Francis Russell Oral History Interview

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

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

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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened August, 1976
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

MCKINZIE: Ambassador Russell, how did you happen to come into Government service in the first place?

RUSSELL: I practiced law in Boston from 1929 until 1941, and while there I got to know John Dickey, who had worked in the State Department under Francis Sayre and Secretary [Cordell] Hull in the trade agreement program. During the period from 1929 to '41 I was active in the League of Nations Association. My father had been an admirer of Woodrow Wilson, and I had been brought up in that tradition.

I had the misfortune to go to high school in

[2]

the town that was the home of Henry Cabot Lodge, and all during the Senate fight over the League of Nations, I would start out on the two-mile hike for high school loaded with arguments for the League, surrounded by contemporaries of mine who were of the Lodge persuasion. It never came to physical blows, but there were some very heated arguments. I'd come home "bloody-but-unbowed," and my father would give me new arguments and I'd start off the next morning. We had a debate in our history class on the subject. I was the spokesman for the League. The vote was 30 to 2 against the League. The only other person who voted for it didn't dare to say so. After I graduated from Harvard Law, I was invited to be on the Board of Directors of the League of Nations Association.

John Dickey, and I, used to take the same train to work. We'd commiserate with each other

[3]

during ‘39 and '40 about practicing law in Boston while the world was going to hell. He was asked by Nelson Rockefeller, whom he knew, to help out in the Office of Inter-American Affairs,

John was put in charge of the blacklist of firms in neutral countries that were dealing with the Axis, and he needed a deputy. He called me on the phone one evening and wanted to know if that was a lot of guff that I'd been giving him or if I really meant it. I said I guessed I meant it.

So Ruth and I went to Washington thinking we were going down for about six months. The blacklist became a part of the economic warfare effort. When John was asked by Hull to set up the Office of Public Affairs I became chief of the division called World Trade Intelligence which administered the blacklist.

MCKINZIE: Was that an effective instrument, do you think?

[4]

RUSSELL: There's no doubt about it, These were firms in Latin America, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland, We were trying to hurt the Axis by denying it the benefits of doing business in those areas. A considerable proportion of the firms that were put on the list were put out of business because they weren't able to do any business with American companies after that. It also put the fear of God into other companies that might have been wavering as to whether they would do business with the Axis or not.

The way the Office of Public Affairs got started bras this: In 1944 Hull noticed that when hearings came up on the Hill on the Reciprocal Trade Agreement, there were representatives of private organizations, Chambers of Commerce, the League of Women Voters, the Federal Council of Churches, labor organizations and farm organizations appearing , support of the program. He

[5]

got to talking with some of them and they expressed their regret that they had no place in the Department of State where they could go to express their views or get information.

In those days the Department was known as the "Old Lady of Pennsylvania Avenue." It was unapproachable. The staff was small and felt it had a monopoly on all knowledge about foreign affairs, It wasn't much interested in what anybody else thought. But Hull was so much impressed by the interest and support of these people that he asked Dickey to set up an office where representatives of these organizations could make contact with the Department. So John set up what shortly became the Office of Public Affairs.

In it there were: a Division of Public Liaison, a Division of Public Opinion Analysis, a Division of Publications and one of Historical

[6]

Policy Research,

When John became president of Dartmouth in 1945 I became the Director of Public Affairs.

The division of opinion research subscribed to 100 newspapers across the country, the leading magazines, and also conducted two polling operations. One was of the Gallup type, the other was conducted by Rensis Lickert, originally in the Department of Agriculture, who later went to the University of Michigan. He had worked out a method of scientifically selecting a hundred or so people each one of whom represented a larger segment of public opinion. The interviews with those people would be in depth -- about two hours. You found out not only what they thought, but why they thought it.

MCKINZIE: Given the development of public polling techniques since that time, do you still think

[7]

that those were valid operations?

RUSSELL: Yes. The Gallup type operation is still carried on but the more intensive type of sampling is being more and more applied. Rensis Lickert, now at the University of Michigan, is regarded as a pioneer in this development.

WILSON: Was this kind of activity ordered by the Secretary when the office was set up, or did it evolve as something for the Office of Public Affairs to do?

RUSSELL: It had been carried on in a less active form before the Office of Public Affairs was set up, but it was so obviously related to the objectives of the Public Office it was brought into it.

MCKINZIE: You mentioned that the original impetus for setting up the Office was to give organizations which had an interest in foreign affairs a place

[8]

to go to express their opinions. I gather that it wasn't long before the Office of Public Affairs was seeking to have some sort of contacts with the organizations?

RUSSELL: The operation developed greatly. I think it was a significant development in the democratic process, Unfortunately, it came to an end when John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State and made Carl McCardle his Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. Carl had the firm conviction that all that was necessary for a Government agency to do was to have good relations with the press. Everything else was falderal. Under him liaison with the organizations was greatly cut down, and has never recovered.

I hope that some day a new President and a new Secretary of State will look back at the operation and see that it's something valuable. It should be administered by someone who has a

[9]

very lively awareness of the line that should be drawn between an honest two-way exchange between the State Department and outside organizations, and high pressure propaganda, It’s the easiest thing in the world to flop from one to the other, but because that danger exists is no reason for not having the right kind of an operation. I think if we had had something like that really going on, a large part of the grief over Vietnam might have been alleviated. Some of the strengths of public feeling might have been more vividly brought to the attention of policy formulators; or conversely, some of the intricacies, some of the imperatives of policy might have been brought home to national organizations, or a combination of the two,

In any event, something of that kind is important. It developed, I should say, to a considerable extent as a result of the abilities of Margaret Carter. She had been with the

[10]

Twentieth Century Fund and knew most of the organizations in the United States, She had also a good knowledge of foreign policy, a rare combination.

She brought into the Public Liaison Division specialists in veteran's affairs, women's affairs, agricultural, affairs, and so forth.

We set up a wide range of activities. One was an annual conference in the Department to which about 200 people were invited, usually the presidents of national organizations. We had smaller meetings almost every week where there would be anywhere from 10 to 30 representatives of national organizations, mostly those that had Washington offices and could conveniently come to the Department. When there'd be some foreign policy development that we thought a group of these organizations would be interested in, we'd invite them on an "interested to know" basis. They

[11]

would meet with the director of an office or Assistant Secretary, or, on occasion, with the Under Secretary of State, We had one meeting where Acheson gave his views on China, Let me digress for a minute on that.

There were about 30 representatives at that meeting. After the meeting a group of them came to me and said, "Why in heaven's name doesn't Acheson tell the country what he just told us?" He had explained the background of our policy in China. This was during the period when the Department was being heavily attacked because of its China policy. It was the beginning of McCarthyism and the administration was being accused of having lost Asia to the Communists.

I pushed the idea with Acheson.

MCKINZIE: Was this a "not for attribution" statement on Acheson's part?

[12]

RUSSELL: When he made it to the group it was not for attribution, as all of those meetings were. Finally Acheson said, "All right." I recommended the National Press Club, and he said he'd do it. We fixed a date and he said, "All right now, make a draft."

We made eight or ten drafts, each one worse than the previous one -- utterly unsatisfactory. The day for the speech came. Acheson told me afterwards that he left the office around 5 o'clock, went home, took a couple of martinis, sat down at his desk and wrote out his speech. The next day he gave it, without referring to his notes. The whole speech was given without a note in front of him.

MCKINZIE: This is the speech where he defined the defense perimeter?

RUSSELL: Yes, There were 12 or 15 members of Congress

[13]

there, 5 or 6 Senators. Several of them said it was the greatest speech they'd ever heard and asked that it be published in its entirety, It was transcribed end it was not necessary to change a word, It was grammatically perfect.

Now, getting back to the Office of Public Affairs, Acheson was always 1,000 percent behind the public affairs program. He was generous in giving it his time, in accepting speech requests, and creating an atmosphere in the Department whereby all other officers knew they were expected to cooperate. The director of the Office could always go to any policymaker in the Department and say, "Look, the newspapers of the country, ox the pubic, are puzzled about this or that, We'd like to talk it over. How do we go about providing background so the people will know what going on in your mind?" They were wonderful days for public affairs.

[14]

WILSON: Was that true, in general, for all of the Secretaries of the Truman administration?

RUSSELL: Well, it was true of Acheson when he was Under Secretary; it was true of Marshall. Marshall was absolutely wonderful. He was always available whenever I wanted to see him, and he would meet with groups. Lovett didn't want to have any part of public affairs for himself. He supported the program, he was in favor of everybody else doing it. Once when I asked him to meet with one of the groups he said, "Well, Francis, I'll tell you, when I was Under Secretary at the Pentagon, Bob Patterson agreed to give a talk at some munitions plant up in New Jersey. He was suddenly called to the White House and couldn't make it to New Jersey. He came to me and said he was sorry but I'd have to go up and give the speech for him, 'You don’t need to worry, the speech is all prepared

[15]

and all, you have to do is read it,"'

"So I went up. I was busy with other things on the way up and I arrived and was ushered into an area acres large. Thousands of people were pouring into this place to hear this speech. There was a platform up at one end and I was sitting at a table there with the man that was going to introduce me. I took the speech out of my pocket and looked over the first page. I turned to him and said, "This speech is nothing but a bunch of crap." The loudspeaker was on and my voice went over the whole auditorium. Since then I haven't given a speech and I don't intend to.”

So, the program had Lovett's benediction, but he took no active part.

MCKINZIE: What about Secretary [James F.] Byrnes?

RUSSELL: He just had his tight little coterie. The

[16]

Department went on without Byrnes and Byrnes went on without the Department, but that was a fairly short period.

WILSON: Did you have any serious difficulty in having the idea of public affairs accepted by the old line divisions of the Department?

RUSSELL: There was a wide-range of attitudes toward it. Inevitably the "old school" thought it was unnecessary, in fact dangerous. But, the point is we got support from the top, including from Harry Truman. On several occasions groups were received by the President, Everybody in the Department knew that Truman was backing the program as well as the Secretary of State.

MCKINZIE: There were also a few problems with Congress when the annual appropriations would come up, they'd want to cut you out, as a matter of fact.

[17]

RUSSELL: Yes, there were problems, The philosophy of many, perhaps the majority of Congressmen was, "Look, if you want to know American public thinking come up here. We represent them; we're elected by them. Ask us and we’ll tell you. You don't need to poll the American public or carry on a liaison program. Just ask us, and it will save the Government a lot of money."

MCKINZIE: You really feel that that was their major objection, rather than that the Office of Public Affairs was in some sense a propaganda agency?

RUSSELL: That was part of it toot And that is not an unreasonable apprehension on their part, All I can say is that we were aware of the problem in the Department. We hewed as exactly to the line, separating lack of information from propaganda! as I was able to determine it.

[18]

MCKINZIE: Did you ever have to testify, by the way?

RUSSELL: Only briefly, I never came under intensive questioning on these points. The presentation was usually made by the Assistant Secretary rather than by the director of the office

WILSON: You raise a really crucial question and it's a matter of sensitivity, I suppose. How were you able to remain confident that you were on the right side of the line?

RUSSELL: You couldn't be -- different people inevitably would draw the line at different points. All I can say is that I was very much aware that this was an operation that could become an instrument of high-pressuring the American public, or misleading them. It could be a danger, there's no doubt about it.

On the other hand, it seems to me the other danger is just as great. If you don't have this

[19]

kind of program you have the situation that the organizations were complaining about to Cordell Hull, where the Department is remote from the public. The people don't know what's going on. They would like very much to know the thinking processes of the people that are making the decisions; they'd like to sit around the same table, 25 or 30 people, and hear the policy-maker talk and be open to questions so they can make up their own minds.

These 200 organizations and their principal officers make up an important segment of the intellectual leaders of the country. It seems to me important for them to be able to become as intimate with the policy officer and with the factors that go into the making of decisions as possible. This seemed to me to be the best way of making that possible.

MCKINZIE: Well, this then brings up another point.

[20]

You were talking about these 200 organizations as comprising some of the major intellectual leaders of the country. The question comes up; which is the most important, to deal, with the important public, or the general public? Somebody had to make a decision someplace along the line as to where to focus.

RUSSELL: The operations of the Office of Public Affairs were not confined to dealing with these 200 organizations, One of the things we did was to be as responsive as possible to requests from all over the country for Department officers to speak to groups. I personally spoke to groups in all 48 states between 1945 and ‘52. One of the last ones was in North Dakota. A request came in from the North Dakota Cattlemen's Association saying they were having their national conference in Laramie and they’d like someone

[21]

from the Department to come and talk to them. These were the days before television. You didn't get as a part of your daily fare the Government leaders the way you do now. It was something of an event for someone to come from Washington and talk about the reasons for various policies. So we had many requests -- many more than could be filled. But this one came in from the North Dakota Cattlemen's Association. I saw it and said, "I'll take that one. North Dakota is the only state I haven't spoken in."

I got off the plane, a DC-3, in Laramie, and was met by the executive secretary of the Association. We had just flown over the Badlands -- my God, North Dakota is a godforsaken place -- and I said, "Well, this represents quite a day for me. I now have visited every one of the 48 states."

He said, "Well, I reckon you saved the best for the last." And he really meant it.

[22]

But what I'm saying is that we tried to make the State Department open and available to the public at every level we could think of. We got about a half a million letters, those addressed to the White House as well as to the State Department, from the American public and we answered as many of those as possible. They were sorted into various categories. If one came from a college president it would be carefully read and taken up with State Department officers and a reply drafted. If they were postcards, part of a pressure campaign, they wouldn't be answered. But we did have quite an operation of replying to letters, We also made Department officers available for radio programs.

MCKINZIE: I think you would agree that there is nothing wrong with an administration trying to "sell" its policy or to explain it.

RUSSELL: No, we did so with the Marshall plan.

[23]

MCKINZIE: There is a great interest in the Office of Public Affairs at the time of the Truman Doctrine, and shortly thereafter with the Marshall plan. There is quite a bit of evidence that activity increased in your shop at that time. From whence came the impetus for this very large effort?

WILSON: Maybe one way of getting at that -- how much of Joe Jones' book [The Fifteen Weeks], which gets into some detail on the public relations activities of the Department, is fully acceptable?

RUSSELL: I don't find anything objectionable except one or two minor details that we will get into when we get into the Truman Doctrine. It starts out, I believe, with a description of Acheson's trip down to the Delta. That's another instance of the Secretary of State (this time at the request of the President) taking time to talk to a group of farmers and their families who were

[24]

coming together, at a country fair, Everybody was in their shirt sleeves, including Acheson, The crowd assembled in a gymnasium, benches around the side. On the trip out Acheson had gone over the speech, and on the back of the preceding page made notes, maybe 15 or 20 words, for a whole page of discussion. And as he spoke he occasionally would look down at these words that he had written, but he didn't read anything from the prepared speech. Here were farmers and their wives, children of high school age, and he held them spellbound with his discussion about international world problems.

WILSON: You have cited two audiences for examples.

RUSSELL: Yes, one was to intellectual leaders in Washington, and this one in the Mississippi Delta, You couldn't imagine two more different audiences, and he held them each equally spellbound.

[25]

MCKINZIE: On the subject of increased involvement by the Office of Public Affairs...

RUSSELL: It was the result of two or three things, The Office just started in 1945. It was obviously not equipped, as far as personnel and other resources were concerned, to do the job that seemed to need doing, and that organizational leaders and others were hoping could be done, and that it ultimately came to do.

So there would have been a normal building up of the staff and resources that were necessary to do the job. Another thing is that as its existence became known, both in the Department and outside the Department, there was a great increase in the number of demands upon it, You mentioned the "old guard" in the Department, but there were a lot of new guard people.

Clare Wilcox was a great believer in the program. Whenever anything new came along in the

[26]

field of economic foreign policy, one of the first things held do would be to ask me to drop around and talk with him, and held tell me what was coming up, and would ask for suggestions as to what should be done to inform interested groups, the business community or the farm community, or whatever, about this new policy. And so there was this growth in demand, both from within and without. Then there were the great new foreign programs coming along which required more in the line of exposition than would have been necessary in just normal times.

MCKINZIE: I guess the bluntest question I've been moving toward is: did someone come to you and say, "Look here, we’ve got to sell this thing, and lets get on the ball and get some people out there to talk about it"',

RUSSELL: That would happen from time to time. Mostly

[27]

the initiative would come from the Office itself. During those days we were intimately in touch with what was going on because of the circumstances I mentioned earlier of having a President and Secretary who attached great importance to having the public aware of what was going on -- people like Truman and Acheson and Marshall. We in the Office of Public Affairs could see policy evolving and thought it was our responsibility to talk with the policy officers and to come up with recommendations as to what should be done. More often than not memos would be prepared in the Office of Public Affairs saying, "Here is a policy that is evolving. Here seem to us to be the kind of things that should be done with respect to public information. Should the Secretary or the President make a speech on the subject, as in the case of aid to Greece and Turkey?"

[28]

When new policies seemed to be upcoming, the Office of Public Affairs, without any urging from anyone, would study it and come up with a paper, making a recommendation as to what kind of public affairs program should be carried on in connection with this new policy.

WILSON: What did you do in the situation immediately after the Truman Doctrine speech? Some people in the Department felt that President Truman had stated the case in too sweeping language, in particular people within the Department felt that the U.N. had not been given a role, that something should be done to rectify this mistake. Were you sort of caught in the middle, or...

RUSSELL: There had been inadequate attention to the United Nations. I think Joe Jones handles that pretty well in his book. We did try to keep a lookout on what criticisms were coming in and

[29]

they would be brought to the attention of the policy office. The Division of Public Opinion Analysis prepared weekly and at times daily reports on public opinion developments, on newspaper editorials, the results of polls and how the mail was going. They would go to the policy officers in question so that they would see as much in depth as possible what the state of public opinion was with respect to their area .

MCKINZIE: Could we ask you to talk about the evolution of the Point IV idea and the Office of Public Affairs?

RUSSELL: Ben Hardy was one of my most treasured associates, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man from Georgia, His family owned a small-town newspaper, He'd been in the Navy during World War II, which took him into various parts of Latin America, After the war was over he came around to the Office of Public

[30]

Affairs and was taken on as a speechwriter. He did quite a lot of writing for Secretary Marshall,, His style of writing was one that fitted with Marshall's personality, and Ben got to know Marshall quite well through going up to his office and talking with him in connection with upcoming speeches of the Secretary, Marshall took Ben's work without many changes,

Marshall was an easier man to write for than Acheson. We only had one person in the Office of Public Affairs that could write for Acheson, Delia Kuhn, the wife of Ferdinand Kuhn who used to be an editorial writer for the New York Times. Delia Kuhn worked with the former Ambassador to Japan, Joseph G. Grew. She wrote Grew's memoirs, On rare occasions she would write a speech for Acheson -- which received quite a few emendations. Acheson almost always prepared his own speeches.

In any event, Ben Hardy became Deputy

[31]

Director of the Office of Public Affairs early in 1945. One day in August that year he came into my office and said he thought the American people understood the Marshall plan, why it was necessary, what it was designed to do. But, he said, it had occurred to him that there was an undertaking, which in the long run was even more important than the Marshall plan, that the United States ought to be giving thought to. A third of the world's people were living in destitution and hunger. With the know how in which the United States was preeminent, applied to their problems of agriculture, health and education, transportation, and industry, improvement could be brought to their lot. During World War II a great many of those people for the first time had seen what modern civilization was like. G.I.s had been everywhere, they had seen them in their jeeps, with their radios, and better food. A revolution of expectations

[32]

would be accelerated by that fact. They would be demanding that they get a fairer shake in the world's production, Hardy thought it was not only in the interest of the United States to take the lead in coping with that problem, but the United States was probably the only country that could, at that point, take the lead. He said the United States should start giving thought to that.

I had just finished, in June, a 13-day trip around the world. We flew over the deserts of the Middle East and the jungles of Pakistan and India, and Burma and Indochina and the Philippines.

I had had inchoate thoughts along Ben's line. I said I couldn't agree with him more, but I didn't see at that moment an opportunity for raising it, but it was possible a request for a speech by the Secretary or someone else in a top position would come along where it might be worked in.

[33]

Incidentally, Dean Acheson referred in Present at the Creation to the fact that if you want to affect national policy one of the best situations to be in is that of speechwriter.

I said to Ben, "Let's put it on the shelf and see what comes along."

After the election, which to everybody's astonishment (except Harry Truman's) he won, he spent a couple of weeks in Independence and then came back to the White House, One of the first things he did after he got back was to call the Acting Secretary of State, Robert Lovett, over to his office. Truman said he had been giving thought to his inaugural address, that he wanted it to be a kind of democratic manifesto, that he wanted it addressed to the people of the world rather than to the American people and he wanted it to be fairly brief.

He asked Lovett to have someone in the State

[34]

Department give some thought to what he might say. Lovett came back to his office and asked me to come up. He told me what the President had said and asked me if I would be the one to give the matter some thought.

I came back to my office and called in Ben and said, "Ben, this may be the opportunity we talked about a couple of months ago. Why don't you draft a speech incorporating the idea?"

Ben came up with a draft. I sent it up to Lovett and got it back immediately with a notation saying, "Francis, I'm not sure this is a good idea, but I'm quite sure that it's not appropriate for an inaugural address,"

Ben and I were, of course, disappointed, but we wrote another speech telling of the superiority of the pluralistic way of life over the monolithic way. We sent that through Lovett to the White House, The next morning I got a

[35]

telephone call from Clark Clifford. He said, "Francis, you've got some nice language here, but, you know, we've found that this President does much better when he has something concrete and practical to propose. Don't you have something like that?"

I said, "Yes, Clark, actually I do," and told him about Ben's first draft. He said, "That's great, that's great. Send it over."

They beefed it up by saying "our foreign policy shall have four major objectives," and put in three which nobody can now recall. Then came the fourth which was Ben's draft.

Ben was so much devoted to his idea that when the new Point IV administration was set up with (Henry G.) Bennett from Oklahoma State College as the chairman, Ben left the Office of Public Affairs and became Bennett's public affairs officer. They hit it off like father and son.

[36]

Delia Kuhn tells about when Bennett was going up to the Hill to ask for his first budget. He was being briefed by all the bight young people whom he had assembled on his staff. They weren't sure how the country bumpkin was going to make out up there on the Hill.

Bennett listened carefully and solemnly, and when they finished he said to his secretary, "Call. Sam Rayburn and tell him I want to have lunch with him." They had gone to high school together.

A year or so later Bennett and Hardy started on a trip across North Africa and the Middle East, going on to India and Pakistan. The plane ran into a mountain outside of Teheran and everyone in the plane was killed.

After the plane crash I went around to call on Ben's wife and for the first time learned that after we got the memo from Lovett casting cold

[37]

water on the idea, Ben went home and the two of them sat up until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning discussing whether he should go over my head and over Lovett's head to someone in the White House to tell them about the idea. You've just told me now that he used to be in a carpool with George Elsey and so he went over to see his friend George. I didn't know, until you just told me, that he had that contact with Elsey. After my talk with his wife I had a picture of Ben wandering around the corridors of the White House seeing if he couldn't find somebody he could put his idea up to, and ultimately getting in to see George Elsey and Elsey putting it up to Clark Clifford who then called me. The point is that when Clark Clifford called me and wanted to know if I didn't have something concrete, he had Ben's draft right on his desk and he was

[38]

calling just to cover Ben, so we wouldn't ask any questions as to how they got that draft.

MCKINZIE: At an earlier time you mentioned that when Hardy's first speech proposal was turned down by Lovett you sent a memorandum to Dean Acheson.

RUSSELL: Yes. After I got the call from Clark Clifford and after it became apparent that the idea Lovett had turned down was in fact going to be used by the President, it was announced that Acheson was going to be the Secretary of State after January 10. I wrote him a letter telling what the proposal was.

WILSON: Mr. Acheson held a press conference immediately after the speech in which he spelled out what his view of Point IV was. There was an enormous public reaction to the speech. Can you say that you were pretty confident that this would be favorable?

[39]

RUSSELL: Not at al1. The idea came up as I described it. There was no expectation it would be accepted as well as it was.

MCKINZIE: Yours must have been very difficult work once Joseph McCarthy began making much noise. Could you address yourself to the subject of the office and its handling of the problem of "McCarthyism?"

RUSSELL: McCarthyism was difficult for the State Department, above all for Secretary Acheson. Yet not once during the McCarthy attacks can I recall McCarthy coming up in the Secretary's conversations, You would not have thought a man by that name existed. The conversation would be about fishing, farm problems, or God knows what, but there was never any wringing of hands or oaths, or talk about McCarthy by the Secretary.

McCarthy did attack our foreign policies

[40]

and we did our best to set the record straight as with the one by Acheson on China, But we didn't have any anti-McCarthy programs.

MCKINZIE: The Korean war obviously changed just about everything, changed the focus, at least, and the emphasis in the State Department. Was there any discussion of turning the Office of Public Affairs into something like the OWI during the Second World War, into a quasi-propaganda agency?

RUSSELL: No suggestion of that kind ever came to my attention. The program continued to be of the kind that I described.

One of the things we have not mentioned was the publications program. The divisions in the office were Public Liaison, Historical Research, Public Opinion Research and a Division of Publications. We put out pamphlets; we had a regular weekly publication for distribution to

[41]

those who were specially interested in foreign policy developments of that week. We put out, of course, the State Department Bulletin, which was a quite different publication then than it is now. Today it's confined almost entirely to statements of the President and the Secretary of State. Then we had articles written by policy officers. I think it was a more interesting publication than it is now.

WILSON: As historians, one of the disturbing things about the history in the Foreign Relations series, the volumes of which were published by the Office of Historical Research under the Office of Public Affairs, is what happened during the Dulles tenure. Namely, the publication of the Yalta volume. In many ways that was self-serving, an attempt to pull together documents to disclaim the Democratic administration. Do you recall any temptation,

[42]

any suggestions to do the same? Did anyone say: "Can we use history, shouldn't we use history, to prove our case?"

RUSSELL: I don't recall any suggestions of that kind.

On the Presidents message on aid to Greece and Turkey, Secretary Acheson has mentioned that the steps that lead to its formulation are accurately set forth in Joe Jones' book, The Fifteen Weeks. I would concur. There may be a few things to flesh it out. Acheson came back from his meeting with the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and called a group of us together in his office. He said that the Senators had said they would support aid to Greece and Turkey provided the President would make a public statement on the subject and make the case for it so it would be persuasive with the American public. They felt that unless the President did

[43]

mike such a statement they would have problems with their constituents. The purpose of Acheson's meeting was to initiate the steps to put together a statement of that kind, The Office of Middle East Affairs, under Loy Henderson, drafted the part that had to do with the background. The Economic Office was to put together the part indicating the economic situation in Greece and Turkey and why the funds were necessary. Then he asked me to prepare a statement about the general situation in the world -- the relationship between, the United States and the Soviet Union, and what had led up to the critical situation.

There was a subcommittee of the State, War and Navy Coordinating Committee dealing with information. I called a meeting of the subcommittee. The regular group supplemented by State Department officers concerned with overall relations between West and East. Llewellyn

[44]

Thompson was there representing the Office of Eastern European Affairs.

No effort was made to come to a decision or a consensus. I made a note of the principal suggestions. The meeting was held on Friday afternoon. Saturday morning I went to my office and dictated my thoughts.

It's since been claimed that the Truman Doctrine called upon the United States to play the roll of world policeman. But the statement says that aid should be primarily economic and in military equipment. There is no suggestion that American troops should be used for anything. The Truman Doctrine is one of the most frequently discussed and "least accurately stated" items in American foreign policy. It has been vastly misrepresented as to what it says and what it recommends.

In making my draft I posed the conflict as one of pluralistic democratic societies against

[45]

monolithic, authoritarian societies. That was the issue as it had been the issue in World War II; that and the right of every country to make its own decisions as to the kind of society it wanted.

The question has been raised as to why it was desirable to make it so universal -- why talk about the policy of the United States as giving aid to countries that were under attack? Wouldn't it have been better, as Walter Lippman said ad infinitum, to just recommend aid to Greece and Turkey.

The reason I didn't put it that way in my formulation was that in the postwar period there were a large number of small and weak countries whose political and economic societies were in disarray, where the duly constituted governments were under pressure because of their economic weakness. If the Free World, and in terms of

[46]

1947 that meant the United States, was going to say it was immaterial to us whether small and weak countries were going to be knocked over, then we'd have to anticipate that what was then happening in Greece and Turkey would happen in these other spots, It was desirable to announce that we were planning to do it for Greece and Turkey, but also that other weak countries might receive the same assistance in the difficult circumstances of the postwar period. If that were said the likelihood that the Kremlin would continue its efforts would be reduced.

WILSON: That's a rather precise statement of containment...

RUSSELL: I don't want to quibble, but I think "containment" is a somewhat broader term than what I have described. This is more specifically a policy of giving economic aid, and under some circumstances,

[47]

military equipment to countries that are under pressure. That really isn't containment. Containment was directed against Moscow; doing something to them, bringing pressures against them. Whereas the Truman Doctrine formulation was saying that we're going to give aid, in cases we deemed worthy of it, to countries like Greece and Turkey that might come under pressure.

WILSON: Was this assumption that you have just put precise words to generally held at the time?

RUSSELL: My draft represented my own thinking. Franklin Roosevelt had, it seemed to me, made an all-out effort to convince Stalin that the United States hoped that the relationship that existed before World War II could be put on a better plane. He said it both in words and deeds. But after Poland and Czechoslovakia he

[48]

became convinced the Kremlin was going to continue with its old objectives.

I can remember thinking, during those days, "We are in an ideological war. We know the Kremlin's ideology. What is ours? What do we stand for? What's the fight about? What do we tell people in the rest of the world who are trying to make up their mind where they stand, what we stand for, what the Kremlin stands for? So when Acheson asked me to prepare this part of the address what I was putting down was the result of my thought on that point.

MCKINZIE: Ambassador Russell, thank you very much.

Acheson, Dean, 13, 23, 24, 27, 30, 33, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 48

Bennett, Henry G., 35, 36
Boston, Massachusetts, 3
Burma, 32
Byrnes, James F., 15-16

Carter, Margaret, 9
Chamber of Commerce, 4
China, 11, 40
Clifford, Clark, 35, 37-38
Containment policy, 46-47
Czechoslovakia, 47

Dartmouth University, 6
Defense perimeter speech, 11-13
Dickey, John, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6
Dulles, John Foster, 8, 41

Eastern European Affairs Office of the State Department, 44
Economic Office of the State Department, 43
Elsey, George M., 37

Federal Council of Churches, 4
Fifteen Weeks, 23, 42
Foreign Relations, 41

Gallup Poll, 6, 7
Georgia, 29
Greece, 27, 42, 43, 45, 46
Greer, Joseph C., 30

Hardy, Benjamin, and Point IV, 29-38
Harvard Law School, 2
Henderson, Loy, 43
Historical Policy Research Division of the State Department, 5-6, 40, 41
Hull, Cordell, 1, 3, 5, 19

Independence, Missouri, 33
India, 32, 36
Indochina, 32

Jones, Joseph, 28, 42

Korean War, 40
Kremlin, 48
Kuhn, Delia, 30, 36
Kuhn, Ferdinand, 30

Laramie, Wyoming, 20
Latin America, 4
League of Nations Association, 1-2
League of Women Voters, 4
Lickert, Rensis, 6, 7
Lippman, Walter, 45
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 2
Lovett, Robert, 14, 15, 33-34, 36, 38

McCardle, Carl, 8
McCarthy, Joseph, 39-40
McCarthyism, 11
Marshall, George, 14, 27, 30
Marshall plan, 22, 23, 31
Michigan University, 6, 7
Middle East Affairs of the State Department, 43
Mississippi Delta, 23-24
Moscow, United Soviet Socialist Republics, 47

National Press Club, 12
New Jersey, 14
New York Times, 30
North Dakota, 20, 21
North Dakota Cattlemen's Association, 20, 21

Office of Public Affairs of the State Department, 3, 5, 7-8, 13-15, 16-17, 18, 29-30, 40, 41
Office of Inter American Affairs of the State Department, 3

Pakistan, 32, 36
Patterson, Robert, 14
Philippines, 32
Point IV, the creation of, 29-39
Poland, 47
Portugal, 4
Present at the Creation, 33
Public Affairs Office of the State Department, 3, 5, 7-8, 13-15, 16-17, 18, 29-30, 40, 41
Publications Division of the State Department, 5, 40-41

Rayburn, Sam, 36
Rockefellar, Nelson, 3
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 47-48
Russell, Francis:

Sayre, Francis, 1
Secretaries of State and the Office of Public Affairs, 13-16
Spain, 4
Stalin, Joseph, 47
State Department:

• • defense perimeter speech of, 11-13
  • background of, 1-3
    as a speaker, 14-15, 20-21
  • Bulletin, 41
    Eastern European Affairs Office of, 44
    Economic Office of, 43
    Historical Policy Research Division of, 5-6, 40, 41
    Inter American Affairs Office of, 3
    Middle East Affairs Office of the State Department, 43
    Public Affairs Office of, 3, 5, 7-8, 13-15, 16-17, 18, 29-30, 40, 41
    and public relations, 8-9
• State, War, and Navy Coordinating Committee, 43
  Sweden, 4
  Switzerland, 4

  Thompson, Llewellyn, 43-44
  Truman, Harry S., 11, 27, 33, 42-43
  Truman Doctrine, 23, 42-47
  Turkey, 27, 42, 43, 45, 46
  Twentieth Century Fund, 10