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

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened April, 1972
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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Fourth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 22, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library.

HESS: We are recording for this morning's session, sir, what would you like to start off on?

SPINGARN: Well, I want to continue on the Larry King article in Harper's Magazine of October, 1966, "My Hero, L.B.J." When I read this article which was October 6th, I grabbed my phone and I called John Fischer, who is the editor-in-chief of Harper's Magazine in New York. He was away that day so I was referred to the executive editor, Willie Morris.

I explained who I was and asked him for fifteen hundred or two thousand words in the next issue to answer King's article. Mr. Morris was very friendly and he offered me seven hundred and fifty words as a letter-to-the-editor in the December issue, two months off. It seemed that it took that much lead time. He said that because of their lead time situation I would have to get the letter to him by the following Monday -- this was Thursday I was calling him. I said I would do that and in fact I did better. I got up early Friday, October 7th, and knocked out a long version of

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some eighteen hundred words and a short version of about a thousand words of a letter to Harper's on the King article -- two alternative versions. I completed both versions by early afternoon the same day and mailed them, air mail special delivery, to Mr. Morris about five p.m., Friday, the day after I first contacted him. This wasn't as difficult as it sounds because I had done quite a bit of research, or perhaps I should say my style of research which would make any Ph.D. shudder, on the subject of L.B.J. and the liberal establishment long before I ever heard of Larry King.

I sent such long letters because I hoped against hope that my singing Pulitzer-level prose would melt Harper's hard heart, and its editors would rise and in a single voice cry, "We absolutely must publish in our next issue this brilliant man's superb demolition of the Larry King or Dr. Fell syndrome on L.B.J."

On October 17th, I received from an assistant editor, Mrs. Wolf, a friendly letter saying that Mr. Morris had given her, my "witty and informative commentaries on Larry King's article," I'm quoting her, but she went on to say that because of unavoidable space problems it

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was necessary to cut my letter and she enclosed for my approval her cut version which ran around four hundred and twenty-five words.

Mrs. Wolf had done a good job of cutting it to four hundred and twenty-five words, but it seemed to me that a large part of my thesis had been eliminated, obviously and inevitably, in cutting it to that small proportions. So, on Tuesday, October 18th, I got up at four o'clock and I wrote John Fischer, the editor-in-chief, a long letter and sent it to his home. I wrote a letter about two thousand words going over all this and asking him first to print my long letter or to commission me to write an article for the January or February, 1967 issue, without pay, if desired, on L.B.J. and the intellectual establishment. In length, I said, whatever you regard as a standard length Harper's article. If that's impossible, I said, will you print my letter in about seven hundred fifty or so words, as Mr. Morris first said he'd give me, and if that's impossible well go ahead and print Mrs. Wolf's version.

I receded each time down to a lesser position, and I realized that the magazine had no equal time obligations but it seemed to me that there ought

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to be room in Harper's for a voice of dissent from the prevailing intellectual verdict on L.B.J. I said I didn't regard myself as a sycophant of his, he had his faults, y como, but that it seemed to me that the idealistic liberals and intellectuals often set standards of conduct for L.B.J. which they spurn for their own guidance.

For instance, one of the things that Larry King despised about Lyndon Johnson was that Lyndon hadn't used his great powers, and political influence in Texas to move the Texas political and socio-economic establishment into a more liberal climate; that he had gone along with the big oil and the big steel and big cattle interests down there.

Well, I noted that Larry King himself had for a considerable number of years, six or eight I think, maybe more, been the chief assistant to a Congressman from Texas named Rutherford who was very much more conservative than Lyndon Johnson was -- I looked his voting record up. If Larry King was such a dedicated liberal why did he use his talents to work with such a conservative. He was setting standards it seemed to me for Lyndon Johnson that he hadn't set for himself,

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but that is only a detail I suppose.

The main thing is that this type of liberal seems to set style above substance. He would rather lose with a Kennedy than win with a Johnson. He would rather strike a noble posture and go down to defeat than do a little corn pone arm twisting and win, and things like that.

This simply doesn't make any sense to me. And, as to the question of Lyndon Johnson blowing his stack from time to time, being oversensitive to press and other criticism, and being mean to his staff, well, let's take the first count to begin with, about the sensitivity to newspaper criticism. Thirty-five men have been President of the United States including Lyndon Johnson -- he's the thirty-sixth President, but Cleveland had two numbers, and Lyndon Johnson is probably the thirty-fifth President who has blown his stack over press and other attacks. George Washington was the first. Jefferson described an explosion by George Washington at a Cabinet meeting, an outburst which, by the way, was no novelty to Washington's associates, in the following terms -- I'm quoting Thomas Jefferson:

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That's George Washington.

On another occasion in June 1793, Jefferson reported to Madison that Washington was ill with a fever and, "He is also extremely affected by the attacks made and kept up on him in the public papers. I think he feels these things more than any person I ever yet met with." But, of course, Jefferson had never met Lyndon Johnson, I could go on with similar statements about other Presidents.

By the way, I referred earlier to what the intellectuals of Lincoln's day thought of him; here's a quote from a history by Perkins and Van Deusen, written in 1962, quoting from them:

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Hans Morganthau, where are you? This was the man that Hans Morgenthau says was the perfect combination of truth and power, but the Hans Morgenthaus of the 1860s didn't think so.

Now, as to how hard L.B.J. is on his staff. Recently, I saw a book published in 1966 -- I saw this last fall sometime for the first time. It was written by a senior British civil servant named George Mallaby called, "From my Level" and he says of Churchill, I don't have the exact quote before me, but he says of Churchill that he was absolutely impossible as a boss, cantankerous, mean, abusive. He didn't know any members of his staff except those who were closest to him. He didn't even know their names. He was everything that was wrong and bad and abominable in a boss, "and we loved him." So, as I said before, hard-driving executives are not easy on their staffs anymore than they are on themselves, and yet you don't want your

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President to be too easygoing. Maybe he shouldn't be too hard-driving, but he shouldn't be too easy-going either.

Now, I am going to turn over to you, Mr. Hess, the material I have here which are the original letters written in The New Republic and the Washington Post, that two thousand word letter to John Fischer, I don't have them here with me at the moment but I'll dig them up and send to you when I find them, the long letters I wrote to Harper's -- I mean the two long letters of which they printed only four hundred odd words. I would like these back though.

HESS: We will have these Xeroxed and return the originals to you.

SPINGARN: Right.

HESS: I have a couple of questions here about the Truman period events. One was on the Negro voting strength and item number forty-three in your scrapbook at the Library is, "Letter dated March 19, 1957 from Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP to Spingarn..."

SPINGARN: Executive director, executive secretary then of the NAACP, not the president.

HESS: "...regarding the drop in the number of Negroes

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voting for the Democratic Party in 1956." Of course, this is a little past the Truman administration but it does bring up some interesting questions. Did the staff members during the Truman administration think that there was any particular Negro leader who could sway large numbers of Negro voters? Was there a Negro voting bloc, in other words?

SPINGARN: The Negroes until the New Deal came along voted predominately Republican, but they switched after Roosevelt brought the majority of them into the Democratic Party by his New Deal program. I recall that when my father campaigned for Roosevelt in 1936 among Negro audiences, one of the things he said to them was that the Republican Party had been rattling the bones of Abraham Lincoln for seventy-five years, but that's all they'd ever given you, and I think this is true. Well, Negroes, like any other group of people that feel some common identity naturally tend to vote for those whom they think are going to help them. Now, there may be a question -- every man has a great many identities. I mean, he is a member of the race or ethnic group or national origin group to which he belongs. He may be a member

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of a religion, he is a member of a political party, he lives in a town, in a county, in a state, in a country, he has a family and friends who have affiliations. He's a businessman, or he's a union man, or he's a professional man, or he's something else. All of these are identities he has and all of them have some effect on his thinking. No one can say with assurance how the Negroes will vote, the Negroes like any other group vote for what they think are their own best interests in the context of the whole situation and that's the way practically all people vote.

HESS: I was just wondering if the NAACP or the Urban League had any special following?

SPINGARN: In the first place the NAACP is bipartisan, nonpartisan, it never as such – never -- tells people to vote Republican or Democratic, or at least, I think it might have in the '64 campaign because Goldwater was so repugnant to Negroes, but generally speaking its tradition has been that since it embraces large numbers of Republicans and Democrats that it doesn't ....when my father, for instance, participated in the political campaign of '36, he made it clear that he was speaking as an individual and not on the behalf of the NAACP.

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Now, you ask me whether -- actually there is a single Negro leader who, or even any group of leaders, who can direct huge blocs of Negro votes. Politicians naturally like to simplify things. They like to think in any group that there are certain key people who influence huge bodies -- if you just line them up you've got everything made, but things are not that simple, and they certainly aren't among Negroes.

There are many types of Negro constituency, there are different people who speak eloquently to those different types and some who try to speak and don't make it, don't communicate, and so anyone who claims that he owns a large Negro bloc, I don't think is representing the thing correctly. But it is true, as I say, that Negroes like everyone else tend to vote for what they think are the best interests of their group and since Negroes are an underprivileged and have been traditionally an underprivileged, heavily discriminated against group, and since they have a visibility identity, they have been given a cohesion I suppose that other groups don't always have.

But, I will say this, that I think that the upper middle class, the well-to-do upper middle class businessman

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and professional man is likely to vote differently than the poverty-level Negro on any given issue, just as the upper level man of Irish or Italian or almost any other origin you could mention is quite likely to vote differently than the man in the bottom ten or twenty percent economically of that group.

HESS: During the time that you were in the White House, during most of the Truman administration, in fact, there was an effort to get a permanent FEPC, legislative FEPC through, which they didn't get through. What were your activities in relation to that -- during the period you were in?

SPINGARN: I told you yesterday. I told you about the task force which we ran.

HESS: I knew that you had but I didn't know if we had covered it all. The question sort of ties in here. During that time did any leaders of the Negro community come in to speak to you?

SPINGARN: Roy Wilkins is a friend of mine. When he came to Washington we might have lunch or see each other, but the Negro leaders didn't need to come to me, they went to the President. I mean when Roy Wilkins came down with something important he would have a talk

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with the President. They would be talking to themselves I suppose if they were talking to me because in general I would agree with them, and I'm not saying Mr. Truman wouldn't too, but he was the man they needed to influence, not me.

HESS: I knew that we had covered part of that but I didn't know if we had covered it all.

SPINGARN: Of course, there was much less activity and agitation in the Truman administration than there has been in recent years when the racial problems have become a permanent fixture on the front page of American newspapers. In the Truman administration they were rarely on the front page of American newspapers. There were rarely major demonstrations, in fact, hardly ever that I can think of.

I can remember before Truman that A. Philip Randolph and others; Walter White and others, but I think Randolph was the key man, persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to establish a wartime FEPC by Executive order, on the threat, if that's what it was, that they were going to stage a huge march on Washington by the teas of thousands. Now, that was FEPC by the way, here's one of the things that I have always felt, in

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line with my thesis, that the best is the enemy of the good, and that by taking impossible positions of perfection you never win, you never win, you are bound to lose that way.

It has always seemed to me that if the proponents of FEPC in '46, or in the '40s right at the end of the war, would have accepted an FEPC without enforcement sanction, so-called voluntary FEPC, without the enforcement sanctions which were in later bills, that they could have gotten it through Congress at that time, and that the experience with the sort of toothless act might have demonstrated a need for sanctions and that somewhere along the line they would have gotten them, if the thing was demonstrated that it couldn't work without them.

I have always felt that would have been possible and that it was a mistake on the part of the civil rights leaders not to do that, but this is hindsight, of course, and water over the dam. I want to emphasize again that the people like Professor Bernstein who downgrade Mr. Truman because he didn't get civil rights legislation through simply don't know the political facts of life of that era -- no President, I

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don't care who he was, not John Kennedy, not Lyndon Johnson, not Abraham Lincoln could have gotten civil rights legislation through the Senate at that time. It's said that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose hour has struck, but in this case the hour had not yet struck.

Now, I want to add this while I still remember it. I talked yesterday about KOED and the evolution of that. A little personal postscript; yesterday I told how this thing evolved from a project I did in the '56 campaign, speechwriting project, and I had the assistance of a number of able young women. One of them was a lady named Ann Branscomb; she was about twenty-six or seven then, a strikingly beautiful girl from Georgia and very, very bright. She had an M.A. in political science, she was happily married to an able physicist who is now one of the Government's top physicists, I believe, Dr. Lewis Branscomb, who is head of one of the Government's big laboratories out in Boulder, Colorado, and she was studying law.

Ann has been living out in Colorado with her husband. She has become a lawyer and she is practicing, and last Saturday she was elected Democratic

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Vice-Chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party, that's the highest female rank -- by party law, the chairman is a man and the vice-chairman a woman -- and she is here in Washington and that phone call at the end of yesterday's conference was from her, and I am having lunch with her and her husband today.

This is interesting because here is a talented woman who carpet bagged, in a sense, into Colorado, she has only been there a relatively few years and now she's got the highest political Democratic woman's job in the state.

I have a great belief in the abilities of the able and politically savvy woman. They can accomplish miracles and in fact if you could line up a few thousand Ann Branscombs around the country on your side I think you'd win all of the campaigns -- a few thousand around the country, that's all it would take. Because they work harder and they are more effective than their male compeers, if they have the talents and the personality that is required to do the job, Mrs. Branscomb certainly has. I predict that she may, if she wants to be, be Senator from Colorado one day.

HESS: You mentioned that perhaps the FEPC could have

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eventually got through if they had accepted a compromise in '46 pr '47. Did you ever hear Mr. Truman make any statements on compromises on things of this nature, on civil rights matters?

SPINGARN: Well, I can't remember at this late date. I don't remember. Whenever you talk to anybody who says they remember specifically what somebody said fifteen, twenty years ago he probably is lying, unless it was something of very deep significance to them at the moment so they would remember it all through the years. I heard Mr. Truman say many, many things, but I don't remember most of them.

HESS: We have talked to some extent about the loyalty and security matters, and your duties in the White House in relation to loyalty and security matters. Have we covered that adequately or are there other things to be put down? I have a few questions here just on the writing of the message and on the writing of the veto message. Did you write the veto message?

SPINGARN: As usual it was a team job.

HESS: I should have expressed it differently and said did you write the first draft?

SPINGARN: No. I'll tell you what I did do. I wrote a

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first draft, and I also asked my colleague, my former assistant at the Treasury, Don Hansen who was still at the Treasury and who knew a lot about this field to write his version of it, and I think there were one or two more drafts in the picture, and these were all turned over to David Bell who wrote, what I suppose you could call, the composite first draft. I mean he had the benefit of my draft, and Hansen's draft and possibly one or two others, you see.

I would say that -- well, we all wrote first drafts if you like, but David Bell took the several that were already written and wrote a composite first draft and we climbed on top of that and I wrote lengthy memoranda and suggestions for revisions. I sent Dave Bell lengthy memoranda commenting, "strike this, and insert these paragraphs," you know, that sort of thing, pages and pages, and other people made their comments and the drafts evolved until finally we got the final draft, so I don't know who wrote the first draft. It all depends on how you look at it, but I would say that more than anyone else probably it was David Bell, but we were all in the picture.

I remember that Hubert Humphrey -- the President made

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some statement at a press conference, he was asked if he was going to veto the Internal Security bill and he said that he couldn't tell until he saw it. This was his standard statement, because after all, it could always be changed. It was in a news conference I think when he was asked that question. It was not final, and it could always be changed and it is obvious that a President shouldn't commit himself on a controversial bill, ordinarily at least unless there is some special circumstance, on what he is going to do. The bill hadn't even reached final shape. So, he said he would wait until he saw it.

Well, Senator Hubert Humphrey phoned me then and he said the liberals who opposed the bill were disturbed by that statement because they thought it meant a weakening of the President's position, because he had talked adversely about this bill along the way. I said I didn’t see it that way at all because this was just the standard reply of the President on such matters, and that the bill was in conference and theoretically could be amended into a proper bill because some of the provisions in the bill were approved by the President, some of the provisions in the bill

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were in the President's own message to Congress, I think it was August 7th or 8th somewhere like that, the message and bill that I prepared, the President's own internal security bill -- I'm talking about August 7th or 8th, 1950, in there or thereabouts.

So it was theoretically possible, we all knew it wasn't going to happen, but it was theoretically possible that the bill could be revised into the proper shape. I remember this: The President did something unusual, it's never been done before or since as I recall; he attached to his veto message a little buck slip memo in which he said something to the effect that he urged each member of the Congress to read this thing carefully, he emphasized its importance and urged each member to read it carefully, something like that. It will be in your files, the exact wording. It was just a little gimmick you might say, but it was unusual and as far as I know it had never been done before, and there was some press comment on that.

Well, the message went up and the House overruled the veto, hardly leaving its seat to do so, without leaving the jury box, you might say. It went to the Senate and there was substantial debate, and

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they debated -- I think it was a Friday -- and they debated all Friday night, and old Senator Langer, he was the only Republican opposed to it, if my memory is right, and he collapsed finally and had to be carted off to the hospital. And sometime, I think it was Saturday morning, that is my recollection anyway, and the Congress was going to adjourn or was scheduled to adjourn that day. Senator Humphrey's legislative assistant, who I think then was John Sims, phoned me and said that the Senator wanted to know if the President thought they should continue the filibuster and not let the thing come to a vote, should they continue their support of the veto...

HESS: Blocking the vote.

SPINGARN: ...blocking the vote to override the veto by continuing the debate. I took this message to the President, I think it was at a staff meeting that morning, and I told the President about this phone call and asked him what I should advise Humphrey. The President said -- this was a rather typical statement on his part -- that, of course, it was up to the Senator, but that his own opinion was that, if by continuing the debate they could avoid a final vote before

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adjournment, then he would be for it, but if they were going to have a final vote anyway he thought they should continue only until they thought they had gotten all of the possible publicity in the newspapers that they could out of it, and then let it go to a vote, that's my recollection.

I have written all this up in a memorandum at the time, a contemporaneous memorandum, which is in the Truman Library; and again anything I say is subject to revision by the memorandums I have written in the past because they are more accurate than what I recollect now, obviously. I am quoting from memory of long distance events, so I defer to my own contemporaneous memoranda, on everything -- everything.

So. I relayed that message and they let it go to a vote, and oh, there is another thing. The President told Charlie Murphy and me at one point that day -- I've forgotten whether it was Friday or Saturday -- that he had gotten some report from the Hill, Leslie Biffle or I don't know whom, I've forgotten, maybe a Senator -- saying that they had been very much impressed with the cogency of the arguments in the veto message, and that they had been surprised, some of the Senators,

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who were on the fence or who were for overriding the veto, were somewhat shaken by it; and the President was encouraged by this statement and he told Charlie and me to do what we could, to make phone calls and so forth and see what we could do to mobilize support for the veto message, and I remember Charlie and I made some phone calls.

I remember talking specifically to Brien McMahon who was a friend of mine, a Senator from Connecticut, now dead, and I didn't get to first base. Brien was committed to voting to override the veto, and there was no possibility of changing his mind. Charlie made some calls, and I think he called the Democratic National Committee and asked them to help, but it all didn't prove very effective because when the final vote came it was overwhelmingly to override. My recollection is there were only ten or eleven votes to sustain the veto in the Senate, and only thirty or forty in the House, something on that order.

HESS: Do you recall offhand if Joseph Feeney and Charles Maylon also worked with you on this, in your relations with Congress?

SPINGARN: In this particular thing? I don't remember any

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connection they had with it, if they did I'm not aware of the fact.

HESS: One point I failed to ask yesterday when we were discussing them, just what was their relationship to you. Who did they report to?

SPINGARN: As far as I know they reported to Matt Connelly. That was my impression. They certainly didn't report to Charlie Murphy and they didn't report to me. They reported to Matt Connelly, that was my impression.

HESS: Do you know why they would have reported to Matt Connelly?

SPINGARN: No, I don't. Their whole position in the thing was a little obscure as far as the lines of control went, I'm not sure I was aware at the time exactly. My impression was that they reported to Matt Connelly.

And, as I say, it was a very pedestrian sort of operation, it seemed to me, which was possibly consonant with what the President wanted. There was no arm twisting or heavy pressure that I was aware of. It was more a matter of communicating what the White House position was without any argumentation, and reporting back what the Senator or Congressman said. And, neither man, as far as I knew, ever knew much about the substance of

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the measure so that he could have argued effectively in any event, you see.

HESS: Also did you write the message of August 1950?

SPINGARN: Yes.

HESS: Did you work with any particular staff members on that? Anything come to mind? What were the problems in writing the August message?

SPINGARN: Well, the problem was this: The problem was you can't beat something with nothing, and so that was my thesis and the President's thesis and I think I was the one who proposed the message, that's my recollection, but as I say, go back to the files, I don't know really now -- it's all lost in the haze of many years.

HESS: That's quite some time ago.

SPINGARN: Well, it's seventeen years. My recollection is that I proposed simply on that basis that since a bill was rushing through Congress, the Mundt-Nixon bill, that we opposed much of it, and that they were yowling about the need for greater internal security, that we should get up an internal security measure which would incorporate those provisions of Mundt-Nixon, or other bills, that we thought were worthwhile, commendable or at least not bad, and that the President should

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submit his own message and that then you would have something, instead of nothing, to fight Mundt-Nixon with, and that's the way it was done.

Now, I might say, as I said before, in 1950 which was the very height of McCarthyism, you could write the Ten Commandments on a sheet of paper and pass it as an internal security measure, or you could write anything. Anything you labeled internal security was going to go through. That was the way it was. Now, the main provision -- the big central provision -- which encompassed the majority of the whole bill in the Mundt-Nixon bill, were the so-called Mundt-Nixon provision, which provided for the registration of the Communist Party, and certain requirements that it had to fulfill in reporting on its membership and finances, and it also provided for a registration by the so-called front organization.

Now, that was seventeen years ago. This bill became law over the President's veto in September 1950. Seventeen years later the central target of that bill, the Communist Party, has not yet been required by law to register under criminal sanctions for failing to do so, and the Court of Appeals within the last

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couple of weeks has held unconstitutional the attempt to penalize them for failure to .... and now it goes to the Supreme Court and I haven't the least doubt that they will affirm the Court of Appeals and therefore the Mundt-Nixon provisions will presumably become a nullity for all practical purposes. That's my impression.

Let's put it this way: If the safety of the Republic stood in jeopardy and seventeen years have gone by without doing the things the Mundt-Nixon bill wanted done, boy, we must have been in terrible shape back in 1950. Joke. This was a stupid and absurd bill, which didn't make sense, and which was passed in a hysterical moment, of which we shouldn't be too proud, and the proof of the pudding is what has happened to that bill in the seventeen years since, and I think Mr. Truman has every reason to feel satisfaction over his veto of the Mundt-Nixon bill.

HESS: What about the Defense Production Act of 1950? What was your involvement in that?

SPINGARN: Well, my involvement was -- and again I have elaborately documented this because one of the best files in the Truman Library I feel sure is the Defense Production bill file. I mean in technical

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terms and in terms of completeness.

HESS: That's what your papers start off on and it contains -- it's in several boxes, but I thought that there might be a few items here...

SPINGARN: I want to make this comment first. The White House files are the worst files I've ever seen in any Government agency in my life. When you called for a file, a mish-mash of loose papers, literally loose papers, maybe with a string around them, came over, and they were not indexed, there were no tabs, there was no sorting, no collating of them under subject matter -- nothing, just loose papers mostly. It was fantastic.

I had never seen Government files in that bad of shape. In the Treasury, we had had a very able archivist, Miss Helen Chatfield, and by this time she was the Budget Bureau archivist, so when I had major projects I turned the files, I would turn a tubful of files and papers over to her, and ask her to put them in good shape, and she would do a beautiful job. And the two I remember particularly she did for me were the Defense Production Act of 1950 and the Small Business Bill of 1950, both of which I was in

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charge of preparing.

HESS: Those are probably very well documented, and they are in your files and not your papers at the Library -- the Defense Production Act are in boxes one through four, and Small Business in seven through nine.

SPINGARN: Recently an Englishman named Martin Rudd, who is a senior British civil servant, and who was studying for the British Government what other governments are doing to help the small business with the idea of the British Government seeing which of these ideas they can borrow, use, came to see me after spending some days, or more, out at the Truman Library. The reason he came to see me was that he had seen the Small Business Bill file of 1950 which I was responsible for, and he told me that he was so impressed with it that, I am sure it was partly the presentation in the file as well as the material, that he thought he ought to see me, although this is pretty ancient history basically I mean when you are dealing with what to do in 1967 going back to a proposal that didn't even reach the status of law in 1950.

Anyway, on the Korean war bill, the Korean war as I recall broke out, Washington time, June 24th, 1950,

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I think it was June 25th out there and June 24th here, and the United States reacted immediately.

First of all the President ordered air cover for the troops in southern Korea, and then within a very short time, a matter of two or three days, he moved in troops. I can remember doing something very brash, rushing in where angels fear to tread, for these were parlous times. I remember at a staff meeting, oh, it must have been around the 27th I would guess of June, 1950 --and this was none of my business, you understand, it wasn't my function to advise the President on what to do in Korea, but I did, at least I prepared a memorandum making certain suggestions which I presented to him at a staff meeting, and my suggestion was that we ought to get a UN force under a non-American, that was my thesis. A United Nations force under a non-American general would be the best answer to the North Korean aggression. Well, of course, they got a UN force, but not a non-American commander, but it was interesting that the President at this point, I mean when my suggestion was made to him at the staff meeting, he then unbuttoned and told us what he was doing, what he was going to do, and this

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was the first news we'd had, most of his staff I mean, of what he was doing, which is actually what happened, of course.

Anyway, we had to prepare a bill to put the Government in a position to wage war, and there were two main schools of thought as to how far we should go; one, I'll call the Symington school, because Stu Symington was probably the major proponent of that within the circles of Government, and that was -- he was then the chairman of the National Security Resources Board, and they had responsibility for preparing the Government's mobilization plans, and they did have drafts of bills but they were outmoded, I mean they just weren't particularly applicable to the situation we found ourselves in, and Stu Symington was an all-out mobilization man. He wanted to mobilize the country, put it on a war mobilization basis.

And my recollection is that the opposing school was probably led -- I may even be wrong on my protagonists, but this is my recollection at this late date. I want to emphasize -- I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Mark Twain said, "As I get older I remember less and less of past events and most of what I remember isn't

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true." So, for the historians who may read this just remember that I am speaking from memory, and that to the extent that my own contemporary records are different, they are right and I am wrong, and to the extent other contemporary records -- on facts, I am entitled to any opinion I want, but on facts -- differ with me, they are right and I am wrong.

HESS: That's one of the accepted tenets of oral history.

SPINGARN: Yes, but it needs to be said over and over again. As I recall Leon Keyserling, who was then chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, represented the limited mobilization school and, of course, he was right, and that's what prevailed.

Well, Stu Symington is a very energetic and dynamic chap. I remember attending meetings in his office and Stu would charge around the desk and pound on it and shout and they were very dynamic meetings. He was a very forceful proponent of his point of view, and sometimes you would come out of there and you would be terribly impressed by the whole meeting but you'd come out and say, "But what did he say?" It was mostly that charge of energy that got you in

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there, you know.

In any event I was asked to produce a bill, and there was also a message, of course. Now, a different team worked on the message, and I suppose -- well, I've forgotten -- of course, it was Charlie Murphy and Dave Bell and Dave Lloyd, I assume, and who else was in on it I don't know, but I was in charge of drafting the bill that would accompany the message. I remember that this was done over a very short period of time, very short, as I recollect about five days and over a weekend, too, and the five days included Saturday and Sunday. It is just a blur to me now, but we were working night and day for five days, and so many agencies were involved, there were different titles on this thing to promote the defense production. Don't ask me any details about the bill because I've forgotten them all now. You'll have to go to the files.

But, I do remember this: We had little sub-task forces stashed around the whole building so that the people involved could talk on different problems. There would be one here, one down the hall, one on the next floor, they were all over the building for five days,

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day and night, and I was sitting there and I was feeling very important, I'll tell you that, because Cabinet officers were calling on me -- I mean Charlie Brannan came over to see me, and I think [Maurice J.] Tobin came over to see me, because everybody had a major interest in that bill obviously, it was the most important bill before the Government at that time, and tremendous decisions had to be made on what was going into that bill, and what was not going into it, and how it was going to end up. And, of course, the very big decisions were all checked to the President, but there are an awful lot of intermediate and minor decisions that you can't bother the President with, somebody has to decide them, and I was the man that had to decide them at that point, and it had to be done so damn fast.

Anyway, we got the bill together and I recounted previously how I took it up to the Hill, and gave it to Speaker Rayburn, and how I told him that the President hoped the bill would go to the House Banking and Currency Committee. Brent Spence of Kentucky a liberal Kentuckian, and a good friend of the administration, was chairman. The House Armed Services Committee I

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think was the other possibility. I can't remember who the chairman was, but it was a hostile chairman, a chairman from whom we would have trouble we knew. The Speaker, Speaker Rayburn, withered me with a glance and said, "Young man," or words to that effect, nobody, not the President of the United States, no, nobody tells the House where it refers its legislation. That's my prerogative, or our prerogative."

"Yes, sir," I never made that mistake again. I thought I had done it very tactfully. But in any event, he had the House Parliamentarian, Lou Deschler, with him, and he had Desehler look over the bill and then he looked at me and he said, "Well, you fellows have rigged this bill so that the Parliamentarian tells me we have to send it to the Banking and Currency Committee." So it went where the President wanted it to, where we hoped it would.

I remember going down and giving McCormack, he was the majority leader then, a copy, John McCormack, the Speaker now, and a wonderful man who I have known since 1935, and who was one of the principal and most important supporters of this KOED program, which I finally sold to the Democratic National Committee

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last month, and his support is a major factor, I believe, in its going into orbit at last.

Well, anyway when I was emerging from McCormack's office, the Speaker came out of his office and he buttonholed me and brought me back into his office, and he wanted us to add a provision to the bill which would provide that the bill would automatically terminate, all the powers in the bill would automatically terminate, at the end of two years, unless extended by an affirmative act of Congress. I think we had a termination provision that was the other way around -- it would continue until terminated by Congress, or Executive order of the President, or something like that, I've forgotten, but anyway, he wanted an affirmative provision that would automatically end it in two years, unless the Congress extended it. I assured him we'd put it in, I mean, that wasn't worth arguing about, and we did, of course.

And then, I went over and saw Senator Lucas, who was the Senate majority leader, and I left a copy with the Vice President's office, and I have gone into that little matter. Then, the bill was in Congress for several weeks, I've forgotten exactly how long,

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and I kept in close touch, but the fellow who did a terrific job on that bill and who I want to mention right now was Matt Hale, Matthew Hale, who was the Acting Solicitor of the Department of Commerce, and who had worked closely with us in the drafting of the bill, and who we arranged to go to the Hill and work with the committees in the processing of it, and did such a good job and made himself so invaluable that the committees really brought him inside their caucuses as a member of their own staff, you see, so that he was working right inside the club, as it were, and, of course, that gave us a perfect liaison on what was going on.

I remember I used to call Senator Maybank of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, he's dead now, and I used to call him at his home every morning about eight o'clock, and check with him on what was happening on the bill, and communicate to him things that the President wanted his views on, how the bill was going, and how he wanted it to go, and hear from the Senator what he thought and how the thing might turn out, and what the vote was likely to be on this or that controversial provision, that sort of thing -- the usual legislative

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liaison. So, it was a very busy season, but it went through all right and that's about all I remember.

HESS: Mr. Spingarn, what were your duties in regard to labor matters in the White House?

SPINGARN: I had no substantive duties in regard to labor matters, but you must remember that I was in effect the pivot man on legislation -- what the Treasury would have called legislative counsel -- and on the legislation that went through Congress every bill came through me to the President. That is, it went to the White House, it was sent to the Bureau of the Budget to farm out and get the agency views, when they came back from Budget they always had to be done in the space of less than ten days -- quickly, of course, and it was handled on a highest priority expedited basis.

The Budget sent it to me. Roger Jones was the Budget assistant director for legislative reference, and he has had a distinguished career by the way in Government since then. Roger is actually a Republican from Connecticut, a Connecticut Yankee and a Republican. He has been in Government since, I think, '33. Everybody likes him. He's a good man. And, he was Budget's assistant director for legislative reference at that

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time. Later Eisenhower appointed him Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, and then Kennedy appointed him Deputy Under Secretary of State, and now he is back in the Budget as special assistant to the director, and sort of top level trouble-shooter.

He would be the man responsible for collecting the agency views and seeing that the bill got to me on time, and then I would study it and make my own recommendations, which normally would go along with the Budget, and take it over to the President personally, and explain the matter.

If there were, for example, no problems at all -- everybody agreed, you know -- then I could simply take it to Bill Hopkins, who was executive clerk, and say everybody is agreed on this and, it's a formality to sign it, because there is no opposition; but if there was a difference of opinion, that was when you had to talk to the President obviously, and say to him that agency "A" and "B" think the bill should be vetoed, but "C" and "D" and the Budget think it should be signed, and I think it should be signed -- whatever the situation was. Now, as to labor, that would include labor bills and anything else.

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HESS: I just have a short question here. Did the President usually place quite a lot of strength on what the Bureau of the Budget approved or disapproved -- their opinion as opposed to some of the other agencies?

SPINGARN: Yes, I would say that the views of the Bureau of the Budget ordinarily would have a higher value than the view of the particular agency, because the Budget theoretically had no axes to grind, they were not an interest group. They were above the fray, you might say, whereas the agency, after all was in a sense an interest group with its own constituency, more or less, and, therefore, you had to look on them as -- from the President's standpoint they were a proponent of a point of view, you see, and the Budget was not a proponent of any special point of view, they were the judge attempting to weigh all sides and arrive at a fair verdict. I personally would have placed a higher value ordinarily on the Budget view and I think the President did, too.

HESS: Fine. I didn't want to interrupt your chain of thought but I did want to throw that out.

SPINGARN: But that didn't mean that we always agreed with the Budget, but usually more likely than not.

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One of the things, by the way that was a little frustrating, was a tendency of agencies to settle matters entirely on precedent without regard to the actual equities of the individual case. In other words, you would get a case that seemed terribly sympathy compelling -- I mean a real injustice had been done -- but if you permitted this bill to be signed then you would open the door for this whole classification, that was the idea. You had set a precedent. Well, that's an argument that has to be considered, that's true, but sometimes a case is so bad, the injustice so great, that you have to say, I don't care what its classification -- all classifications exactly like this should be signed, there should be something done about it. Let's try to distinguish this from the general category. But the tendency in the agencies was to give you that boilerplate answer, this would open the door to ....you know, so many other similar situations, and quite often the Budget and I would take the opposing point of view, and the President would almost always go along with our point of view, as I recall. These were usually on private bills dealing with the situation of one particular individual, an immigration bill or

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something of that sort.

Actually the functional lines at the White House in the Truman era were very loosely defined and that was best, it was flexible. You had the two big compartments, as I say, between what you might call operations under Steelman, and program and planning under first Clifford and then Murphy. I can't speak for Steelman's area, but within the program and planning, things were very loosely defined and you might get a job that was not at all in your ordinary bailiwick, just depending on who was available, and what the exigencies of the moment were. Nobody ever said to me, "Steve, you are the big internal security and loyalty man." It was just that I was very deeply interested in that field and I gravitated toward it and so naturally the work on it gravitated toward me, you see, that was naturally the way it worked.

Charlie Murphy knew of my relationship to this work so that it was natural that whenever anything like that came up it was likely to be farmed to me.

In the same way, David Lloyd, was the acknowledged master of speechwriting, and most of the big first drafts came from him.

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David Bell, on the other hand, was the acknowledged master in writing messages to Congress, which is a more precise and formal terminology. David Bell has one of the clearest and sharpest and most precise minds I have ever met, and he was therefore the guy, not always, but he was the guy most likely to be handling a message to Congress, as distinguished from a speech, on the first draft of it, at least.

But, this wasn't always the case, so it was all very informal. Now, there is this to be said; at the White House, you either have a small, informal, flexible organization at the top or as it starts to grow it is bound to institutionalize, and then it becomes less flexible, and there are great advantages to that flexibility, that rapport between the men at the top who were working intimately together without any hard and fast hierarchical and institutional lines.

Anything that gets too big has to institutionalize, and then you have to establish hierarchical lines that are rather rigid. This has its value from an administrative standpoint, but it has its defects from the standpoint of, I think, producing the best work. So, we had a very small staff.

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Now, there were only about a dozen people who attended the President's staff conference in the morning and several of those were ceremonial. I mean the three military aides, military, naval, and air aides all attended. They weren't functional in the ordinary sense of the word. Charlie Ross, who was the press secretary, attended, and so did Eben Ayers, the assistant press secretary -- that's five. Then there was Steelman, Murphy, Clifford before he left, there was Matt Connelly, Bill Hassett, and all the administrative assistants except David Niles, as I said, he never attended; that is Dave Stowe, Donald Dawson, George Elsey and me. And, I have told this story, too, on tape I believe, I wasn't invited to attend I just infiltrated finally and stuck. The question of who attended the staff conference was never sharply defined, but it was indispensable to the man who was working at the top level, you simply couldn't do your job without being there.

HESS: You wouldn't know what was going on.

SPINGARN: You wouldn't know what was going on and since the President's time was very limited for your own solo approach to him, this gave you a daily opportunity.

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Actually, I found as I went along and sort of got my feet on the ground, since I was handling legislation and since everybody, of course, Matt Connelly was the guardian of the gate as far as getting in to see the President was concerned; but since I handled legislation and I was often carrying enrolled bills and Matt knew that these had to move, I never had any trouble getting in to see the President. I mean I would go over there and there would be people in the anteroom, and I would say, "Matt can you put me in between a couple of appointments?" And he would always do it. I'd say, "I will only take three to five minutes of his time," or something like that. That was the way it worked. And that was principally because I was working on legislative matters and the enrolled bills particularly which had to move. There was a time limit on them.

HESS: You could get the President's attention just about anytime you needed to?

SPINGARN: Yes.

HESS: Well, the subject of labor also brings up the subject of unemployment, and in the President's midyear economic report of 1949 one of the items touched upon was the areas of heavy unemployment in the United

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States, and this has been regarded as one of the first acknowledgements of this taking place after the war. Did you help write that message? Do you remember anything about that?

SPINGARN: To tell you the truth I don't recall that I did and I expect I didn't, but my recollection is that a little task force was set up under John Steelman, headed by Houston, John Houston, and I'm sure David Stowe was in the picture, too, and I don't know who else. I don't know whether they worked up that program, but they were assigned to see what they could do about bringing help to the distressed areas, the special pools of heavy unemployment and depression. You know there was -- not a depression, but a recession in '49. I remember a lot of discussion on that, but I can't focus on it. I don't know.

You have to remember that you are working so hard and so many things are happening ....now you asked me, not on tape, but you asked me one day if you could describe a typical day at the White House. Well, there were no typical days at the White House -- there were no typical days. Here is an example; one of the things I did every day, and I still do it, was to make lists

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for myself of the things I had to do, and I have here two big volumes which I call my White House manual. And actually this was a kind of modus operandi book, I don't know what you want to call it, this is for my own benefit.

HESS: Now, this has been microfilmed?

SPINGARN: It has been microfilmed...

HESS: And, it's out at the Library.

SPINGARN: ...and it's out at the Library, two volumes of my White House manuals. And I picked out copies of memoranda I wrote and anything that I thought was of interest enough to go into this. Of course, I may have overlooked a lot of things, too, because I was too busy to always do it with care. But I used to write to my secretary, "Copy to WH manual," you know, and she would put it in here. Whether or not I caught everything, I'm sure I didn't, of course, but every day I would write notes to myself, and some of them are in here. Usually these were longhand notes, but sometimes I had my secretaries, Mary Jones, or Margaret Anderson, type them.

By the way, you were talking about civil rights votes. Here, for instance, is a memorandum, "Re

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second FEPC cloture vote," and it discusses the next vote on FEPC as scheduled for July 12. They had had a first vote on cloture a couple of months earlier. It discusses the composition of the Senate on this thing, how we think they are going to vote; it had the following -- the thirty Democrats that should be present and voting on July 12. And for instance it has asterisks after several of those names and says the asterisk means they were absent on May 19th, 1950 cloture vote; that means these fellows were not present on the last cloture vote, we should try to get them to be present on this next one, and so on.

HESS: Those were the men to work on.

SPINGARN: Those were the men to work on. And here is the past record of the whole Senate, Republicans and Democrats, on previous key civil rights votes in '49 and '50, which might give some indication as to how they would be voting, you see, and so on. For instance here is a memorandum of July 5, 1950, by me, a memorandum for the FEPC file:

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Now, you see this shows that we were trying -- doing our best. Here are more like this. Here is a memo, for instance, from Philleo Nash to me giving some breakdowns on the votes and what we might expect in the cloture vote, and there's lot of these, you see, many, many memos like that. But I had in here somewhere, I thought -- I know ...here's something. It's a memorandum for Murphy from me dated June 10, 1950, the subject is, "The presidential reply to Attorney General McGrath's June 6th letter about the fine record of Solicitor General Perlman."

I raise this because in my discussion of Professor Bernstein's paper on civil rights in the Truman administration at the American Historical Association Convention on December 29, 1966, I told how he cited Philip Elman, who was one of Phil Perlman's lesser assistants at the time Perlman was Solicitor General, as saying that Perlman was a racist and used all sorts of obnoxious words -- that he said, "There's a delegation of 'coons' waiting to see me;" that he wasn't really interested

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in civil rights, that he was only interested in publicity for himself, and so forth. Well, here is a memorandum which I call -- it's tab number fourteen in my White House manual -- and I write to Murphy:

And the last sentence of the Attorney General's letter reads as follows:

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I'll have to stand on the record, but I think that that's what went out, or something like that.

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HESS: Fine. That will be available at the Library if any of the researchers striking this point want to refer to it and read the whole memo.

SPINGARN: Here is a bill that I really don't remember at all. It's a memorandum from me to the President, June 16, '50. "Suggested items for discussion with Congressman Brent Spence, Friday afternoon, June 16th." In other words I gave it to him in the morning because he was going to talk to him. And it is on the rent control bill and, also, on reorganization plan number twenty-four, transferring the RFC to the Commerce Department. Well, now, one thing that I haven't mentioned, I still haven't found, during a lull, I'll look. Oh, here's something.

I told earlier -- yesterday or the day before -- I told about giving him an excerpt of a speech by my father about politics and the poet, and about the excerpt from Carl Sandburg on Lincoln as a politician. Here is a memorandum referring to this.

HESS: What tab number is that?

SPINGARN: This is tab...

HESS: Tab number twenty-two.

SPINGARN: Tab number twenty-two in my White House manual.

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"Memorandum for the President from Stephen J. Spingarn, Subject: Politics and the Poet," and I start off, "You may be interested in seeing this article which I mentioned to you on the Williamsburg this weekend." The Williamsburg was, of course, the presidential yacht, and I had gone up with the President to Valley Forge where he had made a speech to the Boy Scout encampment, there were some fifty thousand scouts, there and we returned on the Williamsburg -- it was an overnight trip. And then at the end I say (I had talked to him you see on the boat about this), "There is also attached an excerpt from Carl Sandburg's work on Lincoln which seems to tie in with the thesis of my father's article." This was perhaps not too Machiavellian on my part.

Every Monday the Big Four met with the President, the Big Four being the congressional leaders, the Speaker of the House, the Democratic Majority Leader, the Vice President, and the Senate Majority Leader. In my time these were Speaker Rayburn, Majority Leader John McCormack, who is now the Speaker of the House, Vice President Barkley, and Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois. Every Monday morning Charlie Murphy and I gave the President a memorandum of items which we suggested

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he might wish to discuss with the leadership. Murphy and I normally signed the memorandum jointly.

HESS: Did any of the members of the White House staff sit in on those meetings?

SPINGARN: No.

HESS: Did the President usually relate to you or to Mr. Murphy after the meeting was over what had transpired?

SPINGARN: Let me say, only if it seemed to him something that we ought to know. I can't speak for Charlie Murphy, he'll have to speak for himself, but I didn't ordinarily hear what had transpired except that if I was greatly interested I might ask the President on some particular point, if anything had been decided on this or that, but ordinarily I wouldn't. Usually what we were doing was to suggest to the President that he gently influence the legislative leaders along a legislative course, to push his program at this or that point, you see.

HESS: Do you think this meeting on Monday was one of the President's prime contacts with the Congress?

SPINGARN: Oh certainly, certainly. I mean, for instance, here is a memorandum of July 10th, 1950.

HESS: Tab eighteen.

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SPINGARN: "Suggested items for discussion with the Big Four on Monday, July 10th. The President may wish to raise the following matters," I'll just read a few so you can get the idea, "with the congressional leaders; one, point 4 appropriations. The President may wish to emphasize his determination as to the full thirty-five million dollar authorization be appropriated, and his intention to confer later in the week with the ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Appropriation Committees." I'll skip two, that's on point 4, too. Well, now let me give point two, "point 4 investment guarantees. The House is scheduled to vote this week. The President might wish to reiterate his support for this measure and the importance of a strong favorable vote." Three, campaign of truth, "The Budget will have the appropriation estimate ready by tomorrow, the President might wish to ask the leaders when they would like to see the estimate sent forward pointing out that he can have it up before the weekend." Oh, here is five, "Cloture vote on FEPC. This comes up to July 12th. The President may wish to emphasize again the great importance of obtaining the maximum showing of Democratic support. Reference might be made to

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Boyle's statement on Sunday," that's Bill Boyle the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and so on. The Sumner Pike nomination was coming up, and there was a lot of opposition, and the President was strong for it. I remember I did some work on that, too. Alaska and Hawaii statehood. Amendments of the Clayton Act, that was the anti-merger bill which became law later that year. The Department of Health Education and Security.

HESS: What do you recall about your involvement in some of those points you have just been reading off?

SPINGARN: Not much. Here's one I remember though. Hastie nomination. I mean obviously I was involved in almost all of them in some degree or other, but I don't remember much about -- there were too many things to remember fifteen to twenty years later. The Hastie nomination -- here's one I remember. I remember the cloture vote on FEPC, of course. I don't remember anything about those point 4 items. I remember a little about the Sumner Pike nomination, because I wrote some material on that I remember. I think I wrote a message for the President, or a letter of some sort. Hastie nomination -- that was William Hastie who has been

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nominated for the Court of Appeals in the third circuit up in Philadelphia, whatever circuit that is. "Senator Magnuson and other pro-Hastie Senators who will be back sometime this week in connection with the debate on the omnibus appropriation bill. Magnuson would like a vote in the full Senate Judiciary Committee on the Hastie nomination on Monday, July 17. This would be an excellent time, and the President may wish to mention this to the Senate Judiciary. Senator [Forrest C.] Donnell appears to be the only one dragging his feet on this matter although he says he is not against Hastie." Donnell was a Republican, or was he -- yes, I think he was. Well, anyway, William Hastie was, I think, the first Negro Court of Appeals judge. He was a wonderful guy -- was and is, he's still a Court of Appeals judge up there, a very able judge -- as I recall he had been on the Harvard Law Review. He was the special counsel of the NAACP and a friend of mine, and a splendid chap. He had been Governor of the Virgin Islands, and he had been a judge down there. That had been a Federal job but not on the level with the Federal district or appeals court judge in the United States. He had been dean of Howard Law School, he was an outstanding man, and the President nominated him to be Court of Appeals judge, and naturally

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since he was a precedent breaker, in a sense, there was opposition from southern quarters, and some of the opposition attempted to make Hastie -- this is 1950 remember -- to make Hastie out a Communist fellow traveler -- link him up with fronts.

But the fact of the matter was that Hastie not only was not that, but that he had been a strong opponent of Wallace in '48, and that he had done very effective work in pointing out the Communist domination of the Wallace Progressive Party in '48, this is all a matter of record; made speeches and all that sort of thing.

In any event, at my suggestion, Bill Hastie got together a dossier on these things, you see, to prove his record, and I placed them I remember in the hands of key people on the Hill, Senators and so forth.

I remember a personal phone call I made to Vice President Barkley on this matter because I, of course, had a special interest in seeing that the Hastie nomination went through, and I remember a special phone call -- I've forgotten the details of the call that I made to Vice President Barkley -- I think it was at his home one day about expediting, and about the problems of the Hastie nomination, and what could be done about it. I

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was much interested in that and, of course, it did go through. And, Hastie has been an excellent judge, President Truman has every right to be proud of that nomination. There are many other items here.

HESS: Those will be out at the Library so the researchers can go through them.

SPINGARN: Yes.

Dick Neustadt is very much in the news these days because he is director of the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard. Here is a memorandum ....I won't read the whole thing, but I'll mention that it's tab number twenty in my White House manual. It was dated October 9th, 1950, I was to leave the White House about two weeks after that. It was a memorandum for Donald Dawson, who was an Administrative Assistant to the President, and who was in charge of personnel matters: "Subject: promotion recommendation for Richard E. Neustadt," and I go over the fact that Neustadt had come to the White House staff in May 1950 from the Budget to serve as my assistant. He was in grade fourteen and I was recommending him for a grade fifteen promotion. I said I had intended to wait until he had been six months at the White House, but in

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view of my imminent departure I was making the recommendation now a few weeks early. And here's the operating part:

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I sent that to Charlie Murphy with a note: "Charlie here is a promotion recommendation on Dick Neustadt which I am sending Don Dawson. If you agree, I should be very happy if you would cover it with a memorandum to Don with any comment you care to make on the subject."

And, Charlie Murphy, the same day, October the 9th, wrote to Dawson: "I have examined the attached recommendation for promotion for Dick Neustadt which is being sent to you by Steve Spingarn. I want you to know that I agree fully with what Steve has to say concerning Dick's outstanding ability and the exceptional quality of his work."

Well, here is an epilogue to this which casts

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another light on Dick Neustadt, though not on his abilities, which are tremendous. In October about two weeks after I wrote that memorandum I went to the Federal Trade Commission as Commissioner. Dick Neustadt had been brought to the White House by me and was my assistant. I never had any trouble reaching Charlie Murphy or other people on the staff by telephone but Dick Neustadt was the hardest man for me to reach by telephone on the White House staff. Sometimes he wouldn't answer a call for three days.

I commented rather bitterly on this on occasion but it didn't seem to do any good. In '63 or '64 Dick Neustadt was -- by this time had written the book Presidential Power which Kennedy used as his Bible. He was professor at Columbia, and he was a special consultant to the White House on various matters. I was again trying to promote my KOED program. Dick Neustadt had a pipeline to the President and I wanted his help. I had great difficulty even getting a reply. I mean he wouldn't reply to my communications on the matter; he came to Washington almost every week, but he never called me. So, one day he was staying at the Dupont Plaza, which is right across the street

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from here, and one day about seven forty-five or eight o'clock in the morning I went over to the Dupont Plaza and rapped on his door, and when he answered I impersonated the voice of a foreign waiter -- I said, "Ya, ya," something in an incomprehensible foreign voice, he came to the door and opened it, he wasn't wearing anything but the lower half of his pajamas and I infiltrated and pinned him down and spent an hour or so with him and finally got a little help from him, but it was a rather hard way to do it.

So, whatever the components of Dick Neustadt's nature, I would say that gratitude is not one of them. But the longer I live the more I realize that gratitude is not a very common ingredient in any of our natures. Gratitude as someone has wisely said represents a lively expectation of favors to come, among most people, and I suppose it is true with me, too, though I hope not. So, that represents perhaps a more interesting footnote to my account of Dick Neustadt's outstanding ability.

HESS: I have a question about international affairs.

SPINGARN: All right, go ahead.

HESS: Could you tell me what your duties were in the

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White House involving international affairs? You came in shortly after the President's inaugural, address in which he made the statement on point 4. Did you get into the formation of that?

SPINGARN: No, I did not. I can only say that on international affairs, I had no responsibilities on international affairs except that I was a member of the speechwriting team and I got in on most of the speeches during my era there, to some degree or other, and these included the foreign policy speeches, of course. The chap at the State Department who was Dean Acheson's principle speechwriter, if I'm not mistaken was Marshall Shulman, who was very able, and he was usually the guy who would start off on these -- I don't know that even that's true -- anyway he worked with us on the foreign policy speeches. Butch Fisher, Adrian Fisher, the State Department legal adviser was another guy who might, and perhaps others, but there was no compartmentalization on speeches.

HESS: Do you recall any particular problem that arose?

SPINGARN: No, I don't. What sort do you have in mind?

HESS: The Palestine refugee problem.

SPINGARN: Oh, gosh I don't remember.

[400]

HESS: The Marshall plan, the operations of the Marshall plan?

SPINGARN: I remember vaguely. I can't remember the details so it's not very helpful but I remember somebody, of course, Dave Niles was the fellow who was supposed to be responsible for anything relating to Israel or Palestine, but I remember receiving some letters or memorandum of some sort, I can't even remember the details of it, making some proposals, I remember writing some memorandum about it and giving it to Philleo Nash or perhaps to Dave Niles. I don't remember the details so this is not very informative.

You know actually as I look this book over I realize that one of the best ways to stimulate my thinking processes is to go down these entries here because each one of them almost brings back memories.

HESS: What do you have in mind?

SPINGARN: Well, I don't know. Let me think about it, because these are the things, you know, it takes stimulation of past events to give you any real memories. It seems to me what would be most useful is if I spent an hour or so, perhaps this evening going over this

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if I have time and noting down the ones I would like to comment on.

HESS: That's a good idea, to get some background.

SPINGARN: Yes. That to the extent if I can add anything, you see to...

HESS: To what's already down.

SPINGARN: ...to what's already down. Here is something that might be of interest. I am very much interested in it today, as the President was then, and is now, I hope. Here's a memorandum for instance. This is tab number forty-five, dated August 16, 1950:

You see there is a reference to Maylon. I sent copies of this memorandum to Mr. Murphy, Mr. Dawson, Mr. Connelly, General Maylon, Mr. Feeney and Mr. Niles.

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HESS: Both Feeney and Maylon are mentioned there.

SPINGARN: Yes. You see, Maylon was the House man and this was a discharge petition in the House, so he was the theoretical operating man there.

HESS: Any particular problems come to mind on the D.C. Home Rule question?

SPINGARN: Well, the problem always was...

HESS: Anything that might not generally be known?

SPINGARN: Yes. Well, I don't know whether it is known or not. The problem always was as I recall in the House, it passed the Senate over and over again, if my recollection is correct. It passed the Senate five times or something like that, up until recently I mean, but the House always killed it.

Now, the reason I'm particularly interested is that I am now a voting resident of the District of Columbia.

I have lived here ever since I got out of law school in 1934, except for the four war years. Up until '63, I voted the first half of the time from Arizona, where I went to college and law school and started voting, and the next half in New York which was my native heath.

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Then when the constitutional amendment giving the District a presidential vote went through in '62 or '63, I decided I should vote where I lived, so I transferred my voting residence here, and I have been trying to be active in Democratic politics here, not too successfully because I was on the losing slate in a Democratic primary here in 1964 in spite of the fact that I was the only one of a hundred and seventy-eight Democratic candidates in that primary who had President Truman's endorsement.

But, recently I seem to be making a little progress. I had some differences with Joe Rauh, whom I have known for a long time, who was the Democratic chairman of this city for many years, but we made up last fall. But in January 1967 Joe resigned as Democratic chairman and Tilford Dudley, Ted Dudley replaced him. He is a very able and fine chap who is chairman of the speakers operation for the AFL-CIO; a good lawyer and a good Democrat. Ted Dudley and I have been on closer terms than I have been with Joe Rauh, and he has already given me at least one chore to do. I have had lunch with him and I talk more freely and easily and have better access to him than I have had

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in the past.

I am also a member of the Home Rule Committee here, and I have been working with Sturgis Warner who is a lawyer, a Washington representative of a big Cleveland law firm, a very able lawyer who is really "Mr. Home Rule" in the District, except that Sturgis does his work behind the scenes. He knows more about the Home Rule thing than Joe Rauh does, although Joe Rauh's been the public figure, but Sturgis works tirelessly night and day and he's always organizing, writing memoranda, analyzing, seeing people at the White House, on the Hill, but all this behind the scenes. In any event, Sturgis and I have had many talks in the last few months, and we have both agreed that the only thing constructive that is likely to go through in the 90th Congress is the non-voting D.C. delegate legislation.

The Home Rule bill will not go through the 90th. It failed in the 89th Congress, which was a liberal Congress, which should have passed it, and the reason I think it failed was because the local political leaders here, Joe Rauh and company, weren't willing to accept a compromise that would have been a little less

[405]

than they wanted, but would have gotten them the bill. And I believe if they would have accepted and endorsed the Sisk bill in the House, which was not an immediate Home Rule bill at all but a referendum bill under which, if the bill had been passed, there would have been an election here to decide whether we wanted Home Rule. Well, I am sure that would have gone through, and if that were true, a constitutional assembly would have been selected to write the Home Rule charter, and then that Home Rule charter would go up to Congress like a Reorganization Plan to be voted up or down, without amendment.

That could have been all done within the 89th Congress. We could have gotten the vote on the up or down within the 89th, if they had moved fast and accepted the Sisk thing, but they didn't and it locked between the Senate and the House then and nothing happened.

Now, in the 90th the Democrats lost forty-seven seats net in the House of Representatives and they are a substantially more conservative Congress than the 89th, although I don't mean to say it's a reactionary Congress by any means but it's substantially more conservative.

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It is not in the cards, as I see it, that there will be a Home Rule bill in this Congress. But, there is one thing that's been in the Home Rule bill all the time which could be detached and put through separately and which would be enormously valuable, and that is a non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives for the District of Columbia. This man would be like the non-voting delegate the territories of Alaska and Hawaii had until they became states. This man would have every right of a Congressman, a member of the House, except vote. He would have the same salary as a Congressman, thirty thousand a year. In addition he would have the same pay and allowances for his staff that a Congressman from a state of the same size as the District, that is about eight hundred thousand people, that would roughly run another eighty to a hundred thousand for staff hire. And, he would have office space and telephone and all that.

In other words, you would have a paid lobby of somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, federally paid, to lobby for the District, in the halls of Congress. And this fellow would be inside the club. He would not be like Walter

[407]

Tobriner or Charlie Horsky, going up there with his hat in his hand, he would be inside the club.

If he were an effective guy, he would make alliances up there that would help. For instance the former delegate from Alaska is now Senator Bartlett of Alaska and so it goes. Now, furthermore, at present we have an election in this city every four years, presidential year only. Aside from the vote for the Presidency, there are only phantom elections locally, we vote for people to fill phantom unpaid jobs, the national committeeman and woman, the delegates to conventions, that sort of thing.

Under the delegate thing we would have a real vote every two years, for a real job -- paid thirty thousand a year with real powers. That would mean that you could keep the precinct organizations together, it would run a political ramrod up the spine of the city, with a vote only every four years you can't keep precinct organizations together -- the whole thing dissipates, you see. You'd have a real political organization in this city, on both sides, Democrat and Republican. And, then, here is another thing, this fellow would be kind of an ombudsman for the city.

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Everyone with gripes could go to him and this would make service on the District Committee of the House much less onerous. Most Congressmen hate it, because it does them absolutely no good at home, and on the contrary it is likely to hurt them, it has hurt them if they spend too much time on District affairs. And they get all the gripes from people who want jobs or welfare or have police problems, or what have you. Under this setup they could shove it over to the D.C. delegate, he would be on the committee, of course, and he would have the staff to handle it, and you could go on and on. There are many features.

Now, the thing that has to be laid on is an agreement that nobody will load Home Rule amendments on this bill because that will kill it. In other words, there would have to be some kind of an agreement that the bill will go through without Home Rule on it.

This is not Home Rule, I want to make that clear. This fellow exercises no sovereign functions in the District of Columbia, he simply is a non-voting representative in the Congress. But it will represent a first move toward Home Rule because this fellow can help organize an alliance in Congress and in the

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country, if he is a good man, that will help us get Home Rule eventually in the 91st Congress, let us say.

President Johnson within the last few weeks sent a message to Congress on the District of Columbia, and one of the things that he recommended in addition to a reorganization plan which hasn't yet been sent up but which presumably will go up soon -- one of the things he recommended was the D.C. delegate -- that's good. At the end of the last Congress Congressman Mathias of Maryland, a Republican, and Congressman Udall of Arizona, a Democrat, a good friend of the District of Columbia and a fine Congressman, he and I both went to the University of Arizona law school, but at different times, sponsored separate bills, one Democrat and one Republican for this D.C. non-voting delegate, and I am very hopeful that it will be possible to put that through.

I am also hopeful -- here is another interesting thing -- the President of the D.C. Home Rule Committee is a lawyer here named David Carliner. Mr. Carliner wants to establish a national committee on Home Rule in the District of Columbia, with people all over the

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country. In other words to establish alliances around the country, because the trouble is now that nobody outside the District gives a hoot, so we need influential people around the country to get on this committee, and he asked me if we could get President Truman as a honorary co-chairman, along with President Eisenhower, and I said I would try. I told him -- this is within the last two weeks -- I told him to write a letter to President Truman and give it to me, to write a letter stating what it was about and why they needed him, stating that there would be absolutely no work because the President's health is not the best now and we don't want to load him down with any work, but this is just an honorary, a symbolic thing, and remind him of his own major efforts to get Home Rule for the District of Columbia because the President tried over and ever again.

I, myself, when I was at the White House, can remember writing messages or letters for him on Home Rule for the District of Columbia. I told Carliner to write that letter to Mr. Truman and give it to me and two or three days ago I called Charlie Murphy, and the reasons I wanted a letter to President Truman was

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for this reason: Because Charlie Murphy is going out to Independence on April 1st, which is only ten days off or so, and he is going to make a speech out there to the Truman Library Associates, so this will be the ideal time. I will give the letter to Charlie and I've already discussed this with him and he has agreed to take it and see what the situation is and whether Mr. Truman is agreeable to serving. I am hopeful that in this way we can get Mr. Truman to take the symbolic leadership on the Democratic side of a national committee for Home Rule for the District of Columbia.

HESS: Do you remember any particular problems that came up on that subject while you were in the White House -- when you were writing the messages?

SPINGARN: Well, the problem was to get the bill through the House, this was the principal problem. It is epitomized in that memorandum there, I suppose, which deals with the question of getting a discharge petition. The problem has been typically that we have absentee land lordism in the District. Today we have a Congressman from South Carolina named John McMillan who is chairman of the House District of Columbia Committee, and has been for a long time. I've forgotten who was

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the chairman then, it couldn't have been McMillan because that's too far back, but he is rather representative of the people who have been chairman though.

Now, Mr. McMillan is a conservative person with strong conservative Southern views on the race question, and to be honest with you, as I see him, he is not the least bit interested in the welfare of the District of Columbia. He is only interested in turning to his own constituency and saying, "Look how I'm beating these niggers over the head up here. Look how I'm kicking them in the rump," you know. That seems to me the way he handles the legislative business of the District of Columbia. He's interested in making a whipping boy of the District of Columbia for the benefit of his constituency back in South Carolina.

HESS: Has that been pretty typical of people in his position?

SPINGARN: It seems so to me, yes. Now, it isn't that way on the Senate side, fortunately, where you have a sensible and moderate decent chap. Senator Bible of Nevada is chairman of the Senate District Committee, but the problem has typically been in the House. The House District Committee has been the major stumbling block,

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was then and is now, to doing anything constructive for the District of Columbia, legislatively.

HESS: Anything else? I have marked off everything that I put on the list down to the Federal Trade Commission, but we have a few others.

SPINGARN: I have several things that I want to get to.

HESS: A couple of the things that you have mentioned were the secret session of the President's temporary commission which you said would be quite lengthy, perhaps.

SPINGARN: Yes, I guess it would be.

HESS: And, also, you said that you might have something that you would want to put down about Mr. Clifford.

SPINGARN: In sort of a classified area, yes.

HESS: We may want to get to that later. I checked off most of the other things that came up.

SPINGARN: I had some notes for myself and I may want to make more but ....well, you asked me about distressed areas and I see now a note which indicates I did something on it, but I have no idea what. It is tab ninety in my White House manual, it's a note for John Houston dated October 23, 1950 -- two days later I left the White House to go to the Trade Commission. "Subject: File on distressed areas program. Since I am leaving I am sending this file for your use or destruction,"

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I write John Houston who was working on the distressed areas program. What was in my file I have no idea. This is a typical disposition. Here is a memorandum of October 18, 1950 to Dave Bell. "Subject: SJS file on CVA," that's the Columbia Valley Authority, this was the bill that we had worked on in early '49 but which never got anywhere.

HESS: When you first came to the White House.

SPINGARN: Yes. "Dave. Here is my CVA file from almost two years ago. If you can call such a horrible conglomeration of papers a file. I am sending it to you for your disposition including destruction if you care to pass the penalty of death on this poor innocent file. There may, however, be a few papers and memorandum in here which you may wish to save."

HESS: Regarding that 1949 unemployment and back to Bernstein's paper that he read last December, I would like to read a paragraph and see what you have to say.

SPINGARN: All right.

HESS: This is on page twenty-five and twenty-six of Bernstein's paper:

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Do you think you were unaware of the plight of the Negro?

SPINGARN: I certainly do not. I mean I have been steeped in this all my life. I was certainly not unaware of it. It seems to me that Professor Bernstein although he piously states that a man should be judged in the context of his own times and not in the context of a generation or half a generation later continually does just that. Today we have had, and we have only had it for three or four years, a poverty program, or anti-poverty program, and we have been especially gearing it at the poor Negro, I mean, many of its aspects are especially designed to assist him, but in those days this concept had never been evolved. I suppose that in the most enlightened circles that it was, but I mean as an actual function of Government it simply

[416]

wasn't -- I never heard it seriously discussed by any responsible person during my time in Government.

And I don't remember that Negro leaders like Roy Wilkins were seriously saying that you ought to put five billion dollars a year into some kind of special program aimed primarily to help the poor Negro. The general concept was at that time that we should have programs to help the lower end of the stick people, and we tried to help them with programs, with minimum wages, and public housing, and social security, and unemployment insurance, and public works in times of depression, and things like that, these were the' concepts of that time. You can look back on them and say they weren't enough, that's true, but judging them by ....they were far ahead of the program for the previous generation.

HESS: Well, I want to ask you a question on your opinion of that some of the other people may have been thinking. He says, "Like the President and his advisers most were unaware of the extent of poverty in America."

SPINGARN: I'm not going to think for anyone else; let them think for themselves, and talk for themselves.

HESS: Fine. That ends that.

[417]

Fifth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 22, 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library.

HESS: We are ready for our afternoon session, sir. What would you like to start on?

SPINGARN: Well, you asked about ECA, foreign aid. There was one interesting episode that I remember. It probably came during May 1950 while Mr. Truman was out on a whistle stop trip and I was backstopping at the White House. I had been at the White House since the beginning of '49, but I had only been Administrative Assistant to the President since February 1950 and I was feeling my way cautiously, as one does at the White House. No one really gives you instructions as to what the limits of your perimeter of authority are and things like that.

HESS: You have to sort of feel out and see what they are.

SPINGARN: Right -- you have to kind of feel them out and see what they are -- test for strength. As I pointed out, nobody invited you to attend the morning staff meeting but it was very important to attend. But, during this whistle stop trip I was backstopping, and I was talking to top people in Government, both at the Cabinet level and congressional leaders, because I was sort of liaison

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between them and the train. I remember there was some kind of a hassle over the foreign aid appropriation -- it was being cut by the House committee and I had some calls from Congress and I'm not sure now who it was who called me, I think it's in my White House manual somewhere, but I remember I had talks, I think with Paul Hoffman who was then the foreign aid administrator and with William Foster, who was his deputy, and with Speaker McCormack, he was then the majority leader, and others. A principal problem in the picture was Congressman Clarence Cannon from Missouri, from President Truman's own state who was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who had long been a supporter of foreign aid but had suddenly turned sour on it, and was trying to greatly reduce the appropriations, that as I recall was the big problem -- Chairman Cannon of the House Appropriations Committee.

I ran across at that time a personal letter that President Truman wrote Clarence Cannon, I don't know whether it was then I saw it or a little later but it was about that time, and it was an absolutely delightful letter, I have it somewhere, I'm not sure where, but

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it was a very tart and "no punches pulled" letter, from one old friend from Missouri to another, and the general idea was that he couldn't understand how his old and valued friend from Missouri who had so long been a supporter was now turning tail and running and was crippling the very appropriations that he used to support. I've forgotten the exact terminology, but I only remember the main thrust of the letter which was a "no punches pulled" letter from Truman to Cannon.

HESS: The President was disappointed in him.

SPINGARN: The President was very much disappointed in Mr. Cannon, that's right, and he was telling him in no uncertain terms about his disappointment.

HESS: During the years that you spent in the White House did you ever hear any discussion of where the idea for the Marshall plan originated? Was that discussed?

SPINGARN: Well, I have heard it discussed, I don't know whether it was at the White House, it probably was. My recollection is that it really originated with Dean Acheson and that he first introduced the idea at a speech he made in Mississippi, of all places.

HESS: Cleveland, Mississippi.

SPINGARN: Cleveland, Mississippi, that's the name. And

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the speech attracted no particular attention. It wasn't until George Marshall, who was then Secretary of State, made a speech at Harvard, I believe, in which he threw out this idea, and then suddenly it was picked up and became front page news, that's my recollection of it.

And, also, there is an interesting story but I don't have it really in focus about the point 4 program and where that came from. George Elsey knows that story because he is the fellow who told it to me as I recall, but it was some relatively junior official in State, whose name I cannot recall at the moment, who brought forth that idea and got it into the President's State of the Union, I think it was, in 1950 -- '49 or '50, I've forgotten which, probably '49 come to think of it -- and it was point 4, the fourth point in...

HESS: The inaugural address.

SPINGARN: …was it the inaugural address? In an address that Mr. Truman made and that's how it came to be given the shorthand name of the point 4 program, but the idea I believe originated with a relatively minor official of the State Department. Anyway, George Elsey would know more about that than I do.

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I remember I had one idea -- I was full of ideas, whether they were good or bad is another story. I had one idea somewhere along those lines that I put in memorandum form and circulated to State and elsewhere, and that was the problem of what to do with the people who were fleeing communism. There were a lot of people coming out from the Iron Curtain countries, especially from East Berlin, through East Berlin of course, but also elsewhere, and the difficulty was that there was no good arrangement for handling them. I mean if they were high level people or important officials, of course, they got red carpet treatment because they were valuable, but the rank and file were likely to be put in what amounted to refugee camps and there they would rot for interminable periods while an effort was made to find a country that would take them, or set them up somewhere.

This did not seem to be a very sensible way to deal with people who were willing to come to our side from the other side, and I put forward a proposal that probably didn't make much sense, or at least it made a lot of sense in theory but in practice it would be hard to put across, and the idea was that somewhere or other we should establish a state for refugees from

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communism, perhaps in Africa, perhaps in Alaska, perhaps in South America, just who was going to donate the territory was, of course, the itchy question, and the point was that we would establish and subsidize and support a state and make it self-governing as soon as it was possible, and provide the underpinnings, the intrastructure, that would make it a place where people could work and do things and make a living, and instead of having these people rot in refugee camps, this was the place where they would be put. But nothing ever came of it.

HESS: Did you ever bring that tentative plan to the attention of the President?

SPINGARN: I don't recall that I did. I circulated it at lower levels. You have to arouse some enthusiasm at lower levels ordinarily on a thing that significant before you can expect the President to do anything about it.

HESS: Before you move it up.

Well, we have several things that we haven't covered yet. What you want to put down about the secret session of the President's temporary commission.

SPINGARN: Well, I'll come to that later, I think.

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HESS: What would you like to discuss now?

SPINGARN: I think I would like to talk about the Democratic National Committee.

I have been scrutinizing the Democratic National Committee at more or less close range for about twenty years, and I have already recounted what I did in '48 when I was on detail from the Treasury in the White House during the campaign and...

HESS: We've got down a few things about '52.

SPINGARN: ...and in '52, I was Federal Trade Commissioner then and while I wasn't actually "Hatched;" traditionally the Federal Trade Commissioners were not active in the sense that they made speeches, and I didn't. But, I was quite active in writing memoranda and providing speech ideas particularly in trying to develop a program to counteract McCarthy and McCarthyism.

And by the way, as a digression to that, let me say this: After the defeat of '52 I continued my efforts, and Charlie Murphy and Averell Harriman became interested in the idea of setting up an organization, a unit in the Democratic National Committee as I recall, for the specific purpose of countering McCarthyism. McCarthy, of course, had called the Democratic Party a party

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of treason, twenty years of treason, and all that, and we knew that he was going to continue his activities, in fact, we expected that he might be even more effective because the 83rd Congress, which had just been elected in '52, was Republican. That meant that McCarthy was going to be a committee chairman, and he would have all the powers that a committee chairman had and the staff to underpin him, so he was in a position to do more harm really than he had before. So, at the suggestion, I think, of Charlie Murphy, I prepared a memorandum -- this would have been probably in '53 and maybe even late '53 after I left the commission, I'm not sure when -- I prepared a memorandum suggesting a program and how it would operate, the budget and so forth, for the Democratic National Committee, and I recall that the idea was that I should head it, and there were even financial arrangements tentatively made -- I think Averell Harriman was going to take care of that phase of it as I vaguely recall -- but somehow or other the thing never got off the ground, I do not remember why now, except perhaps Steve Mitchell who was the national committee chairman at that time didn't want it. I do not recall why it didn't, but that was

[425]

discussed between us, Murphy and me and with Averell Harriman, and there was a lot of talking about it and I did write a memorandum or two on it, but it didn't happen.

HESS: Also, in connection with the 1952 campaign in your papers at the Library I found a memo from you to Governor Stevenson dated October 14, 1952 suggesting a major campaign speech advocating a comprehensive anti-monopoly and pro small business program, so I trust that you were still interested in small business in the 1952 period.

SPINGARN: I was. I was, but that speech unfortunately, I think it should have been made, but it wasn't made. I had a certain amount of correspondence with Governor Stevenson during and after the campaign, and made certain proposals to him and he replied indicating a favorable opinion, but I don't think it ever went any further than that.

One of them was, as you say, this anti-monopoly and small business program; another was the role of the Democratic Party as the party of opposition after the defeat; another was how to deal with McCarthyism, and perhaps there were others that I don't think of at the

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moment.

I covered 1956 in talking about KOED to a large extent. I told how the KOED idea evolved from the speechwriting project that I did while I was Director of Special Activities for the vice-presidential campaign. I took over an empty apartment right across the street here at the Anchorage -- they have several buildings and that is the building I live in -- and got a few bright young ladies including Anne Branscomb, whom I had lunch with today and who is now the Democratic Vice Chairman of Colorado although she is a carpetbagger from Georgia who has only been there five years, and she is a practicing lawyer, too, as well as a wife and mother, and a very delightful lady; we ground out those speeches, mostly by long distance telephone calls by me to people I knew around the country, ex-Democratic bureaucrats and academicians. Every day we would knock out five or six speeches, I mean we would have them, they would come in by air mail special delivery, I'd edit them, and take them down every day to the Stevenson headquarters, and I would turn them over to either Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., while he was there, and then to whoever replaced him, I've forgotten now, he went away after awhile and

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someone else replaced him.

HESS: Were those speeches to be given by Senator Kefauver?

SPINGARN: I also went to the Kefauver headquarters which is in the same area, they are only a block or two apart, and I gave a copy to Bill Haddad, who was the sparkplug, a young fellow, he was only twenty-eight years old. He has since become a star journalist who's won many awards. He ran for Congress up in New York, I think it was in '64, and got licked. He married a granddaughter of Franklin Roosevelt, and he is quite a guy; enormous ability. There were a lot of people at that headquarters but if you wanted anything done Haddad was the fellow who did it. He was doing everything. He had a hundred balls in the air; in fact he had a hundred and two counting his own, and the idea was this, they would send it by pouch, they had couriers, I believe, who took it out to the candidate wherever he was.

Now, I also sent a copy air mail to President Truman, I think it was through Charlie who was with him or whoever was with him, I've forgotten now -- now the idea was this: The candidates were moving around the country, I mean by the candidates Stevenson and Kefauver,

[428]

and President Truman was the third major Democratic figure, those three were our major spokesmen. They were moving around the country making whistle stops and occasional major speeches all over the country. Except for the major speeches we'd only get local publicity so it didn't make a particle of difference if they all used the same speech -- except for major occasions -- it didn't make a particle of difference, because it wasn't going to get anything more than local attention in a campaign where they're talking that much, if you follow me.

HESS: Yes.

SPINGARN: So, and this is clear -- I told the Kefauver people that I was going to give Stevenson and Truman copies of the same speeches and if they made a major speech -- in the first place I assumed that they were reading the newspapers on each others major speeches so that they would know what was being said, roughly anyway, and to the extent that these were only minor occasions it didn't make any difference because there wouldn't be that much publicity for it. Sometimes they were overlooked entirely, you know, they were making so many. Let me say this: Nobody sitting hundreds of

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miles away from a candidate who is moving around can write the exact speech that candidate is going to give. His own team on the spot will always revise, revamp, edit or just pick out snatches from your draft and use it as they see fit. In other words you are feeding grist into the mill and that's the way the stuff I prepared was used. I had letters from both Stevenson and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., after the election of '56, saying that my stuff had been helpful. I know that some of it was used.

I remember for example one speech I wrote -- I wrote this personally -- how the Republicans deal with small business. The Republicans had made a movie on small business, on a small businessman, this is '56. They went down in Southeast Washington here, I believe it was, and they found a small grocery store owner, and they took a movie in which he is recorded as saying how he had gotten a loan from the Eisenhower Small Business Administration, and how it had set him up, and how wonderful it was and all that and so forth. They had made a movie of this and they made several hundred prints of that, and shipped it all over the country. Well, somewhere I ran across the name of the man,

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the small businessman, in some press story about the movie, who had been the star of this little film which the Republicans were sending hundreds of prints around to tell about the glories of what they had done for small business.

I called up Drexel Sprecher, a friend of mine, who was then executive director of the Small Business Division of the Democratic National Committee, and I took him down to the Southeast store and we interviewed the little businessman, and what he had to say when he was talking himself was a lot different than what he had to say when he was talking for that film when the words of the Republicans were put in his mouth.

I think they paid him twenty-five dollars for the use of his store or something like that, and what he had to say was that things were very bad in his business, that stores were closing up all around him, that he had never seen small business in such bad straits as it was right then after four years of Republican Government, and they were murdering them. He had never gotten a nickel from the Small Business Administration.

HESS: He needed the twenty-five dollars.

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SPINGARN: He needed the twenty-five dollars, that was about the idea. I wrote all this into a speech for Stevenson and/or for Kefauver whoever wanted to make it, it was a kind of ribbing speech. Here was their filmed picture of this guy and here is what he really told me when we interviewed him. It was a delightful little item, and Arthur Schlesinger wrote me later that it was used in some minor speech, I think it was in New Jersey somewhere, by Stevenson.

There was another thing, Arthur Schlesinger asked me -- this is before I started my speechwriting project -- he asked me to write a speech on small business, I mean a major speech for Stevenson to give on anti-monopoly and small business, and I wrote such a speech. He asked me to make it, oh say, twenty-five hundred words, or something like that, and I gave him a speech of about five thousand words the first draft. I am always too prolix, but I put a cover memorandum on saying that, I thought he ought to look over the first draft because he might like things that I would have deleted if I were cutting it to twenty-five hundred, and put on the cover memorandum specific deletions that I would make if I were cutting it to whatever the

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limit was, I said, "Delete this paragraph, and strike that line," and, you know, so forth and so on. So, he could turn it over to a secretary and she could have reduced it, if he followed my idea, but he might have liked stuff that I would have deleted, you see. Well, first of all that speech was to be given in one place, and then it was to be given in another, and each time I rewrote the speech to give it local connection, see. I think once it was scheduled for Detroit, and another time for Boston, but to make a long story short, Arthur Schlesinger said it was a fine speech, but it was never delivered.

But, of course, you have to remember that although the candidate makes an enormous number of speeches, he only makes a relatively few number of major speeches. He can't make too many, and actually it is a mistake to pound too many issues. It is better to pick out the two or three most important issues and pound those very hard, rather than talk about ten different issues, in different speeches.

I am talking about major speeches. It's all right to cover as many fields as you want in the whistle stops, there you would talk about the problem

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that concerns the people in that area most, as you find out through your political intelligence.

But when you are dealing with major speeches you are talking to the whole country because all the major newspapers, the big metropolitan newspapers, pick it up and the candidate will get a play all over the country, so that you have to be careful about not dispersing your fire too widely so that you are not really having any impact, you are just confusing people with too many ideas.

There aren't too many different occasions on which major speeches are made, and the candidate, therefore, has to be very selective about what he talks about and, of course, there are a lot more speeches available for these occasions because everybody wants the candidate to make a speech on their pet subject, that is natural, and get their ideas on that subject into the speech.

Well, I made that small business speech. In 1957 when I went out West to put a resolution through the full Democratic National Committee which was meeting in San Francisco -- that was the resolution on KOED which I have told about previously when I discussed KOED -- I

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stopped off in my old bailiwick, Arizona, for some days and I made several speeches there in Phoenix and Tucson, and I made a speech to a large group in Tucson, of active Democrats. I summarized the small business speech that I had written for Adlai Stevenson but which he hadn't delivered but which might, I said laughingly, have won the election for him if he had only delivered it.

HESS: The key to victory.

SPINGARN: The key to victory, ah oui. I'm afraid I was slightly exaggerating. The only thing that would have won for him was if he could have looked more like Eisenhower than Eisenhower did.

Anyway, I also remember in that '56 campaign, in the last stages of the campaign the invasion of Egypt took place, first by the Israeli and then by the British and French, and also in that same period the Hungarian uprising took place, all this in the last week or two of the campaign. Boy that was crowded

Now, the funny thing was, you look at this rationally today and even then, these seemed to indicate the great failure of the Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy. Eisenhower had come in in '52 and one of his pet

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campaign credos and slogans was, not containment, that is the old outworn Democratic doctrine of how to deal with communism -- liberation, we are going to espouse the doctrine of liberation and not merely containment. Well, this is as phony as a seven dollar bill, of course, and the Hungarian thing showed that because the Hungarians actually believed that liberation stuff and then when they rose up they naturally turned to the United States when the Russians moved in their tanks and troops and they said, "Help us," what did we do, or what could we have done, that was it.

We couldn't do anything without starting World War III because we had no contiguous border, I mean there wasn't any possibility of doing anything, and that should have been obvious, unless you wanted to run the almost certain risk of starting a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union and a third world war.

Fortunately they weren't willing to go that far to support their phony slogan. And then as far as the Suez thing was concerned it looked to me fantastic -- the President, that is General Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles said they had no intimation that the British and French were going to pull this fast one in the Middle

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East. Yet obviously it is perfectly apparent we know now from subsequent reports that it had been cooked up for some time and that Israel had been in consultation with the British and French and that it was all agreed on about what was going to happen.

Then after that, of course, the United Nations convened and we and the Russians lined up together to order the British and French out of there, and they did pull out, and this looked, at least this looked a little as if the old western alliance were collapsing because we were lining up with the enemy against our allies who trusted us so little they didn't confide in us what they were going to do in this highly sensitive area.

Well, I wrote a lot of stuff on that and I also remember I located a story about Secretary of State Dulles visiting with Nasser two or three years earlier, sometime between '52 and '56, I don't know exactly when, and there was a picture of him giving some kind of fancy, maybe pearl-handled, but anyway fancy revolver to Nasser. Now, this made a delightful picture, you see, Dulles giving Nasser a gun, and I remember preparing a speech, I think it was for Estes Kefauver

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who was up in Boston then and I thought this would make an excellent speech for him to make in Cambridge, pointing out the phoniness of Republican foreign policy, and how its shallowness and ineptness had been demonstrated by the developments of late October 1956, the uprisings in Hungary which we couldn't help, and the unknown-to-us invasion of Egypt. You know, politics is a funny thing because far from hurting Eisenhower that helped him; it should have hurt him but it didn't.

HESS: Why do you think it helped him?

SPINGARN: It helped him because the American people said this is a very grave situation, we may be on the brink of war and by gosh we've got a great general in the White House let's keep him there. That's my opinion as to why it helped him. So, it should have shown that his policy was inept and fumbling, but on the contrary it helped him in the election. And by the way, I exchanged a number of letters with Mr. Truman during the '56 campaign. I think, but I am not sure, I have them over here somewhere in these voluminous manila envelopes, and I think that they are in the Truman Library somewhere, I'm not absolutely certain. I wrote

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him about my opinions and he commented in return about the Middle East business and various other things, and he told me that he would discuss his views with me about the election after it was over, and he ruminated about the election and what was happening. They are interesting letters. I particularly remember the letter in '56 (November 20th), after the election. I had sent him a copy of my KOED program and he wrote me back saying it looked good to him and, that, "If you and Charlie and Dave stick together, you should be able to work out something that will make us win in both years," 1958 and 1960. Dave being Dave Lloyd and Charlie being Charlie Murphy, of course. We did win in 1960 but I have to admit I didn't have much to do with it. Now, that's 1956.

HESS: Was one of those letters you received in 1956 about Mr. Truman's views on civil rights?

SPINGARN: That is right. Now, I will give you briefly the background of that and I will later, perhaps tomorrow, trot out my letter to him which is long and his to me.

HESS: I didn't know whether you wanted to bring that up now.

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SPINGARN: ...well, I'll just mention it since I'm covering that area until we get to the actual letter, but what happened is this: In the beginning of the campaign I intended to make speeches, that is the '56 campaign. I was actually on the roster of the Democratic National Committee's speaker's bureau and I did make two or three speeches. I made one to a labor group over in Baltimore, a union, and I was on a team, a man-woman team who addressed -- well, this is amusing -- who addressed the national convention of the General Federations of Women’s Clubs that was meeting here in Washington.

This is an enormous organization of upper middle class ladies, heavily Republican, from all over the country, and they wanted -- it being the middle of the campaign -- they wanted the Republican and Democratic parties to provide them with a debate and we did.

Senator Sparkman was due to be the Democratic orator but he had to withdraw for some reason or other and I was asked to replace him and I did. My lady colleague was Gladys Tillet, of North Carolina, who was the Democratic national committeewoman from North Carolina and who is now, I believe, to this day,

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U.S. representative with one of the UN commissions, whether it is the commission on women's rights or what, I've forgotten now, but I think she had the rank of ambassador, anyway she is the U.S. representative on one of these -- a very nice lady.

The Republican speakers were Fred Scribner, who was the Under Secretary of the Treasury, he may then have been general counsel -- he was first general counsel and then Under Secretary of the Treasury -- and who was also the Republican committeeman from Maine, and Bertha Adkins. She is now the president of a college somewhere I believe, a woman’s college, and she was vice chairman of the Republican National Committee. She had the job that Margaret Price now has, and India Edwards had at the DNC in the past -- that job, and Katie Louchheim too. She was the head woman at the Republican National Committee, and I think for a while she was Under Secretary of HEW later.

In any event that was the team. First the Republicans talked and then we talked as I recall -- maybe we alternated, that was probably it. Well, the Republicans got up and they talked an awful lot about Korea and blood and gore and our boys dying over there and the Democrats are responsible for it, and all the wars are under Democrats, and so forth and so on. This was

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the middle of the Korean war -- no this was after the Korean war but that is what they were talking about just the same.

HESS: In '56.

SPINGARN: In '56 they were talking about blood and gore and our boys had been dying, how all the wars were under Democrats and look what happened in Korea and so forth and so on, and we Republicans don't give you wars but those Democrats do ....they were waving the bloody shirt good and hard.

Well, when my turn got up, among other subjects, I touched on President Eisenhower's health. Now the President had had a massive heart attack in September, I think it was '55, and then when he recovered from that in June '56, he had an ileitis operation, and it seemed, at least to all Democrats, that the question of his health was very pertinent, especially when a fellow named Richard Nixon was the Vice President, and I talked about that among other things. I mean I talked about issues, too, but I mentioned that. And I said that we all hoped that the President would have a long and full life, but we couldn't slough the fact that he had had very serious illnesses and physical failings

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within the past year, and that what particularly disturbed us was that a heart beat away from him stood a man named Richard Nixon, and him we deeply mistrusted.

Well, as I went in to this thing a long and angry "boo" began to run through the audience, "boo, boo," and they booed me to the rafters. You know it is rather an unsettling thing for a man to be booed by a female audience, I'll tell you. It's bad enough to be booed by an audience but to be booed by a female audience is particularly bad. I have to admit I was momentarily a little unnerved, but I rallied, I pulled myself together and I waited for the boos to subside and I said, "I know this doesn't sit very well with you, but I want you to remember this: I sat there patiently and I listened to the Republican orators talk about blood and gore in Korea, and the responsibilities of my party for all that and I'm telling you I didn't like that a bit but I didn't boo, I listened quietly and I hope you ladies will be good sports and bear with me patiently, even if you don't agree with me until I get through." So, that at least stopped the booing, but there was a funny incident at the end. When I got finished a bunch of ladies rushed up to me and they

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said, "Oh, that was great, you really gave it to them." And one of them said, "I still wish that you had touched on his religious hypocrisy." I quickly discovered these were all Southern ladies, they were the only Democrats in the General Federation of Womens Club and I think they were the only ones who were for me in that group.

HESS: Maybe they were the only ones that weren't booing.

SPINGARN: They were the only ones who weren't booing, obviously. Well, so much for '56. I'm trying to think if there is anything else I can think of on '56, but I think that covered it fairly adequately.

Well, now in '60 John Kennedy, of course, was running, and I want to say this that although I had strongly supported Adlai Stevenson in '52 and '56 I was no longer for Adlai Stevenson. I wasn't sure who I was for by this time, I mean in the convention of '60, I only knew I didn't want Adlai Stevenson to be nominated because this man had had two chances, he had lost each time and I was certain he could not win and moreover I was beginning to feel that although he was a wonderful man, a great man, that there was a certain indecisiveness and Hamlet-like quality in his makeup that would not make him the best of all Presidents,

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that he was not decisive enough.

In any event, the real thing that influenced me was that no man has the right to more than two strikes at the Presidency. From one standpoint I would have liked to see Stu Symington get it because I knew Stu Symington and it's nice to know the President, but from another standpoint I felt that, well, Stu Symington is in many ways an admirable and fine fellow, I wasn't sure that he was presidential caliber either in some ways. He's a good Senator, but I don't know whether he would make a good President. I wasn't really sure one way or the other about John Kennedy. I mean John Kennedy actually had not had a very impressive record in the Senate, not very impressive, so I was really in doubt as to who I wanted to see get the nomination.

I would have loved to see Hubert Humphrey get the nomination because I knew him and admired him, but he was already eliminated by the time the convention came along. You remember he was eliminated in the primaries, for all practical purposes.

But in any event, I was strongly for Kennedy after he was nominated -- I can't say that I was for

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him before that but I wasn't against him either. I wasn't for anyone really before he was nominated.

Well, then I wanted to get into the campaign as I have always wanted to get into campaigns but I found it impossible. The Kennedy team was simply not interested in giving anyone who wasn't already a member of their team an opportunity to pile up political credits, at least I think that is the assumption. If a man works hard for you and does important chores in the campaign you've got to do something for him politically -- you don't have to but that's the way life goes, the way politics goes -- so they wanted to handpick people who were going to be their lieutenants, their key lieutenants, in all this.

I was willing to do anything, I mean I wasn't so proud that I wouldn't have done bench boy work if they wanted me to do it, I was willing to do anything. I mean I would have made speeches or I would have written them or I would have done organizational work, or I would have done anything they wanted me to. I called and wrote the committee repeatedly. Senator Henry Jackson, whom I really didn't know at all -- just a handshake, I didn't have any real acquaintance with

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him -- was chairman during that campaign.

It is almost impossible to reach a chairman in a campaign he is so busy, except in '56, to go back, Paul Butler, who was the chairman, was entirely bypassed by the Stevenson organization. He really didn't have a dog gone thing to do. I used to go down to the Democratic National Committee and sit and just chat with him, powwow with him for long periods of time while he complained about how he didn't have anything to do in the middle of the campaign, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee was doing nothing practically.

Anyway, in '60 I finally hit on this stratagem but it didn't work. I wrote out a check for two hundred dollars and I sent it to the chairman, Jackson, with a letter saying here is my check, and by the way I would like very much to work in the campaign and here is my record and I will do anything you want me to do. I have worked in a lot of other campaigns, and I can make speeches or I can write them or anything else, or words to that effect. I would get an acknowledgement from the Treasurer of my two hundred dollar check and no other communication. I did that three times in a

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row -- two hundred dollar checks each time, which to me is a lot of money, being of modest means. But I never did get into the campaign to make a long story short, despite my donating that money, and more as far as that goes. I didn't begrudge the money, but I didn't see why I couldn't get into the campaign.

Well, in '64 I wanted to get into the campaign, too, and I had some difficulties, too. I talked to any number of people. I wrote any number of letters to any number of people. I wrote Chairman John Bailey, and I wrote Jim Rowe, and I wrote people at the White House, my goodness, I wrote all over offering my services for the campaign. I was offered a job but when I went down to look at the job I realized that I was just going to be a sort of glorified file clerk, and I knew I wouldn't be very good at that and I didn't see why other people couldn't do it better and I decided not to do that. It wasn't that I cared about the work being menial, I just didn't think I would be good at it -- I wouldn't like it, and I needed something with more eojones in it.

Well, finally late in the campaign, Ed Foley called me up. Ed Foley was -- well, I had known him

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since about 1935 both socially and professionally, he was one of the most successful and effective of the young New Deal. lawyers. He became general counsel of PWA under Harold Ickes at the age of twenty-eight, I think, and he came over to the Treasury where I already was in 1937 or 1938 as assistant general counsel when the PWA broke up, and then a year or so later Herman Oliphant, our general counsel and a brilliant lawyer, a law professor, died and Ed who was only thirty-four, I think, by then was made general counsel by Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury. I served under him as general counsel and I worked closely with him -- after the war he was assistant secretary and I was assistant general counsel of the Treasury, and then he became Under Secretary, and I worked closely with him on many things.

For example, on the President's Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty in '46 and '47, Ed was the Treasury representative on that commission and I was his alternate, and attended all the meetings except one, and was on the working committee that met daily and actually did the spade work.

Anyway, Ed called me up -- and Ed has called me

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up on several occasions, a couple of times in the late '50s for instance, he phoned me and asked me to help him, I guess you might call it a boiler room operation on a hundred dollar dinner, and I went down to his law office, and phoned a million people. I remember one day I spent the better part of an afternoon with Claiborne Pell, who was not then a Senator, and I sat in the same room in Ed Foley's office and made telephone calls to people who had been invited, you see, to encourage them to come, to find out if they were coming, you know, the usual procedure, that sort of thing.

Any way, in '64 Ed called me up. In the '50s he had his own law office with Tom Lynch who had also been Treasury general counsel and my boss and a fine lawyer and a good man, but sometime in the early '60s Foley and Lynch merged with Tom Corcoran and Jim Rowe's law firm, and now they are partners in that firm. Of course, Tommy Corcoran is the famous Roosevelt brain truster, and Jim Rowe is Lyndon Johnson's -- he was also Roosevelt's brain truster, but he was administrative assistant to Roosevelt and he was the

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deputy, it wasn't called that then -- but he was the Deputy Attorney General, and he also has been a behind-the-scenes political adviser of Lyndon Johnson for many years, since probably around 1950, maybe earlier for all I know, and I have every reason to believe that he is the one or two men outside of Government who is closest to Lyndon Johnson, in terms of political advisers -- a very able chap.

Anyway, Ed Foley called me up and said the White House had called Corcoran and Rowe and him and asked them to recruit some men to go out on the road for the Democratic National Committee in the closing stages of the campaign to work on getting out the vote, would I go? I said, "Sure."

It was an operation under Matt Reese's wing. Matt Reese was a West Virginian whom John Kennedy had brought to the national committee. He worked in the Kennedy campaign in 1960 and President Kennedy had brought him into the committee in charge of the registration division of the Democratic National Committee, that is the division whose job was to get a maximum Democratic registration in the first instance, and then turn out a maximum vote on election day.

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Reese is enormous -- I mean, I'm no mean size myself, but believe it or not he makes me look like Tiny Tim, and he is a tremendous operator, a very capable and effective guy and he had some awfully good men working for him, I wish I could remember the name of that young assistant of his, Mike something or other, he was first class.

Well, the long and the short of it was that they were fanning men out around the country and our job was to contact county chairmen, Democratic chairmen, labor leaders and other local chieftains of the Democratic Party. Reese had personally written a pamphlet which described blow-by-blow a modus operandi, I mean the details of it, not generalities, of how to get the maximum vote out. I mean how to organize car pools, the telephone system, all that, block captains, the details of it, and with the paper work shown, even forms and all that. They even had it laid out how they were to communicate each day to Reese at the national committee, that is the people they had signed up to do this, and then facsimile signature letters from the President were to go out immediately to these people to stimulate them.

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It was all laid on -- how to get out the vote. It was pretty good, too. When I went into it out in the field I found some minor practical bugs in it but the main thrust of it was excellent. So, we were to take this document in quantity out there and give it to these people and urge them to use it or at least to adopt it with whatever changes they thought necessary to their local situation. And I did that and I have it somewhere -- I know I set it aside before lunch, I wrote reports each ....yes here it is -- I wrote reports each day or two to Matt Reese from the field, and here for instance: "Memo to Matt Reese, Democratic National Committee from Steve Spingarn in Pennsylvania. Subject: Second and final report on five Eastern Pennsylvania counties covered by me, October 21 to October 25." I go over them county by county, I give the background figures on the political history of each county, I tell about the people I have talked to, I give my ideas of how the situation seems to shape up, and I make a forecast of what I think is going to happen in that county on election day. And by the way, you might be interested, at the end of the memo I

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include what I called my "Fearless Forecast." Here it is

Well, this will give you the idea:

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Then, after I got back I suggested to Matt Reese that John Bailey, the national chairman, send a telegram to each of the local Democratic leaders that I named with the following text:

And then I sent a memorandum to the President via George Reedy, and this is interesting. It works in with my KOED operation. In Easton, Pennsylvania there is Lafayette College, and I always call up colleges when I go

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there and find out who the activist Democrats are on the faculty, because they can give you a lot of good information on the local situation that you won't get from the leaders -- the organizational people. The usual story. I am from the national committee, I am asking the leader questions, he is going to tell me what a great situation it is and what a wonderful leader he is, obviously. He's defending his stewardship, but when you go to these other fellows you may hear a more truthful picture of what the real situation is.

So I always call up the chairman of the political science department and I ask who are the active Democrats in your faculty and he's glad to tell me and I call them, that's the way it goes.

Well, anyway, I found out that a political scientist, Professor Paul Pfretzchner, is the leading Democratic activist at Lafayette since 1949 -- this was in '64 -- he has conducted an Easton city poll in almost every election, about a dozen in all. These are scientific sampling polls. He takes a ten percent, I think I am a little high on that, sample in every precinct in the city; I think it was less than that, with interviews of

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each person polled.

His average error has been two and a half percent and his polls are highly regarded by local politicians and press and here are the results of his poll in '64: LBJ, seventy-eight percent; Goldwater twenty-two percent; Representative Rooney, who was a Democratic candidate for Congress, seventy-two percent; McCormack, a Republican, twenty-eight percent; and Mrs. Blatt, the Democratic candidate for Senate, sixty percent, and Senator Scott forty percent. And, these were phoned to me personally by Professor Pfretzchner. I immediately reported them to the White House, because it was a straw in the wind.

Now, the reason I say this ties in with the KOED thing. This sort of thing can be done all over the country easily. This fellow was using his own political science classes to educate students politically, it was an operation to tell them something about politics, and an interesting one which the students would enjoy, I'm sure.

And this could be done with the KOED operation. You could do it at colleges in every state in the Union, and you could collect some wonderful figures, probably

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that would exceed in accuracy, I wouldn't be surprised, in many respects or at least would give you more massive sampling than Harris and Gallup combined. It is just one of the things you can do.

And by the way, Pfretzchner was pretty nearly right in 1964, I think he was within his usual margin of error. If anything as I recall he underestimated slightly. But anyway it was very close. I've forgotten now the actual results -- I reported later what the actual results were against his prediction -- it was close.

By the way I sent these to Marvin Watson at the White House a week ago or so to look over and return to me in connection with some other things I was sending him and he has returned them to me. Marvin Watson has been the White House man running the Democratic National Committee. I am going to turn these over to you for Xeroxing and return to me, please.

Now, that covers '64. For '66 I have I think told most of the story, but briefly it is this; no, I haven't. I think I should tell this.

HESS: You mentioned the other day that you were disappointed in the organization.

SPINGARN: Right.

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HESS: I think that's about all.

SPINGARN: That's about all. I haven't covered it, I just mentioned it. Here's what happened in '66 -- again I was interested in getting into the campaign in some capacity or other, although congressional campaigns are less interesting from my standpoint than presidential, or from anyone's standpoint, still they are interesting.

So, early in September of '66, David Chewning who is National Director of "Operation Support" at the Democratic National Committee invited me to lunch. I had known him from the '64 campaign. Dave Chewning is a Georgian, an economist, he was born in South Carolina and reared in Georgia. He was a department store executive in Atlanta, I believe, and in the '50s his boss who was a Republican -- Dave is a Democrat -- came up to be an official of the Defense Department, or the Army Department, and he brought Dave up with him and Dave was an official, too, I think he became Deputy Assistant Secretary to the Army, or some such job, and afterwards he went into Robert Nathan Associates, which is probably the biggest economic factory in the world. They do economic planning for

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nations and governments, including ours, all over the world. They have something like sixty professional associates -- a huge thing.

Robert Nathan was one of the real brains of the War Production Board during the war, a brilliant fellow.

Anyway, Dave was director of "Operations Support" in '64 and they reorganized it or started it up again or maybe they never killed it entirely, anyway it was running in '66 although on a more limited basis. They organized committees of activist Democrats in every state in the Union, multiple committees, hundreds of committees in all the states, and the idea was that these people would be dissemination points for our literature on the issues; they would organize forums; they would arrange speeches, all that sort of thing; they would work for candidates and all this in cooperation and coordination with the state committee, but it would serve to get people in there -- some of whom might not even want to work directly with the state committee for one reason or other, independents, anybody who happened to be on your side, who was willing to propagate our side of the issue. And in between campaigns they acted as focal points for supporting

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the administration's position on legislation -- they write letters to the editor and the members of Congress and organize that sort of thing -- our public interest lobby group; it's a good idea, and, if effectively run, it could be very helpful.

The only trouble was that in '66 Dave Chewning. was only able to spend -- he was not even over at the committee, he was in the Nathan office -- and he was spending no more than an hour a day on this and he was working like a dog on his regular work, and meeting deadlines on that, so he had very little time for it, and there was one young woman, Nancy Bush, who was executive secretary at "Operation Support," and she was actually in the national committee, and even she I don't think was working full-time. Most of the time Mrs. Margaret Price was using her on other matters, so it wasn't really being run very strongly, but it was a good operation.

It was one of the, few good things I saw at the Democratic National Committee in the '66 campaign, and this was so feebly run that it wasn't really able to make much of a dent. With more manpower and money they could have done a lot more.

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And the other thing I understand, that I heard from other sources was good, was Louis Martin's operation -- he's the minority's vice-chairman. But first of all let me go back. Dave asked me to do some writing, write some speeches, fact sheets and letters. I said I'd think about it. But a week or so later he seized the bull by the horns and wrote me a letter and he named eight issues he wanted me to write on. I hadn't yet agreed and I wrote him back a rather tart letter saying -- I said, "For one thing Dave," I said, "I haven't followed all these issues, I'm not up-to-date on them, I want some background, factual material on them. Will you provide that and I'll write about them. I can write but I need a little factual material. I haven't got time to do the research on it, that takes time."

He said, "Sure." And he sent me some stuff but, to be honest with you it was not very impressive. It wasn't Dave's fault because he wasn't responsible for putting it out, it was supposed to be put out by the DNC Research Division, and other branches, but they just didn't have it. The only thing that he sent me

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that was worth a nickel was some poop on auto safety, which was not a big issue in the campaign, it was a nice little issue, but it was not a major issue. And that, by the way, was not even done by the national committee, this was stuff put out by Congressman [James A.] Mackay of Georgia, who had been the sparkplug of the auto safety legislation.

Well, then I turned to the committee proper and I called up Al Marks who is or was, I think he still is, the director of research and publication, although since the election Bill Phillips, an excellent man, has been made deputy chairman in charge of that operation. I'm not sure just where Al Marks fits in now -- public relations, maybe.

In any event, I asked Marks -- I said I was writing for the committee -- and I named fifteen or eighteen issues, because I thought I might write on other things, on which I would like all the factual background, all the poop the committee had. He assured me I'd get it. A week went by and I got nothing. I went down to the committee. He was out. A few days later I went down to the committee again. He was in

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conference. I then wrote him a note at the committee reminding him that ten days or more earlier he had promised me the stuff and I hadn't received it. Several days later -- this was about two weeks after I first was notified -- I got seven items in a small envelope. That's the total of all I got.

Two of them were speeches, one by the President and one by Rusk on Vietnam, which I had long since gotten from the State Department. Two of them were about the glorious achievements of the glorious 89th Congress, well that was all right but there was one hitch. This is October, by now '66, or late September and, by golly, these documents were '65. They hadn’t been updated through the second session of the 89th Congress -- great. That's how much on their toes they were. The other three items were little speech sections of a few pages on Medicare, they were all right -- pedestrian stuff. That was the total haul I could get from the committee.

Now, on the other hand I went down to the Republican National Committee. I always go to the Republican National Committee in a campaign. They receive me

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like a visiting Pooh-Bah. They asked no question about my politics, I was perfectly prepared to tell them, I would say, as I always do, "I am a Democrat but I like to read the other fellows material, maybe you'll convert me." They wouldn't have cared. I said, "May I see your material on the issues?"

"Sure." They led me over to a table. It was half again as long as this, I guess, and several feet wider, it was maybe twelve feet, fifteen feet long and six or eight feet wide, a huge table. And on it in stacks were dozens and dozens of piles of pamphlets, brochures, flyers, all sorts of poop beautifully printed, typography great, format great, on every issue and subject you wanted under the sun. I scooped off the whole top layer of that table, the whole top layer, and I could hardly stagger away with the load.

In fifteen minutes -- now mind you I had taken two weeks and gotten seven piddly little items of which none were any good, really, from the Democratic National Committee, for whom I was working. I go down to the Republican, the enemy camp and I get marvelous

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poop -- I took it home and went through it, it was revolting from my standpoint, but it was pretty good from theirs.

Another thing, when I called up the Democratic National Committee and wanted anything, a press release or anything, I would have to call three successive people on three different days and then it would take a week to get it, if then. I called the Republican National Committee, and I remember I asked for extension 120, and then I would ask for Vivian, or Peggy, or Freda, I got to know the girls, and I would kid with them and I would say, "May I have ten copies of your press release of October 13th on high prices and inflation?" That's an actual press release of theirs. It would be in the mail that day. That's the way they operated. The Republican National Committee as I saw it was run by an old pro named Ray Bliss, the former state chairman of Ohio. It was run well, it was a good, sound, efficient, effective operation. Our committee was the worst I have ever seen it and it hasn't often been very good. It was the worst by far -- it was terrible, it was moribund and it stunk. It was a disgrace to

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the party.

HESS: Why was it so bad?

SPINGARN: Well, my theory of the case is this: It was really President Johnson's fault. The President didn't want -- I mean, this is my estimate of the case and it's speculation you understand, but it's my best estimate. I think there were two factors at work; one, was the tremendous victory in '64. I think the President was fooled by that. Remember that he got forty-three million votes and Goldwater got twenty-seven million, the biggest victory in history.

Well, I think that the main factor of the victory was the allergy to Goldwater on the part of the American people, plus the fact that Lyndon Johnson was still more or less on his honeymoon to some extent, and of course, there was also the fact that the Vietnam war had not yet heated up.

I also think that the President has his own way of dealing with political things based on his background in Texas, and that he felt that he could deal with the leadership of groups over the heads of the masses, as it were, and that he doesn't need a

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real political organization. The President has been quoted to me, by reliable press men, now this is an accurate quote. A New York Times man told me it was absolutely true, that the President had said that he didn't see why the Democratic National Committee couldn't be run by one man and a secretary. Well, by golly it was run that way in the '66 campaign. It was a moribund outfit and now I think this about it -- I think Lyndon Johnson is a great politician, and when I say a man is a great politician I say it as a mark of respect because I believe that what this country needs for its Presidents are great politicians.

I do not regard the word "politician" as a word of stigma. Quite the contrary. With two possible exceptions every President who has had a rating from the historians of good or great was a lifelong professional politician. The two exceptions are George Washington and Woodrow Wilson, and even George Washington spent more time in politics than he did fighting the British and the Indians combined, and as to Woodrow Wilson, he was Governor of New Jersey when he was elected President, and for eight or ten

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years previous to that he had been president of Princeton University, and if there is anything more political than being president of a big university I don't know what it is; so, he was not altogether an amateur.

But all the others, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Polk, Lincoln -- I'm naming the ones who have had a good or great rating -- Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, every one of those men was a lifelong professional politician.

Now, the same thing can be said in other countries Winston Churchill, Disraeli, you can go on down the line. In England a man writes proudly after his name -- occupation, politician, but very few men do that in this country; it is unfortunate that a mythology has grown up about politics; that politics is dirty and that almost all politicians are crooks. Well, some politicians are crooks, just the way some bankers and some businessmen are crooks. But the fact of the matter is, as my father once pointed out, as I mentioned, and as I believe, that politics is the

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noblest practical occupation of man, because it deals with how people decide how their society should be run in every phase and at every level.

It is a national misfortune, it is a world misfortune, that a mythology has arisen about the corruptness of politics, and the corruption of politicians. And this goes back centuries and centuries. I have amassed a pile of quotes on this.

Shakespeare talks about a "scurvy politician." And there are several quotes from Shakespeare derogatory to politicians. Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels said something like this, that a man who can make two ears of corn grow where one grew before, or two blades of grass grow where one grew before, is worth the whole race of politicians. That's the 18th century. Well, I would like to ask Jonathan Swift if he were alive today, who decided that this particular experiment was the one that should get priority attention and the money to be done? Who supported this, and who arranged for the dissemination of this information so that it would be useful afterwards if it wasn't politicians?

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Even great politicians have spoken stigmatically of politicians. I have a quote, a rather disarming quote from Abraham Lincoln, in which he says something about an opponent, that he's nothing but a politician and you know what that is ....I've forgotten the exact quote. And then Lincoln added, disarmingly, "But, of course, I'm a politician myself, so you know that there can be nothing mean or slanted in what I say."

Well, Lincoln was only twenty-seven years old when he said that and I hope he learned better before he died. But the fact of the matter is that our literature is filled with these references as to the scurviness and corruption of politics and politicians, and we love to repeat these jokes. Artemus Ward, the great 19th century humorist said, "I'm not a politician and my other habits are good, too." Simon Cameron, who was Secretary of War, said: "An honest politician is one who when he is bought, stays bought," or something like that. And Cameron should have known because he was one of the most corrupt public officials we've ever had in this country. He was Lincoln's Secretary of War for a while.

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So, it's a misfortune that this mythology has grown up about the corruption of politics. Mr. Truman, I think, is one man who would call himself a politician, but he's rather unique in that. Most men don't. They shy away from that name. Wherever I go I ask people, "What are your political views?"

"Oh, I'm not interested in politics; it's too dirty. You know, you can't trust those politicians." You hear answers like that. This is for the birds, for the albatrosses too, because they confuse the corruption of the material of life and of human beings, with the nature of politics.

I have given you the excerpts from my father's lecture from the New School for Social Research, as it was reprinted in the Atlantic Monthly three years after his death, November, 1942, to be exact, in which he goes into this, and which is really the basis of what I'm talking about now.

But the Democratic National Committee failed, flunked its test in the '66 campaign. On November 5, I wrote the President who was down in Texas on his ranch, a long four page letter, about four or five

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o'clock in the morning, and then a one page cover letter, in which I expressed some ideas about how bad the Democratic National Committee had been in this campaign. This was two or three days before the election, remember. I presented some facts from what I'd seen about how bad the National Committee was, and I expressed the hope that after the election I could sit down with anyone he named, and give my views on what should be done. I sent copies of this all over the White House, to Bill Moyers, [Joseph] Califano, everybody, [Robert] Kintner and others. I even sent it to Marvin Watson, although from where I sat, he seemed to be the man who bore considerable responsibility for this trouble.

I didn't get any responses to this letter, but I kept writing and talking and making phone calls. It's very difficult when you're on the outside without official function to even get a phone call through to a Cabinet-level man or a senior White House staff man. I know this to be true. I mean, at the end of a day, they may have fifty phone calls stacked up. Obviously, they talk first to the Cabinet and the Senators, and a fellow like me would be way down

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at the bottom of the priority list, and usually he just never gets called back, that's all.

I mentioned to Charlie Murphy that I tried to reach Joe Califano at the White House. He's Special Assistant to the President, one of three or four top men there. I hadn't been able to reach him. Now, Charlie is chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, and Joe Califano is the transportation man at the White House, and Charlie says sometimes it takes three days for Califano to return one of his phone calls. I mean, you can't blame the man, he's just deluged. I'm not blaming the man, but I'm just stating a fact.

Well, I called over and over again, and also after the election I started calling (John) Criswell, who is really running the national committee now. He's both the acting executive director in place of Cliff Carter of Texas, who was first "the Marvin Watson" of the White House, and then went into the committee itself as executive director; and Criswell is also acting treasurer in place of Dick Maguire of Boston, a Kennedy man, who was the treasurer. So, he's doing

[#474 was omitted in numbering the pages.]

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those two main jobs. I was surprised to find, knowing how moribund the outfit was when I met him, that he's a very capable guy -- savvy, bright. It obviously wasn't his fault. He was under wraps, that's clear to me. After all, he had to do what he was told to do from the White House, and they, didn't want a big operation. Now, he's been given the green light, and he looks pretty good to me. I think he's going to do a good job.

Well, in any event I tried for weeks to reach Criswell after the campaign, and in the meanwhile I kept calling everybody at the White House. Every day I'd get up and I'd call Kintner, Robert Kintner is Secretary of the Cabinet, and he's former president of NBC, and former president of ABC. He's been president of two-thirds of the networks. He's the communications man, I suppose you would say, at the White House. I'd call Califano, and I'd call John Roche, and I'd call Douglass Cater, and I'd call Marvin Watson. The secretaries would always be very polite and they'd say, "We'll call you back," but they never did. Once in a while, on one occasion, I

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talked to Walt Rostow, he's the .National Security man, but finally -- I was trying to get help to see Criswell. I wrote Marvin Watson and I said, "Could I see you?"

And he wrote me back and said, "Criswell is the man you should see," but he didn't offer to help me. You know, one phone call from him to see this fellow would have done it. And I was calling Criswell, but he was never answering.

So, finally, one day, this is funny, I called Kintner for the steenteenth time, and that afternoon, or the next day, an assistant of his, named Charles McGuire, I believe, called me back, and he said, "Mr. Kintner can't talk to you, but he asked me to talk to you."

So. I told him the story of KOED in a short space of time and said, "Can you help me see Criswell?"

And he said, "I'll be in touch with you." By gosh, that afternoon, Criswell's office called me, and the next thing you know I was on the opposite side of the desk looking at Criswell. McGuire, of course, had easily arranged it.

So, on February 3, I finally saw Criswell. And

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we had a fine talk, and he bought the KOED idea. Before we were through he was not talking about if we would do it but how we were going to do it. And he has told me since definitely that it will be done.

As I've said before in talking about KOED, I wanted to nail it down so I spent the next few days making phone calls and writing people and saying, "Will you telephone or write Criswell and tell him they ought to do the KOED thing; it's good."

I talked to Speaker McCormack and I talked to other politicians, professional politicians, and I also talked to eggheads, intellectuals, professors, like Stephen Bailey, Dean of the Maxwell Graduate School of Public Affairs at Syracuse, and James MacGregor Burns, who writes the books on political science and biography, Roosevelt and Kennedy, and Evron Kirkpatrick, who is the executive director of the American Political Science Association.

They all promised to either phone or write Criswell, and without exception they did -- without exception. Well, I was just trying to show Criswell and the DNC that this was not a one-man operation, and

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that it had support from both the intellectuals and the politicians. Criswell said to me, "By the way, you have a good friend at the White House."

And I said, "Who is that?"

"Charlie McGuire."

I have never in my life met Charlie McGuire and my total acquaintance with him is based on one or two phone calls. But that phone call from him to Criswell was magic, you see. Now a less tenacious, or at least a less stubborn fellow, would have given up a long time before.

This was weeks of phone calls -- hundreds and hundreds of phone calls, I mean, I'm not kidding -- hundreds. And they finally got me into Criswell, you see. But it was only because I kept battering on that stone wall until I got in. I've been trying for a long time to see John Roche who replaced Eric Goldman at the White House. Eric Goldman was the intellectual in residence who resigned in a huff last summer because he said nobody was paying any attention to him, or words to that effect. And he said some unkind things about the President, and Bill Moyers answered him and then they

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appointed John Roche, who I think is an excellent appointment. He is a Brooklyn Irishman, who, as I said before, has been national chairman of ADA. He also is, or was until recently, a professor at Brandeis. He's a pragmatic liberal. I wanted to see him. I didn't know him; I had heard him make speeches and I called him repeatedly and wrote him some letters. He would occasionally answer a letter but I couldn't reach him on the phone. Then one day I saw in the newspaper, the New York Times, a letter by Leo Cherne, who is the sparkplug of the Institute of Public Affairs, or whatever it's called, up in New York, an amazing guy.

On the 25th anniversary of this outfit, a few years ago, this is, oh, five years or so ago, about 1960, they gave a dinner celebrating that and I've seen a picture of the guests. It is absolutely fantastic. Leo Cherne arranged it, and with the possible exception of the Pope, there is hardly anybody conspicuous in American or world life that isn't there. Eleanor Roosevelt was there, Henry Wallace and Norman Thomas, and any number of generals, I think Omar Bradley was

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there. I remember Admiral [Arthur William] Radford was there and many others. I think Curtis LeMay was there. He had everybody. He had liberals, conservatives and moderates, he had absolutely everybody. It was a fantastic aggregation that he had assembled. Anybody who can do that has a lot on the ball. Leo Cherne is quite an operator. Among other things (he has many hats), he is the chairman of the executive committee of Freedom House in New York, and the letter I saw was a letter by him defending some poop, some materials, some pamphlets and statements that Freedom House had put out in support of our involvement in Vietnam. He was defending that against attack, and he made a fairly good defense, I thought. The thing I wanted to see John Roche about was just that.

I'm going to come to this, because I want to give you one of the major things I've been working on for the last six months in this Vietnam business. But I'm just going to touch on it now about getting in to see people. So. I wanted to see John Roche about my ideas on how bad the administration and the State Department presentation of our case is to the American public, and what I think should be done about improving it.

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My own feeling is that we are winning slowly the military war in Vietnam, but we are losing the propaganda war, or the counter-propaganda war, and if we lose that, we'll lose the military war too. So this is another front and it's not being handled right. We're spending five or six thousand lives a year and twenty to thirty billion dollars on this thing and the whole thing could go down the drain if the American people decide that they want out. And there are two disparate points of views emerging. One is escalate up to whatever is necessary to win quickly, and the other is get out now; and either one of those would be a catastrophe. Neither one of those is what we should do, in my opinion, and in the opinion of the administration.

So. I called up Leo Cherne in New York -- I didn't know him, but I introduced myself to him -- and I told him I was coming up to New York and would he have lunch with me. Well, a couple of weeks later we had lunch up there, and it turned out -- I don't know this -- it was just a bonus as far as I was concerned -- that he was an old buddy of John Roche, talks to him all the time. He arranged for me to see John Roche. It was just

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happenstance. But there was a connection, you see, on this Vietnam business. I didn't even realize the connection, but there was. I thought that Leo Cherne might be helpful to me in helping me present my case somewhere, but I didn't know where. And so I had an hour with John Roche at the White House on January 5th, on Vietnam.

But, to get back to the Democratic National Committee: I had prepared a letter for the President that day, January 5, and I think I've given you a copy. If I haven't, I should. Well, I'll find one eventually and give it to you. I won't interrupt now. And the gist of what I said was, that at the risk of being presumptuous, I was going to offer a great politician some advice. My thought was this, that he had had two great challenges in his political career. The first one was on November 22, 1963, and he met that magnificently, and the second one was now. The second challenge was, was he going to realize that he had made a bad mistake about how a political party has to be run. No man, even as great a politician as he, can run it alone. If he continued on that

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course I thought 1968 would be a rerun of 1966. Or was he going to realize that you needed a real party organization and revitalize the party organization from stem to stern.

I said the Democratic National Committee, in effect, should be keelhauled, and should be reorganized and new people run in there from stem to stern. I said there are many good men who could be chairman. Neil Staebler is the Democratic National Committeeman from Michigan. He was the state chairman for ten years and he was the fellow who put "Soapy" Williams in for six terms. He was Congressman for one term himself, and he ran for governor unsuccessfully against Romney in '64. He's a master politician, and an unusual one. Also he's a wealthy man in his own right. He's a successful businessman in Ann Arbor. He is that unusual combination of the theorist and thinker and the practical politician. From 1955 to '60 he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee's committee on organization, and he wrote the plan for field operations of the committee. It was a good plan and it was used, and it played a major part in the successful campaign of 1958, and perhaps even of '60,

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but certainly '58.

So Neil Staebler would make a good chairman. And I said, "Of course, there are lots of other good men who would make good chairmen." I thought of Larry O'Brien. I didn't think I had to suggest him to the President, and then I knew there was a delicate situation with Larry O'Brien, because after all, he is a Kennedy man, and he is a Johnson man. If it came to a showdown between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and he were in the middle, it would be a tough situation for him. I'm sure Larry O'Brien is a man with the greatest integrity, but that's a situation that would be hard for any man. I don't know how he'd solve it. I suspect he would be with Lyndon Johnson against Bobby Kennedy now, but I don't know. I'm told that Bobby Kennedy's people regard Larry O'Brien now as a traitor and a defector.

In any event, then there would be Jim Rowe and there would be Ed Foley and there would be others too, that would make good chairmen. Well, all I meant was that the party needed reorganization and revitalizing And the President made his decision shortly thereafter.

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By the way, I forgot to tell you this, at the finish of my talk with John Roche, an hour, and we weren't talking about this, you understand, I said, "Here's a letter, John. Would you place it in the President's hands?"

He said, "Yes." So. I assume he did.

I immediately hotfooted it over to the Vice President's office, which is across the street, after I left Roche, and as I came into the Vice President's office.(I didn't have an appointment with him), Max Kampelman, who was for a long time his legislative assistant when he was Senator, and is still one of his most important advisers, a lawyer here in town, came in. He had an appointment with the Vice President, and I knew Max from years back. And I said, "Max, here's a letter for the President. I'd like Hubert to have a copy, too. Would you place it in his hands?"

He said, "Sure."

I know that he did and I know that Hubert read it, because I called up Max Kampelman the next. day and he said that Hubert had read it in his presence.

A lot of other people were saying things like

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this, too. I don't mean to say that my letter had the slightest impact, but the fact remains, whatever it was, the President has given a green light to action by the committee, and they have done a lot of things. In the first place, from my standpoint, Criswell has bought my KOED program, for ten years I've been plugging it, but equally important, they have re-established a registration division. It was absolutely madness that they abolished that and didn't have it in the '66 campaign. And they put a former Congressman named Billy Farnum of Michigan in charge. He's a fellow with a long labor background.

They have hired Bill Phillips, who was for many years the staff director for the Democratic Study Group of the House – 180 -- well, in the 89th Congress, it was 180 -- it's less now. One hundred and eighty liberal Congressmen in the House, most of the non-Southern and some of the Southern Democratic Congressmen. And Bill Phillips is one of the best voter education people and political research men in the country.

And they've got Charles Weltner, the former Democratic Congressman from Georgia, who left in a

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conscience crisis, because he didn't want to support Lester Maddox for Governor last year. He retired from the race for re-election. And Weltner is a good man too. And Criswell, who is the key staff man down there, seems to be an excellent man. Lots of ideas and savvy and imagination, so I'm very much encouraged by the way things look down there. I think that Lyndon Johnson, if I'm right, has proven that he's a real great politician, because he seems to have recognized that he's been wrong and that he's going to do something about it. That's the test of a man. It's easy to ride on success, but the test of a real politician, is a man who can reverse a failure.

HESS: Do you want to get into either one of the subjects about Clifford or the secret session?

SPINGARN: Oh, I don't think I will today. I think I'll let that hang over. Let me see if I have anything short that I can discuss briefly. I don't know whether I gave you that or not, but I want to. That's the full notes of my talk on civil rights in the Truman administration.

HESS: I'm not sure.

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SPINGARN: I don't think I did. Anyway, take it and Xerox it and give it back if you will.

Oh, here's something, perhaps of interest. I think I can cover it in ten minutes or so -- by five anyway. Tomorrow, I wish you'd make a note of this, I want to talk about Vietnam, the presentation of the case for our appearance in Vietnam, and I want to talk about my debate with Bertrand Russell and about Lewis Mumford. I've already referred to Hans Morgenthau and the New Republic, but I want to mention them. I want to talk about -- well, I'll just get started on the State Department, and my correspondence with McNamara and so forth and so on.

Let's see. Here is a civil rights case that is current in this city at this time. I mean, it involves, shall we say, a major question of possible discrimination on account of race. I have called it "Washington's Little Dreyfus Case in Blackface." This is, shall we say, a catchy name for it more than anything else. I rather like that name.

I know a lady named Mrs. Willie Hardy. She's one of the most dynamic women that I have ever known.

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She herself is, I think, in her middle forties, but she looks about thirty-five. She's a grandmother. She's married to a taxi driver and she has five children and a couple of grandchildren, I believe. Mrs. Hardy was on the Democratic Central Committee of the District of Columbia. She was one of the anti Joe Rauh members and she split and joined the Reeves-Lanahan slate in the 1964 primary here. That's where I met her. She was also chairman of the 78th precinct and a very effective chairman in the Southeast. She had the biggest turnout, the biggest registration of any precinct in the whole city, over a thousand.

And if I may digress, on May 5th, I think it was, '64, the primary took place. The rule was that the polls closed at eight but anybody in line at eight o'clock could vote. And I went out to her precinct. I was there before eight and there were maybe eight hundred people, standing in line.

They didn't finish them up until midnight, but they waited and they all voted. It was probably 95 percent Negro. And every one of the major candidates and many minor ones was out there working that line.

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You could work them right up to the door of the building, you see, this is legal. Frank Reeves was there and E. Franklin Jackson was there and Joe Rauh's son was there, and many others.

I was there. I must admit I walked down that line and I shook every hand in the line, and I gave them my literature and I asked them to vote for my slate and me, and I would usually point, because it was in sight, I would say, "Do you see Spingarn High School over there? That's named after my father," I would say, absolutely shamelessly. It's wonderful what a man can stoop to, but I didn't even blush when I did it. And, by the way, there's an amusing by-play in this. There is a chap in the city, a lawyer named Jerome Spingarn, a very able guy, but no relative of mine. His wife is Natalie Davis Spingarn and she is very able. She's written a lot of articles for the better grade magazines, Harper's, Atlantic, and she is executive assistant to Senator Ribicoff, or she was the last I heard, of Connecticut. And I have met Jerome and Natalie Davis Spingarn two or three times, but you know, I just know them casually. In any event, we're not related.

[#491 was omitted in numbering the pages.]

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Well, Natalie Davis Spingarn is a local politician and she has held jobs like delegate to the Democratic convention, and things like that here. And she was on the Joe Rauh-Jackson-Shackleton slate, the opposing slate.

HESS: The other fellows.

SPINGARN: The other fellows in the '64 primary, and I was on the Reeves-Lanahan slate. In other words, there were Spingarns on both slates. And wherever I went I heard, "Oh, you're Natalie Davis Spingarn's husband," or father, or son, or nephew or uncle or brother, you know.

And I would say, "No, we're not related." And what was worse, you see, I was always being told that Natalie Davis Spingarn was related to the Spingarns of Spingarn High School. And I remember someone saying when I was walking down that line that night in Willie Hardy's precinct, pumping hands, and they said, "Oh, you're related to Natalie Davis Spingarn. She's the Spingarn of Spingarn High School." And, you know, this struck me to the quick, because in local politics, Spingarn High School in a city where there is 65 percent

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Negro is a plus. And it is named after my father, and Natalie Davis and her husband are not related to me or him. So, I reared back, and I walked back about ten feet. I have a pretty strong voice. And I bellowed up and down that line, it could have been heard for hundreds of yards. I said, "No, that high school is named after my father. It is not named after Natalie Davis Spingarn or her husband. They are not related to the Spingarn that school is named after in any way whatsoever," and so on.

HESS: I expect they took notice of that, didn't they?

SPINGARN: Yes, but we didn't win the election.

Well, anyway, I'm talking about Willie Hardy. And Willie Hardy has worked for Senator [Philip A.] Hart of Michigan and until recently she was the staff director of the University Neighborhood Council, which is a social service operation, quite a big one, in the near Northwest, which is mostly a Negro area. It was originally established, as I understand it, by Howard University, but then became independent. And she was, until a few weeks ago, the head of that.

Early in December, last, December '66, Willie

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Hardy called me up and she said she wanted to talk to me about a case of injustice involving a Negro police officer in the city named Carl Siler. I invited her and Carl Siler to have lunch with me at the Carlton, at the Democratic Club there. I listened for two and a half hours to Carl Siler's story, and I cross-examined him carefully, I'm a lawyer after all, and I think I know when men are telling essential truths. Nobody tells a story about himself that's of jugular interest with total accuracy. It's impossible. But in the main thrust, I believed him. The gist of his story in summary was this: He's 28 years old; he's a Negro police private; he's been on the force three years. Last September, the night of the 15th of September he was off duty in civilian clothes. He had a date with his girl and about one o'clock in the morning he took her home in his car. He was double parked outside her apartment house, down in Southeast. A prowl car with two white police officers came by. He was double parked; they told him to move on, and he said he would in a minute. The prowl car went away, came back in a few minutes, "Move on. Don't let us catch you here

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again." He said he would.

The prowl car went away and came back a third time and they were still sitting in the car, talking, and just then the police car pulled up behind them and stopped. At that point, the girl got out of the car, she walked up to her second floor apartment, and he waited to see that she was o.k. and then he moved out. The prowl car followed. He turned right, they followed him, but not making any signal to him. Finally, they turned on their red flasher and their horn and ordered him to the curb. One police officer got out of the prowl car. Siler got out of his car too. He was in civilian clothes. He was a police officer, though.

Then there's a difference in testimony as to just what happened. The police officer said that he was going to give him a ticket, that Siler didn't have his lights on, was driving without lights. He said that as he approached him Siler used filthy language on him. He said, "Don’t you mother fucking white cops have anything to do but fuck with me?" Those are the exact words he was supposed to have said. Siler

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denies that he said this. But the police officer said that he said it in a loud and boisterous voice, that he was disturbing the peace. He immediately decided to arrest him. And he said, "You're locked up." And he grabs Siler behind by the belt, you know, the way they do, and Siler starts to push him away with one hand and pull out his credentials with the other and he said, "I'm a police officer." And they scuffled a little, Siler tried to show him his credentials -- that's what Siler said. The other guy said he was resisting arrest. The other police officer gets out of the car and then comes in, together they grab Siler and they fall down on the pavement and they handcuff him. The credentials fall on the pavement.

Then, Jones, one of the police officers, orders Siler into the prowl car, they're going to take him to the station and book him. Siler says he won't go until they pick up his credentials and his gun, which is in the car, which he is required to carry with him at all times, off duty or on. Then according to Siler -- he is handcuffed -- Jones comes around, belts him in the face, knees him in the groin, and punches

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him in the belly -- he's handcuffed. At this point, apparently, they discover the credentials and they realize that he is a police officer and then they know they're in trouble at least this is my theory. They wouldn't have done this if they'd known he was a police officer, I don't think. You see, the whole assumption that I have and that Willie Hardy has and others have, that this is typically the way a Negro citizen is treated by the police, not the same way you and I would be treated under the same circumstances. So, they called their precinct commander, a Lieutenant Drescher and he comes over with the sergeant. Drescher takes the handcuffs off Siler, puts him in his car, takes him to the station; one of the white police officers who made the arrest, drives the prowl car, one drives Siler's car to the station. They're already there when Siler gets there with Drescher, they're standing inside the doorway of a room. Siler and Drescher walk down the corridor, and Jones is there, the man who had, according to Siler, belted him in the nose -- by the way, his nose was broken, although it's not clear whether it happened then or later -- and kneed him in the groin and punched him in the belly.

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And all of this is a matter of hospital records, because he had these contusions. He had a bite on his belly, by the way, teeth marks, and contusions and welts and a broken nose.

Well, Jones is standing in the doorway. Siler walks back down with Drescher. Siler says he thought that Jones made a motion to attack him. Jones says he was offering Siler the keys to Siler's car which Jones had driven to the station. In any event, according to Jones, Siler then attacked him, breaks away and attacks him, Siler's not handcuffed.

There's a little flurry -- there are a few blows struck -- but the only important blow is again struck against Siler. He gets the other eye blacked. Just a few blows are struck and they're separated and the police fall on Siler, spread-eagle him, and throw him into a lock-up. The next morning he's taken to be arraigned and there's some delay but eventually he is arraigned. In the meanwhile, he is interrogated by the higher police officials, and one of the charges later is that he was uncooperative. Well, he knew he was in hostile hands by this time and he wanted his lawyer, and he didn't want to talk without his lawyer.

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The police said he was a police officer and he had to talk when a superior told him to -- and tell what had happened.

Well, in any event, he's arraigned, and then three criminal charges are brought against him. A felony charge -- assaulting an officer -- that was the police station affair; and two misdemeanor charges, one is disorderly conduct, that was the loud, noisy, dirty language, and the other was driving without lights. The felony charge goes to a grand jury. They hear the evidence and dismiss it -- no true bill. Dismissed -- no indictment. The two misdemeanor charges are brought before a general sessions court, Judge Halleck -- son of the former minority leader of the House -- a Republican. He dismisses the disorderly conduct charge -- that's the loud, dirty language. And the whole result in the courts is, he's fined $5.00 for driving without lights.

Siler says that's the one thing he's absolutely sure he wasn't doing. So, he's fined $5.00. But, Siler brings charges against the police officers who had beaten him up, and he prefers charges also with the Human Rights Commission here, the Human Relations

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Commission of the District of Columbia, of police brutality charges.

The police then bring police charges against Siler, looking to his dismissal from the force. They bring in a nine-count specification, conduct unbecoming an officer, and failure to comply with regulations -- umpty-dumpty-umpty-dump -- failure to report his injuries within a certain time -- you know, the book.

A six-day trial board hearing is held, and they find him guilty on all counts. By the way, he's been suspended without pay since September 15th. Willie Hardy had hired him on her staff. He had worked for her, but I guess he's lost that now, because she left. And they found him guilty on all charges and recommended dismissal. He has appealed to the D.C. Commissioners, and on February 10th, the D.C. Commissioners held a two and a half hour hearing, and they now have the matter under advisement, that is, for decision, whether to approve the recommendation that he be dismissed, or reverse, or what.

Well, I heard this whole story from Carl Siler himself, and I was satisfied in my own mind that this was a case of outrageous injustice. At the worst,

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the thing should have been washed out, as a little confusion and misunderstanding on both sides. But here is a man, out of a minor traffic violation, at most, while off duty with his girl, comes a beating up, a broken nose and the ruin of his career. Does this make sense?

Furthermore, the courts have considered the matter and they have washed the whole thing out except for a $5.00 fine on the criminal side. Now the police are going to fire him, and have in fact, cut off his pay since the beginning. Well, some time in January, as I recall, Willie Hardy held a rally in a church, the Church of the Redeemer in Northeast, which I attended. She had all the civil rights organizations in the city there, I mean, the leaders, to talk for Siler. And she had even imported talent from New York. She's a great organizer. The NAACP was there, CORE was there, SNCC was there, and Marion Barry was there, and Julius Hobson was there, and Marion Barry made a fiery demagogic speech and Julius Hobson made an even more fiery, demagogic speech and I thought to myself, "Nobody can top that."

But then a fellow got up and he topped them both

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with ease. His name was Jesse Gray. He's from New York – Harlem -- and he's a fellow who organized and led the rent strikes up there, and, boy, he is a volcano. But he made a lot of sense, bitter as he was. A lot of things he said made sense. He said, "This isn't just Washington. This is the way white police treat Negro citizens all over the United States...They call us 'nigger' or 'coon' or 'boy,' and then they start beating on our heads. What I say is that we should use the Siler case as a lever to hold a national conference on police brutality here in Washington, and we'll bring in people from Los Angeles, Detroit, and Cleveland and New York, and we'll show them the facts." Well, you know, that was an interesting idea. And everybody present thought that was great and they were going to organize that. And Willie Hardy held a meeting in her office which I was going to attend but didn't, a few days later, to organize it, and I understand it's still in process. How far its gotten I don't know.

Well, in any event, I was satisfied that this was a monstrous injustice, so I went to work and I talked to Commissioner Tobriner -- by telephone at home -- one Sunday. I talked to Tobriner, I talked to Duncan, I

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talked to Mathe, General Mathe. I talked to all three D.C. Commissioners and told them my views and expressed the hope (this is before the hearing), that they would give this their very closest scrutiny, because I said, "In my opinion, and I'm a lawyer and I've examined the case and I've carefully cross-examined Carl Siler and I believe that any fair minded man will say this is a monstrous injustice."

General Mathe made an interesting suggestion to me: He's the engineer commissioner, a new man. He said, "You took Siler to lunch; why don't you take the other side; why don't you take the arresting officers to lunch, and hear their side?"

I said, "That's a good idea, General. I'll do it if they'll go with me." I knew they wouldn't. I mean I assumed they wouldn't. So. I called up Police Chief Layton. He's the chief of police here, and I had a very interesting twenty minute talk with him. He courteously declined to let Privates Jones have lunch with me, or the other arresting officer, or Lieutenant Drescher, the precinct commander who was also in on it, he said that it was in regular channels, you know, was quasi-judicial

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and he didn't think ....and I understood. I mean, he was perfectly within his rights in saying that.

But then he launched into a defense of the police here. He said they treated everybody alike without any regard to color of the man. I said, "Well, Chief, this isn't the way I see it. But this isn’t just Washington's problem, this is a problem all over the country. But the reason it's special in Washington is that we have a sixty-five percent Negro population and the police force is eighty percent white. And furthermore, the top two echelons in the police force are a hundred percent white. And in the third echelon, that's the captain echelon, there are only three colored police officers among many whites, you see. That's part of the problem."

Then two or three days later, William Raspberry, who is a reporter for the Washington Post, a Negro reporter and an excellent man, had an interesting article which seemed to indicate what the white police do when they sit around their orderly rooms in the afternoon or evenings. He had photographs of what they had written on their walls – scrawled -- and carved on it. It showed a gorilla, "A typical nigger bastard," it said. "I hate niggers," and stuff like that.

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I'm told by my Negro friends that this is common all over the city. I don't mean to say that this is every white police officer, but, I mean, there are enough of them so that it taints -- they do a lot of their recruiting from Southern states, you know, and they have built-in prejudices when they start. So then I talked to Joe Rauh, and I talked to Ted Dudley, and I've gone to lunch with Ted Dudley, and then I talked to Carl Shipley, the Republican chairman, because justice is non-partisan. I had quite a talk with Shipley and he has written me a couple of letters about the case. I talked to Bishop Paul Moore, because he's very active in civil rights, and I talked to a lot of other people whom I tried to get interested, including Newbold Noyes, the editor of the Star and Russell Wiggins, the editor of the Post, and Hollander, the editor of the News. I talked to them all personally.

Well, here's an amusing thing. On the day of the hearing, February 10th, I went down to it. That's the appeals hearing before the three D.C. Commissioners. It lasted about two and a half hours. I had written a letter to the President on this thing, the Siler case,

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explaining what I had done, that it was an outrage and I hoped that he would interest himself in it.

I sent it through Stephen Pollak, who replaced Charlie Horsky as the D.C. man at the White House. And I got a polite acknowledgment from Pollak, that's all.

But on February 10th, I went down to the hearing, and after the hearing, I distributed copies of this letter to the President, to the reporters at the press table, the Washington Post man, the News, the Star and the Afro-American. And one of the television reporters, the NBC man, saw me doing this, and came up and asked for a copy and I gave him one. So I gave away five copies. Well, the next day -- I didn't see it for several days hereafter -- the News had a story on this thing, and they had a statement in it -- I have this thing somewhere or should have it -- the gist of it was -- it was a story about the hearing, it was a very languid story, which seemed to think this was all a big bore and that the facts were obscure and murky and who knew where the truth lay, and so forth and so on. The reporter seemed to have a bad taste in his mouth, and had probably gotten out of bed on the wrong side that day. He was

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terribly bored about it all. Well, then down in the middle of the story, it says this:

This is by a fellow named Samuel Stafford, writing in the February 11th Washington News. Well, naturally, this made me look ludicrous, and I didn't like it. So, I wrote a letter to the editor, Hollander, whom I had already talked to. I went down to see Hollander; he wasn't there. But Nicholas Blatchford, the managing editor, was there and I had a half an hour talk with him. He promised to run my letter and he did. And the gist of my letter is, and this is part of my credo of politics and philosophy of life. I said about Stafford's story that I didn't think that it represented, "one of his more shining hours." It seemed to me to be written in a mingled spirit of apathy and cynicism by a man with only a superficial knowledge of the Siler case.

Mr. Stafford apparently found the whole hearing a bloody bore. He announced that, "much of the dialogue was murky."

I agree that the case presented against Carl Siler

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was decidedly murky. But I thought the case presented for him by his able attorney, John Karr, was very clear. I regard the Police Trial Board recommendation of dismissal as an outrageous act of injustice and I hope the D.C. Commissioners will see that justice prevails. Then I referred to his account of me, which I've quoted to you:

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Now, the editors added a note to my letter. This is amusing because, you see, it justified all the work I went through to get this letter in the News.

HESS: I remember both of those. I read them in the News when they came out.

SPINGARN: Well, let's knock off.

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