Truman Library - Robert G. Nixon Oral History Interview, October 23, 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 23, 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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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: To begin this morning, sir, let's discuss the change in the site of the press conferences from Mr. Truman's Oval Office to the Indian Treaty Room.

NIXON: The President's press conferences as an institution grew and underwent changes. Fortunately, these changes were for the better. This was an important means for the Chief Executive to communicate with the entire nation through the newspapers, radio news, and TV, which, as we all know, is a very powerful media because it combines visual as well as auditory impact. The two seem to have a more powerful impact than just the written word.

So, this was an important means of communication, not only by the President to the Nation,

but by the Nation to the President. How can you run things adequately if you don't know what's going on? The President is able to learn the mood of the country and the interests of the country through the very simple process of the questions that are asked him at a news conference. So, there's an exchange of communication and information.

I say the changes that have been made are for the better, because we haven't always been that fortunate. Instance, again, the very scanty contacts the Presidents had with the news media in earlier years. There was this rather peevish and fretful manner in which Coolidge handled his occasional press contacts, and Hoover's failure to hold a news conference for many months at one of the most critical periods in our history.

So, changes did come about. We moved over to the Indian Treaty Room in April of 1950.

The Republicans had gotten to the point where they just couldn't stand it anymore. The Democrats had been in power sixteen years. They were doing everything that they possibly could to get back in the White House. It was all on a basis of "all is fair in war and politics."

I think I pointed out that in this free exchange of questions and answers in the President's Oval Office, there was no identification of the questioner at all. You would fight for the privilege of asking the question. By the moment one questioner had been answered by the President, you would chime in just as fast and as loud as you could to ask your question. Invariably, three or four would be doing this same thing at the same time. Things sorted

There we would be jammed in this relatively small Oval Room. From here and there in the room a question would pop out. If a correspondent happened to be six feet six, his head would jut up above the others and the President could see who he was, but if you were five feet five, you were buried in the crowd. The only possible means that he had of knowing who was asking the questions was if he was able to see the few in the front of the row that he knew, or if some fellow was six foot six. Sometimes the President was able through long familiarity to recognize the voice.

Now, why did identity become important to the White House? This was a period, as I've said, of an intense fight for power. While the Truman administration through its own peccadilloes

and failures, may have deserved much of the criticism that descended up on it, there was a great deal that it did not deserve that was purposefully fabricated or dug up by the political opposition, who were trying to end this long period of power by the Democratic Party.

Correspondents, of course, are not independent people, free to make their own decisions or do as they please. They work for a living like everybody else. Their security is involved. Regardless of their personal feelings one way or another, they have to mirror the opinion and desires of the editors they work for. They are given orders to do thus and so. If they don't want to play on the team, they have to get off.

So, the President's press conference, among many other things, was a forum for loaded questions.

Questions were often pointedly put for partisan purposes. They went beyond just trying to bring out factual news objectively. Sometimes questions can be asked that are not venal at all, but the results may be highly embarrassing to the presidential administration.

Now I don't say that this should not be. It's not my province to take one side or the other of an issue of this type. It's not my province to defend the President, or his prerogatives. Whoever is in there, could do it a lot better than I could do it for them.

I relate this simply so it will be known why identification is important to the White House. There was a question that was asked at a news conference on August 5, 1948, which long afterwards turned out not to be loaded at all, but which at the time seemed to be a highly loaded question because of the result.

A reporter on the Columbia, Ohio, Dispatch, named Harold Stacy, was sent into Washington by his paper for a brief visit. Perhaps this was a little reward for him. In any event, he attended the Truman press conference in the White House on that date.

It was the only press conference he ever attended. He was taken around and shown the town. He went home to Columbus and that was it.

A couple of days before the news conference, Congressman Richard Nixon, a Republican Congressman from California had opened hearings in the famous Hiss-Whitaker Chambers case. This was billed as an investigation by Congress into alleged Communist espionage in our Government and the workings of the Soviet Government's secret intelligence people in this country. They wanted to discover if American traitors were

Alger Hiss, who was a relatively young Foreign Service officer in the State Department, was in a post of great importance, where he had access to our Government secrets. (Incidentally, he was a member of the Roosevelt staff at Yalta.) Hiss was being accused of having passed secret Government papers to Whitaker Chambers, who was a principal witness and a confessed, longtime Communist agent.

The Communists were tagged "Reds." These were the first in a long period of investigations of alleged communism in Government, which finally wound up in the hearings that were conducted by the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. This was the beginning, so it was somewhat of a sensation.

this Ohio reporter, apparently eager to get a question in, so he could write a dispatch under his own by-line, popped out, "Mr. President, do you regard these hearings as a ‘red herring?’"

His idea, which he didn't fully state, was: "Are these hearings a 'red herring' dragged across the path to cover up the fact that the Republican controlled Congress refused to approve your anti-inflation program?"

The President immediately responded: "Yes, you can quote me, they are using it as a 'red herring' to keep from doing what they ought to do."

No one at the conference knew who asked the question nor paid much attention to it at the time, but when a few hours had passed, and this had gotten into the Republican newspapers, it became an overnight sensation. The quote was taken out of context.

The President simply had acknowledged that this was a red herring. The meaning of the phrase "red herring" was even ignored. It was made to appear that the President, in effect, was acknowledging that there was communism in Government and that some of the people in his administration and in the previous Roosevelt administration were traitors who had sold out their country to the Russian Government.

NIXON: That is it. The meaning of "red herring" is well-known by anyone who has ever gone through grade school. So you don't have to go to the dictionary, but the Republican press instantly seized upon it, and began to attack the President, and certainly did not go to the dictionary, because their interpretation of it was meant to embarrass the President.

This was the beginning of what the White House considered a necessary change in location. It was also, to a considerable extent, the beginning of changes in the manner of handling presidential press conferences.

The reason that I was impressed by this as a beginning was because some months later, Charlie Ross called me into his office and asked me did I recall what reporter had asked this "red herring" question. Well, I didn't, and I told him so. Charlie said, "Well, Bob, do you mind trying to find out? You have access to other reporters and that would make it simpler and less obvious than my doing it."

So, I said, "No, Charlie, I'll be glad to. You help me; I'm glad to help you, anytime."

So, I began a search. I went to the back copies of the local newspapers, and the

embarrassing question was there. But I could not tell who asked it. As I say, when you wrote stories in those days, you didn't usually acknowledge that some reporter had asked the question. This was a question at the news conference, period. So, I began to ask questions of reporters that I was pretty sure had been at the news conference that day. As I've said, this question came from way back in the room, and I was standing in front of the President's desk, as usual with my back to the rest of the reporters, and I had made no note of the voice. But I began asking questions. I went to each of what we call the "regulars"--those who you knew attended every press conference.

No one that I talked to had any idea who had asked that question. I was positive that it wasn't one of the Government press people because they weren't supposed to ask questions. Each

of the Government departments and agencies sent an employee in the press department to attend the press conferences so they could go back and acquaint their bosses, firsthand, with what had gone on in the President's conference that day. As I say, they were there to listen and not to participate.

Because no one knew the identity of this reporter, I began to wonder whether this was a highly loaded, purposefully planted question. Of course, this was one of the things that Charlie Ross and his staff were beginning to wonder, because they had by this time taken a very brutal beating in the Hiss-Whitaker Chambers hearings, which had become a sensation. Really these hearings turned out to be the thing that made Dick Nixon a national political figure, just as later the crime hearings on the

Hill brought Senator Estes Kefauver into national prominence on the TV and made him Stevenson's vice-presidential running mate.

So, I then began to use a fine-toothed comb. Mind you there were at that time, well over a thousand newsmen in Washington. A hundred and fifty to two hundred attended the President's press conferences in that room. By that time, I could have well dropped it and just gone to Charlie and said, "Look, here's what I've done, and this is what I've come up with," and then dropped it, but I was just sort of getting my back up about my inability to uncover the identity of the man. Also, it was beginning to sound like a story to me. As a story, I couldn't use how Charlie fitted into it at all. This was in confidence naturally, but I was beginning to smell a larger story that had no bearing on the

NIXON: It looked like a plant, as you say. It sure did. So, I began going, one by one, to the Washington bureau chiefs of the principal newspapers that covered Washington: The New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times and/or Herald-Examiner, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Globe Democrat, and so forth, and so on.

The quite logical way to go about it was to go to the most important newspapers first because they are the ones who are always there, and you would expect it to have been one of them. But one by one they went out to the window. Finally I got to the smaller papers, I don't

mean the country journals, but I mean the papers in cities of lesser size. I finally got around to the Columbus Dispatch. I located the identity of this reporter and found out that he had just been on a one-time visit to Washington and that this was his first and only presidential press conference. This question simply popped into his mind because this Whitaker Chambers-Hiss investigation was a fresh thing in his mind. It was, to him, the one big Washington news at the moment, because he was a newcomer here, and he picked up the paper and saw this. So, that's the way it was.

HESS: How did his bureau chief remember that it was this particular young man, do you recall? Had he written an article about it?

NIXON: Now there we get into a detail that my memory doesn't quite recall. My impression is that he

There probably were many other questions of an embarrassing nature that were asked in the press conferences which may have had an even greater impact on the President and his Press Secretary and staff, but over the years I just don't remember them. The reason this one stands out in my mind is because of the nature of it and because it was brought back to my attention a few months later by the President's Press Secretary. This aroused my curiosity and impacted it upon my mind.

Now, something over a year then went by. I forget the date of the first press conference when this change was made.

NIXON: Yes, as I've said before, it seemed to me earlier than that, but the record shows that

Charlie Ross one day announced that henceforth the President would hold his press conferences in the old, ornate, and gaudy Indian Treaty Room across the street on the third floor of the old State, War and Navy Building which had gradually become known as the Executive Office Building. The overflow of staff from the White House had offices in this building.

Charlie said that the President's press conferences were being moved over there and the reasons he gave seemed logical. It was to give more room and more comfort. It was to enable those attending the news conferences to be seated in comfort instead of standing up, elbow to elbow, as they had been doing for years. It gave the President more room because there was room for a podium, and it gave him more room for his staff. This is the explanation

that the President himself made in opening, the first conference that was held over there.

When we learned this, we then had to busy ourselves with getting new telephones put in the hallways, outside of the Indian Treaty Room, with telephone booths and direct wires to our offices so we could handle the news from the press conference immediately afterwards.

There were other aspects that were not brought out into the open. One of the principal ones that stuck in my mind seemed to be the necessity, if you viewed it from the standpoint of the White House, of the identification of the person asking the question. The correspondents would be seated and in order to be able to ask a question they had to first be recognized by the President. You had to jump out of your chair quickly and stand and start asking the question. If several people popped up at the same time

(which they usually did), then the President would himself either point to you or to one of the others. If some correspondent had been up and down and up and down and not recognized, the President, out of his own sense of fairness, might then recognize this reporter rather than someone that he knew very well and who was friendly with him. Well, that's sort of the way that it went.

HESS: One question on that. Were there times when there were anti-administration reporters who the President would rather not recognize, that he was perhaps slow to recognize or might have ignored? Has that ever occurred?

NIXON: Well, it was more or less a matter of fact, certainly. This gave him an ability for selection. It enabled him, of his own accord, to decide who

was going to ask a question, but this was never anything that was particularly obvious. As far as my recollection goes, Truman rarely took advantage of it. He certainly didn't overplay it. I never felt any loss of freedom nor did I ever feel that anyone else did. The main determining factor was who could jump up quickest and who was the pushiest.

Among the ladies, there were two regulars, May Craig, who represented a group of New England papers, and Sara McClendon, who represented a Texas group. They usually asked pretty good questions. Because they were ladies, the cute way they put those barbed questions in usually brought a laugh, and the President enjoyed it. This was obvious.

Now when this move did take place, there were other factors. The factor of recognition

NIXON: Well, of course. If you're seated in a chair with plenty of elbow room to take voluminous notes, which have to be taken in a very rapid-fire, even though you are sitting on a chair as hard as a church pew, you are more comfortable than standing elbow to elbow in a crowded, warm room. You get two hundred people together for a long, long while, and it's very uncomfortable.

If there was air-conditioning in the President's office, it didn't always work. Roosevelt was afflicted for years with a sinus drip and subject to head colds, so he did not care for air-conditioning. He kept the windows of his office open. In the summers it could become quite warm in there. In the winter, with the heat

plus the heat of say two hundred bodies jammed together, it could get pretty warm.

HESS: Even if the air-conditioning is working it's not designed to take care of that much.

HESS: One point about the move. Last night while rereading some of the news conference transcripts in the Public Papers of the President, 1950, I noted that on March the 2nd, 1950, Mr. Truman started his news conference in this manner:

NIXON: Oh, yes. First, I wanted to add one more note on this business that you asked about comfort.

The Executive Office Building, was not air-conditioned, but because of its thick granite walls and very wide hallways with high ceilings, it was the best type of structure of the years before air-conditioning for coolness in the summer. It was much more comfortable in this quite large Indian Treaty Room. The ceiling of this room was two stories high so it provided good ventilation and tended to keep the room comfortable even in the heat of Washington summers which can be pretty dreadful. But again,

if you pack two hundred and fifty to three hundred people in one room, it is going to, get warm.

So, on the score of comfort, I guess the most accurate thing I can say is, yes, it was much more comfortable than being jammed into a very small office and standing for a press conference that rarely went under a half hour, and sometimes went considerably more.

There were other factors involved that seemed obvious to me, but I don't think they were mentioned by the White House at the time. One was that the news media was growing and enlarging.

First there were the newsreel people. I don't believe that newsreel pictures were ever made in the Oval Room of a press conference. They would be made briefly when the President would have an important caller, and they would

be permitted to go in with their hand cameras and with still photographers. But, of course, there was no room in there for newsreel cameras as such, during the press conferences. However, this large Treaty Room was small auditorium size, and this enabled the newsreel cameramen for the first time to record presidential press conferences. Mind you, by that time, the newsreels had voice as well as picture. So from then on they would set up before the conference would begin. Television was just beginning to really come in and to have an impact.

The newsreel recording of the President's press conference enabled the White House not only to have a complete recording of the entire press conference, but to selectively decide what portion of a press conference could be put on the air, or on the national network news programs in the evening. This in itself was a

Incidentally Eisenhower continued having news conferences in the Indian Treaty Room. He accepted it, instead of changing it somewhere else.

During the Roosevelt administration the reporting had to be paraphrased, and there was no stenographic record available. From that, it changed gradually to the point that each reporter, upon being recognized to ask his question, had to identify himself and his organization. That, of course, was taken down and became a part of the transcript. So the identification of the questioner was complete.

Under Jim Hagerty, an arrangement was made with a commercial stenographic organization (the court reporter type of thing). This was paid for by the news organizations who

From then on the President's press conferences were quoted in their entirety. You were permitted to quote any part of it you wanted to. First, on a selective basis again, but gradually it came around to a full quotation. At first, when the newsreels were beginning to tape a conference, only little bits would be permitted to be put on the air. It seems to me that under Eisenhower they were free to use anything they wanted to out of the press conference because by that time the New York Times was printing the entire transcript of the press conference with every question and answer that was asked. Sometimes it would run to a page and a half.

Each President usually wants to be different. He doesn't like his predecessor looking over his shoulder. He tries to get

When Kennedy came in, he didn't want to have any part of the way Eisenhower had done it, although I believe he did hold some conferences in the Indian Treaty Room. By this time, weekly press conferences were a thing of the past. The White House would decide when a press conference was going to be called. Sometimes many weeks would go by, and there would be none. While Kennedy still used the press conference to his own advantage, he preferred to call in a few chosen correspondents from time to time to the Oval Office or to one of the reception rooms in the White House proper. He talked to them on whatever basis he chose: a background basis (which meant that you could paraphrase things), an off-the-record basis, or sometimes a guidance basis. All of these smaller conferences had rules.

Johnson then did it his way. He seemed, like Eisenhower, to not like the press. He avoided, as much as possible, having anything to do with them. He was a highly controversial individual. He was getting beat over the head a lot like Truman had been before him. He began having his press conferences in a running dog trot. He walked around and around the White House grounds, which covered thirteen acres.

HESS: I have heard that a reporter ran into a tree while taking notes and broke his nose. Have you ever heard that?

It was just as true in a motorcade as it was walking. The car in front sets the pace and may be doing sixty or sixty five. By the time

you get down to the tail of the line you are having to do perhaps eighty-five just to keep up. I don't know what law of nature covers that, but it sure is true. So, when Johnson would stalk out of the White House and start going around the grounds, the correspondents there at the White House trying to cover him would have to run. Johnson was quite a tall man. Some would be running and panting trying to cover this rather strange individual who had come into the White House.

Let's see. Now, back to the Indian Treaty Room. There was one other important change that I've forgotten to say.

NIXON: Yes, you did. Well, he spoke of better acoustics. Not only that, but this was the

first use of a microphone and loud speaker system With that you rarely missed a question or the answer.

NIXON: They had microphones scattered around the room. They were situated so that there was an audible pickup wherever you might be in the room, and you didn't have to shout.

HESS: Whether or not there were a few newsmen who met with Charles Ross about the proposed move.

NIXON: Oh, yes. This doesn't stand out very strongly in my mind. It was a detail. I can logically speculate that it would be the three

press association men, one or two of the regulars from the individual newspapers, somebody from the news magazines, or from the radio and TV networks. Now that was the logical choice. The committee was selected from that. Each media had to be represented. The TV networks, for instance, were trying on every occasion to overcome the long entrenched position that the newspapers and press associations had held.

We didn't really have anything to do with it. My recollection is that Charlie Ross more or less presented us with a fait accompli. He decided that it was going to be the Indian Treaty Room, and that's what it was going to be. My recollection is that some of us raised some objection.

NIXON: It really didn't make the slightest difference in the world to me. I didn't have any personal feelings about it at all. In trying to think what suggestions were made, the only thing I can think of is the East Room.

NIXON: That's right. But at that time, this seemed an invasion of a President's personal prerogatives. The East Room had long been the place for White House receptions. Mind you, this was about the only other place that had room enough for the greatly enlarged presidential news conference attendance. The newsreel cameras had to be brought in and later the TV cameras. It got down to what Ross decided it would be. There was just no other place, and they weren't

The Executive Wings (the West Wing where the President's Oval Office is and the East Wing over on the other side) are connected to the White House mansion proper, but they are really separate entities. The White House mansion, as such, is not a business office or a series of business offices, it's the home of the President. So that, at that time, ruled that out.

As you mentioned, President Nixon now uses that for his press conferences. Well, his reasons are his own. I suppose the logical ones enter into it. All Presidents want to be different from their predecessor, especially, if they are of a different party. There is a matter of convenience that enters into it. Aside from that, there was just simply no other large space adequate.

While we raised some mild objections to any change taking place at all, it wasn't that we objected to the Indian Treaty Room. Our objection was on the basis of there being any change, and why should there be a change. This again was based upon a feeling that it would get us away from the President. Intimate contact with a President normally improves your own situation for the gathering of news. For years we had been in rather intimate contact with the President at his press conferences in the Oval Office. When we were in the President's personal office, standing immediately in front of his desk, we could see every expression on his face, every movement of his hands. All of these things have meaning in conversation, which we all know.

were informal to and fro conversations. Our objection was that the intimacy of these presidential press conferences were bound to be lost by the very physical fact of further separation. That's what we were concerned about. There was no great difficulty about simply walking across the street.

When the conferences moved over to the Indian Treaty Room we three representatives of the press associations maintained the same little privileges that we had had at the conferences in the President's Oval Office. We were always permitted to go in first to take our positions standing in front of the President's desk. In the same way, when the conferences were moved across the street, we were permitted to go into the Indian Treaty Room first. We had three seats right in front of the President's podium, adjacent to

The Indian Treaty Room was sort of like sitting in an auditorium listening to someone make a speech on the podium. The distance was, of course, not quite that great, but the effect was the same. When we had gone into the President's Oval Office for a conference, there would be an exchange of banter between the President and us, a little personal conversation. Well, this was a very nice thing to have.

The President knew us well. We, of course, knew him as well as we could, but the main fact was that he knew us. Whether it was Roosevelt or Truman, they always had something friendly and warm and intimate to say to us.

Sometimes they might even ask how our families were. They knew our wives and children, that sort of thing. Well, we knew that that was part of the intimacy of these press conferences that from then on would be gone with the wind.

HESS: Yes. Last night I was going over the news conferences, for early 1950. I noticed that on February the 16th of 1950, shortly after the time that President Truman had granted his one and only exclusive interview with Arthur Krock, a conference was held. The day seemed to start out rather cloudily because, as the transcript would read:

What comes to mind when you think about the interview that the President granted to Arthur Krock and the feeling among the other members of the press?

NIXON: We, of course, were all outraged. This had been done to us once before by Roosevelt.

An exclusive interview, no matter what its content, is about the unfairest thing that the President can do to the entire press media. Exclusive interviews with a

NIXON: Yes. With only one person getting the Oscar. Now, I'm sure Truman realized the error he had made. He, perhaps, was sorry that he had done it, maybe not, because it was to his advantage. He was fighting back at an atmosphere that was so obvious in his news conference.

We resented this interview, and we resented it very badly. This was, as I said, outrageous. Everybody except Arthur Krock, thought so.

NIXON: Yes. But of course, there were always things that impelled happenings of this sort. Truman,

as. it seems now, almost always was under a drum fire of criticism. The press was mostly controlled by conservative Republicans.

NIXON: As a generalization, all well-to-do people are highly conservative. They want to be the only wealthy people. They want to be the only members of the club. It has been just a traditional fact of our country that those who supported the Republican Party were those in whom reposed the greater wealth of the Nation. The Democrats, earlier of course, were largely southerners, but the well-to-do ones were also highly conservative. There was another thing. The Republicans represented the banking and industrial wealth of the country. The southern

Democrats represented an agricultural economy. They were totally separate things. The large metropolitan papers were largely in the north.

Anyway, Mr. Truman was being beat over the head by the Republican press. It was more or less a succession of things.

It came about in this manner. There was a private club over on F Street that held a reception, and the President and Mrs. Truman attended. At the reception, one of those present was Arthur Krock, who was the head of the New York Times bureau in Washington.

The President was being beat over the head so badly, and he wanted to get his side of the story in. During this reception Krock went over to him and suggested this interview to the President. (Mr. Truman later told me how it happened.) Krock said that if

he got Truman's side of the story, it would be on the front page of the New York Times. It would make the President look a lot better.

Unfortunately for all the rest of us, the New York Times is the one newspaper in the country that really gets attention. When an exclusive interview with the President of the United States appears on the front page of the New York Times, it immediately is going to be widely quoted. It has an atomic bomb effect news wise. If he had said the same thing that he said to Krock in his press conference, it would have had the minor effect of a few pebbles being tossed on a tin roof.

Now, that is a peculiarity about news. The difference in impact of the same material. That's why I say that the rest of the news profession thought this was outrageous.

which was about three quarters of a column in length, since it first appeared, but my recollection is that it really didn't have too much news in it.

HESS: One of the things that was obviously covered was referred to in a question by Merriman Smith. He said, "Mr. President, you were quoted yesterday as having said that if it had not been for the 1948 campaign, you would have sent Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow and that maybe it would be a thing to do sometime in the future. Is that correct?"

NIXON: Now my memory is refreshed on that. This, of course, was big news, which I had forgotten.

HESS: Do you recall anything about Mr. Truman desiring to send Vinson to Moscow in '48?

HESS: There was a good deal of speculation in the press, at the time, that this may have been strictly a political action.

NIXON: Yes, it's coming back to me. It was said that this was a proposal to get Mr. Truman elected on his own. Every political wiseacre was saying that Dewey was in, and it was impossible for Truman to win the election.

HESS: One other thing about the press conference of February the 16th in which the Arthur Krock interview was the main topic. I would like to read just a couple of excerpts here and ask you, if you can recall if this was Charles Ross speaking. After Mr. Truman

said, "I don't like your attitude this morning, so just cool off," someone said, "Mr. President, inasmuch as I am not disgruntled..."

And the question: "I might say to you, sir, as I used to work in the newspaper game [laughter]--that that particular type of thing is a--these fellows feel, I think, that it is a reflection on every bureau chief and reporter in the White House..."

Do you recall who was speaking at that time? It sounds like something that Charles Ross might say because he said, "I used to work in the newspaper game..."

NIXON: That is right. These excerpts that have been read, seems to me, clearly show, the atmosphere. The President had done an outrageous thing, as this man points out, who I am sure was Charlie. This exclusive interview, which a President just doesn't give, except under very extraordinary circumstances, was a reflection upon every bureau manager in Washington. As a result of it, my life from then on was made a burning hell by my editors in New York. They demanded that I equal Krock's exclusive.

This was extremely unfair to me because the organization that I represented did not have the prestige of the New York Times. No other news organization with offices in Washington covering the White House had the prestige of the New York Times, which was sort

of like England's Manchester Guardian. Nor, as White House correspondent for this press association, did I have the prestige of Arthur Krock, who, for many years, had been chief of the New York Times bureau in Washington and an editorial page columnist for the New York Times. No one in Washington in the news business had the prestige of Arthur Krock. It was just that simple.

Almost every other week, a letter would come in from my editors demanding that I equal this achievement, which much later I did, but which could not possibly have been done then.

NIXON: Well, this happened as President Truman was preparing to leave the White House, in

the last few weeks before his term was up. I simply wrote the President a note. Now, I had written him notes on the same subject for a long time

NIXON: I had to reply to these people who had my personal security in the palm of their hand.

NIXON: Yes indeed. They had the power to decide whether I would be their White House correspondent or somebody else would be.

with, and I sure thought I did. I wrote the President a little note, again, asking for an interview. On the basis of that note, he sent me a note, or had Roger Tubby come to me and tell me that the President wanted to see me privately in his office at a certain time of the day. I was thereby able to set up an exclusive interview with him. But back during the time of the Krock interview they had put me under pressure that was just extremely unfair. Here was Krock making about $50,000 a year, and I hate to say how little...

NIXON: Yes, it was considerably less. The whole thing was just completely unfair, and it tended to create anxiety in my own mind. I'm sure that these editors of mine were probably no different from other editors.

HESS: Do you recall if Mr. Smith and Tony Vacarro were also under pressure from their respective organizations?

NIXON: That is something that I don't know. We were competitors of a high degree. I would have been cutting my throat by letting them know that I was under such pressure.

NIXON: If I discussed it with them, this would have instantly impelled them to begin writing notes to the President to try to set up an exclusive interview. After all, you're not married to those fellows. There are areas in which you have to stand them off at a good distance. For your own protection, you don't tell them every little thing that comes along of a business or personal nature, but I still recall

the intensity of those demands from the New York office. My managing editor never let up. Week after week, month after month, I would get these little letters from him, that always had its effect. It was implicit, "How about that exclusive with the President? When are you going to get it?"

NIXON: Yeah, another turn of the screw. I finally just started ignoring him, just to get the monkey off my back. When I say I started ignoring him, it was simply by not replying to his letters. I thought I'd let him sweat a while.

HESS: One point: You mentioned earlier, when we were discussing the red herring remark, that

some owners and publishers and bureau chiefs would have their representatives in the White House ask a pointed or loaded question. Did you ever have your bureau chief or your man in Washington send you down, what you considered, a loaded question?

NIXON: No. I will say this for my editors; they were pretty fair in that area. They tried to leave me alone to do objective reporting of what went on in the world (and there's an exception which I'll tell you about). This, of course, is the way the newspaper business is supposed to go. As our clients, we had newspapers of all sorts of political complexions located all over the world.

The Hearst organization, which owned and operated the International News Service, had its own bureau in Washington to do its dirty

work for them. When I say dirty work, I mean to carry out the purposes of the policy of their papers. Their bureau had a bureau chief and quite a number of reporters. They covered Washington just like we did, but they wrote articles for the Hearst papers from the slant of the policy of the Hearst organization and the papers. Their outpouring of news every day went by special and separate wire to the Hearst newspapers alone. They carried out the wishes of William Randolph Hearst, Sr. They would get messages over the wire from San Simeon, beginning: "Chief wishes," and then people began to jump.

So, you see, I was relieved of that. I never carried out policy stuff. I never wrote policy for the Hearst papers. With independent newspaper clients, you were supposed to. If you had common sense you didn't slant

your stories. You had to try to be objective. So, that is one area I was relieved of. I might add, if I had had to do it, I could not have stood it. I just couldn't have swallowed it, because my whole training and background in newspaper work had been to be as objective a reporter as I possibly could be.

Now, I never was put under policy pressures or anything of that sort. We had many, many editors, and their interests and their curiosity and everything else varied. News bureaus, out over the country, would always be where a newspaper client was. I'm not talking about Hearst newspapers, where the policy area was involved, but I'm talking about entirely independent newspapers. If they were interested in some phase of national life or if a big contract was impending, they

would call our bureau man, wherever he might be, and tell him that they would like to get an answer to this.

NIXON: Oh no. Just the topic or the subject. We would ask the question. Such requests would then be put on our wire to the Washington office. Then they would be given to the reporter who was covering the particular area. Now, if it were a question that had to do with something that was pending in Congress it would be passed on to our people there. If it had to do with a matter that concerned the President and the White House, I might go to Charlie Ross.

That was the normal way to do it. You didn't bother the President at his press conferences with some trivial local thing.

So I was relieved of the pressure and the embarrassment of asking these loaded questions that were asked at the conferences, but mind you, this was not true of the representatives from individual newspapers. I instanced no one as being any different. They all did it at various times because they had to. The Times, the Tribune, the News, the Post, the Star, all those reporters all over the country would ask loaded questions. Presumably the questions came from the correspondents because they were intelligent men, and they were trying to develop news. Other times I'm sure it came as a result of pressure from their newspaper editors.

You mentioned that Mr. Kennedy at times would call in a small number of reporters and discuss things with them. Would he discuss news with them or would it be background? Did that cause a bad feeling among the other men, something in the nature that the Krock interview did?

NIXON: Every President has his own method of doing things. Kennedy liked little intimate sessions with the reporters he knew. Mind you he had been a Senator for a number of years. Having been a Senator, he was well-acquainted with the newspaper fraternity in Washington. He had his own favorites. In addition to his news conferences, which sometimes were not on a regular basis at all, Kennedy liked to invite one or more reporters over. These were not like the exclusive interview Krock

NIXON: Oh, yes, there would. But he would invite his favorites to the Oval Office. So nobody else in covering the White House would know what was going on. They would go to his private study over in the White House, and he would sit down with them and tell them what was in his mind.

Now, this is a very convenient device for a President because he can set his own rules. Under these circumstances he can say, "Now, what I'm going to discuss with you is for your guidance." That meant you could use the material only if you covered up the source. The device, where they can tell you something for your own information, but you can't use it at all, is the off-the-record basis. You can

also write your story on the basis of quoting a high Washington source. To anyone who knows Washington, that immediately means that it did come from the President, because the same material is carried in several of the top newspapers so it bears the authority of source. Obviously a half a dozen bureau chiefs of individual newspapers, like the New York Times, are not going to get together and fabricate a story, without adequate facts.

You asked how this differed from the Krock interview. The Krock interview was a bombshell because it was an exclusive interview with the President of the United States. Kennedy, in these little private session that he liked to have with friends, was able to get fairly wide representation. There was no exclusive nature to it. The ones that he met with were the happy ones. The ones that he didn't

call in were the unhappy ones, but what could they do about it. The whole press of the Nation was not shut out. These interviews were passed around. He didn't always call in the same people.

There is a vast difference in an exclusive story coming out on the front page of the New York Times, with a well-known writer's name over it, from a story that appears in several newspapers written by a number of different correspondents of a lesser stature without stating that the material came from the President. These stories would get around, but the few who were called into Kennedy's study didn't go rushing out of the President's study waving their notebooks shouting, "Look what I have. I've just seen the President." In order to cover themselves, they just quietly went away.

No one in the newspaper fraternity could say they were excluded from a private session with the President. The circumstances of the Krock interview made it horrendous. This was an exclusion of everybody else, and as I say, Kennedy would pass these around.

Also, this was a way to manage news. This enabled Kennedy to put out things that he wanted to get in print. Not only his own side of things, but what he wanted to put out. It permitted him to send up what we called "trial balloons." If the trial balloon went over with the country, all well and good. He then could lay claim to it and go ahead, certain that he had approval already. On the other hand, if the trial balloon was a dud, he could ignore

it. In any event, if it got to a point where anyone was saying, "Well, this is from Kennedy," if he wanted to, he had a complete basis for disclaimer.

HESS: Did Mr. Truman use the vehicle of the press conference to launch any trial balloons? Do you recall anything that might illustrate that point?

NIXON: They all do. Though the press conference is not a particularly good place for it because usually if a trial balloon is going to have effect, it must be launched under circumstances that are not completely public as to source.

NIXON: These were held quite regularly, usually one a week while we were at Key West. We would

go down there twice a winter and usually once in the late fall. We would stay there three to five weeks each time.

NIXON: The President occupied the large home of the commandant of the U.S. Submarine Base. The commandant just moved out for the time the President and his staff were down there. Some of the members of the staff stayed in this large house with the President. Sometimes we would have open air press conferences.

NIXON: Well, that varied. Sometimes we would be at what was called BOQ, bachelor officers quarters, but other times we stayed at hotels or motels. There was a nice hotel over on the beach on the other side of the island where I stayed a number of times. It was confining to be on a naval base, with a six foot steel wire fence all around the place, and nothing to do really. You could go over to the officers pool and swim when you weren't occupied, but it got pretty confining. It wasn't the best type of living. Depending upon the trip and the circumstances, we stayed either at the BOQ, or at this hotel on the beach, or at motels.

Several of the press conferences were held in the garden of the captain's quarters. We would put our chairs under the palm trees. The President sat with members of his staff standing behind him or on either side. We had a

very elaborate setup of communications. This was illustrated by the fact that I had a direct telegraph wire from there to New York. There were instantaneous communications to and fro.

To the greatest extent, the press conferences were held in a large room in the bachelor officers quarters facing out on the porch and street. The President would come in there, with the staff and sit down around a large long table that had been set up for our use. We would sit or stand around. These were very informal sessions, but they would go the same way as a press conference. We would ask the questions, he would give us his answers, or he would make an announcement.

It, of course, was much more informal and much more intimate than these conferences in Washington because there were not many of us who went with him to Key West. We sat around

asking questions and getting his answers. Numerically there were just a handful of people, compared to this auditorium filled Indian Treaty Room. It was more intimate, and informal. But, of course, news was news. The burden of the conferences would always be the same wherever you were, depending on what the current happenings were.

HESS: In reading over the press conferences for the early part of 1950 last evening, I noticed that the President's press conferences at Key West on March the 30th of 1950, was shortly after the time that Senator Joe McCarthy had made his speech saying that there were 57 Communists in the State Department. The President said, "I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy."

NIXON: Joe McCarthy was at that time a burr under the saddle of the administration. He was real bad news to them, and it was to the extent that Truman was having to fight back. This would have been just a natural thing to come up, although the President's reply had some unusual emphasis to it. I think permission was asked for us to use that sentence as a direct quote. I'm sure the record would show whether he permitted it or didn't, but it just doesn't come back to my memory.

One of the things that happened of interest at Key West was the time that Mr. Truman took a dive in a captured German U-boat on one of his early trips. According to the log, the press was not allowed to go along because of the classified nature of some of the equipment that was still on the U-boat.

NIXON: That's right. I remember that he did. The Navy was proud to have a President there. They were always trying to get him to enter into some of the activities of the U-boat base. This was a tremendous morale builder to the young sailors and everyone there in the Navy. And I do remember his going in the sub.

NIXON: I had forgotten that it was a captured German U-boat, though I now remember that there was a captured German U-boat there.

NIXON: This was one of those they had surrendered at sea after Germany had surrendered. It seems to me that it surrendered off the Azores. That's just about all I remember about it.

NIXON: Of course, you're not supposed to do anything that might endanger the life of a President, so that was the basis for criticism. But good heavens, he was being criticized for everything he did.

NIXON: Yes. I forget which trip this was. This was the day in which I saw Admiral Robert L. Dennison as angry as any naval officer could ever possibly get. News photographers are very strange people.

I won't develop the subject. That just has to be accepted as my observation. They are nice guys, but they are very aggressive (they have to be). They are very strange. I've never known one that came out of either Harvard or Yale. Many of them didn't even finish grade school. Pressures are on them to produce

When we would be in Key West, the President and his staff would be at the Captain's quarters, and there was a separation. He and his staff were away from us. We didn't see him every day by any manner of means. Unless he invited us over there, we didn't bother him. You couldn't bother him. Those were unspoken rules. Back in Washington we wouldn't barge into the White House proper. We went over there when we were invited, otherwise not at all. Again, I point out that the White House mansion was where the President and his family lived. The President's office, where the business was done, was in a wing away from the White House proper. The times that we would see the President were when he invited us over to his quarters. On one occasion that I

recall, immediately after the '48 election, he invited us over to the private beach where he and his staff sunned. He would take a little swim (as he used to smilingly remark, dog fashion).

Sometimes he would go out to the naval air station to make the Navy feel good. Maybe he would review the troops. (That was where we always landed and took off.)

On other occasions we might see the President on one of his morning walks. Again, we didn't accompany him on these walks. There has to be some privacy, even for a President. But we might see him on the morning walk if he came by the BOQ. He was a friendly man, and enjoyed having little jokes and fun.

I remember one morning, while I was staying at the BOQ. (I had a large, pleasant room, which I'm sure no lieutenant ever had because

the size was always dependent upon rank. This was probably a captain's room or commanders.) I was awakened by a knock at my door. I went to the door in my pajamas, and who was standing there but President Truman, smiling broadly, with two or three members of his staff. I don't know any other time that occurred. He kidded me about being asleep that late in the morning. It was about 7 o'clock. I must have been a sight just getting out of bed, hadn't even dashed any water in my face.

The news reporters saw Charlie Ross every morning about 9 or 10 o'clock. Sometimes we saw him a second time in the afternoon. Of course, we also had these occasional press conferences with the President. So we were able, day in and day out, twice a day, to produce news from the temporary White House.

This news did not just concern little color stories about what the President was doing and what he wasn't doing, but it dealt with the same major news matters that would come up at the more formal Washington press conferences.

This incident about the blimp was impelled by the pressures on the news photographers to get a photograph of the President doing something. So, they got together, just three of them I suppose, and went out to the naval air base where the Navy had some blimps that had been left over from the war. The blimp could come down reasonably close to the water. They had been used to spot German U-boats.

They persuaded the Navy to give them a ride in one of the blimps. Then after they got

in the air, they persuaded the officer who was in command to take them over the naval base. Well, now of course, their objective was the President, and they timed it by knowing when the President did things. The objective was the President on the beach with his staff, sunbathing and swimming as they did at certain times of the day. When they got over there, the blimp came down reasonably close, and they took photographs of the President and his party on the beach. This was a thing which they felt that they had to do, to get a photograph of the President.

Well, as far as the White House was concerned, they shouldn't have done this. When Admiral Dennison, the President's Naval Aide who was one of the members of the party, saw this, he called in a White House car and scorched the road out to the naval base. I

remember a Marine guard, at the gates of the naval base, afterwards said, "You know, the wheels of that car weren't even touching the pavement as they went by." That shows you that Dennison was a very angry man. When he got out to the naval base, he chewed everybody out. He was a Naval Admiral, Naval Aide to the President, and he really had the authority. I think that he demanded this, and they never got to use their photographs.

HESS: I think Charlie Ross was the one who really demanded the photographs. Do you recall?

NIXON: Probably, at Dennison's behest, but on behalf of the President, he was the one who would have been in authority. I might add this never happened again, but some of the rest of us really were rather surprised at Dennison being so upset. Why not a picture of a President?

Oral History Interview with Robert G. Nixon

Oral History Interview with
Robert G. Nixon