Truman and his staff tried various tricks to improve his delivery. He would read the speech out loud in the Cabinet Room or residence, record it, and then listen with Rosenman, radio adviser Leonard Reinsch, and other aides. This helped him slow down the pace. His secretary, Rose Conway, typed the speeches with natural pauses at the end of lines so that they would coincide with his eyes sweeping back to the start of the next. She left the bottom third of the page blank so that Truman would not have to tilt his head too far down to keep reading. And because she put relatively little of the speech on any one page, he had to turn them often, which also slowed him.
Truman did not always want to slow down. During the 1944 campaign, Reinsch had visited Truman in Independence and brought the transcript of a fifty-five-minute speech the senator had so rushed that parts of it were entirely unintelligible. When Reinsch asked why he had spoken so quickly, Truman replied: “Well, I didn’t think it was very interesting and I wanted to get it over with.” He had not cut the speech, he added, because everyone who had worked on it thought their contributions important and he did not want to hurt their feelings.
Rosenman approached Truman again about leaving in November 1945. He was pretty well broke, he told the president, and had to finally return to private practice in New York. This time Truman released him, allowing him to leave on February 1, 1946, on condition that he return when needed. Truman appealed to him that no one could take his place, but Rosenman replied, “Mr. President, you have a fine replacement sitting right here in the White House, and he even happens to be from Missouri. His name is Clifford.” The assistant naval aide was too young and inexperienced to be special counsel, Truman replied. When he officially announced Rosenman’s departure, he stated that with the end of the war there was no longer a need for a White House special counsel.
After Rosenman’s departure, George Elsey noted to himself: “Comes the deluge, Lord knows who will have brains then. There is no one of ability near the President with a positive program, or even with any ideas on economic matters.”
The first spring after World War II thawed labor problems that had been frozen by conflict. At the end of March 1946, 400,000 coal miners went on strike. And although Truman quickly moved to federalize the mines, bringing the workers back, 164,000 of them stayed away from their jobs. The situation reached a critical point on May 23, when the rail workers also struck. In the mid-1940s, the United States literally ran on coal and rails. More than half of industrial energy came from coal, as well as 62 percent of the nation’s electrical power. Virtually all the railroads ran on coal—and they were the dominant medium of interstate commerce and travel. When the rail workers walked out, they ground the country to a halt. Of 24,000 freight trains that had been scheduled to run, fewer than 300 did. Roughly 175,000 men and women were scheduled to travel by rail, yet only around 100 could do so. Commuters were stranded across the country—in Washington, D.C., enterprising cab drivers charged $150 to drive to Boston and $100 for a trip to Atlanta, more than six hundred miles away.
Truman fumed. With the nation struggling to regain a peacetime footing, this was no time for labor unions or anyone else to put their own financial interests over the country’s. Deciding to draft the rail workers into the armed forces, he called a cabinet meeting for the next day, Friday, May 24. He would address the nation on Friday evening and the Congress on Saturday to explain his move.
Truman handwrote his remarks to the nation over seven pages, his anger controlling the pen: Labor leaders had lied to him. Congress was “weak-kneed” and lacked “intestinal fortitude.” The time had come for vilification and misrepresentation of government to end. A World War I combat veteran himself, he called upon “you men who fought the battles to save the nation just as I did twenty-five years ago,” to help him “eliminate” the major labor leaders, as well as the “Russian Senators and Representatives and really make this a government of, by and for the people,” he wrote in his jagged scrawl, assuring that he had no more regard for “the Wall Street crowd” than he did for the labor union leaders. He concluded: “Let us give the country back to the people. Let’s put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors, make our own country safe for democracy, tell the Russians where to get off and make the United Nations work. Come on boys, let’s do the job.”
Hang a few traitors. Do the job indeed.
When Clifford first saw the proposed speech, he worried that the president had spun “perilously out of control.” As Truman’s biographer David McCullough later wrote: “It was as though somewhere deep within this normally fair-minded, self-controlled, naturally warm-hearted man a raw, ugly, old native strain persisted like the cry of a frontier lynch mob, and had to be released.” Truman likely never meant for the speech to be delivered. Like FDR before him, he periodically indulged in what he called “long-hand spasms” where he committed his raw emotions to paper safe in the knowledge that his most trusted aides would intercept the verbal salvos before they reached public ears.*
Truman gave the draft to Ross, who then met with the president privately in the Oval Office and quickly convinced him that such a speech would backfire. They decided to have Clifford, who had replaced Vardaman as naval aide in April, rewrite it. He got the assignment at 5 pm. The speech was scheduled to be delivered at 10 pm.
For Clifford, it was a decisive moment. In ten short months in the White House, he had been working his way into Truman’s inner circle, doing various jobs for the president including shepherding Vardaman’s nomination to the Federal Reserve through the Senate. Truman had come not only to appreciate the quality of Clifford’s work and the incisiveness of his advice, but, perhaps more important, designated him to organize his regular poker games. After a short time, Clifford was even invited to play. He tackled it characteristically: He bought and studied a book on poker, eventually becoming a regular winner.
For Truman’s speech to the nation regarding the labor crises, Clifford huddled in the Cabinet Room with Rosenman, who had been summoned from New York; John Steelman, who had been the point man on the labor negotiations; Ross and Snyder. With two hours to go before airtime, they had assembled a six-page draft.
His rage having cooled, Truman rewrote a first sentence describing the rail strike as “the greatest crisis in this country since Pearl Harbor.”* But the speech retained some of the tough tone from his earlier draft: “The crisis of Pearl Harbor was the result of action by a foreign enemy,” Truman told the nation that night. “The crisis tonight is caused by a group of men within our own country who place their private interests above the welfare of the nation.” Clifford later confessed to embarrassment over the tone but the president liked it.
Clifford and company missed the 10 pm deadline for a final draft: Rose Conway was still typing the speech when Truman uttered “My fellow countrymen” to start the broadcast. The last page was tucked in front of him as he got about two thirds of the way through the address. He called for an end to the strike by 4 pm the following day or he would mobilize the army and do what was necessary to end the impasse. He held in reserve the possibility of drafting the workers into the armed forces.
Clifford stayed up most of the night with Rosenman working up a draft of the speech to the joint session of Congress. The next day, the two men revised the draft as Steelman continued negotiations with the labor leaders at the Statler Hotel. An hour before the speech, Steelman called to report that a deal was close—possibly before Truman’s address. Clifford and Rosenman wrote a few softer, alternate paragraphs just in case. But nothing was complete when Truman had to leave for the Hill and, alternate language in hand, Clifford ran to catch his car.
Shortly after 4 pm, wearing a dark blue summer suit and white shirt, a grim-faced Truman strode into the House chamber, receiving the most raucous greeting he had gotten there in his short presidency. As he started to speak, Clifford was in House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office near the House floor, on the phone with Steelman: a preliminary settlement h
ad been reached, but it was still being typed up.
In the chamber, Truman reach the crux of his speech: He wanted emergency legislation that would authorize him to draft the striking workers into the armed forces. The assembled legislators—whom days earlier Truman had angrily called “Russian”—roared their approval for twenty-three seconds, long enough for Secretary of the Senate Les Biffle to dart in and hand Truman a slip of red paper, a note from Clifford.
“Word has just been received that the railroad strike has been settled, on terms proposed by the President,” Truman said in his monotone. This time the applause lasted for thirty-two seconds and included whoops and hollers. The moment was so dramatic that at least one senator—Wayne Morse, a Republican from Oregon—publicly charged that it had been staged. Typically, after announcing that the strike had been settled, Truman drove right back into his text, motoring through as if nothing had happened. The House and Senate quickly passed his legislation.
Now the president would rectify a mistake. He summoned Captain Clifford to the Oval Office in early June and told him that it was time to return to civilian life—as White House special counsel. He announced the appointment at his press conference on June 27, not only resurrecting the position but formalizing Clifford’s rise as one of his most important aides. In turn, Clifford’s most trusted assistant was George Elsey. The pair had met in the Map Room on Clifford’s first day in the White House. They would remain close associates for the next two and a half decades.
Clifford and Elsey had bonded quickly and spoke frankly about the Truman White House staff. “There is no policy-making body,” Clifford said, amazed and appalled by the haphazardness of it all. “It’s just a collection of not-too-well-informed men, each one intent on his own job.”
“We used to call George Elsey ‘the man who did Clark Clifford’s thinking for him,’” said Steve Spingarn, who would replace Elsey as Clifford’s assistant in 1949. Indeed, while Clifford, who was always conscious of his image and assiduously cultivated the press, garnered much of the credit as Truman’s speechwriter, he often acted as more of an editor than drafter, and on several notable occasions attached his name to what was substantially others’ work. “He did not do a great deal of writing,” his successor as special counsel, Charles Murphy, later said. “Clark Clifford is an excellent salesman of other men’s ideas, but he’s not an original thinker,” Spingarn added.
Clifford and Elsey were Truman’s key speechwriting team for the remainder of Clifford’s White House tenure—though their duties were hardly limited to ghostwriting. As Clifford was Truman’s top adviser on political and policy-related matters, they got into everything. Elsey’s body of work ranged from redesigning the presidential seal* to surveying U.S. relations with the Soviet Union.
“President Truman’s speeches and messages and the like were written not by ‘writers,’ but by lawyers and economists and public administration types who had picked up along the way a skill as generalists in government,” Richard Neustadt, a second-term speechwriter, noted later. “This may not have meant the highest literary quality for Truman’s public papers, but it certainly meant sensitive awareness of their potential as vehicles for making or influencing policy.”
There were drawbacks, especially regarding literary quality. Rosenman had written the 1946 State of the Union Address solo. Clifford and Elsey labored to produce the message for 1947. “Three years in the Map Room—that hadn’t educated me to do political speeches for the president,” Elsey said with a laugh. Nor did Clifford make any bones about having literary talent: “I wrote slowly and laboriously in longhand, using a soft pencil, erasing and revising constantly,” he recalled in his memoirs.
Truman himself was pleased with the speech, the first State of the Union to be televised.* His journal entry that evening said: “Read my annual message. It was good if I do say so myself. Clark Clifford did most of the work. He’s a nice boy and will go places.”
On February 21, 1947, the British government formally notified the United States that it could no longer afford to provide economic aid to Greece and Turkey, two countries that the United States and Britain had already determined were keys to preventing a Soviet tide from sweeping out of occupied Eastern Europe into the fragile but still free countries of Western Europe. If the two nations were going to hold, it would have to be with generous aid from the United States.
Truman consulted with congressional leaders and his own top aides. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the influential president pro tem of the Senate and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Truman that he would support a massive foreign aid plan, provided that the president put the case in the proper context—explaining in stark terms the link between these discrete foreign aid cases and the broader global struggle that was unfolding against Soviet aggression. Truman moved decisively. He was willing, he told Clifford, to “lay it on the line” with the American people.
In July 1946, Truman had told Clifford to compile a list of the treaties and agreements that the Soviet Union had broken over the years. Clifford delegated the job to Elsey, who had more than passing familiarity with the issue because of his Map Room duties. He accompanied Truman on weekends on the presidential yacht Williamsburg, handling classified cables and reports for him. Reading the classified traffic, Elsey noted with rising alarm both aggressive Soviet actions and their apparent failure to make a strong impression upon the president. “I, for one, am afraid that Mr. Truman is not yet fully conscious of the aggressions the Soviet Union has in mind,” Elsey noted to himself on March 10, 1946. “He keeps brushing aside reports on the events in Eastern Europe & the Near East & Asia with a phrase like ‘That’s not so good, is it?’ and then he’s on to the next matter.”
Elsey resolved to provide more than a mere list of broken agreements. He spent the summer canvassing senior officials and produced a devastating eighty-one-page case against the Soviets. “The gravest problem facing the United States today is that of American relations with the Soviet Union,” the report began. “The solution of that problem may determine whether or not there will be a third World War. Soviet leaders appear to be conducting their nation on a course of aggrandizement designed to lead to eventual world domination by the U.S.S.R.”
Clifford wrote a cover letter and passed the report on to the president as “a report by the Special Counsel” (Elsey was not mentioned). Truman called him at seven o’clock the following morning. “Powerful stuff,” he said, asking that Clifford immediately bring him all existing copies, which he planned to lock up. “It is very valuable to me—but if it leaked it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin,” Truman told his aide. “We’d have the most serious situation on our hands that has yet occurred in my administration.”
The report disappeared for more than two decades, but its effects were felt both in a hardening of Truman’s attitude toward the Soviets and in Elsey and Clifford’s familiarity with the issues surrounding the European crisis.*
A heavy-flaked, wet snow covered Washington on the evening of Saturday, March 1, 1947, eight days after the British had warned of the impending problem. In the State Department, Deputy Secretary of State Dean Acheson oversaw production of initial drafts of what would come to be known as the Truman Doctrine speech, with public affairs officer Joseph Jones writing three drafts, the last of which was sent to Clifford on Friday, March 7, the day that Truman decided that he would give a speech. His staff did not unanimously agree: That day Elsey had sent Clifford a letter arguing that this was not “the occasion for the ‘All-out’ speech.” The message to Congress should be focused, he wrote, because the Soviets had not given an explicit pretext for such a confrontational message, because the public was not ready for such a stunning declaration, and because the administration would need more time to properly write the address. But Clifford, like Truman, thought that the moment had come to make the case. There were, he thought, always opportunities for delay i
n crises. “This speech must be the opening gun in a campaign to bring people to the realization that the war isn’t over by any means,” he told Elsey, who climbed on board.
Truman thought the State draft too wordy. Clifford agreed. These complaints were not surprising. Prose from the cabinet departments tended to be bureaucratic and cautious, and the State Department compounded these problems with overly flowery rhetoric—the kind particularly unsuited to a president from the Midwest who valued direct simplicity in his speeches.
Truman believed that the idea behind a speech was to say what you had to as simply as you could. Thanks to Clifford’s efforts, and an increasing willingness on the part of Truman to assert himself over his own speeches, a distinct rhetorical style was starting to emerge. As Truman’s White House tenure went on, speechwriters translated their prose into what they called “Missouri English”—plain, short, direct, sentences that suited his style. “Subjunctives, passives, polysyllabic words, foreign phrases, lengthy sentences and a unique language called ‘State Departmentese’ received a brutal blue penciling,” Kenneth Hechler, a second-term ghost, noted later. “Anything that sounded like a diplomatic communiqué or an after-action report of military operations was immediately tossed out.”
Once the writers had a sufficiently polished product to show the president he would make comments and edits, and they would eventually circulate it to the cabinet departments. Finally a “freezing session” would convene in the Cabinet Room, typically attended by the special counsel and any speechwriters involved, along with the press secretary, and administration officials with knowledge of the subject matter. Truman would read the speech aloud—not as if he were delivering it, but conversationally, to see how it struck his ear. Occasionally he asked Clifford to read it aloud, so that he could hear how it sounded. He would catch phraseology that might trip him up.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 5
