Oral History Interview Number 1 with
DAVID H. STOWE
May 27, 1969
by Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library
Jump to additional interview involving David Stowe in 1973 and again in 1989.
HESS: Mr. Stowe, how did you come to be associated with the National Security Resources Board?
STOWE: I think, Jerry, before I answer that question I have to go into a little history. And this, after all the years have gone by, may not be so accurate. The National Security Resources Board, I believe, came into being at the same time the Department of Defense Reorganization Bill passed the Congress and the Department of Defense was being established. The National Security Resources Board was to be, as its name indicates, a planning agency and not an operating agency. It was originally set up in the Department of Defense. During this time I wasn't familiar with the board or its operation at all. I do know, that after a year or year and a half's operation many people, and I think this might well have been primarily in the Bureau of the Budget as opposed to the President himself, thought that the planning was not being done in the way that it had been contemplated and perhaps, even more importantly, the civilians who had been placed in charge of the agency, in the Department of Defense, were becoming sort of captives of the military. The National Security Resources Board was transferred over to the Executive Office of the President and thus became, as was the Bureau of the Budget and the Council of Economic Advisors, a part and parcel of the Executive Office of the President. At that time, or shortly thereafter, Arthur Hill, who had been the head of the Board, resigned and the President was seeking someone to replace him. I believe that, at that time, the President asked John Steelman, who was then The Assistant to the President, to also assume sort of guidance of the NSRB on a temporary basis, while awaiting the appointment of a new director. And, as of that time, I was deputy to John Steelman. I had not been made an administrative assistant to the President and practically everything that John got involved in, I got involved in. We had been there only a short time when the President decided to nominate former Governor, former Senator, Mon [Monrad C.] Wallgren. Once that was known, I had suggested to Mon Wallgren that he should send, in advance of his arrival at the Board, one or two people in whom he had great confidence who could spend that time while he was waiting for confirmation and arranging his affairs, to come to Washington to get a feel of the Board's operation, so that John Steelman and I, in effect, could pass the wand to them. The two people that I recall who were sent were former secretary to the Governor, Jack Gorrie, and a former associate, and incidentally, a close personal friend of mine for years before that, by the name of Jack Davis. There was a third staff member from Wallgren's staff who was sent whose name I do not recall, and he did not stay very long. Actually, this becomes important only because later it became quite an issue in the question of confirmation of Mon Wallgren. Now, briefly, I never was quite sure what created the problem so far as the Senate was concerned, except perhaps this was part and parcel of some of the old cry of "administration by cronyism" because it was well known that Mon Wallgren was a very close personal friend of President Truman. However, the fact that these men had come in and were preparing to take over, added fuel to the fire that this was sort of a prearranged, predetermined method of moving the whole thing into Mon's hands as a crony. Fortunately for the agency, Jack Gorrie remained and eventually became the Director of the program in his own right some years later. However, during the time that the confirmation hearings were going on, Steelman and I continued to operate the agency with sort of our left hand, and continued our other work with our right hand. When the Senate refused to confirm Mon Wallgren, and the President was then faced with selecting another nominee for the position, I moved over practically full-time into the Board, with John coming in two or three hours a day. But I moved my office into the Board and took over, for all intents and purposes, the actual direction of the Board during that time. Subsequently, the President nominated the then Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, to be the Director. He was confirmed and became the Director and acted in that capacity for one or two years. I'm not quite sure of the length of time.
HESS: What were a few of the problems that arose at the time that you were connected with the Board?
STOWE: The first thing was to try to orient the agency back out of its military attitude into the civilian planning to determine what functions of planning were needed. One which comes to mind, very quickly, was the fact that nothing had been done in the area of civil defense, and subsequently, under the Korean impact, this became extremely important. Not that we had to have a full-blown agency but we at least had to have some planning on it. In the areas of shipping and the areas of the resources themselves, stockpiling, it all had been dominated by people who had been oriented into the military concept. Now, when I say military concept versus civilian I'm not quite sure what it means. But we did have to, first of all, change the personalities of a number of department heads there to the extent that once I was dubbed as President Truman's hatchet man.
HESS: You fired quite a few?
STOWE: And to assist in convincing some people that they would be happier elsewhere. So, I would think that in the early days--actually while we were waiting for Mon--we didn't try to do any changes. We just wanted to hold the agency together and keep it going. But when it became obvious that there would be a period of time, we then did start moving. One of the most important things was that as a planning agency the NSRB had to use and rely upon staff of other government agencies in the areas that might be performing their planning--a thing that apparently had not been done at all in the Department of Defense. And there was considerable resistance on the part of the agencies, feeling either that their jurisdictional rights to do all this planning on their own were being threatened or feeling there shouldn't be any higher level of planning. That we had to overcome, and we had to get cooperation and participation. Now this was made, I think, easier on us in that John Steelman was wearing two hats: namely, The Assistant to the President, and the Director. There weren't many agency heads who were prepared to argue with him, particularly if it took on the aura of a jurisdictional dispute, with them trying to protect their so-called rights to do something. Another area that was emerging, and did become a problem area, is that planning agencies, I think, historically have had to face the problem that planning in the abstract is not the most interesting thing in the world to do. And once you have something reasonably well planned, then comes the desire to operate it. And in each area where planning had gone on, the individuals involved were now getting in to telling the agencies what they must do; in other words, becoming a super administrative device on top of agencies in the government. It was our philosophy that the job of the National Security Resources Board was to centralize, not to perform, but to centralize and coordinate long-range planning as opposed to short-range planning, and that in such a perception there's no room for becoming an operating agency. So, John Steelman and I developed a term which subsequently, I think, Stuart Symington accepted, which was "spin off the operating." Once we had planning fairly well in hand, and if there became a need to move into the operation as there did in Civil Defense, to "spin it off" from the Board and set it up as an independent agency, an operating agency. Naturally it would continue to carry the burden, the burden of planning, but its planning would be more immediate planning for immediate actions as opposed to long-run planning. And secondly it would be free to operate the agency as an operator, and in that way not interfere with continued planning.
HESS: On the subject of Civil Defense, I believe you took a trip to England. Is that right?
STOWE: Yes.
HESS: What do you recall about that trip and your findings?
STOWE: Somehow or other I'm trying to figure out just where Mr. [Millard Fillmore] Caldwell came in now as the head of the agency. Oh, he was at Civil Defense--after we set up Civil Defense as an independent agency. And one of the reasons that the President selected him, I believe, was that as a former Congressman and as a former Governor, he would command respect. One facet of the problem was reflected in the opinion that the people had during World War II when civil defense was often referred to as "fan dancing." So we needed a head of the agency who could command respect of Congress, and our feeling was that a former Congressman might fit well in relation to his former colleagues. Furthermore, in a Federal-State arrangement, the cooperation of the states was extremely important. And having a man who had been both a Congressman and a man who had been a Governor, we felt provided the impetus to good relationships in these two areas of need, namely the Congress and the states. Shortly after he came in as the head, it was suggested that since the British had had such dramatic experience during World War II, that in order that our planning and thinking would get the benefit of the practical needs of civil defense as opposed to some of the guesswork that we had been considering, it would be well if the head of the agency went to England and spent two or three weeks. Prior to that time I had been fortunate enough to meet the head of Britain's civil defense program during World War II. He had offered that at any time that we came over, he would be delighted to give us the entire background history and methodologies that they had used during the time of the bombings of Britain. He had also pointed out, in prior conversations with me, that if it hadn't been for what he called the "year of the phony war," when they were getting ready but no one was fighting, that they would have been in very bad shape because they made progress only during that year. So, when the bombing actually started they were in much better position. So we felt that it would be advisable for the head of the new agency to go over and spend some time. It would be a practical, laboratory-type relationship. He asked me to go with him. I did go with him, and spent two weeks with him reviewing all the planning and activities that went on during World War II, and what they were continuing to do. It was as a result of this that subsequently the Governor asked, and Sir John Hodsel who was head of the Civil Defense over there agreed, that they send a British team over here. This team helped in the planning, and it actually helped design and construct our one Civil Defense center that ever got off the ground. It was out in Olney [Maryland] which was modelled after some of those they built in England for actual practice under simulated conditions of bombing and rescue, of digging people out of rubble, and all that.
HESS: I have read that some Congressmen did not want to get too deeply involved in Civil Defense because they thought it would be a sign of belligerent intentions on our part. Is that right? Did you run across any thinking like that?
STOWE: No, I don't recall any. You see, I was in Civil Defense, getting it started, getting it off the ground, getting it transitioned over to the agency. Then after this trip to England--as a matter of fact at the time of the trip to England--I had already left the planning area and was working with the people back over in what was supposed to have been my job about a year or so earlier, over in the White House as an Administrative Assistant to the President. And I think I probably went to England only because I did know the people and Governor Caldwell didn't, and this was a way of facilitating his trip.
HESS: Tell me a little about the Civil Defense facility at Olney. How was that set up?
STOWE: One of the things that the British soon discovered was that there was a very definite form of practical training. It's not just running around the street blowing whistles and directing traffic. For example, they soon discovered that all of the pipelines in London, water pipelines, had been down in the ground so darn long that no map of London showed where they were. So every time a bomb would burst and a main broke, they would have no idea where that thing went to or came from. In the year of planning, they were able to realize this. Practically all the water supply used in sections of London was transmitted by two-and four-inch mains lying just in the gutters. If a bomb hit one of those, you could see the segment of pipe and you could replace it and they were back in business again. In the meantime, they would still be digging to try to find some of the old mains that were down under the streets of London. I illustrate that only for the practical argument. They did learn very quickly. One of the great problems was not only trying to get the civilian population in a safe place, but that many never got there and they had to be dug out of the rubble of bombed-in houses. There are tactics, much as miners use, on how you can get in the rubble and get people out with the least continuing damage to that person.
HESS: How to shore it up and things of that nature?
STOWE: Yes. So, they created, in a number of locations, some half dozen or perhaps even more, actual simulated bombed houses where they created rubble. They had trap doors by which people could be put into these little places, and then the squads were trained to go in and get them out the way that they would have to get them out [in a real situation]. It was rather dramatic, but still it turned out to be very important in saving lives. Now, we had had no concept of this. We were still in the whistle blowing, "everybody get to the shelter" idea. The practical fact of life is that there is another side of this thing and the Civil Defense squad has to be well trained. It has to be a rescue squad; it has to have a number of facets that really cause you to say, "Why didn't we think of that first?" So, to build and construct some of these ingenious sorts of devices and to simulate these things, they sent a team over here. It helped us to construct one. This, unfortunately, as a Civil Defense project, sort of deteriorated. I suppose it's because its need was evaporating, so this center deteriorated and I think it was finally sold and disposed of.
HESS: Was there ever very much discussion about building large shelters?
STOWE: Yes, that was discussed. We, of course, urged the construction of shelters but we had a situation quite different from the British in the construction of shelters. I think, about all we really urged was that where local authoritites were going to build big public parking facilities, they should go underground, under that, and simultaneously construct something that would resist a certain amount of bombing.
HESS: Okay, fine. And awhile ago you mentioned the problems of stockpiling. Just what were the problems that you were faced with at that time.
STOWE: The concept of stockpiling was to have a ready source of certain hard-to-get minerals and what have you which we, as the word implies, bought and put in safe position for use. As often occurs in a government as big as ours, sometimes they realized they had too much of something. Or more importantly, in the changing military requirements oftentimes something that was needed three years ago is no longer needed because something better has been discovered to take its place. So, the question of what you do with this stockpile, when does the Government move with it, when does the Government sell off of it, when does the Government buy, becomes very important in timing, vis-a-vis your needs. I don't know whether it was the beginning of what President Eisenhower called the military- industrial complex or not, but one of the greatest pressures always was that when there was a shortage of something, the military seemed to always support the industrial request that the stockpile be released so that the manufacturer could get a supply of copper or whatever it was, at a time when we were still struggling to get our, quote, "stockpile" up to where it was thought it ought to be. So, when we talk about stockpiling, it was a problem of when do you manipulate the amount of the stockpile and the disposition of the stockpile, and who gets it. This was beginning while I was at the NSRB, the National Security Resources Board, and I held a number of meetings about stockpiling. Various people were contending that different things should be done at the same time with the same resources and we had to finally come out with a judgment as to what we felt, and then recommend it to the President.
HESS: Do you recall what minerals were the most critical and most difficult to obtain and may have given the stockpiling people the most trouble?
STOWE: No. Platinum, I recall, was one because the great supply of platinum in the world, at that time at least, was Russian-controlled. But I think the one that perhaps caused the greatest amount of argument was copper, because it was in such demand commercially. We were doing building that had been stopped during World War II and everybody wanted building materials, and copper was a very important building material. It seems there was more argument over copper than over anything else.
HESS: Did they try to place quite a bit of pressure on you to release copper?
STOWE: Well, through the agencies, but not directly. It was one of the advantages, also, that the NSRB was very difficult to get to directly, just like the Bureau of the Budget and any other of these offices in the Executive Office of the President. It was a little difficult to get direct pressure. They put pressures on the agencies who were cooperating in these decisions.
HESS: What was President Truman's attitude towards the Board during the time that you were on it?
STOWE: First of all, please remember that I was never on the Board. I was there first as John's deputy in the White House and just went over with him. And secondly, I became an Administrative Assistant to the President and remained there. I never had a title in the agency. I often wondered why, in my signing papers, somebody didn't object. I know that during the time John Steelman was the Director and certainly during the early days of Symington, the President was interested in the Board. He was consulted rather regularly on the direction that the planning would take, and I think it reflected in great part his feelings of how it should be set up. I'm afraid that it was more of a problem, in the early days, than it was a help to him. So, whether he had a reaction to it, as he did to the Bureau of the Budget, and whether we were being an agency that was extremely important to his administration, I'm not sure we were ever able to demonstrate that. I think that he recognized, though, that it was an attempt to do comprehensive staff work, for decision-making in areas of long-run planning.
HESS: What was the general relationship of the Board to the other members of the White House staff--or did you have very much relationship with the White House staff at the time, on Board matters?
STOWE: On Board matters, we had practically no relationship with other staff members. One area in which we did have was in the planning for the continuous operation of the Office of the President--in the event of an emergency.
HESS: Did you ever have occasion to talk with Mr. Ferdinand Eberstadt?
STOWE: No, I didn't in this area. Eberstadt was a consultant, or was actually in the Bureau of the Budget--I don't remember--with Harold Smith whom I was very fond of when I worked in the Bureau of the Budget. I know Eberstadt has made real contributions in Government organization.
HESS: Was the NSRB his idea?
STOWE: This I don't know. You see, I inherited it. I didn't get into it and didn't have time to read the history of it--it was going so fast. I talked with a fellow by the name of Blaisdell quite often. Now, it seemed to me . . .
HESS: Thomas C.?
STOWE: Tom Blaisdell, and I think he had worked with Ferdinand Eberstadt in the past somewhere, but I never did talk with Eberstadt.
HESS: Speaking of Mr. Blaisdell, just what do you recall about your conversations with him? What particular subject was he interested in?
STOWE: Basically, in the function of the NSRB as a long-term planning agency.
HESS: I believe he was at the Department of Commerce at this time.
STOWE: Yes. Yes.
HESS: Okay. One quote that I would like to read is from a book by Edward Hobbs, Behind the President: A Study of Executive Office Agencies, and on page 178-79 he says, "Strained relations with departments were commonplace in NSRB's earlier days. The forthright efforts made by Steelman and Stowe to gear the departments into the NSRB staff planning programs smoothed over many of the rough spots." I'd like to ask a couple questions about that. What were those planning programs and could you tell me about the rough spots that he mentioned?
STOWE: The "rough spots," I would guess, concerned the concept which we disliked so, which was that the military was going to plan things in their own image, although in many of these fields civilian agencies had the responsibility for planning. When the NSRB was extracted and brought over to the Executive Office, these people that came with it still felt that what they needed were large planning staffs and they weren't interested in utilizing the agencies. Our feeling was that the basic planning had to be done in the agencies with the basic know-how. Therefore, we welcomed their participation as opposed to trying to close the door on them, but we put the basic responsibility back in the civilian agencies who had the long-term responsibility in these areas.
HESS: Is it, or is it not, sort of a natural characteristic for the military and the military-minded people to take over agencies that are substantially civilian in character, and run them from a military viewpoint?
STOWE: Yes, I suppose there is a logical explanation for it. Civilian agencies can get bogged down in discussions, conferences, conferring, and re-conferring. And the military, as I observe it, does have within its power to stop all this at some point and simply say, "Now we're making a decision." So, I think I could understand why they might feel that planning would advance farther if they got a group who would do it within their concept of planning. Yet, the problem was that they would be duplicating other efforts and probably showing less skill than existed among those who had worked for a number of years in the civilian agencies and who had great competency in the many fields of resources planning. You have a case, for example, in wartime where a whole industrial complex becomes pretty much part and parcel of the military operation. Civilians become pretty much a part and parcel of the military operation. Mr. Truman, I believe, felt very clearly that those parts should never come under one hundred percent dominance of the military. Otherwise, you would, in effect, have a state of martial law, when it should operate as a civilian agency. However, obviously, the operation must relate to the military, and this perhaps explains the basic difference in approach. I must say I've attended some of these planning sessions where it just seemed interminable, with discussion going around and around and around and it comes to a point where you would feel like cooperation is futile. So then, you think, "Let's go ahead and do it ourselves and forget these people."
HESS: What's your opinion of the success, your estimation of the success, of the NSRB in carrying out its programs during the years that you were associated with it?
STOWE: I think it was coming around on the right course. I think it did make some contributions. However, with the establishment of the Charlie Wilson office [Office of Defense Mobilization] which was supposed to have been concerned with short-run, immediate problems vis-a-vis the Korean situation, as compared to the long-run nature of the NSRB, inevitable conflicts developed. I think that beginning there, both agencies began to go down the drain more or less. One was supposedly purely wartime and the other was long-range, in character. You would think that even the long-range would survive, but I'm not even sure there is a vestige of its survival in the Government of today. Maybe, but I'm not aware of it.
HESS: Any other thoughts on NSRB?
STOWE: No.
HESS: Concerning White House staff, Sam Rosenman, who was the first Special Counsel, had left before you got to the White House, it that right?
STOWE: Yes, but you see, I had worked with Sam in the Roosevelt administration and I had been detailed over by the Director of the Budget to work with Sam when he was legal counsel to President Roosevelt. Sam Rosenman was coming down one or two days a week from his duties on the Supreme Court of New York, so that I used to see Sam at least once or twice a month, getting up papers and things that were important to him and doing such jobs as he wanted me to do. Now, I wasn't his fulltime assistant, and when he came down fulltime I went back to the Bureau of the Budget fulltime. I had been spending some time working with the Judge so I knew him before I'd ever met Clark Clifford.
HESS: Did the two men carry out the job of Special Counsel in any noticeably different manner?
STOWE: It would be very difficult for me to compare, because the nature of the problems he discussed with the President, and the nature of those things that he asked me to prepare a little staff work for, might be completely different. I don't know. I, too, have watched him sit in meetings where issues were being thrashed out, on which he was to make a recommendation to the President, and as I say, he also was the same type of person who was able to listen, to analyze, to get a grasp of the problem even though it had been something brand new to him and he'd never heard of the type of issue before. He would come out with what I thought were very good recommendations. In that respect they were pretty similar.
HESS: There is some discussion and some mention in history books that perhaps before the 1952 convention, after the first of the year, that Mr. Truman may have supported various men as Presidential candidates--such as Alben Barkley, Averell Harriman, Fred Vinson. Did you ever hear any talk like that around the White House?
STOWE: For Barkley, yes.
HESS: What were Mr. Barkley's difficulties in Chicago that year?
STOWE: I think the greatest difficulty was when a group of trade unionists held a meeting with the Vice President, and, as I understood it, frankly said they couldn't support him because they said he was too old. I know this made Mr. Truman very unhappy. I think the fact that Barkley, then without consultation as far as I know with the President, took himself out of the play which left him as a candidate who could no longer be supported with any strength. Now whether that decision was made at that moment, which was only a few days before the final decision or not, I don't know.
HESS: What had you heard about Mr. Barkley?
STOWE: I knew that the President was quite fond of him. I think he admired him greatly and would, I suspect, have supported him unhesitatingly for the office of the Presidency. But whether or not he was, in effect, Mr. Truman's candidate up to that point, I don't know.
HESS: Do you think that Mr. Truman was in favor of Adlai Stevenson receiving the nomination?
STOWE: I don't think there was any question that at the time he went to the convention to support Mr. Stevenson, and in the subsequent period where he campaigned for thirty or forty days on the train and made many other speeches, that he was fully in support of Mr. Stevenson. Whether or not earlier in the pre-convention period there were other candidates that he might have been more eager to support, I can't say. I just don't know.
HESS: In Cabell Phillips' book, The Truman Presidency, he relates an incident in which Mr. Stevenson and a number of his staff visited the White House in August of 1952 to lay out plans for the campaign. Do you recall anything about the visit of Adlai Stevenson and his group to the White House?
STOWE: Only one and its anecdotal; I don't think it will help history any.
HESS: Well, let's hear it anyway. What is it?
STOWE: There were some people who thought for awhile that at certain angles Mr. Stevenson and I tended to look alike. This occurred when his picture was on Time magazine or something, and someone had laid a piece of paper across it and I must admit that at certain angles there was a slight comparison. So, on that trip, we sort of stood next to each other in the Cabinet Room and we didn't look alike at all.
HESS: Do you recall any of the staff members discussing what went on at that meeting?
STOWE: No, I do not.
HESS: What do you recall about the trips in '52 and the speeches that were made?
STOWE: I suppose two things come to my mind about the trip. Those who had been on the train in '48, and I think this led to a real misinterpretation, just felt that the crowds that we drew, almost from the beginning, were as large and as enthusiastic as those in '48. You see, we had that enthusiasm, that desire. We had a town in West Virginia where people had to stand around for three or four hours, and we understood that they had been sent home saying that the train would be late. This upset us because we figured that can only make for a lesser crowd, and without being accurate on the figures it seems to me they could have estimated the crowd at around three thousand at four o'clock in the afternoon when we were supposed to come through. When we got through, there were almost eight thousand. The town had only about five thousand people, so they had to come from all around. This was the thing, I think, that throughout the entire campaign tended to mislead those of us on the train, that there could be a Democratic victory coming in spite of the name of Eisenhower, the opposition candidate. The other thing that I remember is that this was the first time in my experience that anything got thrown at the trains. If I recall correctly, our first engagement with it was in the town of Muskegon, Michigan where a couple of eggs and something else hit the back part. None of them ever hit the President, but one hit a photographer. We didn't have much of it during that campaign, but this was the first time I had ever heard of such an outrageous thing. I think we did have maybe two or three incidents of this nature. Since then, it has become more popular but I had never heard of it before and was so outraged by all this.
HESS: What was the basis for that?
STOWE: We have no idea except that in some crowds, occasionally, you find people who are there to heckle. You usually ignore it, except when we were at that academy up at Phillips Exeter and all the Phillips Exeter students came down and had obviously prearranged a heckling session. Mr. Truman stopped in the middle of his remarks and he gave them a lecture on etiquette that I don't think they'll ever forget. He said it with a great deal of force and conviction, and surprisingly I think that each and everyone of those young students realized that they were being talked to that way, because it stopped.
HESS: Who, of the staff, was along on the train?
STOWE: In '52?
HESS: Yes, '52.
STOWE: Matt Connelly was in overall charge. I had the President's car. Margaret was substituting for her mother. Her mother was ill at that time and Margaret was acting as hostess and Mrs. Truman joined us, I think, one day here and one day there on occasion, but not for very long. In the speech writing area, Charlie Murphy was in charge, and there was Dave Lloyd. The press was handled by . . .
HESS: Joe Short died on September 18th of 1952.
STOWE: He made the first trip out.
HESS: And then Roger Tubby and Irving Perlmeter took over.
STOWE: Roger Tubby and Irving Perlmeter took over, jointly. Irving had a heart attack out in Washington and came back on the train with us; from then on Roger took it over. There was that shift in the press relationship. Now, in terms of other people, there was the secretarial force, three, four or five secretaries, the switchboard, the usual arrangement, mimeograph operators and everything. Well, there could well have been some others in the same category as those I named.
HESS: Did the President, or did he not, seem more relaxed than in 1948 when he was the actual candidate?
STOWE: The only thing I could say about whether he seemed more relaxed was that in 1948, when he was the candidate, people remained in his car almost all of his waking hours. They felt that they had a right to stay there, and people were hanging, as I understand it, virtually from the chandeliers. One of the decisions that we made on this trip, in 1952, and the one that I became the enforcer of, was that people would not come back to that car until five minutes before we were about to stop. I even had them lined up two cars beyond so we could get them through quickly, so they wouldn't be back there milling around. In the same manner, within five minutes after we took off from a town, that car was cleared. This permitted the President time to relax, time to read, and more importantly, time to work with Charlie Murphy and Dave Lloyd on upcoming matters and to handle the business of the presidency, which was carried on. That's why, I think, there may have been someone else on the train working on, you know, administrative problems, but I can't place who it would be.
HESS: What seemed to be the degree of cooperation between the Stevenson campaign train and the Truman campaign train once the campaign got under way?
STOWE: I think there continued, throughout the campaign, difficulties at what I call the staff level. It's very difficult to get to.
HESS: Did you think that there was anyone that the Democrats could have put up that year that would have defeated General Eisenhower?
STOWE: I've always thought that Mr. Truman might have, but I'm not positive of it.
HESS: Dr. John Steelman, whom you worked for for a number of years, had the title "The Assistant to the President." Just where would he fit in in this context? You have mentioned that the legal counsel would really ride sidesaddle with the President. Where did Mr. Steelman fit in, and do you know where he got the title "The Assistant to the President?"
STOWE: I do not know where he got the title "The Assistant to the President." I think the easiest way to distinguish them [Steelman and Clifford]-- perhaps it's an oversimplification--is that John Steelman's functions were primarily in the day by day operation as sort of the chief administrator under the President, as opposed to the chief policy determiner or political determiner, or someone that you would use as a private citizen does as legal counsel. Fortunately, no real feeling of conflict, I think, ever developed. There was period of time when there was some public discussion that these two were in conflict. I don't think this was ever the case however. When I went over as John Steelman's deputy, one of my unusual duties was to be liaison with [Charles] Murphy, because of our old relationship, so that through a Stowe-Murphy liaison, any possible conflict between Steelman and Clifford could be held to a minimum if not eliminated. Secondly, when I was debating whether or not I would go over with John Steelman, I was urged to do so by the Director of the Budget. The Budget Director was quite anxious that I go over there to again eliminate any conflicts which might develop between the functions of the Director of the Bureau of the Budget and those of John Steelman. I don't think there was a big conflict. Of course, with Murphy there was never a whisper of it. And I don't think the President would have stood for it.
HESS: What about Matthew Connelly? What was Mr. Connelly's background?
STOWE: Outside of his relationship with the Truman Committee, I don't know. Matt's primary function was to arrange appointments; that means determining who should and who should not see the President and things of that kind. It doesn't mean just setting them down in a book, you know, "at 2:30 somebody is coming in." Matt was basically determining who the individuals were who would be coming in to discuss things with the President. Of course, the reason that I'm sure many staff members feel as I do about Matt was that whenever we had problems that were not of the type and kind that you would want to take up at the morning staff meeting, because they were too long or others would not necessarily be interested in them, Matt could always get you in to see the President within almost a matter of minutes if it were that urgent or certainly within the day if it was more or less routine. Although we didn't take up routine matters; it had to be more than routine to go in. Matt would always see to it that the President was availabile to the staff on important things; at least he did with me.
HESS: Joseph Feeney and Charles Maylon came to the White House staff in 1949. Just how was congressional liaison carried on before then, do you recall?
STOWE: No, I don't. I don't think that Mr. Truman ever really formalized it. My observation would be that having been a former Senator, he felt that it was not the proper role of the White House to continue to send great numbers of people up there trying to influence legislation. As a former member of the club he took a different attitude than Roosevelt had had. Therefore, my impression was that it was always sort of an informal, on a "when necessary" basis, that he himself conducted a part of it, as did Mr. Clifford, I think, when he was legal counsel. I know Mr. Murphy, when he was legal counsel, did that work in part. That's why I was never quite sure what these two full-time people [Maylon and Feeney] did, vis-a-vis legislative matters.
HESS: Was Leslie Biffle instrumental in congressional liaison?
STOWE: I wouldn't doubt that the President may well have spoken to him on occasions, or maybe on more than just occasions. But I think the main thing is that he did not set up formal groups as we had before and we've had since.
HESS: Such as the Larry [Lawrence] O'Brien operation?
STOWE: Yes. In effect, to tell Congress to do this, that or the other thing. Mr. Truman, it was my understanding, just didn't believe in that philosophy. Obviously, however, there have to be relationships, and there have to be contacts and it can't all be done by the President of the United States. I think he did it more on a "when needed" basis.
HESS: How would you rate Mr. Connelly as a political advisor?
STOWE: Oh, I think he was very sharp. He always seemed to know when people were not, what we might say, the right ones to see the President, at certain times, because of something this guy had said or done. He was aware of when the relationships were, you might say, good for a face-to-face meeting, and when they were poor. I think he personally followed a lot of this. I think that he kept track of the multitudinous relationships and then was able to evaluate them.
HESS: After the administration, Mr. Connelly had some difficulty. What do you recall about that?
STOWE: Well, I recall alleged charges. I recall that they dropped all of them except one which might be called "giving full time and attention to your driving," which is a technical charge of a traffic violation that perhaps I improperly equate to what was almost a technical charge against Matt. The end result was, however, that he went to prison for a year. I have a personal feeling that the administration that followed us had their eyes on one or two other people that they would have loved to have gotten something on to incriminate or to embarrass Mr. Truman. And failing to do that, they picked on the only thing they could find left which was this rather tragic slight impropriety, if you want to call it that, on the part of Matt. But he was close to the President, and if he had been anywhere but close to the President, nobody would have bothered him.
HESS: Who were the people they were primarily interested in, do you recall?
STOWE: Well, rumor had it that they spent considerable time and effort trying to get something on John Snyder.
HESS: I have been told that Herbert Brownell had an office set up just to get information and derogatory information on Truman employees. Is that right?
STOWE: I had never heard that, but I know there was a period of time after the change in administration where I had been informed by employees who were then in the Department of Justice, that they were spending some time on attempting to get derogatory information. I must say again this was mostly geared and directed at John Snyder, I suppose, because he was in the very key position of Secretary of the Treasury, plus the fact that he was a long-time close personal friend of the President, and they thought they might find something. I guess the record shows they never did.
HESS: Our next White House staff member is William C. Hassett.
STOWE: William Hassett was the most interesting person I think on the White House staff. As a former reporter he had the greatest facility in and command of the English language, which stood the President in great stead in writing all those various kinds of letters that a President has to write. Bill was great at it. He had such a breadth of experience, not only as a reporter, but serving in the same capacity with President Roosevelt. He developed a philosophy which I'm sure endeared him to the President.
HESS: What was that?
STOWE: Just a general philosophy of life. Of course, one of their great pleasures was playing with words and Hassett was an expert on words, and I must say that Mr. Truman very rapidly became an expert on words just to keep up with Bill Hassett. I have seen them move to two, three, four dictionaries in the middle of an argument over words. Bill was philosophic. Bill and Charlie Ross were the two people that I felt, as a new and relatively young staff member, when I had doubts or qualms, or even questions of propriety of action, never a hesitation in going to them because they both took, as I say, this philosophical approach based on great wisdom and great experience. And although they would never tell me what to do, I usually came out of such conferences quite convinced what I should do.
HESS: All right, a man that we mentioned just a minute ago, Charles Ross. What was his background?
STOWE: I felt about Charlie Ross the same way I did about Bill Hassett. He was a particular, personal advisor when I needed help, and I think in Charlie's case it was more that he was very interpretive of what might be Truman's philosophy and Truman's reaction in certain situations, while Bill Hassett was more what would be called a Presidential reaction. Charlie lived out here where I did and I had to see him from time to time outside the office. A very, very fine man. I think he did an extremely good job as press secretary to the President. Charlie was certainly devoted and dedicated both to the President and to his job of keeping a good public image of the President. I suppose this is why he virtually worked himself to death.
HESS: Well, he died on December 5th of 1950 and that night Margaret sang at Constitution Hall and the next morning a music critic by the name of Paul Hume received a letter. Do you recall that?
STOWE: Yes I do.
HESS: What to you recall about the Paul Hume letter?
STOWE: Well, I recall the concert first. I was there with our guests, in our box. I suppose on the first number or two Margaret was quite properly nervous and also was singing some of these things which were Wagnerian-type, which [Helen] Traubel was getting her into. So I don't think that the first couple of numbers in her program were of the calibre that the people might have been led to expect. Fortunately, she got into something rather light and airy and Margaret had a wonderful voice for that type of thing. Everything was beautiful from then on, but there was this little rough spot at the beginning of it. But Mr. Hume, I think, recognizing what might have happened, had to be the music critic, and really took off. The next thing I know, he had received the letter. I didn't see it before it went. I don't think anyone did. It really created a lot of consternation. But I think it also reflected something. If I haven't already put this in, I should put it in. A number of years later when we were sitting around with a group of shipyard workers in Baltimore, Maryland, where I was the umpire [in a labor dispute], something came up--I think Mr. Truman may have made a speech or something. The shipyard workers began talking about him. They had done this many times before with statements like, "Well, our boy's back on the road again. Did you see what Mr. Truman said last night?" So I finally asked them. I said, "Look, what is it that causes you fellows to have this warm feeling about President Truman as you have expressed it not only now but on numerous occasions?" There was sort of a silence and I thought maybe somebody would think of Greece and Turkey or some of the more dramatic things. Finally, one shipyard worker said, "You remember the letter he wrote to that damn music critic?" I said, "Yes, I certainly do." He said, "Well, that's what a shipyard worker would have done." And with that, all of the union men sitting around the table nodded, "That's right. That's right."
HESS: Stick up for their daughters.
STOWE: Well, it was a warmth that came through. It came through in Mr. Truman's relationship with people in a speech. In spite of the fact that I am sure it upset some people, this was what many people felt just made Mr. Truman great. He just wasn't going to be kicked around, or have his daughter get kicked around. Second Oral History interview with David H. Stowe, September 25, 1972 in Washington, D.C. by Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library.
HESS: To begin this morning, sir, let's discuss Dr. [John R.] Steelman's office, the set up of the Assistant to the President. I do not have the date that he began as head of OWMR (Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion), but he was Special Assistant to the President from December 29, 1945, until December 12, 1946. At that time he was also with OWMR and then on December 12, 1946 he became the Assistant to the President and served until the end of the administration. I might add that in a few of my interviews, there has been some question about the duties of Dr. Steelman: the range of duties; the responsibilities of his office; just exactly what they did and how it was done. Since you worked for him for several years, could we clear that up this morning?
STOWE: First of all, I only worked for Dr. Steelman a little over one year, from September 1947 until after the election in 1948. Shortly thereafter I became an Administrative Assistant to President Truman. Let's go back just a bit. Dr. Steelman was the head of the office of War Mobilization and Reconversion for a period of time. During that time he also became Special Assistant to President Truman; in effect he was wearing two hats. He continued to direct the office of OWMR and served as a staff member to President Truman, until the time OWMR was closed down. In the fall of 1946 Dr. Steelman asked me if I would come over to the White House as his assistant. At that time I did not accept his offer. Subsequently, in September of 1947, when he was The Assistant to the President, he again asked me to come over as his assistant in the White House; at that time a one-year arrangement was worked out with Jim [James E.] Webb, the Director of the Budget, where I was at the time, and Dr. Steelman. I went over as the so-called Deputy to the Assistant to the President. This title was never cemented down because my payroll title was Administrative Assistant in the White House Office. However, I did serve as his deputy and during that time one of the things I had to do was to attempt to integrate the staff that he had brought with him from OWMR, with his White House operation. Most of OWMR had been liquidated by that time; these were residual staff members. However, it resulted in a rather substantial staff when compared with other White House staffing patterns; it included a newspaper public relations type of person, Mr. Fitzgerald; a legal counsel whose name I don't recall at the moment; staff for the Advertising Council; a liaison person for the motion picture industry and some other functions which apparently had been utilized in OWMR as a part and parcel of the conversion after World War II to the peacetime economy. During that year a number of those people and their functions were either terminated or transferred to other agencies; only one or two were continued on in Dr. Steelman's White House office.
HESS: Just what was the function of Dr. Steelman's office? I have heard him described as a man who was in charge of the day to day workings of the White House. It that right?
STOWE: I was associated with Dr. Steelman both when I was his deputy and afterwards when I was Administrative Assistant to the President. I continued to work fairly closely with Dr. Steelman in a number of areas. First, I would say that he handled perhaps more of what might be termed the general government relationships for the White House, that is, the day-by-day operation. I would say that most of the White House day-by-day administrative dealings with the various agencies were conducted in great part through Dr. Steelman's office. I would say that in the area of general government administration he was the focal point, although subsequently, when I became Administrative Assistant, some of that continued to operate through my office.
HESS: Did he have very many functions dealing with legislative liaison, relations with Congress?
STOWE: No. That was handled entirely through the Legal Counsel's office or Matt Connelly's office. As far as I know, no legislative things except possibly where it might have been a bill that affected labor- management relations might have been referred to him for comment, but I would in general say no.
HESS: You know, two men were brought in in 1949 and given the specific title of Legislative Liaison, Charles Maylon and Joseph Feeney. Did you often work with those men?
STOWE: No. I know both of them but they worked directly for Matt Connelly. As far as I know their legislative work was under Matt Connelly, and I assume that was coordinated with the Legal Counsel. We had nothing to do with them.
HESS: All right. Dr. Steelman took part in many labor matters. Did you think that there was a feeling on the part of perhaps the Labor Department that the White House was setting up an office within the White House that should not have been done? Perhaps they should have been working more through the Department of Labor?
STOWE: Well there is no question that the Truman administration setup for dealing with independent agencies in the labor field and with national labor- management disputes was quite different from those that we have had since then. As the former Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Dr. Steelman had a reputation as one of the top mediators and labor experts in the United States. My background was in the field of labor-management relations where I had handled many of those agencies in the Bureau of the Budget. So naturally, with two of us over there, I suppose that labor disputes tended to gravitate to Dr. Steelman's office. Secondly, under the Truman administration, at least in the labor field, the independent agencies such as the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the National Mediation Board, and the National Labor Relations Board, which on the charts report directly to the President of the United States, by and large reported to Dr. Steelman and did not report through the Secretary of Labor, a Cabinet officer. I think as far as the independent labor agencies were concerned, they probably preferred this relationship because it gave them direct access to the White House and to the President in times of difficulty. I know that Cy [Cyrus] Ching, who was Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, on many occasions expressed the feeling that this was a good arrangement because when necessary he could get right in to see the President of the United States and didn't have to go through a Cabinet department. Since the Truman administration, this has been handled entirely through the succeeding Secretaries of Labor, both Democratic and Republican. It is still an academic argument as to which serves the best purpose. I think insofar as the independent agencies are concerned they would prefer, of course, to deal directly with the seat of power, namely the White House, rather than go through a Secretary of Labor regardless of who that Secretary might be. I think the other side of the coin is that there was a feeling during the Truman administration, which has not been true since then, that too many labor disputes of national importance were brought too close-in to the White House. Actually, on occasion, Dr. Steelman and/or I became involved in what might be called super-mediation or last-ditch mediation on some major strikes, not only in the railroad industry or steel industry, but in others, particularly atomic energy. Secondly, there was a panel set up during the Truman administration to deal with atomic energy disputes, and obviously anything that was set up in the White House in the field of labor relations would come under the general supervision of Dr. Steelman. There was another facet to Dr. Steelman's office which I don't think too many people in the White House realized the importance of. As I am sure you are aware, sometimes disputes arise between Cabinet members and or agencies. Oftentimes, these are jurisdictional over who's going to run which program--things of that nature. Now in this area I think the President relied almost completely on Dr. Steelman's prior experience as a top mediator to bring in the Cabinet members involved, and to work out some sort of mediation agreement, as to their problems vis-a-vis each other and their institutional squabbles over who's going to do what. In this area Dr. Steelman played a very important role and one which, I am sure, even some of my fellow staff members in the White House were not aware.
HESS: Did you ever hear any comment by the two gentlemen who served as Secretaries of Labor for Mr. Truman? Mr. [Lewis B] Schwellenbach was there until the summer of 1948; that was the time of his death. Then there was a period of a couple of months when there was no Secretary of Labor, and then Maurice Tobin took over, in August of 1948. Did you ever hear those two men comment on the Steelman setup in the White House?
STOWE: I never heard any comments from Schwellenbach, because by the time I arrived in the White House he was ill, and I don't believe he functioned completely as the Secretary of Labor during the latter part of his term before his death. I had a lot of contacts with Morrie Tobin. I never heard any complaint or any suggestion that we were interfering in his business. Although I could well understand that Secretaries of Labor, particularly in this more modern viewpoint, do handle all these independent agencies, that wasn't the way it was set up under the Truman administration, and frankly, no, I never heard any complaints from Morrie Tobin. There may have been some complaints from lesser lights within his department who were interested in getting their relationships with independent agencies perhaps on a stronger basis, but I never heard anything from Maurice Tobin.
HESS: How successful was Dr. Steelman in dealing with labor matters?
STOWE: Well, I think his record probably speaks for itself. He was considered then, and still is looked upon, as one of the best mediators that we've ever had. He, Cy Ching, and George Taylor are spoken of in the same general category of ability as top mediators.
HESS: How did he go about the job? Did he have anything in particular, any particular methods of operation, that helped him be successful in that?
STOWE: Well, first of all, he had the personality and the patience and the know-how that is just absolutely essential to any mediator. If I could write a book, now that I'm here at the National Mediation Board, on how to do this I'd make a fortune. It's quite simple to write a book on how to become an arbitrator, which I was for the past 17 years before I came over here. But no one has written a book on how to mediate; it's a matter of personality; it's a matter of sense of timing; it's a matter of knowledge; and most of all it's winning the confidence and trust of the parties. I can't say just what made him great except that he was.
HESS: Do you personally find it more difficult to be a mediator than to be an arbitrator?
STOWE: Yes. As an arbitrator, you have simply a judgement to make against any given body of law which normally is the contract between the parties; that is, to interpret and apply. As a mediator, you are trying to bring people together often when they don't want to come together, don't want to make an agreement; it becomes very difficult and requires a great deal of innovation and ingenuity to do it. I would say that it also represents a person who does not impose his judgement on what the parties should do, as an arbitrator does, but it required him in a very adroit way, to sell the idea of what they should do. I sometimes wonder, looking back on mediators I have known, including Dr. Steelman and members of this board--my predecessors--whether mediators can ever become good administrators. The simple reason is that they are so conditioned not to make decisions and not to administer things. I would say this was one of the things, when I was Dr. Steelman's deputy, that I found myself insisting on time and time again, and that was that the time would come when he had to make decisions. Instead, he was more prone to let the parties work things out. That's fine if you can get them worked out, but in the White House sooner or later you may have to make a decision.
HESS: In regard to Dr. Steelman's position as The Assistant to the President, as opposed to the position of the special counsel, let's discuss that just for a moment. Were there periods when there was a certain rivalry going on, or a friction that may have been present between Steelman and Mr. Clifford?
STOWE: Well, let me put it in a framework. Whenever you are responsible for the general government operation, obviously there are areas where the President is also going to be consulting with his legal counsel as counsel, as opposed to law officer. Also, the charter of the Director of the Bureau of the Budget was that of making him, in effect, overall manager of the government. So there was always potential conflict between the office that Dr. Steelman held, and that of the legal counsel within the White House, and also with the Director of the Bureau of the Budget who technically at that time was the overall manager of the government establishment. I would say that at a time in '47 there was perhaps some minor conflict. It never got beyond the level of "minor" for the simple reason that Mr. Truman was not the type of person that would tolerate that kind of business. And secondly, the staff of both the legal counsel and the people who worked with him, such as Charlie Murphy, myself, and Steelman felt that on many of those things we could avoid the appearance of conflict by working them out. So, I would say that conflict was at a minimum. Frankly, one of the reasons Mr. Webb was disposed to allow me to go over, for a while--it was originally to have been a one year assignment--as a deputy to Steelman, who was a good friend of his, was to make sure no conflict developed between them. As former Chief Examiner of the Bureau of the Budget, I understood both the functions of the Bureau and of Steelman's office and no conflict ever developed. You will find that most of the Directors of the Budget, namely Jim Webb, Fred Lawton, Frank Pace, and some of those who followed during our administration, did not find themselves in conflict with John Steelman because I think the coordination between his office and their office was fairly well worked out.
HESS: How would you characterize the relationship between Dr. Steelman and Charles Murphy?
STOWE: Well they had worked together for a number of years before Murphy became legal counsel; they got along very well and there was little or no conflict. Dr. Steelman clearly recognized the areas of Mr. Murphy's assignment as well as his inordinate ability to work with the President and vice-versa. Mr. Murphy's not the type of person who felt that anything was being added or subtracted from his function, busy as it was.
HESS: For just a few moments, let's discuss a few of the men that were on Dr. Steelman's staff; if you can tell me just a little bit about what their functions were, or if you worked with them on a particular job. Russell P. Andrews was special assistant to Dr. Steelman from 1950 until after the election in 1952. This was a little bit after your time, is that right?
STOWE: Yes, after my time . . .
HESS: After your time with Steelman.
STOWE: . . . but Russ Andrews had worked for me in the Bureau of the Budget. Harold Enarson, who succeeded me in Steelman's office, was appointed to the Stabilization Board and they needed someone to serve as an office manager in Dr. Steelman's office. Russ Andrews was suggested by either Enarson or myself, I don't know which, and was put over there primarily as a general office manager assistant to Dr. Steelman.
HESS: Well, Harold Enarson was special assistant in Dr. Steelman's office, from September '50 to August 4th, '52.
STOWE: Yes.
HESS: Late in the administration also. How did he come into the White House?
STOWE: The same way. Harold worked for me in the Bureau of the Budget. I thought he came over a little before that, because I left Dr. Steelman actually after the election of '48. I was shifted over, working with him with the National Security Resources Board (NSRB). And it was during that time I was made Administrative Assistant to the President, although for a few months I continued to remain at the NSRB. Dr. Steelman was the titular head and I was actually spending most of my time there. I remember, now, that Bob Turner also served as a deputy to John Steelman in the White House. The President appointed Turner to the Council of Economic Advisers, and it was at that point when Dr. Steelman didn't have any assistant in his White House staff office. Harold Enarson went over as a replacement in the areas that Bob Turner and I had covered.
HESS: And William Bray was Special Assistant to Dr. Steelman from April '47 to April '49.
STOWE: Yes. Bill Bray had been with the President in the '48 campaign and had, I think, been with John Steelman at some point prior to that. When he returned after the campaign, or thereabouts, I believe, he did go in as a Special Assistant to Dr. Steelman. Precisely what he did there I am not too well aware.
HESS: James V. Fitzgerald, from '47 to '51.
STOWE: Jim Fitzgerald was the public relations person. I believe he had been public relations director for Francis Perkins, in the Department of Labor. He was there when I arrived, and I think he had been the Director of Information for the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion; he remained on with Dr. Steelman for a period of time. He left sometime in 1949.
HESS: John Gibson, as advertising liaison and public relations from '46 to '50.
STOWE: This was one of the functions set up originally in OWMR. It dealt with the Advertising Council. I don't know the precise functions it had over in OWMR. The Advertising Council was made up of advertising people. You may recall that there was a lot of public service advertising going on, and I think Gibson's main function was to allocate public interest advertising time among the various Government programs, because everybody was trying to get as much free advertising as they could. The Advertising Council had insisted, both prior to the time I became aware of it and during the time I was aware of it, that there be someone, and they preferred that that someone be in the White House. They wanted someone who would have the authority to allocate and to tell the Government agencies whether they could have free advertising. The advertising people did not want to make these decisions as between programs and agencies but wanted the Government to do so.
Third Oral History Interview with David H. Stowe, July 24, 1980, Washington, D.C., by James R. Fuchs, Harry S. Truman Library.
FUCHS: Mr. Stowe, I have some questions about the 1960 campaign that I believe have not been covered specifically in other interviews. One thing that has come to my mind, I believe there was a little problem of Mr. Truman ad-libbing. Do you recall anything about that?
STOWE: Yes, I do. We were receiving speeches mostly from Dave Lloyd and Charlie Murphy, in Washington. President Truman used to go over the text before he spoke. On some occasions he apparently would remember a very good line that was in the speech and occasionally he would take it out of context from memory. When he did that, the line had no context for the audience to appreciate, and then when he came to it in the written speech and repeated it, it was flat. This occurred most pronouncedly in a trip to the State of Washington, and subsequently down to Reno, Nevada, where he did it two or three times. From Reno we were to go to Oakland, where we had a speech that Dave Lloyd had written that was absolutely fantastic. It was a take-off on Disneyland, with Nixon marching up to do this and doing all the things that are rides in Disneyland; it was brought into a political context, a beautiful thing. One doesn't usually want to say to a former President, "You're screwing up your speeches by doing this," but I finally decided to do just that because this one was so important, and knowing that he had been ad-libbing in the wrong place. On the plane going to Oakland I talked to him. I said, "Look, Boss, this speech is beautifully done as a satire; Dave's done such a wonderful job that when you get to the red line, which I have marked on your reading copy, please do not ad-lib anything; just give it as it is." I explained to him what he had been doing. At the meeting in Oakland the crowd was fantastic. The entire ballroom was sold out. They had closed circuit television in various rooms, with 20, 30, 40 people in each of these rooms--watching it way away from where he was speaking. I didn't know how he would receive my criticism. I didn't know what he was going to do, but this was so important. Bill Bray and I were greatly concerned, whether he would continue to reach for these funny things and have them out of context. When he started his speech, he was ad-libbing as usual, until he got to the red line, and at that point his head went down and he started reading verbatim. Within the first two or three quips that came out I am sure he realized that he had a winner, and from then on he didn't deviate one word from the text. In addition to that, he felt comfortable with it and began acting and gesturing with his arms. We've often heard the statement of people rolling in the aisles laughing. Believe you me, this speech was so effective that I actually saw a couple of people rolling in the aisles with laughter. It was the most effective, satirical speech that I think I have ever heard in my life. Lloyd did an absolutely magnificent job and so did the "Boss."
FUCHS: This was the "Nixonland" speech?
STOWE: Yes. A few weeks later we were in the Carlisle Hotel in New York; we had one of the penthouses, and Kennedy was there and had the other one. The then-Senator Kennedy came in and remarked that he had heard about his Oakland speech and what a fantastic speech it was. I don't recall that President Truman returned to this business of taking ideas out of context after that, but it had become a very serious problem prior to that time. It was in his mind; he had read it just a few minutes before he went on and he'd remember those good lines and then ad lib them in the wrong place.
FUCHS: It's difficult to tell a former President to don't do something.
STOWE: I felt very uncomfortable, because after all he had made more speeches than I would ever make in three lifetimes and he was an expert at "ad libbing."
FUCHS: Who were the principal writers of speeches in this campaign, to your knowledge?
STOWE: Charlie Murphy and Dave Lloyd.
FUCHS: What about David Noyes?
STOWE: He was not a principal writer in this campaign.
FUCHS: I see. As far as protection of the President is concerned, there was no Secret Service?
STOWE: No.
FUCHS: He didn't have them at that time. All right, you had some problem with the crowds. Were these crowds ever hostile or just jostling, and trying to get close to him and see him, or what?
STOWE: Since we were operating without any Secret Service protection, the main problem was the simple matter of trying to move him around without people crowding in wanting to shake his hand and all those things. No, there was little hostility, except for one instance, which I'll come to. What we learned was that in small towns the local police were of little help. Selectmen, or whatever the local government politicos were called, would just brush them aside and come on in. I just couldn't cope with that many people. The reporters would be coming in, along with everything else, and I finally devised the idea of talking to the Governors in advance. I would call the Governor of each of the states we were going into and ask them to assign one or more state patrolmen. I found that the state patrolmen, who didn't necessarily come from the localities where we were stopping, were more effective in handling the visitors and maintaining the privacy of the President. This took quite a bit of doing, but I will say this, that most of the Governors were extremely cooperative, whether Republicans or Democrats, and the patrolmen were excellent. This problem didn't hold true for major cities like New York or Chicago where the local police force could handle it because they were used to handling crowds and they had handled Mr. Truman when he was President. But in the smaller towns local police were just helpless. I don't blame them; they got shoved aside. But the patrolmen wouldn't be shoved. Another thing that came up was that because of handling the visitors, the press, baggage, etc., we decided that we had to have at least one more person traveling with us. Originally it was just the President and myself. We had to have one more person. This is when Bill Bray was added. He was with the [Democratic National] Committee. They assigned him over to handle part of that load so that I could concentrate on working with the President while Bill was looking after the baggage and the press. He had certain things that he took care of at every stop. The only troublesome thing was the time I had to spend on the telephone the night before, for example, if we were leaving one state and going into another, making arrangements with Governors or with the people the Governor had told me to contact. I don't call it security, because we didn't have many security problems; it was really keeping people back so they weren't pressing in on him all the time, or coming in when we didn't want them in. Now, we did have one situation that I would call really troublesome. We were going by train from Pittsburgh to New York after our last speech of that campaign, which was in Pittsburgh. Some group, and I don't know who or what they were, had about three cars hooked onto the train and they obviously were very anti-Truman. They became very obnoxious as we were going to the train, and they were obnoxious as we left the train. It was their language, their attitude, the vociferousness, and yet to this day I don't know what group it was. They had two or three cars and it just happened they were attached to the train we were on. It was unfortunate, but there it was pretty nasty for awhile.
FUCHS: How was that handled?
STOWE: We just got on the train and stayed there. When we left we took the elevators so that we didn't get involved.
FUCHS: Did Mr. Truman remark about this?
STOWE: Well, I don't recall whether he remarked about it. I felt it; they were brutal. You know, we were on a freight elevator which they had arranged to take us up, and these guys--there were twenty of them on--and they were saying very uncomplimentary things.
FUCHS: How did it come about that you were assigned specifically? Did he request someone be assigned, and then the Democratic Committee . . .
STOWE: Prior to the campaign, whenever he made speeches to organized labor or something like that, I always went with him. In the early days we did it at our own expense. On political trips, Charlie Murphy usually went out. In this campaign Murphy was traveling with Johnson. As you may recall, I officed in Charlie Murphy's law firm's office and Charlie asked me if I would make a trip with President Truman. The original idea was that he was going to make three speeches. I asked what was involved, and Charlie said, "Fly out to Independence, pick him up, fly with him to where he's going to speak and fly back; then you come home." I figured that would be fine and I would love to do it. Well, the three speeches turned into about 40 to 60 major speeches. I don't know how many were off-the-cuffs. Actually, if you look at the schedule you will see from the first speech he made in Iowa, I believe, to the last speech he made, we were out of Kansas City from Monday to Friday almost every week. Instead of being three speeches, it turned into about six weeks of steady work, and I'm not sure I would have taken six weeks of steady work. But the political aspect of it was new to me.
FUCHS: Got into more than you planned on. How do you think that Mr. Truman handled the religious question?
STOWE: I think perhaps that was his greatest contribution to the Kennedy campaign. He had a speech, which I don't recall where it was first delivered, but it was used three times as I recall in the course of our travels. It really went to the heart of the religious issue that was being presented. I suspect that this is probably one of the reasons why we spent so much time in the South, in the Bible belt, as opposed to New York, or other parts of the country. If you look at our schedule you'll see a predominance of speeches in the South, in the area all the way from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, down to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas where I suppose there was some feeling that the religious question would be a major issue. I refer you to the speech rather than try to tell you what was in it, but he took the opportunity in each and every speech, usually, to indicate the fact that this question should have little or no bearing on how to vote. He also referred to himself as a Baptist, as a 33rd degree Mason, past Grand Master of Missouri, and apparently the religious matter was very much on his mind.
FUCHS: He did this off-the-cuff?
STOWE: Yes.
FUCHS: Nixon, as you know, was accused of calling Mr. Truman a traitor, and of course, later on he said well he hadn't done that, and it more or less came down that he had called him a traitor to the democratic principles, and so forth. Did you ever talk to Mr. Truman about that, or how did he, if you remember, really feel about the charge?
STOWE: As I remember, somewhere up in Wisconsin, when General Marshall was attacked, and certain people did not rise to his defense, this upset Mr. Truman because as far as he was concerned, General Marshall was one of the world's number one citizens. I'm not really familiar with this alleged traitor sentence.
FUCHS: I see.
STOWE: I do know that he was skeptical of Mr. Nixon's background, skeptical of a lot of things, which would not have made them political bedfellows even if they had been in the same party. I wasn't there when President Nixon, for example, brought the White House piano out to Independence or what his reaction was. I don't know.
FUCHS: Well, they kept us kind of out of the way. Of course, Mr. Truman was gracious to an extent, because you know he hadn't been coming to the Library for quite some time. He came back for that, and as he sat and looked at the piano, I guess Mr. Nixon sat down. But then Truman didn't escort him through the Library. He was older then, and had been ill. In the earlier days, you know, he escorted dignitaries through, and he might have for Nixon, if he felt differently, but I'm not sure what he would have done. I believe it was in the earlier campaign, in 1952 when Eisenhower was running that Truman was very deprecatory of Eisenhower for not coming to General Marshall's defense.
STOWE: You are absolutely right. In regard to Eisenhower, the thing that seemed to upset Mr. Truman more was the fact that at the time he went down to Kansas City to call on President Eisenhower after the election, he was told by some stupid staff member that the President was too busy to see him. That bugged him more than not being invited to the White House or anything else, as he told me a number of times. That incident upset him. I think I covered in one other interview the business of their rapproachment at the Blair House at the Kennedy funeral. I thought that was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened.
FUCHS: Truman seemed to have a great deal of respect for Bill Knowland, and of course, for Warren, Governor [Earl] Warren. Did he discuss Bill Knowland with you at any time?
STOWE: No, he didn't, but I am familiar with the Warren relationship. It started when we were campaigning. Governor Warren felt very sincerely that whenever a President of the United States came into the State of California, he should meet him, and, as the Governor, extend his courtesies. In the train trip on the '52 campaign, the Stevenson campaign, I recall he met us at our first stop in California, which is quite a ways from the capital of California. He came aboard the train and volunteered to introduce the President, which the President declined because he didn't want to embarrass Governor Warren in any way. Then, in furtherance of this non-embarrassment idea, I suggested to the Governor that he move two cars forward and then we escorted him over to his car. We knew where it was parked, but unfortunately the press having seen him come on the car, but not seeing him go off, the rumor spread that he had spent the night on the train. This may have created some problems for the Governor. I was privileged to have dinner with Governor Warren and President Truman on two or three occasions. I always remember that on almost each occasion, President Truman used to say to him at one time or another, "You know, you're more of a Democrat than most Democrats." There was no question that there was a tremendous mutual admiration and respect between them. I recall the first Truman reception--a fund raiser for the Library in Washington--that was held at the Shoreham Hotel. I had been through the line, and I was coming back out. Mrs. Stowe and I were leaving to go home when I saw then-Justice Warren arrive, and get into the long receiving line, about two or three hundred deep. I went over and said, "Mr. Justice, will you come with me?" I moved him up to about third in position, caught the President's eye, and moved him right on in. Later the President expressed his thanks to me for moving him up, but I believe Warren would have stood in that line until he got there in due course. He was that kind of person. Yes, there was a very warm relationship there.
FUCHS: Civil rights seemed to be downplayed somewhat in Mr. Truman's speeches. Was there any particular reason for that or was it a conscious effort not to get into that too much? Of course, your speeches were in the South; a great many of them were.
STOWE: No, I can't add to that. There wasn't any question that as President he had a very strong feeling on civil rights. The only thing that I can remember is that in two of the states we campaigned in he sort of chided the audience before he started, saying he didn't know what the hell they invited him down here for on this occasion, because in 1948 they wouldn't even let him on the ballot. And that got a good laugh. To answer your question, I wasn't really aware that it was downplayed if it was.
FUCHS: From your knowledge, was his first usage of, "I don't give them hell, I just tell them the truth and they think it's hell," in that campaign?
STOWE: No.
FUCHS: He used that in an earlier campaign?
STOWE: I understand that was in '48.
FUCHS: Well, in '48 was when they started to yell, "Give 'em hell," and he just came back with that rejoinder. I can check that out.
STOWE: Well, as I recall it, but I wasn't there, it was somewhere out in Seattle or Tacoma, that some guy from the balcony called, hollered that, and that's when that came up. Of course, he used variations of it from then on, not only in that campaign. Of course, then it became a trade mark, "Give 'em hell," and we heard it a lot.
FUCHS: What did he think of the debates, the Kennedy-Nixon debates? Did he talk that over with you, do you recall?
STOWE: Well, in the second one I think it was, we were in Raleigh, North Carolina, a big dinner; they put a big screen on and we all watched it together. That was the one where the question came up about his profanity, and Kennedy handled it beautifully about Mrs. Truman. I caught his eyes real quick, and he was laughing so I figured we got over that one. And then, of course, the next one, which I think was the third or fourth, I'm not sure, anyway the one on international affairs was a disaster, as far as we were concerned. As I've already mentioned to you, when Kennedy went through everything dealing with international policy, back to Wilson or Roosevelt and never once mentioned Truman and all the things like the Marshall plan, and things you would expect, he was very disappointed.
FUCHS: Do you think this was an oversight, or why did Kennedy view that it would be to his detriment to bring up that matter?
STOWE: I have no idea why. It was a shock to everyone. I don't know whether we covered this off-the-record earlier, but that same night after I talked to Matt McCloskey in Philadelphia, apparently Matt talked to Kennedy, and after Kennedy called Truman, down in Louisiana or somewhere, he was a different man. What the explanation was, what their conversation was, I don't know, but it seemed to take the heat out of the problem. Still, it was a bad mistake on Kennedy's part.
FUCHS: Well, I think you could expand on this when we go over this at a later date, and go into more definite detail about that situation. You did mention it in your earlier interview. Did he ever mention Joe Kennedy?
STOWE: Well, I wasn't there, but there is the classic quote; in which Truman said he "was not afraid of the Pope, he was afraid of Pop."
FUCHS: I have a document here that kind of interested me; it involves Kay Folger of the Speaker's Bureau. You wrote her and you mentioned a map.
STOWE: Yes.
FUCHS: You hoped a map would be made of that campaign. Did you ever have that?
STOWE: No.
FUCHS: It never came about?
STOWE: I never saw it.
FUCHS: I often wondered about that.
STOWE: You see, the committee in his own campaign had made a map showing every place he went and where he made speeches.
FUCHS: In '48?
STOWE: Yes. And I had hoped that something like this could have been done for the Kennedy campaign. But so far as I know it never was done. I think it would be fascinating, because of all these little towns we stopped in. For example, in North Carolina, we stopped at every little hamlet in eastern Carolina, and no President or Vice President had ever been there before. The crowds were fantastic.
FUCHS: Well, I'm sure when scholars go to these papers and they see that, they are going to ask us if it ever got done and . . .
STOWE: I don't think it has; if it has I've never seen it. Somebody could still do it.
FUCHS: Joe Feeney, in his interview, said that he didn't think Kennedy would have won if it hadn't been for Paul Butler, who more or less made a big indictment of the Republican Party. Did you feel that that was important?
STOWE: My own feeling is that Kennedy might not have won without Truman.
FUCHS: You think that Truman really ran a very effective campaign?
STOWE: I think that was, and I think President Kennedy recognized that.
Fourth Oral History Interview with David H. Stowe, June 24, 1989, in Washington, D.C., by Niel M. Johnson, Harry S. Truman Library.
JOHNSON: We're going to discuss some anecdotes and some items that may not be on the other interviews that have been recorded in the past. We've been talking, Mr. Stowe, about some security things at the White House, and I thought perhaps I could start by asking you again about security provisions for President Roosevelt during World War II. You mentioned a ramp and a small shelter, I think, under what was it, the west wing?
STOWE: The east wing.
JOHNSON: I don't believe that's on tape anywhere. So, do you want to talk a little more about that again, about Roosevelt and provisions for him?
STOWE: Well, as I understand it, during World War II, there were no arrangements for bomb shelters in the White House itself, but that a tunnel had been constructed from the east wing of the White House over into the Treasury Department where there was a deep vault. Since it was a tunnel and on an incline, no stairs as I understood it, they could wheel the President, in his wheelchair into that in the event of necessity. I never saw it; I never went in it, but I understand it was still there at the time we renovated the White House.
JOHNSON: And a small shelter under that east wing?
STOWE: Under the east wing, there subsequently was built a relatively small shelter. It was about the equivalent of two rooms. It would have been adequate for a minor type of attack, but would have been useless in the point of view of a ground zero atomic attack.
JOHNSON: That was there until the renovation in 1948?
STOWE: Until the renovation.
JOHNSON: What about the Map Room? It's still not clear to me whether the Map Room was in one of these secure areas, or whether there was any special protection around the Map Room. Do you remember the Map Room at all?
STOWE: No, I don't. George Elsey and Clark Clifford were familiar with that.
JOHNSON: You mentioned that you were the only one at the White House who was designated by President Truman to deal with atomic energy information. Is that right?
STOWE: That's right.
JOHNSON: Sort of like a Q clearance.
STOWE: So I was informed by the Atomic Energy Commission some time later when they wanted me to do something for them, under the impression I had a Q clearance. Then they found out I hadn't, but that I had this special clearance. They did, later, give me a Q clearance, but that was after our administration.
JOHNSON: I think you mentioned that the Atomic Energy Commission security people did put a recording device on your telephone.
STOWE: Right.
JOHNSON: Is that the only one in the White House that you knew about, that tape recording?
STOWE: It was the only one I knew of.
JOHNSON: It's the only recording device that you know of that was in the White House when Truman was there?
STOWE: And after that one caught on fire, I didn't use it either.
JOHNSON: Do you want to just say a little more about that, why and how that was installed in your office?
STOWE: Well, they put it in one of these cabinet-like things that they often have, with silver carafes standing on them in Government offices. Apparently, they forgot to bore any holes in the back for air circulation, and after I turned it on a couple times, and was running it, it got a little hot in there and caught on fire. Later they came over and bored some holes in the back of that stand, but I didn't use it much after that.
JOHNSON: Well, you were only supposed to use it when you were conversing with someone, and something sensitive came up on the phone?
STOWE: Right. And partly being for my own protection.
JOHNSON: You know, we've been asked if we have any knowledge of the wiretaps that the FBI did apparently on Tommy Corcoran. Do you have any knowledge of that?
STOWE: No. I don't know if anybody in the White House outside of my secretaries know about this machine either, because it was handled by the AEC. I think I told you they came and checked all around once or twice a week, checking for any kind of bugs that might be anywhere around there.
JOHNSON: The AEC security people?
STOWE: Yes. This originally started when I was assigned the job of working with the Atomic Energy Commission on a report. I can't think of the name of that commission now, but Bill Davis was the chairman of it. It was a Presidential commission on atomic energy, and because of the sensitivity of some things this commission was working on, and because of my assignment by the President to work with them, the AEC decided I had to be cleared. And from then on everything that came to the White House on atomic energy they apparently dealt with me.
JOHNSON: Okay, so you were the contact at the White House on atomic energy.
STOWE: So far as I know, there was no one else. In those days it was so secure, you didn't know who might be dealing with it.
JOHNSON: I don't think there's been anything in particular in these other interviews that deal with renovation of the White House. Did you have anything that you wanted to add about the renovation that we might put on record?
STOWE: One or two anecdotes. The President, after he had built the Court House out in Kansas City I guess fancied himself as quite a construction expert. He very wisely had set up a commission, because, as he said, if people didn't like what was being done, they'd blame him. This way, Congress appointed a commission and if the people didn't like it, they'd blame the commission. But he used to go over there almost every day after work and look around and check the job out, until General [Major General Glen E.] Edgerton called me once or twice and said, "For goodness sake, can't you keep him away; he thinks he's rebuilding the court house out there." There's another anecdote. I went over on many of these trips with him because one of the things I wanted to see each time was how they were doing with the shelter. I remember we were up in what later would be his bedroom, and as I recall it, the bathroom was sort of a long room with washbasins and a commode that ran like a little ell. I think I'm correct in that. Anyway, I heard him one day in there just plain explode, "Who the hell thought this up?" I go in there and in the little ell where the commode was, they had placed a safe in the wall, so the only way you could get at the combination would be to sit on the commode and turn the combination. Now, I don't know whether he had that taken out or not, but he sure thought that was the dumbest thing he ever saw in his life. It may still be there for all I know.
JOHNSON: Anything else about renovation before we leave that subject?
STOWE: I think he was really very, very much concerned that it be put back exactly as it was. Edgerton, I think, did a magnificent job of marking everything and putting it back. My understanding is that with the exception of one or two minor pieces, and the major change in the grand stairway, which was a great advantage, the house, when it was put back in, was almost exactly as it was before.
JOHNSON: You mentioned that when Mr. Truman was at the Blair House, there was a place where he would read the morning paper before he went out on his stroll. Do you want to describe the situation there and then that attempted assassination which got you into the security picture again?
STOWE: There was a little room on the front of the Blair House, or Blair-Lee, which is on the corner right next to the Court of Claims. There was a desk and a chair, a few things in a small room; he would go in there and read his morning paper before he went on walks with the Secret Service. The Secret Service had become concerned that the Blair House was susceptible [to assault], since there were only about ten feet and nothing but a little picket fence between the sidewalk and the house. They were concerned that somebody might throw things into the window, a Molotov cocktail or something of that nature. They had been experimenting with how they could protect the first floor particularly, and part of the second floor, because of the angles they had discovered from atop Old State and from an office building back on the back side, which might permit a sharpshooting type of thing. They'd been working on this, and they finally called me up one day, and I guess that was because I had found some money for them one other time because of my former budget connections, or maybe because we had been working together; I don't recall at that time exactly what our relationships were in this area. They said that they had found a screen--they couldn't put bullet-proof glass in because it was too heavy for the house--but they had found a screen that they could put on those front windows that would withstand whatever poundage that they were concerned about somebody throwing things in. So I asked them the name of the company and they said it was called, as I remember, the Psychiatric Screen Company. At that point I said, "No way, we're not going to put up psychiatric screens on the Blair House because the newspaper people would get hold of it and they'll say, 'Hey, they've got the President behind psychiatric screens.' Forget it, and try to find something else that will serve your purpose." About two weeks later I was in Jack Hunt's restaurant, which is just a block up on Pennsylvania Avenue, when a waiter came back and said, "Mr. Stowe, there's been a shooting down the street." I said, "Let them shoot." He said, "But Mr. Stowe, it's at the Blair House." With that, I got out of that restaurant in a hurry; Jack swears I turned over two tables going out. I got on down the street and instead of stopping at the Blair House I rushed right up to my office in Old State; I got the president of the company that manufactured the Psychiatric screens and told him I guess he'd heard it on the radio by then, but told him about our problem. He said he'd have a man down the next morning to measure the windows and that he would then stop the factory and make a run, a special run of screens, for the Blair House. Then I could relax, because I had visions of something happening and that order being pigeon-holed on my desk.
JOHNSON: So those were put up then rather promptly?
STOWE: Yes.
JOHNSON: Those special screens that fit on the outside of the windows?
STOWE: Yes.
JOHNSON: I think perhaps it's not on the record about the National Security Resources Board, and your job of realigning personnel, rotating them, and I guess firing people. Would you want to say a little more about that particular job that you had?
STOWE: Well, the National Security Resources Board was transferred from the Department of Defense to the Executive Office of the President and became in effect like the Budget Bureau and the Council of Economic Advisers, a Presidential staff operation. [Arthur M.] Hill, who was president of the Greyhound Bus Company, had been chairman of the committee, but he resigned; so the President had to appoint someone to run the National Security Resources Board. At that time he had appointed, or indicated his intention to appoint, former Senator Mon Wallgren of the State of Washington. While that was going on, John Steelman was named as the titular head, and I was still his deputy at that time and had not been made Administrative Assistant to the President. I went over with him and actually spent most of my time there. One of the things we found was that much of the staff, some two or three hundred people, with the exception of stenographers, had been people that had been accustomed to dealing one way or the other with the Department of Defense. They were Defense Department-oriented type of people.
JOHNSON: War Department I suppose at that time.
STOWE: The War Department, yes. They were from business, some of them dollar-a-years, some of them on salaries, but they were all caught up in the military type of planning. And the National Security Resources Board was supposed to be separate and apart from that. It was a long-range national planning board; it was not for the purpose of doing it just for the military. It was decided that that type of person would just not fit into the mission, the true mission of the National Security Resources Board. So one of the things that Dr. Steelman and I had to do was to, by one device or another, gradually replace all of those people with people with a broader viewpoint of the security resources problem. Some of them went easily; some of them we sort of had to ask to depart. But, unfortunately, in that process most of which I had to do, not Dr. Steelman, I became known as Truman's "hatchet man." If you'll look in Francis Heller's book, he's got me tagged as "hatchet man."
JOHNSON: Well, every President has to have a hatchet man, I suppose.
STOWE: Well, that was the only area that I did any hatcheting; that was the National Security Resources Board.
JOHNSON: I might mention a couple of other things. In 1950, and this would be right after the Korean war had started, the idea of having a science advisor to the President apparently became very important. Weren't you assigned to contact Golden, William T. Golden?
STOWE: No.
JOHNSON: I'm going to talk to him this afternoon. He interviewed a lot of the scientists in order to decide whether there should be a position of Science Advisor to the President, or maybe have a small committee that would offer science advice to the President. But you don't recall your involvement.
STOWE: Vaguely, vaguely, but I don't really recall that.
JOHNSON: One of the persons we have interviewed says that in the steel strike of 1952, that he's sure that you gave Truman advice about the steel situation and that you told the President that this was a critical problem. You said that if we didn't keep steel production going it would have a definitely adverse affect on the war in Korea, that is, on equipping American military forces in Korea. Do you recall your involvement in that '52 steel strike?
STOWE: Oh, I was involved up to here in the '52 steel strike.
JOHNSON: But were you the one that was advising the President that if we don't keep steel production going, this will create a critical problem?
STOWE: No. That was the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense had a very strong position on that. Now, I may have relayed it to the President, but I had no knowledge whatsoever as to the pipeline or what was involved. The Department of Defense took a very, very strong position, that we could not stand even one day of strike, and it was that position that was influential in the President's first course of action. It subsequently turned out that we could stand a considerable longer period than one day and not interrupt the pipeline, but I didn't know that at that time.
JOHNSON: You're just relaying information from the Defense Department to the President?
STOWE: If I was the one that relayed it. I know that was their position and I was involved. Dr. Steelman and I were both involved, but we were involved as mediators, as people trying to resolve the dispute, not into whether we should do this. Subsequently, after all of our efforts had failed, I suggested in a staff meeting one day that the President call in Phil Murray and [Benjamin] Fairless and put the proposition right to them, face to face. He turned to Steelman and asked Steelman what he thought of that, and Steelman said that well, he had had them both in but maybe it would be worth another try. Now, I made that suggestion because at that point, the President was seriously considering using the Selective Service Act, and the Department of Justice had turned down the Selective Service Act as a possible vehicle for us in the very beginning, on the grounds that a certain part of the Act had been changed just a little while before, when the Act was renewed, which put in doubt, if it didn't absolutely eliminate, the President's right to do what he was about to do.
JOHNSON: To seize the mills.
STOWE: Yes.
JOHNSON: So he's thinking about using the Selective Service Act to justify seizure of the mills.
STOWE: Yes, rather than the Taft-Hartley. So that's why I, sort of out of sheer desperation, threw it out. Subsequently, that following Saturday, he had Fairless and Murray in his office and I was with them. I don't know why, but Steelman was not there; I was the only other person in the room. At the time, I had prepared for the President, at his request, a document which was sort of a flag-waving little speech, with a second page which said, in effect, if you two guys don't reach an agreement on this, here's what I'm going to do. And then he was going to go down the road that Murphy had suggested. When he got through the flag-waving, on which he did a marvelous job of really getting those guys all shook up, I expected him to turn to them and tell them, "And now if you don't, here's what I'm going to do." He never did; he never gave them the alternative, never used that page, the second page. So he sent them into the Cabinet room. He said, "You go into the Cabinet Room and you work this out and Dave will be available for anything you want." Well, that day I had gotten a little piece of something in my eye and the doctor downstairs couldn't seem to find it, so he decided that I should go over and see an eye specialist. I put them into the Cabinet Room, and I got into a car and went right over to the specialist. He found, believe it or not, a little piece of steel, which had embedded in my eye. He flicked it out with a knife.
JOHNSON: Steel struck your eye, yes.
STOWE: And I went back over to the White House with a great big patch over my eye. When I got back there, Mr. Simmons, Phil Simmons, the usher in the west wing said, "Where have you been? Mr. Murray and Mr. Fairless are looking for you." So I rushed into the Cabinet Room and they said, "Dave, we'd like to see the President." I said, "Well, now you heard what the President said; he doesn't want to see you until you've got an agreement." They said, "Well, Dave, we'd like to see the President." And I started to make my little speech again and it suddenly dawned on me what they were saying; they had an agreement. I took them through Rose Conway's office, which was between the Cabinet Room and the President's office, and cracked the door. The President was talking with somebody. I sort of wigwagged at him, and he got rid of them and we went on in there. They then told him that they had reached an agreement in principle and they were sure they could work it out. So, while everybody's shaking hands, and slapping each other on the back, the President looked at me and he apparently noticed that big patch on my eye, and he said, "What the hell happened to you?" And with that, Mr. Fairless said, "Mr. President, Phil took a swing at me and I ducked, and Dave forgot to." Ben Fairless was quite an after dinner speaker, as I understand--I never heard him--but he was greatly in demand, and for about three or four months after that he was using that as his punch line. So I finally wrote him and said I wanted some residuals from that story, since it was my eye that got it.
JOHNSON: So that was the final settlement then.
STOWE: That was the final settlement.
JOHNSON: That was after the Supreme Court had said it was unconstitutional, and so the mills had to be returned to industry?
STOWE: Right.
JOHNSON: Charlie Sawyer, of course, was the Government's agent, so to speak, that was in charge of the mills in that period. Did you deal much with Charles Sawyer?
STOWE: No, Charlie Murphy did all that. There probably would be things in Murphy's records dealing with that.
JOHNSON: Yes. We have Sawyer's papers too, and he has some memoranda.
STOWE: No, Steelman and I--we acted as mediators. This was after the group in New York failed to get together with Nate [Nathan] Feinsinger. Finally, in sheer desperation we decided to bring them into the White House. We did, and we had them in twice. The first time it was no success, and the second time we had no success. During that second time they were in the Cabinet Room, and we had almost a tentative agreement. The industry people kept screaming that they wanted to go out to lunch, and they went out to lunch. It was late in the afternoon, two or three o'clock, and it was just at that time the Supreme Court decision came down. They came back into the room, a completely different group from when they went out. They were not willing to do anything, or talk about anything. So that's when we lost it.
JOHNSON: I think about the time that the steel strike started, that the coal mines were turned back to their owners. The coal mines had been seized by the Government, and were being run by the Government.
STOWE: That's right.
JOHNSON: And then finally they were turned back to their owners about the time the steel problem came up in '52.
STOWE: Well, I don't recall the exact relationship, but that was the one in which the Government fined Lewis, I don't know, a million six, or something like that.
JOHNSON: Did you have face-to-face meetings with John L. Lewis?
STOWE: Yes.
JOHNSON: With the "beetle brows?"
STOWE: One of the most interesting things--this was some time after I was out of the White House--I got on a train in New York on the Metroliner type. I don't know what they called it in those days. I went up to the dining car early before the train left, to try to get something to eat, because it gets so crowded coming back. There was one vacant seat that the maitre de motioned me to, and I was sitting with John L. Lewis. We got to chatting and we had a most marvelous chat. He had been there and practically finished his dinner by the time I sat down. We happened to sit together when we went back to the parlour car. He was telling me about how he and his wife and his daughter used to visit Calvin Coolidge when he was the President, and that Mrs. Coolidge and John L. Lewis' daughter used to skip up and down the halls in the White House together. Then it suddenly dawned on me that I had remembered that somewhere somebody had said that Coolidge had asked him to be Secretary of Labor.
JOHNSON: Oh?
STOWE: I happened to mention something; he was fussing about certain things that were going on in the Government as of that time. I said that well it somehow reminded me of the things going on in Coolidge's day, and that was a big mistake because from then on I got a lecture all the way back to Washington on how good Coolidge was. The most interesting part about it was here was this big man, bushy eyebrows as you described him, and when he and Coolidge were having a conversation, he would be himself and then he would be Coolidge in that clipped New England accent. And as he talked the tears would roll down his face. It was an absolutely remarkable thing.
JOHNSON: And he liked Calvin Coolidge.
STOWE: Oh, yes, they were close.
JOHNSON: Isn't that something?
STOWE: It's a most unusual relationship.
JOHNSON: You have another anecdote here on John L. Lewis and the President.
STOWE: Yes. After the President had left office and was on one of his return visits to Washington, he was staying in the Mayflower Hotel, where he always stayed when he came here. Don Dawson came over and said that he had had a contact from John L. Lewis asking if he could have a few minutes with the President while he was here. Someone had suggested it; I'm not quite sure when, but Dawson was the one that had brought it to us. The President agreed, and it was arranged that John L. Lewis would come over to the Mayflower at a certain time. Apparently somebody tipped off the newspapers because about fifteen minutes before the appointed hour the corridor outside the President's room was full of cameramen and everybody else out there. Lewis came in, and he and the President went into the back bedroom and had a fifteen or twenty minute conversation. When they came out they were all smiles; somebody asked if the press could come in and the President said, "Yes, let them in." They said they would like to have pictures taken of the two men. The President said to John, "Well, it won't hurt me John, how about you?" They had their pictures taken shaking hands, and what was said in there I have no idea.
JOHNSON: Do you have any idea what year that would have been?
STOWE: I would say roughly two years after he was out of office.
JOHNSON: About '55 or so.
STOWE: Somewhere along there. I'm not sure. Dawson might know, because he made the original contact.
JOHNSON: As far as you know they were friends, or friendly from then on?
STOWE: Well, they didn't see much of each other, I'm sure, but . . .
JOHNSON: You were mentioning an episode involving Forrestal and atomic energy and civilian control of atomic energy. Do you want to go ahead and describe that?
STOWE: Well, there was a period of time, and I'm not sure of the exact dates in there, but apparently Forrestal, as Secretary of Defense, had been seeking from the President some control over the use of the atomic weapon. Control at that time rested completely and totally in the hands of the President. The President, as I understand it, had resisted Forrestal's idea on the grounds that it should not be there, that it should remain in the civilian President's hands and only his hands. He called me in one day and told me that Forrestal had made another request concerning the atomic weapon, and that his [Truman's] answer was still the same. Because it involved atomic energy, I guess I was selected as the messenger rather than somebody else. He told me to go over and see Forrestal and to tell him that the answer was no. He also had told me to tell only Forrestal, not anybody else. I was to deliver it personally to Forrestal. I went over there and when I got into Forrestal's office, the Secretary of Army was in there. I was reluctant to move, until finally Forrestal said, "Look, you can go ahead; Secretary [Kenneth] Royall is Secretary of the Army and he's cleared. So I delivered the message that the President had reviewed what he requested concerning atomic weapons, and his answer was no, negative. With that, Forrestal said, "Well, I disagree with that answer, but I shouldn't argue with you about it; I will take the matter up with the President." I started to get up and as I did, he went into about a five minute tirade.
JOHNSON: Forrestal did?
STOWE: Forrestal. On why it should be in his hands; why he should have. . . . I'm listening to it, and I couldn't get up and walk out very well; but he was really going on for quite a little period of time. So, when I got back to the White House I told the President, just as I've told it here, what happened. We both, you know, were a little perplexed at why he should have suddenly burst out about it all. It was shortly thereafter that he went out to the Naval Hospital, and was ill, and subsequently, as you recall, apparently committed suicide by jumping out the window. I recall one time, sometime later I think when we were aboard the Williamsburg, that the President and I were chatting and we both sort of wondered if that had been symptomatic, and if there was anything that could have been done at that time.
JOHNSON: Do you remember the substance of this tirade, any substance in his argument on why the military should have control? Do you recall any substance to it?
STOWE: No, I really don't. I was so shocked.
Jump to additional interview involving David Stowe in 1973 and again in 1989.
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