Oral History Interview with
Charles S. Murphy
Former staff member in the office of the legislative counsel
of the U.S. Senate, 1934-46; Administrative Assistant to the President
of the United States, 1947-50; and Special Counsel to the President, 1950-53.
Subsequent to the Truman Administration Murphy served as Under Secretary
of Agriculture, 1960-65; and chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board,
1965-68.
Washington, DC
July 24, 1963
C. T. Morrissey
[Notices and Restrictions | Interview
Transcript | Additional Murphy Oral History
Transcripts | List of Subjects Discussed]
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 It may not be published in full except by permission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 May, 1971
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri
[Top of the Page | Notices
and Restrictions | Interview Transcript
| Additional Murphy Oral History Transcripts
| List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
Charles S. Murphy
Washington, DC
July 24, 1963
C. T. Morrissey
[80]
MORRISSEY: With your permission, Mr. Murphy, I would like to ask about
some of the people that worked with you when you worked for President
Truman. Could you tell me how David Lloyd, for example, came to be a member
of the White House staff?
MURPHY: I can. In the 1948 campaign, President Truman and his immediate
staff had gone off on the campaign train. I was in Washington doing as
well as I could operating a home base to provide material for the President
to use in speeches and getting this material from various sources, and
doing the best I could to translate it into speeches or early drafts of
speeches. One of the sources we used was the Research Division of the
Democratic National Committee which had been established earlier in 1948
primarily for this purpose and at the
[81] insistence of President Truman,
who in turn had been urged to do it by Clark Clifford and me. David Lloyd
was a member of that group, the Research Division in the Democratic National
Committee. Prior to that time I had not known him. The head of that division
at that time was William L. Batt, Jr., from Philadelphia. It was about
a half a dozen people. They sent us a good many speech drafts.
In the circumstances that I was in and very badly needing help, I asked
Bill Batt to send over to work with me directly full time the best speechwriter
they had. He sent David Lloyd. That’s the way he first came and he stayed
with us throughout the campaign and after that was attached to the White
House staff. As I remember, he was appointed and carried on the payroll
of one of the departments at one time, but actually worked at the White
[82]
House from then on as long as President Truman stayed.
MORRISSEY: Why did you think that the Research Division should be established?
MURPHY: So that we would have the kind of material that the President
could use in his campaign and to help with writing speeches. They did
a very good job. This was, so far as I know, the real beginning of the
technique that has been developed more fully since then of doing a fairly
thorough research job on all the places that a candidate expects to visit,
what the local interests are, the nature of the geography, the nature
of the industry. We had in that campaign, a folder, a briefing paper on
almost every town where the President stopped, large and small, and this
technique was carried on and developed further.
[83]
In 1950 the President made a trip on a train for about ten days out to
the Grand Coulee Dam and back. The pressures were not as intense then,
of course, as they were in a political campaign; we had more time to prepare
for that and it was perhaps the best briefing job that was done. This
was not done by the Democratic National Committee at that time, because
this was not a political trip. They assigned different subject matter
fields to different staff members or different members of this Research
Division in the national committee. I don’t remember now what they were
but they broke it down trying to be as helpful as they could to the President
in the campaign, and it was a great help, and something of this kind has
been done, I think, by every presidential candidate since then.
MORRISSEY: What kind of work did David Lloyd do as
[84] a member of the White House staff?
MURPHY: Well, he did pretty much every kind of work that I did, I guess,
which was generally working on program and policy matters in a staff capacity
for the President, as distinguished from the administration of programs
which primarily was under John Steelman. John Steelman was his chief staff
assistant in connection with the administration of existing programs,
but developing new programs, legislative proposals, speeches, messages
to Congress, things of that kind, most of this staff work was coordinated
in our office and Dave Lloyd helped with this generally, as did David Bell.
MORRISSEY: How would you decide which member of your staff would be responsible
for different chores?
MURPHY: I don’t know that there was any well-defined
[85] method for doing
this. David Bell tended to get the assignments relating more directly
to the Bureau of the Budget or budgetary matters because this was his
background. Both of these men were quite able economists in fact, and
had some professional training in that field. I don’t believe, certainly
at this time, I can give you any standard views for determining which
of those two got assignments.
MORRISSEY: Could you tell me how Richard Neustadt came to be a member
of the White House staff?
MURPHY: Neustadt was in the Bureau of the Budget and worked with us a
great deal on assignment from the Bureau of the Budget. It is my recollection
that he rather badly wanted to join us on the White House staff and this
had a lot to do with it. I thought it was
[86] true then, I still do, that
if a man wants to work with you there’s a better chance of him turning
out well than if otherwise, and this did not turn out well. Dick did some
beautiful work for us, not altogether as consistently and not nearly so
rapidly as Bell and Lloyd, but some extremely fine work he did.
MORRISSEY: Was there any particular kind of work that Neustadt would
focus on?
MURPHY: He wrote the Democratic platform in 1952. He wrote the first
draft--perhaps it’s not quite accurate to say the first draft. It is traditional
for the President to make available, an incumbent President of that political
party, to make available a draft of a suggested platform as a starting
point in the convention, and Neustadt did most of the
[87] drafting on the
version that was sent from the White House to the convention in 1952.
He did an excellent job which was, to a very considerable extent, a clarification,
expression of the policies of the President at that time, and did not
involve a great deal of developing new policies.
MORRISSEY: How did it happen that he was the one to get this job?
MURPHY: Because he was--I made the assignment to him. One, because he
was available and not so pressed with work, I think, as other people;
and second, because I thought that if he had time he would do a good job
and the assignment was made a good long time in advance; he spent right
much time on it. I don’t mean to say that this is the only thing he did.
It just happens to be the one that I recall at the moment.
[88]
MORRISSEY: How did Kenneth Hechler come to be a member of the White House staff?
MURPHY: My memory is not real clear about this. I talked to him on the
telephone today, by the way. My memory is very clear about some of the
things that happened with Hechler while he was there. My memory is not
real clear as to how he first came. He was by 1950, if I remember rightly,
the man that we looked to for the type of research relating to points
to be visited by the President that had been done originally by the Research
Division of the National Committee. He did an excellent job and a most
thorough one. This involved a lot of what I suppose you might call "original
research," the kind of thing, more or less, you’re doing
now--get on the telephone, call people who lived there and talk to them,
until he knew all about the town. In 1952 President Truman did a lot of
[89]
campaigning and Hechler did the same kind of thing for him in 1952. I
just don’t remember at the moment how he first came to the White House
staff. He had been a teacher of political science at Princeton University
where he had inaugurated some novel practices, brought his classes in
a party to Washington from time to time, would call on the telephone with
a loud speaker hookup, some public official in Washington and carry on
a conversation with him for the benefit of his classes from time to time.
I don’t think he was with us in 1948. Do you happen to recall?
MORRISSEY: I think you’re right.
MURPHY: I just don’t remember.
MORRISSEY: In addition to these campaign chores, were there any other
particular chores that he would be responsible for?
[90]
MURPHY: Yes, there would have been and this would have been primarily
in the research field. We had a very considerable amount of on-going research
all the time of various kinds.
MORRISSEY: Did George Elsey work with any special kind of problems?
MURPHY: George worked with every kind of problem. He was there before
I was. When I first got there he was assistant to Clark Clifford who had
just been made Special Counsel to the President. Clifford had been Naval
Aide; George Elsey went there as a naval officer, and was still in uniform
when I first went there in 1947. He was first assigned to what they call
the Map Room, I believe, while President Roosevelt was still living. This
was a room in the White House--it was covered with maps that the President
used in keeping up with the progress of the war.
[91]
Elsey sort of, by the process of what would be osmosis, gradually shifted
over to the position of general assistant to Clark Clifford and did a
prodigious amount of work. Almost anything and everything that Clifford
was called on to do, Elsey helped with. Clifford’s work, of course, was
the same kind of work that I helped with when I first went there and as
long as I stayed there. In the 1948 campaign Elsey’s particular assignment
as you will find out more fully from him, was the whistlestops.
I remember--if this kind of thing is of interest--very shortly after
I went there the Congress completed action on a bill and sent it to the
President, having to do with portal-to-portal pay. I don’t remember the
provisions or the purposes of the bill now very clearly, although I was
quite familiar with it at the time; I had worked on the bill some on the
Hill before
[92]
I left up there. Just after I went to the White House, Congress
completed action on it and sent it down. It was the kind of bill that
presented a very close question for the President as to whether to sign
it or not, and a bill of rather considerable importance. This was my initiation
to the process of getting the comments of the various departments, the
legislative clearance operation of the Bureau of the Budget, its recommendations
to the President and how this works out. Right in the midst of this, Clifford
got sick. I asked Elsey about how this worked and almost all these comments
coming in from various departments with a recommendation to the Bureau
of the Budget, and I asked whose final recommendation was the President
likely to get, who was likely to be the man who made the final recommendation.
He thought about
[93] it for a minute and said, "If I’m not mistaken,
you’re likely to be."
This was something that took me aback very considerably, so he and I
got ourselves into an automobile at that point and went out to the hospital
to look for Clifford. We got out there and Clifford had a fairly high
fever and was not really in any condition to talk about this in a very
earnest and serious way.
I took Elsey on home with me and we spent a good part of the evening
talking about how a new fellow grappled with a thing of this kind, and
if I’ve got these two things put together right and I think I have, we
tried something then that, so far as I know, was never tried before or
since, and this is to make legislative history at this point in the legislative
process.
There were some points in the bill that
[94] were of some importance that
were not altogether clear, the language was somewhat ambiguous, so the
President signed the bill and at the same time sent to Congress a message
saying that he signed it with the understanding that it meant so-and-so.
This was an effort to establish that meaning so that the courts would
construe it that way. This construction was one that did not please all
members of Congress and all of their constituents, so this at first irritated
them and then in a short time they began trying to make countervailing
legislative history, a rebuttal, as it were. That is as far as I followed
the matter then, I think. It certainly is as far as I can follow it in
my memory now. I don’t know which way the courts decided. I may have seen
one case since then where the President did something of the same kind,
but that was, as far as I
[95] know, the first time it was ever tried.
MORRISSEY: How did Donald Hansen come to be a member of the White House
staff?
MURPHY: I think we’d go back, I believe, to Steve [Stephen J.] Spingarn.
I believe Steve Spingarn came first and Donald Hansen was, in a sense,
a replacement for him, if I remember correctly. Spingarn was an assistant
general counsel in the Treasury Department. I had known him more or less
for some years. Working on some interdepartmental committee, I don’t remember
the subject matter, I remember a meeting they had in what was then the
R.F.C. Building. Spingarn was very generous with his recommendations as
to how this matter should be handled by the President and it seemed to
me that he was so helpful that it might be a good idea to give him a chance to
[96]
do it full time. So I did arrange to get him transferred to the White
House staff where he worked for several years. He also was a prodigious
worker and developed something of a tendency toward specialization, and
one of the things that he handled was loyalty and security matters. We
had right much of that. It came to my office--sort of a miscellaneous
item that had to go somewhere and they turned it over to us.
We had a loyalty board for White House employees and presidential appointees,
as I recall, and we had a general supervisory function for the program
in the Government and how it operated, whether the President needed to
change it and so on, and some of the toughest cases just automatically
came up to the President, came up through this machinery and we had to
make recommendations to him on
[97] that. So, that was one of the jobs that
Spingarn did while he was there. The President appointed him a member
of the Federal Trade Commission and that left a vacancy and it seemed
to us that there was enough work of the kind that he tended to specialize
in to warrant getting a replacement and so we went to the Treasury Department
and looked for a good man. I don’t think I knew Don Hansen, but had had
some experience in this work and was highly recommended as an excellent man.
MORRISSEY: What were the responsibilities of Charles Irelan?
MURPHY: Charlie didn’t stay there very long. I don’t have a clear enough
concept of this in my mind to answer that very clearly. I brought Charlie
in, that I know. I do remember very well where I first knew him but it’s a
[98]
little beside the point. During the war, I was a member of the local
War Price and Rationing Board in Silver Spring and he was the chairman.
I worked with him very closely night after night and Sunday after Sunday,
and he was a fine person, very able public servant. I found him, if I
remember, several years later in the Lands Division of the Department
of Justice, and thought it would be good to have him over at the White
House and got him over there and he had not been very long there before
there was a movement generated outside, I had literally nothing to do
with it, to appoint him United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.
I don’t remember just how long he was on the White House staff. I think
probably not long enough to develop any particular field of work.
MORRISSEY: Are there any other staff members similar
[99] to the ones we’ve
already talked about that we should include in this discussion?
MURPHY: I don’t think of any. You’re going to see Dave Stowe you said.
Donald Dawson you should talk to, Marty [Martin L.] Friedman, who was
Dawson’s assistant, and Milton Kayle who nominally worked for Steelman,
I think, but worked a great deal with us directly. Some other people who
were on Steelman’s staff that you should talk to--Harold Enarson, do you
have this name? Harold Stein. I don’t know what you’ll get from Harold
Stein; you’ll get a different viewpoint though. Phil McGuire of the Steelman
staff; John Houston, who is here in Washington, I think.
MORRISSEY: Did Friedman, Dawson and Kayle work on your side of the White
House or on the Steelman side?
[100]
MURPHY: Physically, the offices were on my side, Dawson and Friedman;
I don’t remember where Kayle’s office was.
MORRISSEY: You say "physically," they worked on your side?
MURPHY: In the West Wing of the White House.
MORRISSEY: Organizationally, did they work the type of problems you were
concerned with?
MURPHY: No, organizationally, they were in between. Dawson reported mainly
directly to the President. His work was overlooked some in some particular
cases by Matt Connelly and in other cases by John Steelman. I hardly ever
interfered with it at all.
Dawson did a great deal to systematize that personnel operation in the
White House. I think he ran it very capably, and I think
[101] the record will
show quite successfully, in the sense of screening out people who should
have been screened out.
You may recall the so-called scandals in the latter part of the Truman
administration when various and sundry presidential appointees got the
Administration into trouble. I think you’ll find that almost all, and
perhaps all of those people were appointed before President Truman
became President--most of them were Roosevelt appointees. The few that
weren’t, I think, were early Truman appointees who had not been screened
through the Dawson operation. Of course, the military aides were there,
the correspondence secretary and the press secretary.
MORRISSEY: Did Mr. [William] Hassett and then later Mrs. [Joseph] Short
work under your jurisdiction?
[102]
MURPHY: No, they reported directly to the President. They cooperated rather closely.
MORRISSEY: Could you tell me something about this cooperation?
MURPHY: Well, Mr. Hassett was there long before I was, of course. His
work and the way he handled it was quite largely personalized and I did
not get very often or very much into the correspondence work that he did.
Now, the other way around, he was one of the staff members who usually
was called in to review drafts of presidential speeches and messages to
Congress. This group included, from time to time, but fairly regularly,
Hassett, the Press Secretary (Charlie Ross and later Joe Short), Steelman,
the Special Counsel and whoever he wanted to bring, and more or less,
Matt Connelly. By and large these sessions
[103] were limited to, well, I suppose
two extremes, major policy questions discussed without reference to language;
small matters as to language. Not a great deal of writing was done in
these sessions usually. That was done directly with the President by the
Special Counsel. These were sort of review sessions and carried on with
a great deal of good humor and a considerable amount of argument, which
the President would allow to go on as long as he thought it was productive;
and then he would decide.
We would have fairly long arguments about very minor points occasionally
and it, more often than not, tended to be the Special Counsel and his
people who had worked on the draft defending it against change. If someone
got a word changed, why, the President would give them credit for a great
victory, "You ought
[104] to be happy there, you got a word changed."
Bill Hassett, oh, I don’t think he undertook to make a great many changes
in this kind of thing, but his style was different; his overall reactions,
judgments were very good and very valuable.
Charlie Ross, I’d say the same thing about. Charlie made, I think, more
suggestions and contributions in terms of specific language and he had
one hobby that he rode so much that we all got to be sensitive to it and
that is, don’t use the word "presently," when you mean to say
"now." He insisted "presently" does not mean that;
it means in the near future and to this day if I see the word "presently"
used when it means "now," I flinch a little bit and a good many
people do this.
Oh, I think as we worked there longer and worked together longer there was more and
[105]
more of a tendency for these review sessions to become more
a formality and less controversial. We found out more about what the President
wanted to say, how he wanted to say it, what the problems were likely
to be with anybody else, so we were able to take care of most of the problems
before we got there and, I think, on the other side, there was growing
and developing a sense of confidence in the work that was turned out.
They didn’t feel that there was such a great need to watch it so closely.
MORRISSEY: When there were differences of opinion among members of the
White House staff about some policy being made, would these differences
be thrashed out in the presence of Mr. Truman, or would they be resolved
before they were brought to his attention?
[106]
MURPHY: Usually in his presence, and with relatively little argument
and he made the decisions himself, usually rather promptly. He just didn’t
have much argument around him and that was all. There was, I think, an
extraordinary amount of good feeling among the members of the White House
staff. Considering the nature of the work, the nature of the place, and
the possibilities for discord, there was just remarkably little. There
was some, but the nature and history of "palace politics" being
what it is, that it was not worse, I think, is a remarkable thing and
mostly due to the character of the President as a personality; he was
very gentle but very firm.
MORRISSEY: Many people have commented on the informal way the White House
operated during the Truman Presidency. Yet the issues dealt with
[107]
were varied and complex. Why were the procedures informal if the
issues were so complex?
MURPHY: Well, my more limited observation these days is, the procedures
there now are just about as informal as they were then, which is a good
thing and I’m glad this is the case. I don’t know, I never thought about
this particularly. It occurs to me that the more complex the issues, the
more likely they are to be dealt with successfully if they are dealt with
informally. Formality can foul up the simplest issue, I think, and you
see this publicly demonstrated from time to time in the United States
Senate where they spend more time frequently on parliamentary maneuvers,
parliamentary questions, than they do on substantive issues because they
get tangled up in formalities.
[108]
I think it’s necessary to get in small and informal groups ordinarily
to get to the heart of things. In Cabinet meetings, then and now, so far
as I know, not very much is done; there’s too big a crowd to do anything
except be told.
I think working with the President, any President, if the work is to
be most productive and accomplished with dispatch, you’ve got to get to
the heart of the matter, right to the bare facts. You just don’t do that
where you’ve got more than two people, and if you’ve got more than three,
you’re really handicapped. You may make it with three if you know the
third man.
The President hears the most surprising things from everybody, and you
might ponder a while as to why this is true. This is the case, not that
it’s related directly to the work, but most anybody would come in--perfect
[109]
stranger--and lay bare his innermost secrets to the President of the United
States. I don’t know why this happens, but it does. I may have told you
this before, that it seemed to me that it developed that one of my jobs
was to go to the President after everybody else had given up and see if
he would change his mind. Did we go into that?
MORRISSEY: No, we haven’t.
MURPHY: This never was written down anywhere. He was extremely tolerant
so far as I was concerned and so there were various occasions when the
staff and some department heads, including, I think, on one or two occasions,
the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who just felt that the President
ought to change his mind but they had run out of their rope so far as
they were concerned in talking to him, and so they would
[110] ask me from time
to time if I’d go back and try it one more time. I would go and occasionally
I’d persuade him to change his mind, for the time being; and he would
do what it was we thought he should do, but more often than not, when
this happened, the same thing would crop up again in maybe a different
form--maybe the same form a little bit later and we found out he really
thought what he’d thought to start with; he may have taken the action,
he may have signed the paper, but he really didn’t agree. I can’t at the
moment recall a specific example of this kind.
MORRISSEY: How did Mr. Truman envision the relationship between the President
and his Cabinet?
MURPHY: Well, he looked on them as his advisers; he did not regard the
Cabinet as a corporate body that made decisions as a Cabinet. He,
[111] of course,
looked on the members of the Cabinet as the heads of operating agencies
who had to make decisions within their fields and operating agencies and
as advisers to him on policy and matters. I did not attend Cabinet meetings
regularly. The only White House staff member who regularly attended Cabinet
meetings was--well, there were two, I guess, John Steelman and Matt Connelly.
Matt Connelly was sort of ad hoc secretary to the Cabinet, to the
extent they had one. I don’t think that President Truman regarded Cabinet
meetings as a place where decisions were made or where policies were discussed
in any depth.
MORRISSEY: What were the responsibilities of Joseph Feeney and Charles
Maylon?
MURPHY: Legislative liaison, Feeney with the Senate and Maylon with the
House of Representatives.
[112]
We did not have on the White House staff an organized legislative liaison
operation at all most of the time. The Cabinet men had some feeling that
we should have and finally these two people were appointed for this purpose,
one for the Senate side and one for the House side. They did not do a
comprehensive job.
I think the prevailing theory in the Truman administration was that the
best way to handle legislative matters usually was to let the departments
and agencies that had the expertness, the responsibility, the information,
to work with the Congress. I think this was reasonably successful. I think,
basically, it’s probably still right. Now there was some legislation,
some very important legislation, that did not fall within the normal jurisdiction
of any agency or department and some other arrangements had to be made.
[113]
One that I remember was passed before I went to the White House but I
saw something of it at the other end of the Avenue, was the Atomic Energy
Act of 1946. Now this was handled for the Administration in the White
House, the OCDM, OWMR- -Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, I
guess it was in those days, and at that time, either Fred Vinson or John
Snyder probably was the head of the office. There continued to be some
legislation that had to be handled primarily from the White House, but
usually, it would fall normally into the field of a department and when
it was not clear that it fell in the field of some department we would
undertake to assign it to some department and this has worked quite well.
It was my experience that when the White House had to get into legislative
matters and working with the Congress, lobbying with
[114] members of Congress,
the best, quickest and most effective way to do this was to get the President
to do it personally.
I understand that this Administration has quite an effective legislative
liaison operation in the White House. It involves some several staff members.
We did not have that kind of thing. President Truman was very good about
this. He did quite a lot of it and quite a lot of it at my request or
on my recommendation. If we needed a particular call made to the Hill,
why, I could typically go in and get him to do this and get the whole
transaction completed within three or four, not more than five minutes.
He was awfully quick; he had tremendous background--almost everything
that was going on. You didn’t have to start way back and bring him up.
You just had to give him the latest word ordinarily,
[115] the latest information,
and the President, when he tries to call someone on the phone, usually
has no trouble reaching them in a hurry if it’s at all possible, so this
happened quite frequently.
MORRISSEY: Did Les Biffle have any involvement in liaison between the
Hill and the White House?
MURPHY: Some and I would say occasionally quite important, but not on
any regular basis. Usually, if at all, I’d say on a rather personal basis.
The President would ask him to help with something where he might help...but
President Truman handled these matters with Congress pretty much on the
merits, the theory was that the best way to get something done was to
get it done on the merits. I don’t mean to say he was not aware of political
considerations because he was and understood
[116] them, but they never were
overriding. He just flatly refused to do anything for political reasons
that he didn’t think ought to be done anyway. We learned that one way
to make him skittish of a proposition was to put it up to him on a political
basis. He’d be suspicious right away. This was not the best way to get
him to agree to anything, which I expect would surprise a good many people.
If you wanted to get him to agree with you about a matter down there,
you subordinated the political angles.
MORRISSEY: Would members of the press come in search of news to White
House staff members?
MURPHY: Yes, they would; they would continue this to the extent that
they found that they were getting anywhere. But they would, pretty soon,
learn they might as well leave some White House
[117] staff members alone and
this included me. The general rule was that they were supposed to get
their news through the Press Secretary and this was followed, I would
say, rather uniformly in the Truman administration. There was not much
news, other than that, from the White House staff.
MORRISSEY: Could you comment on the ways in which your procedures as
Special Counsel were similar to the procedures of your predecessor and
also in what ways were they different?
MURPHY: Well, they were generally quite similar, I would say. The principal
difference that occurs to me offhand is that I undertook to get and use
more staff. Clifford had only one assistant who was tagged directly as
his assistant. That was George Elsey. I was, to a considerable extent,
Clifford’s assistant;
[118] this was by mutual consent. When I first went there
I asked the President if I was to report directly to him and he said,
"Yes." This was my charter from then on, but I had the background
in legislation so the work in the legislative field tended to drift to
me--working with Clifford and a considerable extent under his supervision,
although I always had this charter to go to the President anytime I wanted
to. I enjoyed working with Clifford; it was a very pleasant relationship
so far as I was concerned. Then when he left I continued to be personally
involved in this same legislative part of the work because that was my
background and interest. I had very definitely the feeling that the work
at the White House was important enough to justify getting all the help
I could, provided they were good enough to be really helpful.
I had a rule of thumb that I didn’t want
[119] an assistant unless he was smarter
than I was or else he wouldn’t do any good, but when I got a chance at
one who seemed to me to be smarter than I was, I did the best I could
to get him in. I did right well, I think. This policy, if it was a policy,
of recruiting personnel never was fully recognized or endorsed by anyone
else. They just sort of let me do it a man at a time. That’s the principal
difference that occurs to me. I had more people to help me--although Clifford
did rely a great deal on George Elsey.
I think I had something more of a tendency to organize things in channels--to
establish channels, regularize them with the Bureau of the Budget and
the departments. My recollection is that it was after Clifford left that
we established the procedure for having the Bureau of the Budget ask each
of the departments and
[120] agencies in the fall to send in their recommendations
for the State of the Union message, the Economic Report, and the Budget
message. Before that, the White House, I think, had requested directly,
material for the State of the Union message and had forgotten the others.
We set up, in a little staff there, a fairly regularized procedure for
coordinating the Budget message, the State of the Union message, and the
Economic Report. I would have been in that Economic Report thing, I expect,
from the beginning. That law was passed in 1946 and probably the first
report was in 1947. I don’t remember working on it with Clifford.
I do remember some of the sessions with the Council of Economic Advisers
after Clifford left. My version of this is this--and it’s substantially
true, as a matter of
[121] fact. The chairman of the Council in those early
days was Dr. Edwin Nourse, who was, even then, a rather elderly gentleman
and a very distinguished economist with a distinguished record. He was
appointed largely at the recommendation of Charlie Ross.
Some of us on the White House staff thought that we had a special responsibility
for helping the President with any communication that went to Congress
over his name. This relationship between the White House staff and the
Council of Economic Advisers and the President had to evolve and it centered
around the writing of this, what we called the President’s part of the
Economic Report, the part that was covered with his signature.
Dr. Nourse was a little jealous, or at any rate, not very enthusiastic
about having us participate in this work. As a consequence, there was
right much tension back and forth
[122] when we’d sit down to work on a draft.
We found out, after about the second or third time around, how we could
get this done. We’d wait until the last day, we’d be in no hurry about
getting started, then we’d start it maybe in the afternoon and we’d just
sort of coast and we found out along about midnight that Dr. Nourse would
begin to agree to anything. So we’d do most of the work after midnight.
Leon Keyserling, was then a member of the Council of Economic Advisers
and our views tended to coincide more with Leon’s than they did with those
of Dr. Nourse. The third member of the Council was Dr. John Clark, a very
fine, very able man, as a matter of fact, who had none of this feeling
of resentment of wanting to keep us out. I think he rather enjoyed the
whole business. We had very interesting experiences that way, then later
before we left there, Leon Keyserling got
[123] to be chairman of the Council.
We never had any substantial policy differences with him. Leon, I think,
is one of the ablest people I ever saw and has a better concept of the
big picture, the meaning of economics, the place of economics in national
politics, better than anybody. But Leon has, oh, I suppose, turgid is
the word for his prose. He was very amenable to changes but it took a
lot of changes in his language, and so while this was a somewhat laborious
process after Dr. Nourse left, it never generated the sort of tensions
that we had with Dr. Nourse. Oh, I don’t know, there’s a very definite,
distinct difference between Clifford and me so far as personality is concerned.
He is one of the most impressive people when he undertakes to be I ever
saw in my life. He is pretty much--was then and I’m sure still is--in
a small group, just pretty much overwhelming,
[124] in a perfectly nice way--most
impressive. That’s about all that occurs to me.
MORRISSEY: I think we’re running out of time and running out of tape,
too, so this would be a good place to stop.
[Top of the Page | Notices
and Restrictions | Interview Transcript
| Additional Murphy Oral History Transcripts
| List of Subjects Discussed]
|
