“What impressed me were the comments he made as he went along, alluding to certain historical references,” Milton Kayle, another second-term speechwriter, recalled. “There was depth of understanding. It may have been the first time he saw the speech and people were theoretically putting words in his mouth, but they were putting words in his mouth only with his absolute and complete understanding of what he was saying.”
For the Truman Doctrine speech, Clifford and Elsey met with Jones and Carl Hummelsine, the director of the State Department’s executive secretariat on Saturday, March 8, four days before the speech was to be given, to suggest rewrites. The message needed to be restructured, Clifford said; the draft did not build toward a logical conclusion. He made specific suggestions as well: speaking from his own experience supervising logistics at the close of the war, Clifford suggested mentioning that U.S. administrators would closely supervise the funds to make sure none would be lost to graft. The resulting paragraph prompted one of only three interruptions for applause during Truman’s speech.
Clifford jotted notes in his neat writing for the meeting with Jones. He listed several points to cover, including “Totalitarian regimes are born where people’s hope dies, (Continuation of belief in democracy).” It presaged the final speech: “The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died.” Another passage was closer to full-born in his notes, which read: “It is a grim job with nothing to recommend it except that the alternative is grimer [sic].” Four days later, Truman declared: “This is a serious course upon which we embark. I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious.”
The revised State draft arrived at Clifford’s office the next morning, Sunday, March 9, at nine thirty. A couple of dozen steps from the Oval, it was the nicest staff office in the West Wing (Rosenman had been a previous occupant), complete with its own fireplace and, more important, its own bathroom. Elsey and Clifford spent the rest of that Sunday sequestered there, trying to summon a Trumanesque talk from the wooden and dense State language. They made, by Clifford’s count, more than a hundred changes to the speech.*
By Monday morning, March 10, Clifford and Elsey both still thought that the speech, the most important of Truman’s presidency, had a hole—it still lacked a cogent, concise statement of principles. “I was worried by the absence of what would today be called a ‘sound bite,’” Elsey later wrote. “Where were the two or three sentences that would convey the essence of the president’s policy? Where were the highly quotable words that the press and the public would grasp at once and know that this was a policy that went far beyond $400 million of assistance for Greece and Turkey?”
He focused on a paragraph that Acheson had already rewritten once. “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to give support to free peoples who are attempting to resist subjugation by armed minorities or outside forces,” the State draft read. “It is essential to our security that we assist free peoples to work out their own destiny in their own way, and our help must be primarily in the form of that economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.”
Elsey sensed that what he was looking for was buried in this verbiage. He needed to simplify it and make it stand out. Using “I believe” as a keystone, he created what he and Clifford called “the credo”—and what history knows as the Truman Doctrine.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
Planning for the 1948 political campaign began in earnest in November 1947. Clifford received a thirty-four-page election analysis from James Rowe, an FDR White House aide who argued that Truman could win by running an aggressively liberal campaign. Rowe was a law partner of Tommy Corcoran, the Roosevelt aide who had put off so many Democratic leaders—including Truman (whose dislike for the Cork was heightened by information FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent the president from a tap on Corcoran’s phone). Rowe’s association with Corcoran had earned him a share of Truman’s dislike as well, so Clifford updated and polished the document and then passed it on to Truman in November under his own name.
“The basic premise of this memorandum—that the Democratic Party is an unhappy alliance of Southern conservatives, Western progressive and Big City labor—is very trite,” Clifford wrote. “But it is also very true. And it is equally true that the success or failure of the Democratic leadership can be precisely measured by its ability to lead enough members of these three misfit groups to the polls on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, 1948.”
Truman and his staff decided to make the 1948 State of the Union speech the keynote to his campaign. It “must be controversial as Hell, must state the issues of the election, must draw the line sharply between Republicans and Democrats,” Elsey argued to Clifford in a memorandum in late 1947.
Another writer joined the effort for the 1948 State of the Union: Charles Murphy, a new administrative assistant. Murphy—“Murph” to Truman—was a soft-spoken North Carolinian, who had first gotten to know the president while working as a legislative aide in the Senate Counsel’s office. It was Murphy who, at Truman’s request, had drawn up the legislation that created the senator’s panel to investigate waste and fraud during the war.
Balding and bespectacled—he “looks and acts like an amiable dentist,” Spingarn later said—Murphy’s long service on the Hill had left him with a judicious mind and somewhat diffident temperament. But it had prepared him well for speechwriting: The Senate Counsel’s office takes legislative ideas and puts them into the legal wording needed for an actual bill. The requirements were less eloquence than the ability to translate mass amounts of data into clear prose. As Clifford once had, Murphy figured out that special counsel was the most interesting job in the White House. “It was the kind of work I wanted to do, and so I went and asked if I could help, and he said he would be glad to have me,” Murphy recalled.
Murphy and Elsey toiled over a combative State of the Union draft—and Truman and Clifford both liked it. “Congress meets—Too bad too,” Truman wrote in his diary on January 6, the day before the speech. “They’ll do nothing but wrangle, pull phony investigations and generally upset the affairs of the Nation. I’m to address them soon. They won’t like the address either.” Indeed, Truman started by saying that on such an occasion Congress and the president should focus “not upon party but upon the country; not upon things which divide us but upon those which bind us together”—and then went on to give a campaign kickoff address that was aimed at reassembling the New Deal coalition and laid out his reelection platform.
It was, one White House intimate told Time, “the Bible for the Democratic Party.” And as predicted, Congress did not like it. In forty-three minutes, Republicans in the crowd applauded twice. But Truman was so pleased with the speech that afterwards he invited Elsey and some others into the Oval Office, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out bottles of scotch and bourbon. Together they drank to “Success in ’48!”
Despite the fighting spirit, Truman had delivered the State of the Union in his usual lifeless Missouri twang. Truman simply could not read a speech with passion or force. Clifford, Murphy, and Ross continued to wrestle with the problem of bringing out the interesting, informal Truman they knew in private but who disappeared behind the bland monotony that a written speech produced. In October 1947 Clifford had tried to have Truman read off giant cue cards, but his poor eyesight scuttled the idea.
Murphy now came up with the idea of having the president speak from an outline. The first try
came on the evening of April 17, when Truman addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors in a speech broadcast nationwide. The president droned through a prepared text on inflation that, as one ally noted, had “neither meat nor juices nor votes.” The audience fidgeted. But after the broadcast portion of the speech ended, Truman kept talking, giving a twenty-minute, off-the-record, off-the-cuff talk about U.S.-Soviet relations. It was as if two Trumans had spoken. “He was suddenly a very interesting man of great candor who discussed the problems of American leadership with men as neighbors,” his ally and biographer Jonathan Daniels recalled. “He spoke the language of them all out of traditions common to them all.” The result, Truman recorded in his memoirs, was the most enthusiastic applause he had ever received from a predominately Republican crowd.
After a successful repeat performance on May 1 before the National Health Assembly, Clifford, Murphy, and Ross convinced the president to use the new technique in an early afternoon speech before the National Conference on Family Life—a speech that would be broadcast nationally. “The audience gave me a most cordial reception,” Truman recorded in his diary afterward. “I hope the radio and television audiences were half as well pleased. I may have to become an ‘orator.’ I heard a definition of an orator once—‘He is an honest man who can communicate his views and make others believe he is right.’ Wish I could do that.”
He could. “Returns from the radio on the family life speech are very satisfactory,” he wrote the next day. “Look as if I’m stuck for ‘off the cuff’ radio speeches. It means a lot of hard work, and the head of 64 doesn’t work as well as it did at 24.”
The final piece of the 1948 campaign plan came in early June, when Truman took a fifteen-day train trip to California, where he was scheduled to give the commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley. He traveled across the country and back by train, making five major speeches and around forty minor ones—all ostensibly non-political addresses savaging what he started calling “the good-for-nothing, do nothing, Republican Eightieth Congress.”
On June 11, Senator Robert A. Taft, speaking at the Union League Club in Philadelphia, assailed Truman for “black-guarding Congress at whistle-stops all across the country.” The Ohio Republican should have known better—“whistle-stop” implied that a town was too small to merit a regular train stop (the phrase derived from the fact that when a stop was required at such a station, the conductor would alert the engineer by pulling a signal cord and the engineer would reply with two toots of the train’s whistle).
The Democratic National Committee pounced on the blunder, cabling the mayors of the towns through which the presidential expedition had passed, asking for their reactions. “Must have the wrong city,” the mayor of Eugene, Oregon, replied. “Very poor taste,” came the answer from Gary, Indiana. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Truman pronounced the City of Angels to be the biggest whistle-stop of them all. Taft had introduced a new phrase to the American political lexicon.
There were kinks in the Truman operation. A foul-up in Nebraska left 8,000 empty seats at a major address in a 10,000-seat venue. In the small hamlet of Carey, Idaho, Truman spoke movingly, dedicating the Willa Coates Airport, praising the young man for whom it was named for giving up his life for his country…only to have Coates’s grieving mother explain that Willa was a girl who had perished in a civilian air crash. Then there was the “old Joe” gaffe, the most damaging of all. Speaking from the rear platform of his train in Eugene, Truman waxed sentimental about Soviet leader Stalin. “I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow,” he said, stunning both reporters and aides.
The mistakes drove home that the off-the-cuff style worked, but only with sufficient preparation. Detailed outlined remarks were required to prevent Truman from either meandering into verbal mine fields or simply making stupid mistakes. But all the while, the crowds grew. Truman’s new style—informal, irreverent, and entertaining—was a hit.
The president remained far behind in the polls. A sense of impending doom accompanied the Democrats to Philadelphia for their nominating convention in mid-July. “As the convention met, the depressing feeling of a coming defeat overhung the hall,” Rosenman later recalled. The day the convention opened, The New York Times ran a piece capturing the mood of the town: delegates wandering deserted streets, one quoted as describing the scene as akin to a wake, while a cab driver quipped that “We got the wrong rigs for this convention. They shoulda given us hearses.” How bad was the mood? “Even Texans whispered, probably for the first time in history.”
The actual convention did little to improve the outlook. The passage of an historic civil rights plank prompted all twenty-three members of the Alabama delegation and thirteen members of the Mississippi delegation to walk out. They eventually supported Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat presidential bid.
In Washington, confusion muddled the drafting process for Truman’s acceptance speech, which he was to give on Thursday, July 15. Rosenman—quietly summoned from New York by the president—and Murphy had each prepared drafts. Truman expected the two to work with Clifford and Elsey to produce a unified speech. But with no clear guidance about who was in charge, the only thing that had been decided by Wednesday was that Truman would speak from an outline rather than a prepared text. The process did not start rolling until Murphy, back early from lunch, started sketching the address. When the others returned, they kept arguing before finally noticing that Murphy was writing. What have you got there? Rosenman asked. From there it flowed.
Almost the entire speech was put in outline form. Rosenman suggested that since the Republicans had adopted a surprisingly liberal platform at their convention in June, Truman should call them back into session to act on their campaign promises. They did, after all, control both chambers of Congress and so could enact the platform forthwith.
Truman’s train arrived in Philadelphia at 9:15 pm on the evening of his nomination. A light rain was falling. He emerged wearing a white suit and white shirt with a dark necktie, proper attire for stultifying Philadelphia heat made only worse by a Convention Hall that had no air-conditioning, but did have television lights. The heat in the arena was so bad that Truman and his running mate, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, sat by a loading ramp to get what passed for fresh air while the convention went through the nominating motions.
But the processes dragged on. And on. Four hours later—at 1:42 am—Truman was nominated. Sam Rayburn, the House Democratic leader and convention chair, advised Truman to call it an evening and give his speech the next day. But the president insisted on going ahead.
Rayburn was introducing Truman when a “plump, powdered and behatted” older woman bustled up to the podium bearing a large Liberty Bell made of flowers and seized control of the microphone. She was Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, a perennial committeewoman and the sister of a former senator from Pennsylvania. She called herself the Old Grey Mare. Her flower arrangement housed four dozen white pigeons (“doves of peace”), which had had been caged in the stifling heat all evening. The birds that were still alive were suddenly freed and, maddened by the heat, went wild. “The dignitaries on the platform cringed and shrank away like troops before a strafing attack,” Time reported. “If the President had not won his audience right away, the pigeons might have given him real competition. As [Truman] spoke, pigeons teetered on the balconies, on folds in the draperies, on overhead lights, occasionally launched on a quick flight to a more pigeonly position.”
It was two o’clock in the morning when Truman took the rostrum, for the first time addressing his party as leader elected in his own right. He got to the point: “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!” As with most of his speech that night, Truman ad-libbed that line. The new Truman was in full effect: Where his regular delivery achieved metronomic flatness, his tone now rose and fell, his pace quickened and slowed. He projected energy to his audience.
“My duty as preside
nt requires that I use every means within my power to get the laws the people need on matters of such importance and urgency,” Truman said. “I am therefore calling this Congress back into session July 26th. On the 26th day of July, which out in Missouri we call ‘Turnip Day,’ I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis—which they are saying they are for in their platform.”
Of 2,622 words Truman spoke that early morning, roughly 1,031—40 percent—appeared in the reading outline the president brought to the stage. Using a technique that he would take on the train tracks in the fall, Truman used the talking points as jumping-off points and weaved in his own Trumanisms and style. “Turnip Day” was, not surprising, a Truman ad-lib, as were his admonitions that farmers and labor unions would be “the most ungrateful people in the world” if they failed to vote Democratic.
The speech was a smashing success.
“Entire speech was superb,” William Batt, head of the Democratic National Committee’s newly minted research division, cabled to Clifford. “Best yet you were 100 percent right on off the cuff decision special session idea electrified convention.”
After a brief Labor Day swing to Michigan, the whistle-stop campaign of 1948 began in earnest on September 17. As Truman departed on a two-week swing that would take him to the west coast, Barkley and Secretary of State George C. Marshall saw him off at Washington’s Union Station. “Mow ’em down, Harry!” yelled Barkley. “I’m going to give ’em hell,” Truman shot back, smiling despite a sore throat.
The 1948 whistle-stop campaign has acquired political legend glamour, but for the participants, it was relentless and backbreaking. “I remember it as a miserable, ceaseless and exhausting treadmill,” Clifford wrote in his memoirs. He told his collaborator: “I cannot remember any fun on the train at all.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 6
