NOTICE
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

As an electronic publication of the Truman Library, users should note that features of the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview, such as pagination and indexing, could not be replicated for the online version of the Stowe transcript.

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Opened July, 1991
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

JOHNSON: We're going to discuss some anecdotes and some items that may not be on the other interviews that have been recorded in the past.

We've been talking, Mr. Stowe, about some security things at the White House, and I thought perhaps I could start by asking you again about security provisions for President Roosevelt during World War II. You mentioned a ramp and a small shelter, I think, under what was it, the west wing?

STOWE: The east wing.

JOHNSON: I don't believe that's on tape anywhere. So, do you want to talk a little more about that again, about Roosevelt and provisions for him?

STOWE: Well, as I understand it, during World War II, there were no arrangements for bomb shelters in the White House itself, but that a tunnel had been constructed from the east wing of the White House over into the Treasury Department where there was a deep vault. Since it was a tunnel and on an incline, no stairs as I understood it, they could wheel the President, in his wheelchair into that in the event of necessity. I never saw it; I never went in it, but I understand it was still there at the time we renovated the White House.

JOHNSON: And a small shelter under that east wing?

STOWE: Under the east wing, there subsequently was built a relatively small shelter. It was about the equivalent of two rooms. It would have been adequate for a minor type of attack, but would have been useless in the point of view of a ground zero atomic attack.

JOHNSON: That was there until the renovation in 1948?

STOWE: Until the renovation.

JOHNSON: What about the Map Room? It's still not clear to me whether the Map Room was in one of these secure areas, or whether there was any special protection around the Map Room. Do you remember the Map Room at all?

STOWE: No, I don't. George Elsey and Clark Clifford were familiar with that.

JOHNSON: You mentioned that you were the only one at the White House who was designated by President Truman to deal with atomic energy information. Is that right?

STOWE: That's right.

JOHNSON: Sort of like a Q clearance.

STOWE: So I was informed by the Atomic Energy Commission some time later when they wanted me to do something for them, under the impression I had a Q clearance. Then they found out I hadn't, but that I had this special clearance. They did, later, give me a Q clearance, but that was after our administration.

JOHNSON: I think you mentioned that the Atomic Energy Commission security people did put a recording device on your telephone.

STOWE: Right.

JOHNSON: Is that the only one in the White House that you knew about, that tape recording?

STOWE: It was the only one I knew of.

JOHNSON: It's the only recording device that you know of that was in the White House when Truman was there?

STOWE: And after that one caught on fire, I didn't use it either.

JOHNSON: Do you want to just say a little more about that, why and how that was installed in your office?

STOWE: Well, they put it in one of these cabinet-like things that they often have, with silver carafes standing on them in Government offices. Apparently, they forgot to bore any holes in the back for air circulation, and after I turned it on a couple times, and was running it, it got a little hot in there and caught on fire. Later they came over and bored some holes in the back of that stand, but I didn't use it much after that.

JOHNSON: Well, you were only supposed to use it when you were conversing with someone, and something sensitive came up on the phone?

STOWE: Right. And partly being for my own protection.

JOHNSON: You know, we've been asked if we have any knowledge of the wiretaps that the FBI did apparently on Tommy Corcoran. Do you have any knowledge of that?

STOWE: No. I don't know if anybody in the White House outside of my secretaries know about this machine either, because it was handled by the AEC. I think I told you they came and checked all around once or twice a week, checking for any kind of bugs that might be anywhere around there.

JOHNSON: The AEC security people?

STOWE: Yes. This originally started when I was assigned the job of working with the Atomic Energy Commission on a report. I can't think of the name of that commission now, but Bill Davis was the chairman of it. It was a Presidential commission on atomic energy, and because of the sensitivity of some things this commission was working on, and because of my assignment by the President to work with them, the AEC decided I had to be cleared. And from then on everything that came to the White House on atomic energy they apparently dealt with me.

JOHNSON: Okay, so you were the contact at the White House on atomic energy.

STOWE: So far as I know, there was no one else. In those days it was so secure, you didn't know who might be dealing with it.

JOHNSON: I don't think there's been anything in particular in these other interviews that deal with renovation of the White House. Did you have anything that you wanted to add about the renovation that we might put on record?

STOWE: One or two anecdotes. The President, after he had built the Court House out in Kansas City I guess fancied himself as quite a construction expert. He very wisely had set up a commission, because, as he said, if people didn't like what was being done, they'd blame him. This way, Congress appointed a commission and if the people didn't like it, they'd blame the commission. But he used to go over there almost every day after work and look around and check the job out, until General [Major General Glen E.] Edgerton called me once or twice and said, "For goodness sake, can't you keep him away; he thinks he's rebuilding the court house out there."

There's another anecdote. I went over on many of these trips with him because one of the things I wanted to see each time was how they were doing with the shelter. I remember we were up in what later would be his bedroom, and as I recall it, the bathroom was sort of a long room with washbasins and a commode that ran like a little ell. I think I'm correct in that. Anyway, I heard him one day in there just plain explode, "Who the hell thought this up?" I go in there and in the little ell where the commode was, they had placed a safe in the wall, so the only way you could get at the combination would be to sit on the commode and turn the combination.

Now, I don't know whether he had that taken out or not, but he sure thought that was the dumbest thing he ever saw in his life. It may still be there for all I know.

JOHNSON: Anything else about renovation before we leave that subject?

STOWE: I think he was really very, very much concerned that it be put back exactly as it was. Edgerton, I think, did a magnificent job of marking everything and putting it back. My understanding is that with the exception of one or two minor pieces, and the major change in the grand stairway, which was a great advantage, the house, when it was put back in, was almost exactly as it was before.

JOHNSON: You mentioned that when Mr. Truman was at the Blair House, there was a place where he would read the morning paper before he went out on his stroll. Do you want to describe the situation there and then that attempted assassination which got you into the security picture again?

STOWE: There was a little room on the front of the Blair House, or Blair-Lee, which is on the corner right next to the Court of Claims. There was a desk and a chair, a few things in a small room; he would go in there and read his morning paper before he went on walks with the Secret Service. The Secret Service had become concerned that the Blair House was susceptible [to assault], since there were only about ten feet and nothing but a little picket fence between the sidewalk and the house. They were concerned that somebody might throw things into the window, a Molotov cocktail or something of that nature. They had been experimenting with how they could protect the first floor particularly, and part of the second floor, because of the angles they had discovered from atop Old State and from an office building back on the back side, which might permit a sharpshooting type of thing. They'd been working on this, and they finally called me up one day, and I guess that was because I had found some money for them one other time because of my former budget connections, or maybe because we had been working together; I don't recall at that time exactly what our relationships were in this area. They said that they had found a screen--they couldn't put bullet-proof glass in because it was too heavy for the house--but they had found a screen that they could put on those front windows that would withstand whatever poundage that they were concerned about somebody throwing things in. So I asked them the name of the company and they said it was called, as I remember, the Psychiatric Screen Company. At that point I said, "No way, we're not going to put up psychiatric screens on the Blair House because the newspaper people would get hold of it and they'll say, 'Hey, they've got the President behind psychiatric screens.' Forget it, and try to find something else that will serve your purpose."

About two weeks later I was in Jack Hunt's restaurant, which is just a block up on Pennsylvania Avenue, when a waiter came back and said, "Mr. Stowe, there's been a shooting down the street." I said, "Let them shoot." He said, "But Mr. Stowe, it's at the Blair House." With that, I got out of that restaurant in a hurry; Jack swears I turned over two tables going out. I got on down the street and instead of stopping at the Blair House I rushed right up to my office in Old State; I got the president of the company that manufactured the Psychiatric screens and told him I guess he'd heard it on the radio by then, but told him about our problem. He said he'd have a man down the next morning to measure the windows and that he would then stop the factory and make a run, a special run of screens, for the Blair House. Then I could relax, because I had visions of something happening and that order being pigeon-holed on my desk.

JOHNSON: So those were put up then rather promptly?

STOWE: Yes.

JOHNSON: Those special screens that fit on the outside of the windows?

STOWE: Yes.

JOHNSON: I think perhaps it's not on the record about the National Security Resources Board, and your job of realigning personnel, rotating them, and I guess firing people. Would you want to say a little more about that particular job that you had?

STOWE: Well, the National Security Resources Board was transferred from the Department of Defense to the Executive Office of the President and became in effect like the Budget Bureau and the Council of Economic Advisers, a Presidential staff operation. [Arthur M.] Hill, who was president of the Greyhound Bus Company, had been chairman of the committee, but he resigned; so the President had to appoint someone to run the National Security Resources Board. At that time he had appointed, or indicated his intention to appoint, former Senator Mon Wallgren of the State of Washington. While that was going on, John Steelman was named as the titular head, and I was still his deputy at that time and had not been made Administrative Assistant to the President. I went over with him and actually spent most of my time there. One of the things we found was that much of the staff, some two or three hundred people, with the exception of stenographers, had been people that had been accustomed to dealing one way or the other with the Department of Defense. They were Defense Department-oriented type of people.

JOHNSON: War Department I suppose at that time.

STOWE: The War Department, yes. They were from business, some of them dollar-a-years, some of them on salaries, but they were all caught up in the military type of planning. And the National Security Resources Board was supposed to be separate and apart from that. It was a long-range national planning board; it was not for the purpose of doing it just for the military. It was decided that that type of person would just not fit into the mission, the true mission of the National Security Resources Board. So one of the things that Dr. Steelman and I had to do was to, by one device or another, gradually replace all of those people with people with a broader viewpoint of the security resources problem. Some of them went easily; some of them we sort of had to ask to depart. But, unfortunately, in that process most of which I had to do, not Dr. Steelman, I became known as Truman's "hatchet man." If you'll look in Francis Heller's book, he's got me tagged as "hatchet man."

JOHNSON: Well, every President has to have a hatchet man, I suppose.

STOWE: Well, that was the only area that I did any hatcheting; that was the National Security Resources Board.

JOHNSON: I might mention a couple of other things. In 1950, and this would be right after the Korean war had started, the idea of having a science advisor to the President apparently became very important. Weren't you assigned to contact Golden, William T. Golden?

STOWE: No.

JOHNSON: I'm going to talk to him this afternoon. He interviewed a lot of the scientists in order to decide whether there should be a position of Science Advisor to the President, or maybe have a small committee that would offer science advice to the President. But you don't recall your involvement.

STOWE: Vaguely, vaguely, but I don't really recall that.

JOHNSON: One of the persons we have interviewed says that in the steel strike of 1952, that he's sure that you gave Truman advice about the steel situation and that you told the President that this was a critical problem. You said that if we didn't keep steel production going it would have a definitely adverse affect on the war in Korea, that is, on equipping American military forces in Korea. Do you recall your involvement in that '52 steel strike?

STOWE: Oh, I was involved up to here in the '52 steel strike.

JOHNSON: But were you the one that was advising the President that if we don't keep steel production going, this will create a critical problem?

STOWE: No. That was the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense had a very strong position on that. Now, I may have relayed it to the President, but I had no knowledge whatsoever as to the pipeline or what was involved. The Department of Defense took a very, very strong position, that we could not stand even one day of strike, and it was that position that was influential in the President's first course of action. It subsequently turned out that we could stand a considerable longer period than one day and not interrupt the pipeline, but I didn't know that at that time.

JOHNSON: You're just relaying information from the Defense Department to the President?

STOWE: If I was the one that relayed it. I know that was their position and I was involved. Dr. Steelman and I were both involved, but we were involved as mediators, as people trying to resolve the dispute, not into whether we should do this. Subsequently, after all of our efforts had failed, I suggested in a staff meeting one day that the President call in Phil Murray and [Benjamin] Fairless and put the proposition right to them, face to face. He turned to Steelman and asked Steelman what he thought of that, and Steelman said that well, he had had them both in but maybe it would be worth another try. Now, I made that suggestion because at that point, the President was seriously considering using the Selective Service Act, and the Department of Justice had turned down the Selective Service Act as a possible vehicle for us in the very beginning, on the grounds that a certain part of the Act had been changed just a little while before, when the Act was renewed, which put in doubt, if it didn't absolutely eliminate, the President's right to do what he was about to do.

JOHNSON: To seize the mills.

STOWE: Yes.

JOHNSON: So he's thinking about using the Selective Service Act to justify seizure of the mills.

STOWE: Yes, rather than the Taft-Hartley. So that's why I, sort of out of sheer desperation, threw it out. Subsequently, that following Saturday, he had Fairless and Murray in his office and I was with them. I don't know why, but Steelman was not there; I was the only other person in the room. At the time, I had prepared for the President, at his request, a document which was sort of a flag-waving little speech, with a second page which said, in effect, if you two guys don't reach an agreement on this, here's what I'm going to do. And then he was going to go down the road that Murphy had suggested.

When he got through the flag-waving, on which he did a marvelous job of really getting those guys all shook up, I expected him to turn to them and tell them, "And now if you don't, here's what I'm going to do." He never did; he never gave them the alternative, never used that page, the second page. So he sent them into the Cabinet room. He said, "You go into the Cabinet Room and you work this out and Dave will be available for anything you want." Well, that day I had gotten a little piece of something in my eye and the doctor downstairs couldn't seem to find it, so he decided that I should go over and see an eye specialist. I put them into the Cabinet Room, and I got into a car and went right over to the specialist. He found, believe it or not, a little piece of steel, which had embedded in my eye. He flicked it out with a knife.

JOHNSON: Steel struck your eye, yes.

STOWE: And I went back over to the White House with a great big patch over my eye. When I got back there, Mr. Simmons, Phil Simmons, the usher in the west wing said, "Where have you been? Mr. Murray and Mr. Fairless are looking for you." So I rushed into the Cabinet Room and they said, "Dave, we'd like to see the President." I said, "Well, now you heard what the President said; he doesn't want to see you until you've got an agreement." They said, "Well, Dave, we'd like to see the President." And I started to make my little speech again and it suddenly dawned on me what they were saying; they had an agreement. I took them through Rose Conway's office, which was between the Cabinet Room and the President's office, and cracked the door. The President was talking with somebody. I sort of wigwagged at him, and he got rid of them and we went on in there. They then told him that they had reached an agreement in principle and they were sure they could work it out. So, while everybody's shaking hands, and slapping each other on the back, the President looked at me and he apparently noticed that big patch on my eye, and he said, "What the hell happened to you?" And with that, Mr. Fairless said, "Mr. President, Phil took a swing at me and I ducked, and Dave forgot to." Ben Fairless was quite an after dinner speaker, as I understand--I never heard him--but he was greatly in demand, and for about three or four months after that he was using that as his punch line. So I finally wrote him and said I wanted some residuals from that story, since it was my eye that got it.

JOHNSON: So that was the final settlement then.

STOWE: That was the final settlement.

JOHNSON: That was after the Supreme Court had said it was unconstitutional, and so the mills had to be returned to industry?

STOWE: Right.

JOHNSON: Charlie Sawyer, of course, was the Government's agent, so to speak, that was in charge of the mills in that period. Did you deal much with Charles Sawyer?

STOWE: No, Charlie Murphy did all that. There probably would be things in Murphy's records dealing with that.

JOHNSON: Yes. We have Sawyer's papers too, and he has some memoranda.

STOWE: No, Steelman and I--we acted as mediators. This was after the group in New York failed to get together with Nate [Nathan] Feinsinger. Finally, in sheer desperation we decided to bring them into the White House. We did, and we had them in twice. The first time it was no success, and the second time we had no success. During that second time they were in the Cabinet Room, and we had almost a tentative agreement. The industry people kept screaming that they wanted to go out to lunch, and they went out to lunch. It was late in the afternoon, two or three o'clock, and it was just at that time the Supreme Court decision came down. They came back into the room, a completely different group from when they went out. They were not willing to do anything, or talk about anything. So that's when we lost it.

JOHNSON: I think about the time that the steel strike started, that the coal mines were turned back to their owners. The coal mines had been seized by the Government, and were being run by the Government.

STOWE: That's right.

JOHNSON: And then finally they were turned back to their owners about the time the steel problem came up in '52.

STOWE: Well, I don't recall the exact relationship, but that was the one in which the Government fined Lewis, I don't know, a million six, or something like that.

JOHNSON: Did you have face-to-face meetings with John L. Lewis?

STOWE: Yes.

JOHNSON: With the "beetle brows?"

STOWE: One of the most interesting things--this was some time after I was out of the White House--I got on a train in New York on the Metroliner type. I don't know what they called it in those days. I went up to the dining car early before the train left, to try to get something to eat, because it gets so crowded coming back. There was one vacant seat that the maitre de motioned me to, and I was sitting with John L. Lewis. We got to chatting and we had a most marvelous chat. He had been there and practically finished his dinner by the time I sat down. We happened to sit together when we went back to the parlour car. He was telling me about how he and his wife and his daughter used to visit Calvin Coolidge when he was the President, and that Mrs. Coolidge and John L. Lewis' daughter used to skip up and down the halls in the White House together. Then it suddenly dawned on me that I had remembered that somewhere somebody had said that Coolidge had asked him to be Secretary of Labor.

JOHNSON: Oh?

STOWE: I happened to mention something; he was fussing about certain things that were going on in the Government as of that time. I said that well it somehow reminded me of the things going on in Coolidge's day, and that was a big mistake because from then on I got a lecture all the way back to Washington on how good Coolidge was. The most interesting part about it was here was this big man, bushy eyebrows as you described him, and when he and Coolidge were having a conversation, he would be himself and then he would be Coolidge in that clipped New England accent. And as he talked the tears would roll down his face. It was an absolutely remarkable thing.

JOHNSON: And he liked Calvin Coolidge.

STOWE: Oh, yes, they were close.

JOHNSON: Isn't that something?

STOWE: It's a most unusual relationship.

JOHNSON: You have another anecdote here on John L. Lewis and the President.

STOWE: Yes. After the President had left office and was on one of his return visits to Washington, he was staying in the Mayflower Hotel, where he always stayed when he came here. Don Dawson came over and said that he had had a contact from John L. Lewis asking if he could have a few minutes with the President while he was here. Someone had suggested it; I'm not quite sure when, but Dawson was the one that had brought it to us. The President agreed, and it was arranged that John L. Lewis would come over to the Mayflower at a certain time. Apparently somebody tipped off the newspapers because about fifteen minutes before the appointed hour the corridor outside the President's room was full of cameramen and everybody else out there. Lewis came in, and he and the President went into the back bedroom and had a fifteen or twenty minute conversation. When they came out they were all smiles; somebody asked if the press could come in and the President said, "Yes, let them in." They said they would like to have pictures taken of the two men. The President said to John, "Well, it won't hurt me John, how about you?" They had their pictures taken shaking hands, and what was said in there I have no idea.

JOHNSON: Do you have any idea what year that would have been?

STOWE: I would say roughly two years after he was out of office.

JOHNSON: About '55 or so.

STOWE: Somewhere along there. I'm not sure. Dawson might know, because he made the original contact.

JOHNSON: As far as you know they were friends, or friendly from then on?

STOWE: Well, they didn't see much of each other, I'm sure, but...

JOHNSON: You were mentioning an episode involving Forrestal and atomic energy and civilian control of atomic energy. Do you want to go ahead and describe that?

STOWE: Well, there was a period of time, and I'm not sure of the exact dates in there, but apparently Forrestal, as Secretary of Defense, had been seeking from the President some control over the use of the atomic weapon. Control at that time rested completely and totally in the hands of the President. The President, as I understand it, had resisted Forrestal's idea on the grounds that it should not be there, that it should remain in the civilian President's hands and only his hands. He called me in one day and told me that Forrestal had made another request concerning the atomic weapon, and that his [Truman's] answer was still the same. Because it involved atomic energy, I guess I was selected as the messenger rather than somebody else. He told me to go over and see Forrestal and to tell him that the answer was no. He also had told me to tell only Forrestal, not anybody else. I was to deliver it personally to Forrestal.

I went over there and when I got into Forrestal's office, the Secretary of Army was in there. I was reluctant to move, until finally Forrestal said, "Look, you can go ahead; Secretary [Kenneth] Royall is Secretary of the Army and he's cleared. So I delivered the message that the President had reviewed what he requested concerning atomic weapons, and his answer was no, negative. With that, Forrestal said, "Well, I disagree with that answer, but I shouldn't argue with you about it; I will take the matter up with the President." I started to get up and as I did, he went into about a five minute tirade.

JOHNSON: Forrestal did?

STOWE: Forrestal. On why it should be in his hands; why he should have...I'm listening to it, and I couldn't get up and walk out very well; but he was really going on for quite a little period of time. So, when I got back to the White House I told the President, just as I've told it here, what happened. We both, you know, were a little perplexed at why he should have suddenly burst out about it all. It was shortly thereafter that he went out to the Naval Hospital, and was ill, and subsequently, as you recall, apparently committed suicide by jumping out the window. I recall one time, sometime later I think when we were aboard the Williamsburg, that the President and I were chatting and we both sort of wondered if that had been symptomatic, and if there was anything that could have been done at that time.

JOHNSON: Do you remember the substance of this tirade, any substance in his argument on why the military should have control? Do you recall any substance to it?

STOWE: No, I really don't. I was so shocked.

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