of each file as I named it, but not merely that, giving me some idea of what is in each file; and, second, I would like you to begin to Xerox the copy of all the typewritten material in those files and place them in the same file covers and after I have examined your inventory I will advise you to what extent I want other than typewritten material Xeroxed and returned to me. If there are any questions on this would you write me or tell Jerry Hess and let me know so that we can have a meeting of minds. So much for the specific. Now to the general which I think may be of interest to some historians. Under your direction, as I understand it, Jerry Hess has tried vigorously to keep me confined to the [657] events of the Truman administration, whether actually White House events or Federal Trade Commission or whatever, and a lot of my recording has been on that. On the other hand, like any other man, I am naturally somewhat more interested in current events that I am engaged in even more than I am in reminiscing about my past days in the Truman administration. Moreover, I think that Mr. Truman himself, and many historians, would be interested in things which I have discussed because all of them are political in character. I have never engaged really in any activity that wasn't in one term or another political, in the broadest sense of the word. Some of my work has been to try to beef up the Democratic National Committee in one way or another, for example. Other items that I have touched on are an attempt to defend President Lyndon Johnson who is a good friend of President Truman and who I see as a man rather similar to President Truman because, as I see them both, each is a regional politician, who started as a rather parochial local politician, and who grew to national stature and became a great national [658] politician, but who did not shed, as no man really does, all of his parochialism and who therefore encountered the distrust in some cases, and the animosity or the contempt if you like, of some people, especially a certain ivory tower type of intellectual who found that these parochialisms or regionalisms grated, or who don't like Lyndon Johnson, for example, because he didn't go to Harvard and his wife can't speak French to Andre Malraux, and who would not have liked Lincoln for very similar reasons. And who didn't like Harry Truman when he was President because he had been a haberdasher, and he didn't have a Harvard education either, or even a degree from Southwest Texas Teachers College. It therefore seems to me that my activities on behalf of Lyndon Johnson, my -- shall I say -- unauthorized and self-starting activities on behalf of Lyndon Johnson and his administration might be of interest to Mr. Truman and to historians who are interested in the Truman administration, because there is a very real link, both personal, because there is a deep friendship between the two men and in character and style between the two men. [659] The main difference between them, as I see it, is that Lyndon Johnson, by nature, is a very hard-driving type of man, who drives himself hard and drives people under him. And while Mr. Truman was a hard worker, he was not that driving kind of man. He worked hard himself, but he did it in what seemed to be a sort of relaxed way. He got up early in the morning, he did his homework, he took papers back at night and read them, but as I have pointed out, he never really beat his staff over the ears as Lyndon Johnson is reported to do, and as Winston Churchill was reported to do, and as Dwight Eisenhower from time to time was reported to do, and as many other top executives have done. As I have said before it has been my experience that the hard-driving executive, is usually difficult with his staff from time to time -- he's hard on himself and he's hard on them. I remember, for example, I served eleven years in the Treasury, from '34 to '49 with the exception of four war years, during most of which I was overseas in the Army, and eight of those eleven years were under Henry Morgenthau who died last month. I wrote a letter [660] to the New York Times at that time which appeared in the New York Times on February 18th, 1967. And I said that I had great satisfaction remembering my years in the Treasury under Henry Morgenthau. I said that he was a hard-driving man. He drove himself hard and he drove his staff hard. He was not an easy man to work for, and I said he probably wasn't always right in all of his decisions and I don't know any man who is. But looking back on that period from the vantage point of a generation, almost, it seemed to me that I felt then and I still feel now, that the men who worked in the Treasury in those days (and they worked nights and weekends, too, a lot), felt that they were making some contribution to the freedom and security and welfare of their country, and the free world for that matter, and that gives a man a good deal of psychic income. I said that might be Henry Morgenthau's best memorial and let us not say that this memorial perished with him. I got two letters as a result of that; one was from a fearless and courageous patriot who, however, refrained from signing his name. Two days later on the 20th, I received a letter from him, he had evidently [661] written it -- the 20th was a Monday -- he had evidently written it the same day my letter appeared in the New York Times, and he said that Henry Morgenthau was a dirty Jew Communist, a traitor to his country, worse than Benedict Arnold, and obviously I was cut out of the same cloth, or words to that effect. It made my day. I could see this poor sick man sitting in his garret somewhere, thinking of ugly, anonymous letters he could write to people who, unlike him, were not afraid to sign their names to documents, in which they expressed their views. I sent a copy of that letter to Bob Morgenthau, Secretary Morgenthau's son, who is United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and who was the unsuccessful candidate for governor of New York back in 1962 on the Democratic side, and Bob wrote me back a few days ago saying he had enjoyed my letter and appreciated it in the New York Times and said he also enjoyed my "fan" letter -- the "fan" letter I sent him -- he felt the same way about it I did. We feel sorry for this poor fellow, this patriot, this fearless, courageous, anonymous, faceless patriot. [662] Among the things that have interested me, as I say, has been the Democratic National Committee, and within the last month I succeeded in persuading them to launch, and they are going to do it they tell me within the next two or three months, a program which I call KOED to attempt to harness the energies and expertise of the activist Democratic professors on the 2,000 campuses of the United States, not just the prestige colleges, to the Democratic Party, with a home base in the committee run by a hard-hitting, extroverted, politically savvy political scientist, with actual experience in politics, the purpose being to run this around the year and not just in campaigns, and to give those who wish to an opportunity to work for our officeholders at every level, members of Congress and at lower levels, our candidates, our party organizations at all levels, write speeches, fact sheets, position papers, do political intelligence, political market research, surveys on politics, on issues, make their own speeches to local groups that are interested, and many other things. The name KOED is an acronym for Knock On Every Door, a rather gimmicky title [663] mainly for promotional purposes. Mr. Truman expressed favorable sentiments about this program way back in 1956 when I first originated it. I have a letter from him which I referred to on that and, so did Mrs. Roosevelt at that time. I've put in the Archives a letter of January '57 from her and she wrote several letters to Paul Butler, who was then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee in support of KOED, and Speaker John McCormack has written innumerable letters over the years and has been a major factor in getting this program into being. At my request, only last month in a long telephone conversation I had with him, he called John Criswell who is the staff man who is really running the Democratic National Committee to urge him to put this KOED program into effect. So did many others call or write Criswell at my request. Senator Claiborne Pell, Dean Stephen Bailey of the Maxwell Graduate School of Public Affairs at Syracuse, Evron Kirkpatrick the executive director of the American Political Science Association, James MacGregor Burns of Williams College, the Roosevelt and [664] Kennedy biographer, and many other professional politicians, as well as these hard-boiled eggheads, as I call them, not the ivory tower type but the pragmatic type. Well, it would seem to me that program ties in with Mr. Truman and it should be of interest. He once spoke well of it and I am sure he would now if I were to submit it to him again, but it didn't need it this time. Similarly I have talked about my activities in attempting to get launched an organization to counteract the lunacies of the extreme right and left. Again, this was a field that Mr. Truman was very much interested in and I don't see why bringing that up to date is not strictly within the purview of the Truman Library. It is a continuation of his sort of thing, I mean, actually, such as his proposal for the Nimitz commission which aborted because Senator Pat McCarran, the then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee would not give the lawyer members of that commission the exemption from conflict of interest laws that they needed to take on this thankless, unpaid job. But the Nimitz commission [665] was exactly in the same context -- I mean, it wasn't the same operation, but it was in the same context. I am sure that Mr. Truman would think well of the new Institute for American Democracy which I have talked about. By the way, I want to report a victory yesterday in a matter in which I have already tape recorded the story, and it was in the paper this morning. I have told this tape that I am speaking to now about the Carl Siler case here in Washington. Briefly it involved a Negro police private who while off duty last September 15th on a date with his girl was arrested and beaten up -- in a ruckus arising out of a minor traffic violation -- by two white police officers. And then to add insult to injury after being cleared by the courts of anything but a $5 fine for driving without lights, the police department brought dismissal charges against him and after a six day hearing recommended his dismissal on nine counts. A hearing on an appeal from that decision to the three District of Columbia Commissioners was held on February 10th, and yesterday the Commissioners, in [666] effect, reversed the police trial board. They threw out seven of the charges; they restored Siler to full duty with back pay to September 15th -- he was suspended without pay then -- and they only sustained two minor charges which involved a fine of $75 for him, so in any fair examination of the case, it was a tremendous victory for Carl Siler and the people who supported him. And I want to say this, I don't pretend that my part was determinative at all. Aside from Carl Siler, who displayed both courage and good judgment in the way he handled himself after this episode, the two people who deserve the most credit are Mrs. Willie Hardy, who was his sponsor you might say and the sparkplug of the whole operation, and who is a remarkable woman -- I've talked about her. But one thing I failed to mention -- last fall, I think it was October -- Scotty Lanahan who is the daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald and who was my colleague on the Reeves-Lanahan slate in the Democratic primary in 1964 and who now runs an excellent column in the women's section of the Washington Post about three times a week, it's too good for the women's section. I would like to [667] see it get out in the broad pampas of the general news section. In any event, she had a column on Willie Hardy, a whole column, and she called Willie Hardy one of the most important people in this city, and I wrote Scotty congratulating her on the fine column and saying that I fully agreed with her -- Willie Hardy is that kind of a person. And the other person who deserves the main credit is John Karr, a Washington lawyer and a very able one who handled the main part of the legal case for Carl Siler and who did an effective job. And, by the way, I called Carl Siler at 7:20 a. m. this morning, woke him up to congratulate him, and I said, "Carl, for whatever it's worth, I'm going to give you a piece of advice which you may have already thought of, but think it over anyway." I said, "If I were you, when I go back to the police department, as you are going to do, I wouldn't go back with a chip on my shoulder, I wouldn't blame you for feeling bitter about what's happened to you, but don't act that way. Go back with the spirit that that's water over the dam, [668] it's behind me, I'm here and I'm going to do my best to be a good police officer from this day forward if people will let me. I think you will be happier, it would be better for you, it would be better for all concerned." He indicated that that made sense to him and since he is a sensible fellow, I am pretty sure that that is the way he will behave himself. And, if people will let him, on the other side, I am sure he will be a good, competent, efficient and effective police officer. All I am trying to say to you, Phil Brooks, and to anyone else who hears or reads this, is that I would think that since history is a stream, not a series of isolated compartments, that what has happened to Mr. Truman since 1953 is of interest to the Truman Library, what has happened to the men who served him, and the country, particularly where it deals with public affairs, and all of my activities have been dealing with public affairs, though admittedly I have been dealing with them on a self-priming basis as a Democratic politician without portfolio, and perhaps spinning my wheels a lot, but as an enthusiastic citizen, and not loafing. I get up between four and [669] six o'clock every morning seven days a week, almost without exception. I got up at 4:30 this morning -- that's how I find time to do all these tape recordings, because I do my other chores before I come over here at ten o'clock and I work right through usually until six or seven o'clock in the evening when I go out and have two or three drinks and relax, and I find that I need only four or five hours of sleep and I wake up refreshed. Some people say that I am spinning my wheels, and perhaps that is true. One man said to me a few months ago, "You know, I think you are the last of the gadflies," and possibly that is true too. But my theory of the case is this: That there is a certain value in having an outsider with some experience in Government but without any commitments or investments in existing people or policies other than his own instincts and judgment, commenting on how things are running, because the people inside are sometimes too close to the woods to see the forest. All they can see are the trees and the bark on them. I try never to make merely critical remarks, I try always to present [670] constructive alternatives of how I think things ought to be done. I certainly don't claim I'm always right, but I don't think I'm always wrong either. So with that somewhat prolix statement of my view, I will terminate this letter to you, Phil, and go on to other matters. HESS: What would you like to take up first, this morning, Sir? SPINGARN: I'm now going to talk about Oscar Cox., who died in early October, 1966. Oscar Cox was a Treasury lawyer when I first knew him in the middle thirties. He was assistant to the General Counsel of the Treasury who was Herman Oliphant, a brilliant and very able law professor who died in early '39. Oscar Cox was brilliant, imaginative, and an able lawyer. And he accomplished many worthwhile things. I think that in some ways, although no one can make that judgment for someone else, it's unfortunate that he left Government in '45 to go into private practice where he was very successful but never returned to Government. I think the Government could have used his many talents. But in any event, when Oscar died the Washington [671] Post of October 6, 1966 on page B-4 had a lengthy obituary, and the headline was OSCAR S. COX DIES AT SIXTY: DRAFTED LEND-LEASE ACT. And the New York Times of the same day in the story describing his death says: Mr. Cox was the author of the Lend-Lease Act approved before the entry of the United States into World War II. And it proceeds to quote Winston Churchill and others in this matter. It says: Mr. Cox"s lend-lease work was mentioned by Sir Winston in his book, The Second World War: 'The idea had originated in the Treasury Department,' the former British Prime Minister wrote. 'The departmental lawyers, especially Oscar S. Cox of Maine had been stirred by Secretary Henry Morgenthau. It appeared that by a statute of 1892 the Secretary for War "when in his discretion it will be for the public good," could lease Army property if not required for public use for a period of not longer than five years.' That's the end of the Churchill quote. Mr. Cox's discovery of this statute according to a New York Times editorial in 1945 praising his service, permitted the United States to lease munitions of war to other countries and was the basis of the Lend-Lease Act. And in an editorial of October 7, the Washington Post [672] (on Oscar Cox), said: The lend-lease concept, the idea of making American industrial might available to the allies in the period prior to direct American involvement in World War II, originated in Oscar Cox's resourceful mind, and the drafting of the Lend-Lease Act in which he played a principal role exemplified his sure handed legal craftsmanship. Now, here is an interesting historical myth: (A) Oscar Cox did not draft the Lend-Lease bill; (B) the concept did not originate in his fertile mind, although it was a fertile and imaginative mind; (C) the drafting of the Lend-Lease bill was a routine legal chore which took about two hours one evening at the end of December, 1940, or early January, 1941. The 1892 statute had nothing to do with it, and yet this myth has arisen. There was no credit really in writing this thing, because the bill had already been written about seven or eight months before and passed by Congress in the form of a bill to provide help to the Latin American republics, and that was written, presumably, by War Department and Navy Department lawyers, unknown to me. And they may have borrowed that from somewhere else. But my understanding of the situation, and I speak [673] with firsthand assurance, because I was there, is that the lend-lease concept originated really in Franklin Roosevelt's fertile mind, and the putting of this concept into legislative phraseology it's true was done at the Treasury. It was done one night around the turn of the year, from '40 to '41, I think, perhaps right after the first of January. And the two lawyers who did it, did it in two hours or so, as soon as they found the earlier statute of 1940 that I spoke of, the Latin American statute; they knew their work was done for them. It was simply a matter of taking that out and making it applicable to this new situation, and blowing out whatever restrictions were in that statute so that you had more flexibility and more power. It never occurred to them that they had done an historic task, and in fact, they hadn't because, as I say, the work had been done by other lawyers in the War Department or the Navy Department or both, and very likely they had plagiarized earlier lawyers, because no one ever knows. I have been a legislative lawyer most of my government career, and you're always looking for someone to plagiarize from. [674] And as for the 1892 statute, I've had that looked up and that had nothing whatever to do with the case, although the mythology has grown. And the funny thing is, Oscar Cox has many great achievements to his name, but he'll go down probably in history as the man who wrote the Lend-Lease Act, and he didn't do it. After the bill was drafted that night only relatively minor changes were made in it, and then it was taken up to the Hill and put through. I am going to lend the Library, One: a Photostat of the obituaries of Oscar Cox, which give the record of what history now is saying happened: a memorandum of October 29, 1966, which I wrote, and which is headed: "Question: Who wrote the Lend-Lease Act of 1941? Answer: It was not Oscar S. Cox," which discusses that situation. And a memorandum of November 2, 1966, written by Admiral Ernest R. Feidler, who is now the top man at the national Gallery of Art, he's the secretary-treasurer and general counsel, that is the equivalent of the secretary of the Smithsonian, titulary the top man, although John Walker, the Director of the gallery, is the man who you usually see in the newspapers. [675] Ernie Feidler, like myself, was a young lawyer in the Treasury in 1940 and '41, and he later became a captain in the Coast Guard and then a reserve rear admiral, and the only rear admiral in the Coast Guard Reserve. And. he deals with the question as to the relationship of that famous 1892 statute which Oscar is supposed to have discovered and used as the basis, and I think, disposes of that. And I have here also a press release of January 10, 1941, 12 noon. There's no heading as to who issued the press release. It's for immediate release. It may have been the White House, I'm not sure. It says: The attached bill giving effect to President Roosevelt's lend-lease proposals will be introduced simultaneously when Congress meets at noon today by Senator Barkley and Representative McCormack., the two majority leaders. And it then describes what the bill does and it attaches a copy of the bill. And it states, I read in the third paragraph on page one: It follows the precedent established by Congress last June [that is, June 1940] when the President was empowered to authorize the Secretaries of War and Navy to manufacture, purchase and repair war materials for the American Republics. Under the present bill, this country is enabled to [676] furnish war materials of every kind to any country whose defense the President considers to be vital to the defense of the United States. You see, it pins the precedent on the 1940 act that I referred to. There's no reference to any 1892 statute, nor should there have been. I am going to lend you these documents which I would like Xeroxed and returned to me without fail. HESS: All right, Xeroxed and returned. SPINGARN: Right. And I might note that if any historians are interested in further discussion of this matter, and further investigation, I would be glad to talk to them and give investigative leads. It seems to me that this might make rather an interesting article for a historical journal, since the history books all say, or most of them say, that Oscar Cox drafted the Lend-Lease bill. So much for that. First of all I'm going to start off with a general statement about this whole business of tape recording oral history, on the basis of my experience of doing this over the last five days. Actually, in order to do a real job, the man who is doing the talking needs to do a lot of homework. [677] I have done some, but I haven't done nearly enough. It would take at least as much time, and I think more, probably double the amount of time that he spends actually talking to get ready for the talking, to examine his notes and files and papers, to arrange them in an orderly and systematic fashion, and to make notes to himself on the way in which he's going to develop each subject, the main points he's going to talk about. If he doesn't do that, and frankly, I haven't had the time to do that, just to scratch the surface, there's obviously going to be a good deal of digression and wandering and rambling. And moreover, he's going to miss important things and hit minor things and so forth and so on. I don't know what the experience of you, Mr. Hess, has been, with other people you've talked to, but have you had the feeling that they've done a lot of homework before they went to the tape recorder; ordinarily, I would suppose not, I haven't. And I would suppose that they are too busy to do that, that they approach it fairly cold. HESS: This is the general situation. [678] SPINGARN: Yes, that they have really done very little digging in their files before they meet that tape recorder. And so they're talking largely from memory. I have done some, but I admit I haven't done nearly enough, and the more I talk the more I realize that you have to do your homework on a thing like this. Otherwise, the historical tape recording becomes less valuable than it would be with a man who spent several days going over and arranging his papers and organizing what he's going to say. But you can't expect busy men to do that for you. You're lucky if you can get them to talk to the tape, much less do all the preliminary work. HESS: That's very true. SPINGARN: Well, I think this is something that historians who examine these oral tapes should understand. They're interesting, they throw insight, I think, on things that probably don't go into the papers, but .that they should always be checked against the records in the files because men's memories years later are not as good as contemporary records. I did a little homework this morning, not much, [679] because I have just done a very superficial skimming of a file I have, much of it marked "secret and confidential," on "Internal Security in the Truman Administration," espionage and communism and things like that. Throughout my Government career I was involved in loyalty and security matters. As far back as 1939, I was the legal member of a three-man Treasury Un-American Activities Committee, which was then chairmanned by Martin Dies of Texas, who I don't think will rank in history as one of the greater members of Congress, had found, one way or another, lists of persons who supposedly belonged to Communist front organizations. As I recall, there were two or three thousand names. It later turned out, if my memory serves me right, that these lists were, in some cases, mailing lists, and in other cases, they were the names of people who might have contributed two dollars; they represented in many cases, the most peripheral, or even no connection with the organization, because a man is not responsible for the mailing lists he's [680] on. I get mail from some very subversive organizations, including far rightwing outfits and far leftwing outfits and far middle wing outfits. I enjoy getting all kinds of mail. I don't mind getting anybody's mail no matter how subversive he is. I would be glad to read anything that George Lincoln Rockwell wants to send me, and as a matter of fact, I have bought material of the John Birch Society, because if there's one thing they teach an intelligence officer, it's know your enemy and the only way to do it is to see what he's doing and to read his stuff. Well, in early 1942, just before the war, I was responsible for the Treasury firing a man who had been the chairman, and head man of a Communist front organization, but who disclaimed any membership or Communist sympathy. It was a rather interesting case because this gentleman was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's, and on one occasion when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and she went with him and publicly showed her support for him. Mrs. Roosevelt was a wonderful woman, but in those days (she became tougher in these matters later), but in those days she was a little gullible about such [681] matters. She liked young people and she was sympathetic to their tales of woe. I can recall when she invited the American Youth Congress, I believe it was, over to the White House, in 1940 or '41, and this was during the period of the non aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party line at that time was that this was an imperialistic war and that they were against the war and we should stay out of it and we shouldn't help the British and all that. So when President Roosevelt made a speech urging aid to the Western allies, they hissed him, they booed him and hissed him, Mrs. Roosevelt's own guests. It was in all the newspapers at the time. It was rather an ironical situation. Well, the gentleman I'm referring to, had been hired by the Treasury subject to a favorable investigation, and of course he was on the payroll. We had to do that in those days, the pressure was so great to get things moving, and when the investigation came in, it revealed that he had been the chairman for several years of this front organization. He denied that he was a Communist, or had any sympathies. [682] I was asked to investigate the matter and make a recommendation and I did, and talked to a lot of people and looked up his records and eventually recommended that he be dismissed. But there was a difference of opinion. I remember my good friend, Herbert Gaston, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and who was the top man on internal security and loyalty matters, felt differently. He's now dead, and I admire Herbert Gaston, but I thought he was wrong on that. But anyway, the man involved was dismissed. And years later, after the war, I read Elizabeth Bentley's book and she said that this fellow inducted her into the Communist Party at Columbia back in the early thirties, that he was the fellow who signed her card. And he also was dismissed in the early fifties as a Communist by some local school system in an adjoining state. And so I suspect that we were not too far wrong when we dropped him back in 1940 or '41. I interrogated him myself at the time and he was a likeable fellow. Whenever you talk to a man who is [683] pleasant and likeable you must try not to feel too sympathetic for him, but the fact remains, I thought that he didn't belong with us and we fired him. During the war, I was a counterespionage officer; I served three years overseas, I was in the invasion of North Africa on November 8, 1942, I was in the invasion of Italy, September '43, I was on the Salerno and Anzio beachheads and at Cassino and so forth. The three years I was overseas I was a counterintelligence corps officer, and for two of those years I commanded the Fifth Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), from the end of the North African campaign, throughout the Italian campaign, July '43 to July '45. And during that period Fifth Army caught 525, approximately, German spies and saboteurs, Abwehr and SD agents, and we interned perhaps 2000 people as security risks, Nazi collaborators, ardent fascists and so forth. And we always modestly said that we were the greatest combat counterintelligence outfit in the history of warfare, which might have been a slight exaggeration, but we did a pretty good job, I think. [684] And we also always said that in two years we had caught more spies than the FBI had in its entire forty years, or whatever was its history at that point. I think that was true. Of course, the pickings were better. The last two hundred days of the war we caught 300 spies, if my memory serves me right. They were coming through the lines, they were dropping in by parachute, they were coming in by boat, they were stay-behind agents -- we were going crazy. But higher headquarters estimated that we were catching about eighty-five percent of the agents that were coming in, which was considered a very high percentage, an excellent batting average. And I remember at the end of the war, we picked up a German intelligence officer, a warrant officer I think he was, who had worked in one of the Abwehr truppes, which was a small spy organization, which trained or directed agents against us from the other side. And he said they had a commanding officer of this little intelligence espionage unit, called, I think, Lieutenant Trink, or something like that. And [685] Lieutenant Trink was very dramatic. He had evidently read E. Phillips Oppenheim and all those spy stories and he liked to dramatize things. He used to go through wonderful secret ceremonies in which he clothed himself in knightly or regal robes and it was all dark and they took oaths in blood and things like that, with skulls and candles and all sorts of drama. Sometimes, he used to give his spies harmless injections and tell them that this was deadly poison and unless they returned within thirty days for the antidote they would die. And most of all he used to brag to his men about the exploits of Abwehr Truppe, let us say 190 or 150, I think it was, I'm not sure of the number. He used to say that the exploits of this remarkable little espionage outfit were going back all the way to the Fuhrer in Germany in Berlin, and everybody was very proud of them, they were doing such a great, terrific job. But late in the war, toward the end, he got drunk one night with the man who we had caught at the end and he started crying and sobbing, our man told us. And he sobbed out that for six months he had been [686] sending spies across against those verdammt Amerikanisch and that not one goddamned spy had come back. That was the real story, you see. He really sobbed his heart out, and the truth. Then there was the story of Carla Costa. She was the best woman agent the Germans had in Italy. She had conducted several successful espionage missions coming across and going back, and a month before we caught her, she had personally been received by Mussolini at Lake Garda, at his headquarters there. He had given her a forty minute audience, private. He had given her a picture of himself and told her, "Young woman, if all Italian women were like you, we'd win this damnable war." This was September '44 and by this time it was obvious that they weren't going to win. But she was very brave, and a dedicated Fascist. A child of fascism, she believed implicitly in it. She told me once, this is the way she talked, "When you lead me before that firing squad I hope you will look deep into my eyes and see if one of you representatives of the decadent democracies could die as bravely for your country as I will die for mine." Well, you couldn't help admiring a young woman like that. [687] She had a teammate named Mario Martinelli. We caught him first, and he gave us information that helped us catch her, and then of course he identified her. But she refused to identify him; she pretended that she'd never seen him before. But he told us that she had an identification handkerchief on her. This was a handkerchief device that the Germans used for their spies coming back across the line, so that they could identify themselves to the German troops they met. The point was that when you heated it for twenty or thirty minutes over a candle, writing in German came out, and in her case the handkerchief read something like the German words: "Angehöriger der Armee. Luftflotte zu leiten." "Member of the Army. Take to Air Force Headquarters." She worked for an Air Force espionage group. So, obviously, when we found that on her, that was the clincher. But she still refused to talk. Oh, she'd tell us what we already knew. She admitted she was a spy by this time, but she wouldn't give any details about her work or other people and that's what we wanted. We spent five days interrogating that [688] young lady, night and day, in teams. I brought in Major Faccio who was commanding officer of the Fifth Army CS. That was the Italian counterespionage outfit that worked under me, under my operational direction. Faccio was a professional, a lifelong counterespionage officer. He didn't care whether he was catching Americans or British or Germans. It was all in the game. I liked him. He was a competent, hard-working guy, and very, very loyal to us. He may have been equally loyal to the Germans when he worked for them, but there was no question about it, he was with us at this time. He told me how he had caught a British spy in Sardenia, and he had done it because in the dark he smelled the aroma of a foreign cigarette, and he knew that wasn't Italian, and he followed his nose to that cigarette and it was a British spy. These are the little things that give men away, of course. The Germans were supposed to be great espionage people, but we found that their own methodicalness betrayed them. For one thing, that handkerchief trick. After you caught one handkerchief, you're naturally [689] going to test every handkerchief you've found on a suspect. And we caught twenty or twenty-five people with handkerchiefs. They kept using it, you see, after it was blown. Then there was the question of outfitting their spies. Some of them dropped from planes, and some came in by boat, or submarine, but most came through the lines. And they came through the relatively lightly defended area where most of the fighting was not taking place, in the western part of our zone. Naturally, where the troops are thinnest is the best place for spies. And there was one place I remember, a seven miles gap, where it was only patrolled by us once or twice a day. That was the only defense there you see, because the main fighting was somewhere else. It was very mountainous rugged country, so they came through the mountains. It was cold in the winter, and they had to be warmly dressed, and they had to have good marching shoes too, you bet. So the SD quartermaster up in Verona used to provide them with stout walking boots. Well, it simplified his work, and it simplified ours. We could recognize those boots at a hundred [690] yards, you see, after a while. And there was a question of the other equipment they carried. They tended to carry the same kind of concentrated foods, the same kind of gadgets like cigarette lighters, compasses, and things. They tended to tell the same cover stories. They tended to come from somewhat the same background, I mean, educationally, and politically. They tended to carry money in series. When they were given money at the beginning it was given to them in new currency which ran in consecutive numbers. They were always told to go out in the town and break it up, but it was a lot of trouble and most of them never did. So when you found a man with new currency in consecutive series, he was either a black marketer or a spy, one or the other, or both. So these are the things which made our job much easier. And it was stupidity on the part of the Germans, their excessive methodicalness, you see, that did this sort of thing. I don't say we were always bright, but they weren't either. So Carla Costa was captured. I remember Mario Martinelli. He was an interesting [691] figure, a handsome chap, but he had had a very squalid career, including pimping and other things like that in civilian life, black marketing and pimping, and after we caught him and broke him he was delighted to confess. He talked and talked and talked. We had a brilliant linguist named Gordon Messing in our outfit, he had gone to Harvard, where he got a Ph.D. in linguistics, he spoke seven or eight languages, and read twenty. It used to be jokingly said, and it was almost true, that Gordon Messing's idea of fun was to translate Flemish into Sanskrit, and vice versa. He was taking this fellow's confession, and then he'd have to translate it, you see. He was writing it in Italian, I mean, Martinelli was writing his confession. He wrote a page, and three pages and five pages and ten pages and Messing knew he was going to have to translate it. He said, "Keep it short." Usually we asked them to tell everything they knew, you see, but still -- "Keep it short." He wrote fifteen pages, twenty pages, "Can't you keep it a little shorter?" Twenty-five pages, thirty pages, forty pages, and [692] finally he ran up to sixty-three pages as I recall, with Messing pulling his hair out because he had to translate every word of it. After we caught Carla and she wouldn't confess, Mario Martinelli said to me, "Give me a little time with her; I'll make her confess." I said, "So, how would you do that?" He said, "Easy. Red hot needles through her breasts and pubic parts." A nice fellow. I said, "Interesting." Naturally, we didn't do that sort of thing. Carla Costa was subjected to nothing but psychological pressure. Once for two days I did restrict her diet to coffee and toast on the theory that if she tired a little and got hungry she would talk. But I had two army nurses chaperoning her and I said, "Whenever you say I ought to start feeding her again, I will," and after two days of coffee and toast they said, "You better start feeding her again." And we did. But we tried all kinds of psychological pressure. My theory was no violence, but psychological pressure is o.k., and I'll admit I put a pretty liberal interpretation on what constitutes psychological pressure. [693] By the way, Martinelli was tried, convicted and shot, which he richly deserved. And if I'm not mistaken, as he faced the firing squad his last words were, "Viva la Alleate," "Hurray for the Allies." There was an Italian-American officer in my outfit, then a lieutenant, a nice fellow, became a major. He spoke fluent Italian. Oh, my goodness, the name escapes me at the moment -- oh, Tonini was his name, Melio Tonini. Anyway, he was then a lieutenant, and he was the fellow who had interrogated and handled this case. And as the agent faced the firing squad he shouted to my lieutenant: "You're shooting an innocent man, lieutenant." It shook up poor Tonini for days. The dead man wasn't innocent however. Sometimes they shouted defiance as they died, and sometimes they shouted approbation of the allies, you never could tell. In any event, Carla Costa got twenty years but she was soon released. We turned our captured spies and internees over to the Italians, naturally, after the war. And they very properly released them. Personally, I would never shoot a spy, never. [694] The reason is not any softness of heart, but the reason is you can never know when you may need that spy for information about some subsequent suspect you receive and he may fill in a valuable piece of information for you that may identify a subsequent agent. We had a case like that, there was a fellow, I think his name was Lancelotti, whom we shot. And a year later I would have given my right arm, almost, to have had that fellow to interrogate him against another man who I thought had worked with him, you see. That sort of thing. It's all right to pretend you're shooting them. We used to discourage the Germans from recruiting Italians, and of course, naturally, being Italy, they used almost entirely Italian agents. I mean, who would you use in a country except natives of the country who speak the language? We tried to discourage Italians from enlisting in the German espionage service. We used to drop posters on the German side of the lines with pictures of the spies we'd captured and whom we said we had condemned, and some of them had been executed, but most of them hadn't been. This was designed to deter other Italians. "Do not engage [695] yourself," we said, "in the German Intelligence Service, or you too will suffer this fate." And there was a good chance they would because we caught an awful lot. But I wouldn't shoot spies. I'd line them up like books in a reference library and hold them. And the fact of the matter was, it was rather hit-or-miss whom we shot, too. You know, there was not much justice in that. They were fairly tried, I mean, we could have shot them all, because they were all guilty. But the point was, in the beginning we weren't catching so many so there was time to try them. But in the end we were capturing so many, that just the business of martialing witnesses and holding trials was beyond the capacity of the Fifth Army. So a lot of these people just as a matter of convenience were simply interned. It was too much trouble and was not worth it to try them. If they'd been caught earlier, they would have been tried and shot probably. In any event, Carla told me that on a previous trip to Rome she had stayed with her parents who were anti-Fascist, and that her mother had locked her in the [696] bathroom, but she'd escaped from the bathroom and gotten out and jumped in a car and gotten back to the German side eventually. I told her that her parents had technically been guilty of harboring a spy. They knew her to be a spy, you see. They hadn't turned her in and there were death charges for that. I showed her a telegram that I was sending to Count Sforza, who was a friend of mine, Carlo Sforza, who was later foreign minister of Italy, and who at that time was the high commissioner of the Eputaziore, the purge of Fascists, in which I was requesting them to arrest her parents and bring death charges against them. This was a lot of nonsense, of course, I wasn't sending any such telegram. But I showed one to her. This is psychological pressure, and we did a lot of other things. It didn't shake her a bit. Finally, the way we broke her was this: She gave certain information about Rome, her parents and so forth there, which were leads down in Rome. We put that all in writing. I put a man into a jeep and he drove to Rome 125 or 150 miles back and turned it over to the Air Force CIC in Rome, a fellow named Frank [697] Looney (there was a Rome base section of the CIC and there was an Air Force CIC in Rome. The Rome base section of the CIC should have handled it but I knew they would take their time, but I knew the Air Force would act fast for various reasons), and I said, would he investigate all the leads down there and shoot it back to me, and he made a very fast investigation and sent me back a 20 page report within a matter of three or four days. This is fast work, you know, the whole transaction. And it turned out they had caught a colleague of my girl, Carla, a fellow agent, and she had talked a lot about her and told about their work on the other side and how they had been trained and all that. So I trotted this into Carla and I read it to her, and I said, "Now, Carla, you have become very unimportant. We know practically all we need to know about you from this other gal we have captured. Now if you don't want to talk, I don't care, but it will be in your own interest, it will make a difference in your trial, you know, when you come up for trial, whether you do." So, at that point she saw the light. And she [698] talked freely and she gave us information which led to the capture of other agents although she bitterly denied this later. I wrote three spy articles after the war for the Saturday Evening Post and I featured Carla Costa in the last article. This is late '48, these articles appeared November 27, December 4, December 11, 1948. In January, I believe, '49, I got a letter from Carla Costa in English. She didn't speak English, but someone had translated it for her evidently. Dear Major Spingarn: (I was a Lieutenant Colonel later, but I was a Major when she knew me). To make a long story short, she had read the articles in the Saturday Evening Post. Between the lines you could see that she loved the publicity that she was getting, but there was one thing that she did not like. I had called her a "stool pigeon," in effect. I had said she gave information finally which led to the capture of others. She said that she had never done any such thing, never. Let me give her the evidence that said she had. And I wrote her back and I said, "Oh, you did, all right, I'm [699] not going to give you evidence, that's not for you, but you did. We have it in our files," and so forth and so on. And she wrote me another letter and the correspondence languished there. But years later in the fifties, my mother was going to Rome. Now, my mother speaks some Italian, lived a lot in Europe as a girl, speaks several languages, so I gave her a mission. I said, "Mother, I want you to look up Carla Costa." I had her family's address in Rome, and I knew she had been released from prison. So mother was a little frightened by this, you know, this terrible German spy, but she went through with her assignment bravely. She called up Carla Costa and she invites her over to her hotel, and the two ladies spent the afternoon having tea together. And the funny thing was as I learned the story later from mother, mother was very apologetic about me. They talked about me and Carla was very generous and very considerate. Mother told her how much our family loved Italy. She said my father was a lifelong literary friend of Benedetto [700] Croce, the great Italian philosopher, which was true. My father's first book was translated into Italian. He was twenty-four, it was his Ph.D. thesis, and it was made into a book in 1899 and was translated into Italian with a preface by Benedetto Croce, the greatest, probably, European philosopher of the twentieth century. And mother visited the Croces in Italy in the twenties and I visited Croce in September '43. His home was in Sorrento, on the Sorrento Peninsula, and that was right between the lines. There were German patrols in one day and American the other. We were afraid that the Germans would snatch him because though he was not an activist, he was a symbolic figure of freedom, and so some British officers, some British SOE officers, these were the intelligence operation guys, sort of intelligence commandos, picked him up and took him off to the Isle of Capri, just off the peninsula, which we now held safely. And I went out to Capri., oh, about two weeks after the invasion, and I spent a night with Croce. And he refers to it in a book later; he wrote a book called Croce, the King and the Allies, and tells how a high allied officer (I was a major), [701] came to him, the son of his dear old friend, Joel Spingarn, and how we talked, and what he told me about the politics of the situation and so forth. Anyway, mother told Carla Costa how we loved Italy, and so forth and so on, and Carla was very, very generous, if she'd known that, she said, she might have felt differently about me. Mother said that she was about 28 then, in '53 I think, quite handsome, she had been a little chubby when I knew her, squat and chubby, but she was quite handsome and rather trim and well dressed and she was going to the University of Rome, and she was just as good a Fascist as ever. Well, that covers my war experiences. Now, getting back, when I came. back to the United States, I was appointed Assistant General Counsel of the Treasury by Fred Vinson, who was then the Secretary of the Treasury, and later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Joe [Joseph J., Jr.] O'Connell was my immediate boss, the General Counsel of the Treasury, and a very fine chap, later Chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board. And immediately I got involved in this internal [702] security and loyalty stuff again. I was legal counsel of the Secret Service and of the Coordinated Treasury Enforcement Agencies and I also became immediately pivot man on all loyalty-security cases. Every case was referred to me first for decision as to what its further processing should be, whether charges should be brought against the man or what. Don Hansen, and I (he was my assistant), wrote the regulations setting up the Treasury Loyalty Board, and I was the legal member of this three-man board. And in late '46, the President set up the President's Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty. This, if my memory serves me right, stemmed first from the famous Canadian case of Igor Gouzenko, who had defected, he was a cipher clerk, from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, and he defected and brought with him files which proved a large Soviet spy network existed in Canada, some links I think reached into the United States, but anyway, mostly in Canada. This and other disclosures of the period produced a lot of disturbance in the country and in the Congress about how good our security was. And a congressional committee, [703] I think it was, yes, it was the House Civil Service Committee, held hearings on this matter. They made a recommendation. I've forgotten exactly what the nature of it was, but I think they recommended a presidential -- they made recommendations that looked to some action by the Executive, by the President in this field. Their report speaks for itself. The President then set up this commission, the President's Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty, six agencies were represented on it: Justice chaired it, and the Attorney General, was technically the Justice member, but his deputy was A. Devitt Vanech, who was always known as "Gus" Vanech, who was then at the beginning, the special assistant to the Attorney General, but in the course of the Commission's life, became Assistant Attorney General. I will get to him in a moment. And the Treasury, the State Department, the Army and the Navy (this was before they merged), and the Civil Service Commission were the other representatives. In the case of the Treasury it was Assistant Secretary (later Under Secretary), [Edward H., Jr.] [704] Foley and I was his alternate; and in the case of State, it was at first Assistant Secretary [John E.] Peurifoy, as I recall. I've forgotten there were several men, but Peurifoy was one of them. Then Donald Russell was there for a while. He later became Senator and Governor of South Carolina and president of the University; and there was another fellow too, for a while, State had several; and for Navy, it was John Sullivan, who was a friend of mine from Treasury days, because he had been Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. He was Under Secretary of the Navy then, and later became Secretary; for Army it was Kenneth Royall, who was Under Secretary and later became Secretary; for Civil Service Commission it was old Harry Mitchell, who was then the chairman. And each man had an alternate or deputy. The Commission met, oh, I would say, once or twice a week, as I recall, and the working committee met every day. And the alternates attended the Commission meetings with one exception, one we didn't, it was sort of classified, but of course, our principals immediately told us afterwards what had happened, so it [705] really didn't make much difference. I, being the kind of fellow who records everything, sort of like a squirrel, maybe that's not the right simile, but I'm a great recorder. In any event, I wrote a memorandum every day when there was a Commission meeting or a working committee meeting and I kept a file. Nobody else did this as far as I'm aware, and the result was that I think that my files are by far the most complete, and I have given them to the Truman Library, two big volumes of file covers, one containing memoranda and the other clippings, mostly, and formal stuff. Well, then, also when I went over to the White House, I worked on Loyalty-Security there, many aspects of it, I think perhaps I was the principal proponent of a Nimitz type commission thing. I wrote any number of memoranda on that sort of thing, and George Elsey and Charlie Murphy were also strong supporters of that concept. And I was briefly vice-chairman of the White House Loyalty Board, and so forth. I also feel equally strongly about rightwing lunacy as I do about leftwing. I have worked since '52, I've discussed that, to launch an operation which would [706] do something about counteracting these lunacies which are poisoning slowly the minds, or trying to, of the American people, and to try to produce some rational dialogue in this field. An outfit named the Institute for American Democracy (IAD) which was launched last November, represents that concept and I hope they'll be successful. They won't be unless they get enough money and staff to do the job. The last time it was tried was in '64, and that failed for lack of financial support, and if IAD fails, it will not be tried again in our time, obviously, because two strikes and you're out in most leagues outside of baseball. It would be a long time before anybody had the gumption to try it again. I want to refer any historians who hear or read this material that I'm giving now to a useful reference work which will give you the background of this next situation, it's the U.S. News and World Report for November 20, 1953. And it contains excerpts from the statements by Brownell and President Truman and others about this situation, President Eisenhower and all the principals. [707] The main article on this point is on page 110, and it says, "All About the White Case," that's Harry Dexter White, or Harry White as he was known to those who knew him, and I knew him somewhat. He was first director of Monetary Research, as I recall, and later Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, while I was there. A very brilliant guy, but not to me an attractive personality. He always impressed me as a fellow who was delightful to the point of obsequiousness to his superiors, and very rude, mean and curt to his subordinates, or those below him in rank. Not a particularly delightful trait; but he was brilliant. In any event, on November 6, 1953, Attorney General [Herbert] Brownell made a speech before the Executive Club of Chicago in which he denounced Truman's handling of the White case. I haven't really read this recently, but I've given the reference. I'm not going to try to analyze exactly what was said. I'll leave that to people that want to work on it. But the gist of it is, that he denounced Truman's handling of the White case, and, in fact, virtually imputed disloyalty to Truman, because the gist of it was that Truman had been [708] advised that White was a spy and a traitor and then he appoints him as U.S. Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund. Truman made a denial the same day. Among other things he said, "I want to make it perfectly clear that I inherited White from the Roosevelt administration. He was not an appointee of mine, he was working for Henry Morgenthau, then Secretary of the Treasury, when he left. As far as I know I never met White personally or talked to him. Apparently the Republicans have adopted the tactics of Senator McCarthy as a desperation move. It doesn't matter what they do, they can't breathe life into a corpse and they know it." Harry White was dead. And it did seem a little peculiar, to say the least. Whether Harry White was guilty or not, he had never been convicted or indicted, he had denied the charges under oath and yet here was the Attorney General of the United States saying about a dead man that the charges were true and that the President had not done his duty to his country in connection with the handling of the White matter. It was in the best traditions of Senator McCarthy, there's [709] no question about it. And President Eisenhower was typically ambivalent when he was questioned at a press conference, this is the press conference of November 11, 1953. I note that Tony Leviero, now dead (Anthony Leviero of the New York Times, a fine reporter, and a good guy, who covered the White House and whom I knew pretty well and had social contacts with), asked Eisenhower the jugular question: Mr. President, I think this case is at best a pretty squalid one, but if the grand jury under our system has found a man, has in effect cleared that man or at least decided it was insufficient evidence to convict him or prosecute him, then is it proper for the Attorney General to characterize that accused man, who is now dead, as a spy, and in effect accuse a former President of harboring that man? That was quite plain in the statement of the Attorney General. Here is the Eisenhower answer. At that time, apparently, they had to be paraphrased still. They weren't direct quotes. All people were trying to get now is his personal opinion about certain things. Mr. Eisenhower answered: He is not a judge nor is he an accomplished lawyer. He has his own ideas of what is right [710] and wrong but he would assume this. Reporters were asking him questions where with all of this in the. public mind the attorney general is here to answer it himself. Let him answer it. QUESTION: Mr. Leviero: He has refused to answer the questions, you see. [Laughter] QUESTION: Andrew Tully, Scripps-Howard: It is true that Mr. Brownell is here, but he won't see reporters. I wonder if we could ask you to exert your influence to get him to see us? [Laughter] Eisenhower replies: Of course, after all, he felt that reporters were probably getting a little more impatient than Mr. Brownell thinks they should be. He doesn't know exactly what the attorney general has in mind. He is certainly ready to talk to Mr. Brownell more about this when he returns to town, but he is not going to give them orders as to methods in which he handles responsibilities of his own office. The President said he wanted to say that he had found Mr. Brownell interested in justice and decency, and cleaning up what he has got to clean up. We have gone ahead in many lower echelons, he added. He pointed out that there was a report published that we've got some fourteen hundred people that we thought were security risks. Mr. Brownell now has published a particular case and has aroused tremendous interest. Now, we will see how he handles it, and Mr. Eisenhower is not going to color his case or to prejudice his case in advance by talking about it. QUESTION: Mr. Tully: Mr. President, can you give us any indication of what the proof of these charges is that are going to be offered by Mr. Brownell? EISENHOWER: Of course, he can't. Mr. Eisenhower said that he would repeat that Mr. Brownell has got to handle this case in his own way. The President does [711] not suppose and he does not intend to be one that is a party to what looks like rank injustice to anybody. That is all he can say on this. QUESTION: Mr. Leviero: One more question. Insofar as we have been allowed to know the facts, the case rests on the testimony of two confessed traitors Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. I wonder if the FBI independently has developed any evidence to sustain the charge of espionage. [Good question, say I.] Mr. Eisenhower said that reporters would have to ask Mr. Brownell. [The President didn't know.] QUESTION: Robert Riggs, Louisville Courier-Journal: There has been some question as to whether the FBI report said Mr. White was a spy, or whether it said he associated with Communists. Did Mr. Brownell say that the FBI report he used called him a spy? The President said he was going to answer his last question on the subject that morning and leave. He had told them, Mr. Eisenhower said, that Mr. Brownell came and reported to him that there was evidence that there had been subversive action and that high Government officials were aware of it. He gave the name as Mr. White. He said the evidence was so clear that he considered his duty to lay it out, because, Mr. Brownell said, "Certainly, I am not going to be a party to concealing this." The President told him, "You have to follow your own conscience as to your duty." Now, that was exactly what he knew about it. That's the end of the excerpt from the press conference that I have, and that sort of presents the context of the [712] picture. Well, immediately the House Un-American Activities wanted to get into the act, and in November, a subpoena, dated November 9, was served on President Truman, who was then in New York City, directing his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Friday, November 13, in Washington. The chairman of the House Un-American Activities then was Harold H. Velde. Velde was a former FBI man, and he too will not go down in history as one of the greater Congressmen, in my opinion. It's a funny thing. I've known quite a few ex-FBI men, many of them good guys. But the ones that go into politics all seem to be right wingers or become that way, and you could almost go down the row on that. There may be exceptions that I can't think of at the moment, but the ones I think of are pretty rightwing and Velde was like that. In any event, this letter was read by President Truman to reporters at a press conference on November 11, in New York City. At that time, I was in New York City too, and Charlie Murphy called me up and asked me to come down to whatever the hotel the President was at, [713] my impression is it was the Waldorf, but I may be wrong. In any event, I remember Charlie was there, and Sam Rosenman was there, and there were others there, I've forgotten who all, the President, of course. We discussed this subpoena at some length and how the President should respond to it, I remember I think there was general unanimity, I mean, this is a long time ago, and I don't really remember with great detail the discussions, but my general impression is that there was general unanimity (maybe I'm just searching my own mind on this from what I thought), but my impression is that the general feeling was that they couldn't constitutionally require a former President to testify, but the chief question might be whether he should simply refuse entirely to come, or he should appear and refuse to testify on the grounds that he was exerting the constitutional rights of the President's office. I remember ruminating out loud: "It would be nice if we could get Professor [Edward S.] Corwin's -- of Princeton -- opinion on the subject." Corwin was a great constitutional authority who every couple of years wrote a new book interpreting the Constitution. I was [714] startled to find that one of the senior lawyers present not a Government man, not Charlie Murphy, had never heard of Corwin. You never know where gaps in people's knowledge are. It was Sam Rosenman, actually. But a reply of some sort was knocked out and Charlie Murphy was the principal drafter of that reply, as I recall. And I got in a few licks on it, others got in a few licks on it, but Charlie did the bulk of it. And, as usual, Charlie was the "take charge" guy when it came to getting something done. Everybody was there to talk, but we had to get something down on papers, you see. Charlie was the fellow who got something moving in that direction, getting things down on paper. The text of the President's letter is here (in this issue of U.S. News and World Report which I referred to), to Velde, saying he was simply asserting the constitutional rights of Presidents in declining to comply with the subpoena. In spite of personal willingness to cooperate with your committee, I feel constrained by my duty to the people of the United States to decline to comply with the subpoena. In doing so, I am carrying out the provisions of the Constitution of the United States and following a long line of precedents commending with George Washington himself in 1796. And so this is November 1953. I'm not absolutely [715] certain how the next step took place, but I'll describe what happened. I learned from Ed Foley, who had been Under Secretary of the Treasury, and my longtime friend and boss at the Treasury, that John Snyder, who was Secretary of the Treasury, he replaced Fred Vinson about a month of two after I came back to the Treasury in '46, and he was Secretary until Mr. Truman left office. He was a great friend, of course, of President Truman's -- also from Missouri. And John Snyder and Ed Foley, one or the other or both, had gotten some intimation that either the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Senate Internal Security Committee, I think the latter, planned to hold hearings on this matter and call the Treasury officials, because Harry White, of course, was a longtime official of the Treasury. He had gone to the International Monetary Fund, presumably on John Snyder's recommendation that he be made U.S. Executive Director of the Fund. And there were other names in the Treasury that had been in the public prints in connection with allegations of communism and espionage. Well, it then developed that Snyder had talked to, I suppose it was the first Secretary of the Treasury [716] under Eisenhower -- George Humphrey -- that Snyder had talked to. There was one link in the Treasury with the old administration, and that was "Chappy" Rose, Chapman Rose, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Humphrey. "Chappy" Rose is a Republican, he is a Cleveland lawyer and a good one, and he had served in part of the Roosevelt and Truman administration in the capacity as Deputy Director of Contract Settlement. And in my last year or two years at the Treasury I was Deputy Director of Contract Settlement, in addition to my other duties, you see it was a liquidating operation, and it only took a little of my time, but still there had to be someone to handle it. The Secretary was the Director, so the Deputy Director was the fellow who had to actually do the spade work, whatever was to be done, but there wasn't much by that time. "Chappy" Rose was in private life, counsel with George Humphrey, or his firm was, and he brought him into the Treasury as first, Assistant Secretary and then as Under Secretary, he was Assistant Secretary at this time, and I guess the contact was made through him. [717] But in any event, John Snyder and Ed Foley had gotten permission from the Eisenhower Treasury to have access to the files on the loyalty cases which then might be an issue, the cases in the Truman administration, you see. Obviously, if you're going to testify on how you handled the case, how the hell are you going to do it unless you have the files before you. Nobody can remember things that happened years before, nobody, I mean, unless you have absolutely a photographic, photoelectric cell for a brain. You have to be able to refresh your recollections from files, men who handled a million things, and this is just one of them. So they had gotten that permission and I immediately saw that I needed that permission, because I was the man who did the spade work. These were the top level men and they might have to justify it, but I was the man they were going to look for at the staff level as the fellow who had done all the memoranda and things, they were mine you see. If they looked through the files they'd see Spingarn's name all over everything, and they'd say, "This fellow we've got to talk to." That was [718] obvious. So, with that background I'm going to read you these notes which I saw this morning for the first time in years. This is called "Notes for SJS Special Internal Security File." It's in longhand, my longhand. Here I have "Wednesday, December 2, 1953." Late this afternoon I saw Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Chapman Rose, with Captain Ernest Feidler. Now, Ernie Feidler was a Coast Guard captain, then. He .had been Ed Foley's assistant when he was Under Secretary, and at Chapman Rose's request he remained there to be his assistant for a while, for six months or so, when Rose was Assistant Secretary. At my request Rose said I could have access to Treasury Loyalty files on which I worked while in Treasury, and copies of papers therein, on the same basis, as Treasury had already accorded to Messrs. Snyder and Foley .... That's Secretary Snyder and Under Secretary Foley. So, thereafter, I spent several days in December and I think possibly in January, December '53 and January '54, several whole days in the Treasury going through these files and copying excerpts from the files that I thought I might need in case I had to discuss any case which I had handled while I was in the Treasury. And [719] I was given full access to the files and permission to copy them and take excerpts out and I did. This morning I got up at four thirty. I was running through this file and I came across a memorandum I totally had forgotten I ever wrote. It's in my longhand and is the only copy. It's dated Sunday, June 27, 1954, Now, this is, as you see, about six months later. It shows that my labors were not altogether -- it turned out that they were unnecessary -- but it shows that they might very easily have been necessary, I mean, the several days I spent going through those files in the Treasury in December '53 or early January '54. This memorandum I have headed "Re: Jenner Internal Security Committee, Canceled Hearings of June 25, 1954." This is dated June 27, two days later; I'm reading how from my longhand memo: On Tuesday morning, June 22, 1954, Robert McManus of the Jenner [Jenner ISS, I keep saying -- that means, Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, of course.] Robert McManus of the Jenner ISS staff phoned me to request my attendance at an executive session of the ISS [The Internal Security Subcommittee] on Friday, June 25, at 10 a.m., in Room 155, the Senate Office Building. I said I would be there and asked what the hearing was about. He said it was about the old Treasury Loyalty cases, 'Adler [720] and so forth.' [The Adler Case was often in the public print so I have no hesitation in mentioning it.) I inquired whether any other former Treasury officials had been invited to this hearing, and he said, 'no.' Which is interesting. They didn't start with Snyder or Foley; they started with me. I thought it might be that way. I was the fellow who had done the spade work. Now, mind you, they give you three days notice, you see, of a hearing at which you're supposed to defend your reputation, in a context -- this was the middle of the McCarthy era, you'll remember that -- in a very inflammatory and provocative context. A hostile, Republican committee attacking Democrats. You knew what to expect when you went up there. HESS: They gave you three whole days to get ready. SPINGARN: Three whole days, yes. HESS: Not very much. SPINGARN: That afternoon, June 22, I went to the Treasury Department and conferred with Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, H. Chapman Rose. [Now, don't forget that H. Chapman Rose was a Republican, Assistant Secretary of the Republican Treasury Department, headed by a Republican, George Humphrey, under a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower.] I told them of the Friday meeting and told them there was a problem involved in which I would appreciate the views of the present administration. I referred to the Truman 1948 directive prohibiting Government [721] officials from testifying about the handling of loyalty cases without specific presidential approval. I said it was my understanding that the Eisenhower administration had continued this directive in effect. Mr. Rose said that recent events made that pretty clear. I said there were two questions about the interpretation of that directive. When he talked about recent events I think he was talking about the famous letter, I believe it was May 17, 1954, that President Eisenhower wrote to, I think it was either the Secretary of Defense, or the Secretary of the Army, Stevens, in connection with the McCarthy hearing. Senator McCarthy had been trying to get certain information from the Executive Branch, and if my memory is right, on May 17, 1954, President Eisenhower wrote a letter, relying, in effect, on the Truman directive, and continuing, in effect, the directive about not making this type of information available, without an expressed approval in each case of the President. And that's what he means, I'm pretty sure, but that, "recent events made that pretty clear." This is a month later. I said: There were two questions about the interpretation of that directive with which I was confronted in connection with any testimony I gave about the handling of old Treasury loyalty cases. One: Did it apply to former officials such as myself, [722] as well as incumbent officials: Two: In connection with the old Treasury loyalty cases, which the Internal Security Subcommittee was now considering, had the new administration waived the application of the directive insofar as former officials as my self were concerned, by virtue of Attorney General Brownell's testimony of November 17, 1953, before the same subcommittee, when he discussed these cases and criticized their handling [that is their handling by the Truman administration]. I told Mr. Rose, that in my opinion, the 1948 directive as continued in effect applied to former as well as incumbent officials, but that Mr. Brownell's testimony last November had the effect of waving the directive, so that I could testify fully and freely about these cases. However, I said that was only my opinion; that was obviously not authoritative. I told him I did not want to find myself in the middle of a constitutional conflict between the Executive and Legislative branches and I therefore requested that I be given a statement, in writing, before the Friday hearing, by an appropriate Administration source, setting out the Administration's views as to where I stood under the 1948 directive and the question as to its interpretation in the present situation which I had raised with him. I said I was anxious to testify before the Internal Security Subcommittee, because [and I emphasize this] because I believe that the Treasury had handled its old loyalty cases in a sound and responsible manner, and my purpose in seeing him was to iron out any possible impediments that might stand in the way of my testifying fully. I emphasized to Mr. Rose my feeling that Mr. Brownell [the Attorney General] that Mr. Brownell's testimony last November had constituted a waiver of the 'no testimony' directive. I said it would be most unfair for the Attorney General to, in effect, waive the directive as far as he was concerned [723] so that he could criticize the previous administration's handling of certain loyalty cases, and still have the directive to remain in effect to keep us from answering those criticisms. Mr. Rose said he would undertake to get me a statement in writing of the character requested by me before the hearing, June 25. He said that since the questions involved were of more than Treasury concern, that is, of Government-wide application, he would consult the Department of Justice on the matter. I thanked him and left. The next day, Wednesday, June 23, about noon, Mr. Rose phoned me. He said that because of the many ramifications of the problem, he would be unable to furnish me with a written statement desired before the hearing. He said that on the basis of the checks he had made he was able to tell me that he had found no objection from any administration quarter to my testifying fully before the Internal Security Subcommittee about the handling of the old Treasury loyalty cases. I thanked him and said that I would tell the subcommittee the advice which he had given me orally. He said of course that was understood. The next morning, Thursday, June 24, Miss Humphrey of the Internal Security Subcommittee staff phoned to tell me that the subcommittee had canceled the request that I appear at the executive session the next day. She had no particulars as to why, so I phoned Robert McManus of the Internal Security Subcommittee staff, Republic 7-7500, Ext. 2666, who had first called me on this matter. I asked why the hearing had been canceled, and he said the subcommittee was just so busy with other matters that they had to call off my appearance. He said he didn't know when or even if they would call me again, but assured me that I would get ample notice if they did [three days, no doubt] decide to call me. I said I was disappointed, that I looked forward [724] to the hearing, and that I had gone to some trouble to get ready for it by seeking administration advice on where I stood insofar as the legal and constitutional questions involved were concerned. I told him of my talk with Rose and what Rose had told me the previous day. I told McManus that I was anxious to appear before the Internal Security Subcommittee now that the impediments seemed to be removed, particularly because I wanted to straighten out the record resulting from Harold Glasser's testimony of April 14, 1953, before the Internal Security Subcommittee. I referred McManus to my April, 1953, correspondence with Robert Morris, the former chief counsel of the Internal Security Subcommittee on this matter, which McManus said he hadn't seen, and told him that I thought the Internal Security Subcommittee had been less than fair on this matter in failing to print my letter to Morris in the hearings, with the Glasser testimony. I asked McManus if Attorney General Brownell had ever asked the Internal Security Subcommittee for an opportunity to substantially correct his testimony of November 17, 1953, before the Internal Security Subcommittee [that was the testimony criticizing the Truman administration and the Treasury for the handling of those cases]. McManus said not that he knew of. I said that Brownell had made a substantial misstatement of fact at the November 17 hearing which was very prejudicial to the individual involved, that this misstatement had since been called to the attention of the Department of Justice and that if Mr. Brownell did not publicly correct his statement it was a clear flat error of fact [prejudicial to an individual on his loyalty]. It seemed that he had committed something approximating moral, if not legal, perjury. He let stand uncorrected sworn statement which he now knew, even if he didn't originally, was not supported by the facts in the possession of his department. I intimated to Mr. McManus that in the interests [725] of truth his subcommittee might care to hear my information on this matter. He was noncommittal and we ended our conversation. SJS I never heard another word from that subcommittee to this day. HESS: That was the end of that. SPINGARN: That was the end of that. You notice, I made myself freely available, I had interesting testimony that showed the Attorney General had made a flat misstatement of fact, publicly prejudicial to an individual's loyalty, which he never corrected, as far as I know. They didn't want to hear it. Now, I think that's interesting. This has never before been made public as far as I know. By the way, I have in here some other correspondence. I have here correspondence about this Robert Morris episode which I referred to. Robert Morris, who was, as late as '53 anyway, Chief Counsel of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, I felt behaved unfairly in a matter in which I was involved vis-a-vis his subcommittee. Remind me after lunch to give you copies of these papers to be Xeroxed and returned to me. [726] Ninth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 24, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library. SPINGARN: Well, I mentioned this morning, when we broke off, the Robert Morris episode, and I have my file on this before me -- and I think I can best describe it by reading excerpts from some papers in this file. Here is a memorandum from my personal file which is dated April 14, 1953, and this is the text of it: Jack Doherty, of the New York Daily News, called early this afternoon (I was a Federal Trade Commissioner at this time) to say that my name had been mentioned at a hearing this morning of the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said that while Harold Glasser, a former Truman official, was testifying, the Subcommittee counsel, Robert Morris, asked him if he knew that after a conference with me (that is me, Stephen Spingarn) at the White House, Victor Perlo, also a former Treasury official, had been cleared. I told Doherty that there was no truth to the allegation inferred by this question. I then called Robert Morris and asked him to send me an excerpt from the testimony mentioning me as soon as possible. He said that he would do so. I also told him that there was no truth in the statement referred to above. He said that they would be glad to have me correct it if I wished. I told him I would be glad to do so, and, of course, my call to him was in the nature of a [727] correction, but that as I understood it, I was limited insofar as disclosure of details of a loyalty case were concerned by President Truman's directive precluding the disclosure of such information, which directives, as far as I was aware, had been continued in effect by President Eisenhower. I indicated that I would look over the transcript he sent me and let me know what, if anything, I wanted to do about a correction, (and I initialed that memorandum for my file). Well, then I received a letter dated April 16, 1953, from Robert Morris, chief counsel Internal Security Subcommittee to me: Dear Mr. Commissioner: Here is the excerpt from Harold Glasser's testimony before the Internal Security Subcommittee on April 14, 1953, which I promised to send to you. And here is the excerpt; I'll read it, it's quite brief. This is testimony of Harold Glasser on April 14, 1953 before the Internal Security Subcommittee: MR. MORRIS: (Chief Counsel) In 1946 did you know that Victor Perlo was a Communist? MR. GLASSER: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me. MR. MORRIS: Did you try to get Victor Perlo a job with the State Department in 1947 at a time when you knew he was a Communist? MR. GLASSER: I refuse to answer that question on the ground it would tend to incriminate me. MR. MORRIS: Did you know that Victor Perlo, according [728] to a security report of which you have knowledge, was a member of the Communist Party? MR. GLASSER: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it would tend to incriminate me. MR. MORRIS: Did you subsequent to that time recommend Victor Perlo to a position in the State Department with the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees? MR. GLASSER: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me. MR. MORRIS: Do you know whether or not after that information was known, subsequent to a conversation with one Stephen Spingarn at the White House, Victor Perlo's Treasury record was cleared? MR. GLASSER: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me. MR. MORRIS: Did you ever have a conference with or concerning Stephen Spingarn at the White House? SENATOR WELKER: Did you ever have anything to do with clearing the record on Victor Perlo? MR. GLASSER: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it would tend to incriminate me. MR. MORRIS: Do you know that a Treasury investigation was conducted of you in 1942? MR. GLASSER: I did know that there was a Secret Service investigation of me. (That's the only question he answered.) MR. MORRIS: Did Harry Dexter White aid in clearing you in that investigation? MR. GLASSER: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it would tend to incriminate me. So there's the excerpt that Morris sent me. You see [729] the gist of it is that he asked him a question as to whether or not Glasser had information that Victor Perlo was a Communist subsequent to a conversation that one Stephen Spingarn -- I slightly resent that "one" as if I were an unknown nonentity -- to a conversation with one Stephen Spingarn at the White House, Victor Perlo's Treasury record was cleared -- Glasser refused to answer on the grounds of possible incrimination. Mr. Morris then said, "Did you ever have a conference with or concerning Stephen Spingarn at the White House?" Senator Welker then interjected with a question, "Did you ever have anything to do with clearing the record of Victor Perlo?" and Glasser then refused to answer; presumably he was making the same refusal to both the Morris and Welker question. I then wrote Mr. Morris on April 17, 1953, after receiving that letter from him and the excerpt: Dear Mr. Morris: I today received your letter of April 16, 1953, enclosing an excerpt from the testimony of Harold Glasser before the Internal Security Subcommittee on Tuesday, April 14, 1953. I requested that you send me this excerpt on April 14, after learning from the press that my name had been mentioned by you in the course of your interrogation of Harold Glasser, who was [730] a former Treasury Department official, about Victor Perlo, a former subordinate of Harold Glasser's in the Treasury Department. Both men left the Treasury Department in 1947 at which time I was Assistant General Counsel to the Treasury acting, among other things, as legal counsel to the U.S. Secret Service and the other coordinated Treasury enforcement agencies. I was also the legal member of the Treasury Loyalty Board at that time and in the latter part of 1946 and the early part of 1947 had been alternate Treasury member of the President's Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty and a member of the working committee of that Commission which drafted the recommendations which became the present Government Loyalty Program. In 1949 I transferred from the Treasury to the White House staff and in 1950 became Administrative Assistant to the President of the United States until October of that year when I assumed my present post of Federal Trade Commissioner. In your questioning of Harold Glasser on April 14, according to the excerpt which you have sent me, you asked him if he knew, 'That Victor Perlo, according to a secret report of which you had knowledge, was a member of the Communist Party.' You then asked him if he knew, 'Whether or not after that information was known, subsequent to a conversation with one Stephen Spingarn at the White House, Victor Perlo's Treasury record was cleared.' Mr. Glasser refused to answer both questions on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate him. The purpose of this letter is to state that any intimations which the questions you addressed to Mr. Glasser (or his refusal to answer them), may contain that the Treasury record of Victor Perlo was cleared after or as a result of a conversation with me at the White House (or anywhere else), is completely untrue. [731] I was one of the Treasury officials who participated in the handling of Treasury loyalty matters during the last three or four months of Victor Perlo's employment by the Treasury Department. The files of the Treasury Department contain the record of the handling of such matters. It is my understanding that Government officers and employees are prohibited by presidential directive dating back to 1948 from discussing details about Government loyalty cases to congressional committees, that President Eisenhower has not rescinded these directives, so that, therefore, they are still in effect. I would like to state, however, that if President Eisenhower should decide that the national interest would not be prejudiced by making available to your subcommittee the loyalty files of the Treasury Department hearing on the Victor Perlo matter and by lifting the prohibition against oral testimony in this matter by Government officials, I would be available to testify before your subcommittee about my remembrance of the Treasury's handling of this matter which, I believe, was both sound and responsible. Incidentally, in 1951 the Republican Chairman of the Central Loyalty Review Board praised the Treasury Department in the highest possible terms for its past handling of loyalty matters [that was Hiram Bingham, former Republican Senator from Connecticut, a very conservative man]. I might add that during the past twelve years, I've spent from one-third to one-half of my total time working on counterespionage and security matters; this has included three years of service overseas in several countries during World War II as a counterespionage officer. During two years of that time, I was commanding officer of a counterintelligence organization -- the Fifth Army Counterintelligence Corps, which captured over 500 enemy spies and saboteurs. I am proud of the work which I have done in this field, and I have been honored by receiving a number of [732] commendations for it from outstanding Americans. While it is difficult to approach the subject of one's own record with the necessary objectivity, I believe that my experience has particularly qualified me for trying to do an honest job of balancing the delicate considerations of security and individual rights in a free country during a period of great turmoil and tension, if for nothing else. And, though extremists of both sides tend to overlook it, that is the job that has to be done in each of these loyalty or security cases. I detest all forms of political totalitarianism whether it is the leftwing or the rightwing variety -- communism or fascism. To the extent of whatever abilities I have, I have worked and shall continue to work to prevent the encroachment of any of these forms of totalitarianism or their hateful methods of operation on our country and its free institutions. I request that this letter be incorporated in the transcript of your hearing of April 14 at the point at which the reference is made to my name. If for any reason this is editorially impossible, I request that this letter be reprinted in the same volume of your hearing and that there be a cross-reference at the point at which my name is mentioned to the place where the letter may be found. That is the end of my letter. I then received another letter from Robert Morris, dated April 20, 1953: Dear Commissioner: Thank you for your letter of April 17, which I could not read until this morning. As you may know, any variation of sworn testimony should be accomplished by other sworn testimony. [733] For that reason the Subcommittee has always taken the position against receiving a letter when the witness is available. For that reason, I ask if you will not try to work out an arrangement whereby you could come here and we would have an Executive Session and get the record straight. Wish you could give a week's notice on this, and we would arrange it very quietly here with one of the Senators. I assure you that we will make every effort to see to it that nothing but the full facts appear in the Record. Sincerely yours, Robert Morris, Chief Counsel, Internal Security Subcommittee. Now, I naturally found that letter highly unsatisfactory; so I wrote him. His letter was the 20th. On the 21st of April, 1953, I wrote him again: Dear Mr. Morris: Thank you for your letter of April 20 replying to mine of April 17. You state that, ‘As you may know, any variation of sworn testimony should be accomplished by other sworn testimony. For that reason the Subcommittee has always taken the position against receiving a letter when the witness is available. For that reason, I ask if you will not try to work out an arrangement whereby you could come here and we would have an Executive Session and get the record straight.' I am not clear as to the relevance of your statement that 'any variation of sworn testimony should be accomplished by other sworn testimony.' The excerpt from your hearing of April 14, which you sent me in response to my request for a transcript of any portion of those hearings containing [#734 was omitted in numbering the pages] [735] a reference to me, indicated that the only references to me were in two questions put by you to Harold Glasser, who refused to answer the questions. This hardly constitutes sworn testimony. However, if you wish, I shall be glad to give you my April 17 letter in the form of an affidavit (as a sworn statement, in other words). As I told you in my April 17 letter, directives by President Truman which have been continued in effect by President Eisenhower appear to preclude me from testifying before your committee in executive session or otherwise, about the details of an individual loyalty matter in the handling of which I participated as a Treasury official. It has always been my understanding that Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, has been one of the strongest proponents of these presidential directives against the disclosure of information about individual loyalty matters. I am rather proud of my own participation in this matter, and I should have no objection to testifying before your committee in public or in executive session if the presidential ban were lifted, but I'm certainly not going to violate presidential directives. As you know, the issues connected with the presidential directives against the divulgence of loyalty information involve an historic controversy between the Executive and Legislative branches of our Government which goes back to George Washington. I suggest for your consideration that a Republican headed committee of a Republican Congress is in a good deal better position to reconcile the historic viewpoint of these two great branches of our Government with a Republican President than is a Democratic commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. At that moment, of course, Republican President Eisenhower was in the White House, and there was a Republican Congress -- [736] both houses were Republican -- and Robert Morris was a Republican and Chairman Jenner of his subcommittee was Republican -- in other words how did they expect me to go to a Republican White House and straighten out this matter if they couldn't straighten it out as to these directives barring my testimony on this matter. I have added an addendum of August 24, 1953; I was writing in April: I have received no reply to this letter from Mr. Morris. The Glasser hearings before the Internal Security Subcommittee were not printed until this month (that's August, 1953) and I did not receive a copy of them until today. Despite my request, these hearings do not contain my correspondence of April, 1953, with Mr. Morris about this matter. So, he didn't put it in as I requested. Now, I note that, among other people, on June 2, 1953, I wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: