Truman Library - Robert G. Nixon Oral History Interview, October 22, 1970

News correspondent with the International News Service, 1930-58; served as editor of the service for a time. He first came to Washington, D.C., in 1938 where he served as their State Department and foreign relations correspondent. He was a war correspondent, attached to the British army in France and Belgium, 1940, during invasion of the low countries; evacuated from Dunkirk but later returned to France; evacuated with remnants of the British army from Brest, June 20, 1940; covered London Blitz, 1940-41; war correspondent, attached to United States forces in European theater of operations, 1942-1943; correspondent in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, and Mediterranean theater, participating in North African invasion and campaign. Covered Casablanca conference, 1943; Quebec conference, 1944; and Potsdam, 1945. Washington correspondent covering the White House beginning in 1944.

Bethesda, Maryland
October 22, 1970
By Jerry N. Hess

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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

HESS: Mr. Truman told you, on board the Augusta, some of the impressions that he had of Stalin, Churchill, and Attlee. Could you comment on that?

NIXON: Several years later, when we were on the campaign trail in 1948 in Washington State, we were going down through Washington and Oregon and on into California. At a place called Klamath Falls, right on the state border, Truman made the astonishing statement: "I like old Joe." He sure didn't like him much when we left Potsdam because of the feeling of frustration that he had as a result of Stalin's refusal to go along on anything.

To show you how pushy the Russians were, Truman told me that Stalin had demanded a base on the North African coast. He also wanted the Turks to give him free passage through the Dardanelles. This would have enabled the Russians

to threaten the British lifeline through the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, and the Red Sea.

This would have also enabled the Russians to become a dominant sea power in the Mediterranean. It would have given them access to the Atlantic through Gibraltar and the Indian Ocean through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Truman said that he didn't blame Stalin because it didn't do any harm to ask for something if the other fellow was foolish enough to give it to you. But, it showed how pushy they were. Despite the fact that they weren't given any such concessions, they have their warships in the Mediterranean constantly shadowing our Sixth Fleet.

HESS: You also mentioned yesterday that there was an episode involving some airplanes and a little

NIXON: One of the most astonishing things during the Potsdam Conference was the black market operations that were going on. Members of the President's party who had free access to scarce supplies such as food, cigarettes, watches, etc. were lining their pockets in these black market operations.

To supply the President's villa and party, there was an air ferry working from Antwerp. The Augusta and its accompanying destroyer were in Antwerp, and their larders were filled with everything imaginable. Some of the lesser members in the President's party (the cooks and chief bottle washers or some of the clerical staff) were having these planes brought in just loaded down with all sorts of things, but especially cigarettes.

Cigarettes became money. A carton of American cigarettes, ten packs, was a hundred dollars. One or two cigarettes were a lavish

tip to any German who waited on you. This black market operated mainly in the large square adjacent to the bombed-out Kaiserhoff Hotel and immediately in front of the main entrance to the Reich Chancellery. A pound of coffee brought $1,000. That's the way things were going. The Germans starving to death.

They not only brought in this stuff from the Augusta, but they had some of our other Air Force planes flying into Switzerland and coming back loaded with cheap Swiss watches to sell on the black market. I had a wrist watch of my own, a solid gold Lord Elgin. One of the members of the party tried to buy it from me in order to sell it on the black market. I wouldn't even have thought of selling it to him because this had been a gift from my wife. But that's the way it was going.

Even some of the Secret Service men, who notoriously were poorly paid, were doing it.

I think this may have been one of the things that contributed to the downfall of George Drescher.

NIXON: That's right. He had been one of the Secret Service men detailed to watch and protect Truman when Truman was Vice President.

Mike Reilly, who had been the chief of the White House Secret Service detail for many years was well-liked by Roosevelt. Mike was displaced, and in his stead George Drescher was made chief of the White House detail for a few months.

HESS: I heard that Mike Reilly did not get along with the man who was in charge of the Secret Service at that time. Is that correct?

NIXON: He was a short, bald man. I just don't remember his name at the moment. For some reason, he had it in for Mike and had been trying to find an excuse to remove Mike from the detail. As I said, Mike, a fine looking, smiling, Irish-American, was very well-liked by Roosevelt. So, the head of the Secret Service at that time, couldn't get to first base. Almost immediately after Roosevelt died, this man fired Mike. He should have simply transferred Mike to some other post out in the boondocks, but he fired Mike, which was unfair. Mike later got a protection job in Denver with the wartime plants.

I think he knocked from pillar to post. I seem to recall that he also was on the security force of one of the presidential candidates. It must have been for Dewey.

HESS: Did you ever hear the Secret Service men discuss the added difficulty they must have had of covering Mr. Truman because he was mobile and Roosevelt had not been?

NIXON: Oh, yes. It made their task a great deal more difficult. Just a few days after Truman became President he, without any notice to anybody, suddenly walked to the front door of the White House (he was a very rapid walker), went bouncing down the stairs, down the driveway and out through the gate. The astonished Secret Service did a double take. They finally got into motion. They couldn't realize that this was happening. He took them completely by surprise.

was Truman by that time out on Pennsylvania Avenue walking down the street just as briskly as could be towards Fifteenth Street. It turned out that he had decided that he needed a little pocket money, and he was going to his bank to get it. So, it made quite a difference. People were turning around, staring at this man walking briskly down the street. They remarked, "You know, that looks like President Truman." Which it was, but they wouldn't believe their eyes.

A President doesn't walk around by himself, though he'd like to. Truman had to be given a little talking to by the Secret Service chief to remind him that he had lost some of his freedom of movement. When he went anywhere he no longer could go alone, except to go to the bathroom.

When he finally went home to Missouri in January '53, he came into Kansas City, I went with him up to his office in the Federal Office Building. He was still under Secret Service protection, though it had certainly diminished. My recollection is that only one Secret Service man had come with us on the train out from Washington. We got off the elevator and walked briskly down the hall to the door of his new offices. The Secret Service man started to open the door for the President, and Mr. Truman said, "Wait a minute. Please let me open my own door. It's the first time in eight years that I will have been able to do so without somebody just doing it for me." That illustrates his impatience with all the

Secret Service protection. It was necessary. It had to be done, but these were impediments to his freedom of movement.

Not long afterwards, he was back in Washington. George Meaney of the AFL-CIO had invited him to come over to a luncheon meeting they were holding at the Washington Hotel. I was with the President that day in his suite in the Mayflower Hotel; and he invited me to go over with him. I drove over with him in a large limousine. As we passed the White House, the President pointed with his hand out the window and said, "I used to live there." He got a. chuckle from everyone who was in the car.

Harry Vaughan was always with us. He always was on hand when the former President came back to town, acting as his aide. They were close friends. There were one or two others, friends of the President that I couldn't

There was one other thing that I thought I might touch on because it has to do with the Potsdam Conference an a way. You had asked me about these card games. I had rarely played poker. I had played a few games with President Roosevelt in the White House when he was kind enough to invite me in. Every now and then he would get chummy with a few of us. Frankly, I didn't know much about playing poker. It's a game that requires a lot of knowledge. The only thing I had ever played was real poker--five card stud, five card draw, draw limited to four cards. In other words, nothing wild whatsoever. When the President began inviting me to these evening sessions of poker with members of his staff, such as Ross and Harry Vaughan, I found we were playing something that bore no resemblance to poker, as far as I had known the

The President loved wild games. He knew some of the wildest games that I have ever heard of. I don't think you could find them any wilder. Some I even forgot because they were too complicated. There was one that I'll never forget. It was a seven card game called "seven card, low hole card wild, high low." In seven cards, your first two cards are dealt down. The third card is dealt up. The others are dealt face up, but the last card is your low hole card. All other cards in your hand of seven cards that match this low hole card, are like it, wild. In other words, they are anything. If you have a pair of duces as low hold cards, nothing can undercut you. You are a very lucky man on that hand. If you have a pair of treys or a pair of anything else, and you have matching cards up, you may think that you

have three or four wild cards, but the last card that's dealt down can turn out to be a duce, undercutting the treys, and you're dead. Your hand is worthless. The same way if you have two tens in the hole or two nines, or two jacks, or anything of that sort.

This pot is split, but you can win both ends of it. You can win the high and the low. The low is a broken straight called a seven, and these are the numbers of the cards: seven, five, four, three, two. A six, five, four, three, two is not a low hand because it's a straight. But the next lowest hand is seven, six, four, three, two.

This is really an incredible game. I really felt sorry for one of the people playing because he was proud of an ace high straight. An ace high straight in that game is no better than a pair. What you have to have to win any

hand is five aces and a locked low. Many times you have to split the locked low with somebody else. I have lost hands with five kings and a seven, six low. That shows you how hazardous this game is and what you must know about it.

The only limit on these games on that particular trip was that you couldn't go beyond three raises. But by that time if competition was hot and heavy, the money was piled out there on the table in a very high mound. We were playing with the usual red, white, and blue chips: whites, ten dollars; reds, twenty; blues, fifty. So, you can see what kind of game this was. I wound up the trip over six hundred dollars in the hole.

NIXON: I felt relieved that it wasn't more. This was a lot of money to me. When I got back to

Washington, I told my bureau chief about it. I said, "What are you going to do about it?"

So, that's all I ever got. They wouldn't back me up. Oddly enough, to show you the kind of people I worked for, compared to those that others worked for, sometime later the President invited me down on the Williamsburg one evening for a poker game as usual. Steve Early was there and George E. Allen. Allen was well-known around Washington. He was an acquaintance of Roosevelt's and Truman's and a very close friend of Eisenhower's.

and Charlie Ross were there. At one point in the game, the deal was on Joe Short's left. This was five card stud, nothing wild. Joe had one card down. The rest of the cards were up. Joe Short had an ace showing, so he bet the limit. Several of us had decent cards, so we stayed. Then it got down to Truman who was sitting next to Joe Short. Truman had some low card showing, a three or a four, and he raised.

The assumption was that either he had a small pair or an ace in the hole, and he was trying to find out real quickly what was going on and to bump Joe Short out. Joe Short immediately raised back. Some of us took to the woods--maybe one or two remained and ultimately folded. When no pairs showed, because Joe was raising back every time and Truman would raise back, it seemed to become obvious that Joe had aces back to back. What could Truman have? Either an ace in the hole, which meant nothing if Short

had a pair of aces, except a chance. If you have an ace in the hole, you can always get another ace. As it turned out, Truman did have an ace in the hole, and he figured that Joe was bluffing. There are only four aces you know, and it was unlikely that he would have had aces back to back. This kept going on until the fifth card was dealt. When the fifth card was dealt, Short still had showing an ace high hand, that's all he had, not a pair showing. The highest card that Truman had was a five. On the final card, hammer and tongs, they went after each other. Short had the ace showing, so it was his bet, he bet the limit. Truman bucked him and raised. Short raised back. They went through three raises. Truman had showing a small straight, which he hadn't filled until the last card was dealt. He smiled and flipped over his hole card which was an ace.

Now he had sat there and taken all the punishment of raising and re-raising, but he had done the absolute impossibility in cards. He had filled an inside straight. He won the pot, which by that time was enormous. Joe told me afterwards that he had lost over six hundred dollars in that one hand. He went to his boss, Patterson, at the Baltimore Sun, and they paid his losses, unlike my genteel people.

At Key West things were different. At Key West the President played cards with the members of his staff--not any outsiders. There they played what was called "poverty poker." It's a way of limiting the game so that nobody would really get hurt. Not all of the members of the staff played cards, but there was a little group that always played together. Charlie Ross loved the game. Harry Vaughan played for so many years that I used to feel that he could see through the

backs of cards. He was a very astute player. Incidentally, one day he referred to that poor fellow who had been so proud of that ace high straight in that wild seven card game. He said, "Bob, that's the stupidest poker player I ever saw in my life."

And I said, "Well, General, thanks for not saying that I am, because I thought that's what you were going to say."

NIXON: Yes, but I don't want to mention his name. It really isn't cricket as they say. He was a friend of mine.

with the President at his invitation on his staff would put up $100 each at the beginning. If anyone in the game got down to where he had lost the $100 (and that's very easy in poker), then he would draw from the pot without limit. In other words, he could keep on playing on the other players' money. Those things sometimes have a way of evening out. This was really not a gambling game, but just a game to pass the time. As I've said before, the President loved cards. It was really about his only means of relaxation--that and walking. Never did anything else. He never wanted anybody to get hurt in a poker game. The way he played, like his filling an inside straight against a pair of aces back to back, in five card stud, was just incredible. It just showed that he loved the game and never seemed to care whether he won or lost. The use of chips, meaning money in a poker

game, is what makes it a game. Without the chance it is not a game. In a sense, it is quite unlike bridge. You can play bridge for the fun of the game and skill involved to a much greater extent than you can poker.

These games down at Key West were just the way of passing the time for the President in the evenings. It gave him relaxation, getting his mind off of the world. There was nothing venal about them. Key West was right there by the Gulf Stream. You can look out and see this deep blue ocean river going by. It was a great place for fishing--sailfish, tarpon, the big game fish and the lord knows everything else, dolphin, what not.

HESS: Mr. Truman went fishing once or twice. Do you think that he liked to fish?

NIXON: He had absolutely no use for fishing in this paradise of fishermen. He couldn't care less.

He just did not care for fishing. At the invitation of the Navy (and we were on a submarine base you remember), he went, out one day. They had sort of a fishing contest among the members of his staff. Truman didn't even dip a line in. He sat under the awning to get out of the sun which will burn you to a crisp if you don't watch out. He was very glad to get back on land. That's the only time that I've ever known that he even went out on anything of that sort. He did so really only out of the kindness of his heart to please the commandant of the sub base.

NIXON: We weren't on the cabin cruiser that the President was on. We were on one that went along with him and was nearby. Our group had some sort of prize for whoever caught the largest fish.

HESS: Do you recall if that was the time that there was a prize for the heaviest fish, and they filled one full of buckshot? Do you recall that?

NIXON: No, I wish I did remember it, but I don't. I remember that day the only thing that I caught was one of those deadly barracudas which can cut you in two with just one swipe of its razor edged mouth. The waters are filled with them down there. Anybody who goes in swimming in those waters had ought to have their head examined.

HESS: Mr. Nixon, I believe in September of 1945, Mr. Truman went to the American Legion Fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, and spent a little bit of time in the Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee area. What do you recall of that?

about the trip to Potsdam. As it turned out it really proved to be expensive to me. What with the poker losses, and some other expenditures that I couldn't deal with, I was out over $1,000 at the end of the trip, in the course of about a month's time. That was about an eighth of my income at the time. I couldn't make it up on an expense account. There again, I was trapped, because we went to and from an American warship. The only thing that I could show was a $1.50 a day mess fee in the officer's ward room. In Potsdam we were eating at the Army mess. There again a $1.25 or a $1.50 a day and that was it. And our quarters were provided by the American Government. This villa had been requisitioned.

who had been aboard the Augusta. We took them aboard the train to take them up to Washington. They were assigned to the Naval Air Station down here at Chesapeake Bay. They were nice guys, and so I bought them dinner and drinks. We were all sort of glad and happy to be back. So that just added a little--another hundred dollars to the burden. It was all well worthwhile. So, I really had no complaints, except that I thought that my organization should have backed me up. They damn well knew that if the President of the United States invites you to his cabin for whatever purpose it might be, you go. You don't plead headaches and decline to go. The President has every right to take offense, and that's the last you will see of him. At the same time, if your competition is there, and you aren't there, you're going to have your editors looking down your throat and saying, "How come," a little later.

You were asking about Caruthersville. Every year Truman had gone to this American Legion, sort of country fair in the little town of Caruthersville, Missouri, which is located in the boot heel of Missouri, which dips down into the extreme northeast tip of Arkansas.

John Snyder was an Arkansas banker and longtime friend of the President's. He was one of those who pursued Reserve officer interests with Truman after the First World War. He was to be appointed Secretary of Treasury by Truman after Fred Vinson was made Chief Justice. Snyder had taken the job that Vinson had vacated at OWMR. His home was not far from Caruthersville in the town of Jonesboro. Les Biffle, who was Secretary of the Senate for

many years, and a close friend of the President's, was also along on this trip. This was also his home area. As a matter of fact, we stopped in Blythesville. I think we flew into Blythesville from Washington.

The primary reason for this trip was for the President to make a speech dedicating one of the new dams in the Tennessee Valley Authority, down toward the lower reaches of the Tennessee River. So, this gave him the opportunity to carry out his annual performance at the American Legion Fair. He could pay a little tribute to his friends John Snyder and Les Biffle, native Arkansans. It gave him an opportunity to get a little rest before he went on to make his speech.

A man named Lew Barringer was a Memphis cotton broker who had a summer fishing cabin at a place alongside the Mississippi River called Reelfoot Lake. Truman was invited to go to Reelfoot Lake which is really a dreadful place. I think of lakes

as being like the clear, beautiful lakes of our Rockies or of Switzerland. This was just a mud bog. The Mississippi River changed channels quite frequently. This was what happened to form Reelfoot Lake. The river channel changed. There was this slew left that filled up with water. It was rather large and extensive. You could practically hold the water in your hand, it was so thick with mud. It's a yellow, muddy lake filled with the stumps of trees sticking out of the water. But it was a little fishing paradise for that part of southwestern Tennessee. It was near the little town of Tiptonville, which is right on the Mississippi.

The President didn't go there to fish. [I might add that the fish were mainly catfish, perch, and brim which you would expect to find in muddy waters.) He just went there to relax for a few days before we flew on up to make this speech dedicating the dam.

To anyone who had just come from Washington, this country fair was really something to see. It was what you would expect an old time country fair to be. They had the usual small, red clay horse racing track, the fiddlers, and other entertainers. I remember one of the entertainers regaled the President with a recitation about Missouri's great heroes: the James brothers. And he wasn't kidding.

There was a midway carnival. There was a horse race with horses of questionable speed and origin.

It was really amazing to see the President of the United States, not campaigning. Now, when you campaign, you have to put up with a lot

of things, and you do so deliberately. But, this wasn't campaign time, this was just the President out enjoying himself.

NIXON: Oh, yes. He thought everything was just hunky-dory. He liked it and sat there with a lot of attention and pleasure in his face. He chatted with John Snyder, Les Biffle, and the others.

We left there and motored over to Tiptonville to the fishing cottage. Reelfoot Lake is really in quite a remote area. We were not too well oriented as to communications to send our stories into Washington (or wherever they went). In my case I sent them direct to Chicago to what was then our central bureau, intermediate between New York and San Francisco. We had been there just a short time, a day or two or

three, when Charlie Ross told us the President wanted us to come over that evening and visit with him, which we were delighted to do. Incidentally, there was no press conference, no news. This was just a social visit. The President had some fine twenty year old Jack Daniels sour mash bourbon, and he wanted us to have a little highball with him and sit around and talk. Well, Charlie Ross' idea that there would be no press conference just didn't work out.

Just a short while after they got there, an eager beaver, started pressing the President with questions. The atomic bomb was a red hot subject. This wasn't long after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He asked the President if we would give the British the secret of the atomic bomb. The President, with his penchant for simple, direct, ten word sentences, snapped out: "Not on your life, by no means. This

In the first place the President didn't know what he was talking about. Except that here was a decision: "No, we will not give the British the atomic bomb secret." The British already had the atomic bomb secret. It was their scientists under Churchill who had begun to develop the possibility of splitting the atom.

Later I said, "Charlie, this is off-the-record isn't it? You set the rules before we came over here that the President was asking us over for a social visit. So, how about it?"

And Charlie said, "Oh, yes, this isn't a press conference, it's off-the-record."

The social aspect had gone with the wind. Here we were with a big story at good old Reelfoot Lake. We might as well have been on the moon. Some forty or fifty miles away there was a little telegraph station in a small track side railroad station.

The Western Union representative, who for years had gone along with us on these trips, was either ill or on vacation. In his stead, they had sent along a quite inexperienced Western Union man, who really didn't know how to perform the functions.

I wanted to simply go to a telephone and dictate a story. But there is an unwritten rule in this business. You do have to live with these people that you work with. If they want to go to a Western Union wire connection, you sometimes get outvoted. You have to do it the way that they do instead of barreling off to

a telephone. At Reelfoot Lake, there just wasn't that many telephones. There were one or two in that whole area, and that was it.

It was decided that we would get into cars and go up to this small railroad siding town, some forty or fifty miles away, driving in the middle of the night over rutty clay roads. When we finally got there, we set up our typewriters and began writing this story. It was beginning to get pretty late at night. Final editions begin going in around midnight. There were several Western Union telegraph operators, clicking their instruments.

Despite my concentration on writing the story, I soon became aware that nothing was happening. The operators were sitting there, clicking their keys, but they weren't sending a line. You can tell by the sound of a telegraph instrument sending Morse code. You don't have

to read the code itself. You could tell by the sound that they were just clicking their instruments for effect.

I got a hold of a Western Union man and said, "What in the name of heaven is going on? Why aren't you sending my story?"

At first he assured me that they were. I said, "Now, just don't give me that stuff. You are not sending a story. I've heard these telegraph instruments for so many years that I know exactly what's going on." Then he confessed that they had not been able to set up any wires, but they were trying to. This was a rather remote place remember. There was only one telegraph wire in there. It was a one-man station that would occasionally send one or two brief messages on the wire.

I waited a few minutes longer, still writing the story, and the lines didn't come up. Finally

I threw up my hands and went to a telephone and dictated the story into my Chicago office. But by that time, the whole night was shot, and this story didn't make many papers the following morning, but it did in the afternoon.

I've gotten a little ahead of myself. When Charlie was overruled by the President back at the lodge we simply dashed out of the living room of this lodge. As I went through the front door, I heard the President say in some surprise, "Aren't you boys going to stay and have a drink with me?"

NIXON: He didn't know the trouble he had caused. He was a new President, but it was just one of those things in the handling of the press that he wasn't always conscious of. Had he agreed with Charlie Ross that these remarks of his

HESS: This brings up a rather lengthy and detailed subject. Presidential press contacts have changed remarkably over the years. Back in the days of Coolidge, for instance, when he let a few press people into the White House he required that each of the questions be put to him (and only a few could be put) in written form. Then when these men would come into his office, he would arbitrarily decide which of these questions submitted ahead of time he was going to answer and the others went into the wastebasket. Now that's the way that he handled the press.

I understand that Hoover didn't hold a press conference for the last year or more that he was in the White House, during that dreadful economic

When Roosevelt came in in early 1933, he discovered that the Nation's press was a very valuable asset. Something that he could make use of. The country had to be informed day by day of the steps that were being taken to, get this country out of virtual national bankruptcy.

So, Roosevelt immediately began having two press conferences a week. Roosevelt opened up an entirely new thing for the newspaper business and for the country. He had warm, friendly press relations.

I remember later during the war, being invited (with some other top Washington columnists and bureau chiefs), to a private session, in his study. (It was outside of this room where Truman later had the famous balcony built so it looked out on the south side of the White House and across to the Washington Monument.)

This particular private session concerned the conduct of the war. We were permitted to use some of the materials as coming not from the President, but from a so-called high source in Government.

We would jam into the lobby of the West Wing half an hour or hour before we were permitted to go into the press conference. We formed a line, and some beat on the door. This would be the door to the so-called Fish Room. It was called that because Roosevelt had kept a large container of goldfish there. The conferences were very informal. You just went in there and stood. Sometimes so many people jammed up in there that it was difficult to write.

NIXON: Yes, we did. We had special priorities in several senses. We were there everyday, all day. So when a press conference was called, we were the first there in line. When we got in the President's office, we had the privilege of standing at the outer edge of the President's desk. There were a couple of others who were given special privileges in deference to their being somewhat elderly.

NIXON: One was named Earl Godman, who worked for one of the Washington papers. The President would let them sit down in chairs alongside the right hand side of his desk where a caller would normally sit. The President would be sitting in his chair with that big wonderful smile,

usually smoking a cigarette in an ivory cigarette holder usually in his shirt sleeves. Sometimes in the summer he would wear a blue and white striped searsucker suit and almost invariably wore a bow tie.

For some thirty minutes or thereabouts, the ball would be batted back and forth just like in a ping pong game. We would ask the questions, and he would answer them as he saw fit. Occasionally, he had some announcement that he wanted to make which at the outset he would read to us. There was a pretty free exchange. There was no hesitancy about asking questions, regardless of their nature. There were no holds or bars put upon them. We were representing the free press. We were given all of the freedom in the world.

The President was making use of us. We were his means of reaching the country, and if

possible, looking pretty good to the country. Throughout his years in the White House we were not permitted to quote him directly. We could say that President Roosevelt today did such and such. You would go on and say the President in explaining this said, thus and so. But the thus and so was a paraphrase, never a direct quote. That put the burden upon each correspondent to be highly accurate.

The President always had his own stenographic record of the conference. These sessions were invariably held in the President's Oval Office. Occasionally if there was a brief quote, some phrase that sort of rang, we would ask permission to use that sentence in a direct quote. Many times we would be permitted to do so.

a highly educated man from one of our families of high culture. He had a remarkably brilliant mind. He didn't need a press secretary. He was his own press secretary. Just like he was his own Secretary of State. His gifts were remarkable.

He and Churchill dominated the world scene for years. Both were men of remarkable intellectual talent. I've never like to compare them to say Churchill had the greatest gift of the use of the English language, but Roosevelt's was quite brilliant. He was a phrase coiner, perhaps not as well as Churchill, but men are molded by their times.

When Roosevelt didn't want to answer the question, he just didn't answer it. He would change the subject and go on to something else. If the correspondent insisted on pressing him for an answer, he would become annoyed and make some remark to the correspondent to the effect

NIXON: No, that pretty well covers it. The relationships were warm and friendly and constant. He was real news all the time.

HESS: When Mr. Truman came in he cut the number of press conferences down from two a week to one a week. Did you have a feeling at this time that he was trying to model his press conferences after the way that they had been held by Mr. Roosevelt?

NIXON: At first, and for a long while, he continued his news conferences on exactly the same basis that Roosevelt had. They were held in the Oval Office with correspondents standing up before his desk. This was the form of his first press

conference, and so it continued for a long while. He was trying to do everything exactly like Roosevelt had done it. He was so inexperienced. The only thing he knew to do at that time was exactly what Steve Early told him. He did cut down the number of press conferences from twice a week to once a week.

NIXON: Oh, it didn't make the slightest difference to me really. As a matter of fact, in a sense, it reduced the agony. Unless you've got something to say, why hold a press conference.

Roosevelt always had something to say. He was a news maker by his very actions. The two news conferences a week could be fairly barren. I really had no feeling one way or another about it being cut to one, simply because one a week seemed adequate.

Charlie Ross came in, and this was just a little before we went out to San Francisco to the UN Conference. (Charlie had been out there covering the early formation meetings of the U.N.) Charlie was a jewel. He was easy as an old shoe in his mannerisms. He was as helpful as a Press Secretary can be. He was friendly and warm. He was really a fine man. He was good for Truman. He had the sense to let Truman be himself. He never tried to push the President around. He never tried to manage the President or to manufacture the news. He let the President be himself. If the President got himself in trouble, Charlie was never particularly upset and didn't go around oh my Godding. He was an excellent Secretary, a fine colleague, and a very fine person. I had not known him until he came to the White House, but I soon got to know him very well, and liked him very much,

In those days, the Truman administration was new. All of these postwar adjustments had to be handled with rapidity. For a new President, totally unfamiliar with what had been going on, he didn't do too badly really, despite the many, many mistakes that he made and despite some of the people that he had known in private life who surrounded him in the radiance of the power of a President. Many of these people tried to represent themselves as the special emissary of the President, and tried to use White House influence to line their own pockets. Much of which sooner or later embarrassed the President very much and made him look very bad.

I remember one time after one of these unfortunate happenings had taken place, Truman said to me: "Bob, save me from my friends. I can take care of my enemies."

NIXON: No, I don't. This is just one of those things that you remember were said. It may have had to do with the so-called mink coat scandal, if it was a scandal. It was really highly exaggerated by Republicans who were trying to get a Republican President back into the White House.

HESS: How skillful was Mr. Truman in fielding questions that would come up at the press conferences?

NIXON: Oh, he was quite good. What a President has to go through is something that most people have no concept of. Before a press conference is held, there are staff conferences which include the Press Secretary and all of those on the President's staff: the Rosenmans, the

Cliffords, the Elseys, all of the so-called anonymous assistants. All of the Government departments and agencies will have been combed ahead of time to see if they had suggestions of things for the President to announce. The President needs background on what has been going on in various Government agencies. The questions that come to a President at a press conference pretty well cover the waterfront. Many of them can be quite obscure.

I recall that one day in the latter part of Roosevelt's term, a woman correspondent representing some small journal that dealt with fishing in the New England area, said to President Roosevelt, "Mr. President, what do you think of fish?"

She apparently was a newcomer to the conference. This woman seemed to be overwhelmed by being in the presence of a President. She just

Some of the people who attended those conferences, represented smaller media with special interests, like this poor lady who was concerned about fish. Even the Press Association men occasionally had to ask regional questions because news wires, go to newspapers all over the country and all over the world. Local editors frequently wired the Washington offices and requested that their representative in Washington ask a question about some given subject that they were interested in.

NIXON: Yes. Many of the top correspondents in Washington represented individual newspapers

or newspaper chains: the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times. Many times they had special interest questions about matters that were more or less of a local nature.

So, to be able to deal with this very broad area, a President had to undergo extensive briefings by the staff before each news conference, which I'm sure is quite a burden to them. The ability of a President to answer questions depends upon so many factors: How good the briefing has been. How many areas have been covered. Has the information been brought to him so he will know what he is talking about?

NIXON: Yes. He didn't fumble around too much. A President has a very convenient device. If he

doesn't want to answer it,. or feels that he can't deal with it .adequately, he may snap a "No comment." This gets him out of the corner.

The "no comment" is not a wise device because it can be misunderstood. You can ask a question in such a way that if you get a "no comment," you've got the answer, and that puts the President in the position of embarrassment. There are all sorts of ways of rolling those punches. Truman, by and large, handled himself adequately in the news conferences.

NIXON: Oh, yes, pretty well. But he had a singular fault. We get back again to these Missouri mannerisms and dialect. His proneness to use direct sentences with a maximum of ten words. Sometimes he just said, "yes" or "no." Rarely

did he ever develop a subject, like that evening at Reelfoot Lake where nothing was developed. It was just: "No, they're not going to get .it." We had to go with the rest.

That's the way he usually would answer a question. It's hard to write a column story with a ten word sentence as the answer when there is no explanation beyond that and no detail and no additional facts. Because of the heat that's on these stories news wise, there's no time to go to your office and go in your files and look up the background. If you don't have that background from your own knowledge, you don't have much to deal with. If you were covering the White House, you just had to have the background on everything that went on in Government, in the Nation, and in the world. You had to have that background in order to deal adequately with your stories.

This is a highly competitive area. Each man had his own telephone booth with a direct line to his Washington office. The moment that a presidential news conference was over, we raced to our telephone and began dictating, flat out, a complete story with the lead paragraph. You had to dictate this right off the top of your head at high speed to a typist in your office, where it was put on the wire. There was no such thing as leisure to sit down at a typewriter and hem and haw.

NIXON: No rewrite man. Of course, the news editor is always there when these takes are pulled out of the typewriter, to read your paragraph and make any little corrections that may be needed, but your responsibility is to produce in rapid fire fashion a complete story that has the news in

I always prepared myself by knowing what was going on, what was likely to come up, and what had the emphasis of news: Would it be a domestic story, today?

HESS: Would you at this time try to decide on the questions that you wanted to ask if the opportunity arose?

I would go to the telephone, begin dictating, and rarely ever even looked at any of my hastily scribbled notes. This got to be something like taking a photograph. The whole press conference had to be imprinted on your mind just as a photograph is imprinted on the celluloid of a film.

NIXON: That's what you have to have if you're going to do it adequately and meet competition. The competition is so heavy because a newspaper wouldn't necessarily be serviced by only one press association. Many of them took all three. There were even some foreign associations like Reuters or the Agence France.

NIXON: The story that came out first, frequently would be the one story that the newspaper would use. Of course, many papers waited because the time element was not so acute. Often they compared all three stories, and then used the one that was best written. That was where your own ability had to shine.

NIXON: When Truman held his press conference announcing the surrender of Germany, at the end of the conference, Smith, the AP man, and I raced out to our phones. A photographer had left an aluminum ladder on the floor just inside of Connelly's office. Smith tripped over it and fractured his left shoulder. That's one of the hazards of the trade. Actually, it always seemed absurd to me to have to race out of a President's office to get to the telephone, just because a competitor did it.

HESS: Couldn't an agreement have been reached where a leisurely pace to the phone would have sufficed for all?

NIXON: A few seconds more or less were never that urgent. Nothing really is ever that urgent.

NIXON: Yes, he was pretty competitive. No agreement could ever be reached. I don't know whether he was the one that started it or not, but it kept up. You, in a sense, felt you thought you had to go along.

HESS: Had he been there the longest? He was the one that usually signed off the press conferences by saying, "Thank you, Mr. President."

NIXON: Well, he took that upon himself. He bored in all the time. He never stopped. He did this to increase his own prestige in his own mind.

This was a grab. Before that one individual or another would make a point of being the first to say, "Thank you, Mr. President," to end the conference. He would even look around the room to be sure nobody was going to beat him to it. That's the way he operated. This was not by any

agreement among the correspondents, or any agreement with the White House, or by any agreement from the Press Secretary.

HESS: Do you believe that Mr. Truman tried to give an honest forthright answer to the questions that he was asked as opposed to a question that might be couched in terms of half truths where he would mean to cloud an issue rather than answer it?

NIXON: Oh, he was quite forthright, yes. If you have native intelligence, and he had native intelligence, you don't handle things that way. It's in your own self protection because you're going to get caught up with. If you don't want to answer the question, you side-step it or you don't

answer it. Your own intelligence tells you not to lie about it, or to misrepresent facts if you can avoid it. But often the whole story is not told and not commented upon for reasons of policy or whatever else it is. He was forthright.

HESS: You mentioned that Mr. Roosevelt used the press conference as a method to reach and educate the public. Do you think that Mr. Truman's use of the press conference, as a method to reach the public, was successful?

NIXON: They all use the press conference for the same purpose that Roosevelt did, but Roosevelt was more adept at it than most Presidents have been. Roosevelt ran his own press conferences. Truman did so to a lesser degree. He was very often on the receiving end, instead of the delivering end. Many times because of his own actions or because of the actions of others,

he was in real hot water. He would be asked a lot of embarrassing questions, but he did the best he could in fending off these ravenous wolves.

Oral History Interview with Robert G. Nixon

Oral History Interview with
Robert G. Nixon