The 1949 inaugural was the first to be broadcast on television, bringing 10 million more viewers than were present—the largest number of people who had ever watched any single event to that point in history. As David McCullough points out, more people would see Harry Truman take his oath of office that day than had witnessed all of his predecessors combined.
Point Four was widely acclaimed. The Washington Post called it a “Fair Deal” plan for the world. “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln…could have applauded the principles upon which he dealt,” enthused The New York Times.
A bureaucratic rearguard action by the State Department and intransigence in Congress delayed Point Four’s implementation. When it finally became a reality in June 1950, it was badly underfunded. Nevertheless, by the time Truman left office in January 1953, 2,445 U.S. technicians were implementing the program in thirty-five countries, and 2,862 specialists had been sent from those countries primarily to the United States for training. “In its immediate and long-range effects,” Truman wrote in his 1956 memoirs, “Point Four provided the strongest antidote to Communism that has so far been put into practice.”
Ben Hardy left the State Department and joined the newly created Technical Cooperation Administration as its chief information officer. He was traveling with Dr. Henry Bennett, the agency’s first administrator, and other officials in December 1953 when their plane crashed in Iran. All aboard were killed. Hardy was forty-five.
Truman’s first full term brought the end of the Clifford-Elsey team. After the inauguration, Elsey left the White House for six months to return to active naval duty to help Samuel Eliot Morison write a history of World War II naval operations. Clifford was contemplating a departure as well, making a government salary that was less than half of what he had been earning before the war. He wanted to be U.S. Attorney General, and turned down an offer to become Under Secretary of State. During the summer, Truman asked if he had any interest in the Supreme Court. Clifford said that he did not.
Stephen Spingarn, who replaced Elsey as Clifford’s assistant, thought that even though he was at the White House, Clifford already had plans to leave. “As far as I could see, if he was concentrating on White House matters (and I was his only professional assistant), I never saw it,” Spingarn later said. “It is true that he sat in on the last rounds of the speech conferences and things like that, but that didn’t amount to much.” By the time Elsey returned to the White House in August 1949, Charles Murphy was substantially in charge of the speechwriting operation.
When he returned, Elsey did so as an administrative assistant, reporting directly to Truman. “Clifford’s interest in my promotion was not entirely altruistic,” Elsey later wrote. “He would [soon] set himself up in law practice in Washington, and he would count on me to help him stay in touch with White House goings-on. The higher my status, the better I could do so. In the remaining years of the administration, we kept in close contact, closer than would today be considered proper.”
Clifford left at the end of January 1950. “It would be difficult to overstate the value of the services which you have rendered your country,” Truman wrote him. But Clifford took special delight that Truman had noticed his judicial roots. “In the marshaling and presentation of facts your method reflected your days before the jury. Quick in the detection of spurious evidence and alert always in detecting the fallacious arguments of your opponents, your final opinions were always the models of brevity and accuracy as well as clarity and strength.”
Clifford returned to private practice, keeping a hand in Democratic politics and becoming one of the éminences grises of Washington. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson appointed him Secretary of Defense, where he enlisted Elsey to join him. His career was tainted in the 1990s when he was involved in the scandal surrounding the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). He died in 1998 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Murphy took over as special counsel. He cut a starkly different figure from the dashing Clifford. Murphy’s shy-seeming, self-effacing demeanor tended to make the press—and historians—understate his importance. “For ease of turning out a speech, ability to craft one on his own, Charlie Murphy was probably the best,” Elsey said. “And poor Charlie has never gotten the proper credit for his contributions to the Truman administration…. Charlie didn’t leave a paper trail.”
When Murphy died in 1983, James Sundquist, who contributed to the 1947 State of the Union and then joined the White House staff full time in the administration’s last year, wrote that Murphy was “the pivot on which the White House turned. Murphy was not one of the president’s bourbon-drinking and poker-playing cronies; he was, rather, the man on whom Truman leaned intellectually to keep the program of his administration consistent, liberal and honest. This Murphy did by controlling the flow of words from the presidential office…. By being in charge of the words that explained the president’s program, Murphy became perforce the coordinator of program development as well.”
He expanded the Special Counsel’s office staff and did not “share Clifford’s pretense that every speech from his office was solely his own product,” Elsey later wrote. “Early in the second term Murphy had assembled a first-rate team of young assistants to whom he gave generous credit.” With a larger staff, and thus a great ability to handle the workload, Murphy was able to bring a higher level of order to the speechwriting process than Clifford achieved.
That team included Bell and Lloyd—both veterans of the 1948 campaign; Kenneth Hechler, a Princeton professor who would take Elsey’s role as producer of speech outlines in the 1950 and 1952 whistle-stop tours; and Richard Neustadt, a political scientist who also transferred from the Bureau of the Budget staff. The group went on to impressive careers. Murphy became an under secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson Departments of Agriculture and later chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board; Bell became Kennedy’s budget director; Neustadt became a Harvard professor and the nation’s preeminent scholar of presidential power.
At around 4 am local time on the rainy morning of Sunday, June 25, 1950, the North Korean military started shelling South Korean army positions south of the 38th parallel. Infantry and armor soon followed. Truman quickly moved to aid the South Korean military. By the end of the month, General Douglas MacArthur had permission to deploy ground forces to the Korean peninsula.
Although he made a series of short statements about the Korean conflict, Truman did not address the nation until Wednesday, July 19, twenty-five days after it had begun. Murphy and Elsey started working on the speech on Monday, and, with help from Bell and others, had four drafts done by four o’clock on the day of the speech. Truman met with the writers and other senior staff in the Cabinet Room and read it through slowly, pausing at the end of each page to take comments and suggestions, but never reading it through without stopping.
Just before they finished freezing the speech, a message from MacArthur arrived. Elsey thought that word from the general would add drama to the address and, with Truman’s permission, had sent him a draft via the White House Signal Center. They found a portion of MacArthur’s reply to quote and inserted it. “That’s a darn good speech,” Truman said at the end, though Elsey doubted, given how he had read it, whether he could really tell.
“This attack has made it clear, beyond all doubt, that the international Communist movement is willing to use armed invasion to conquer independent nations,” Truman told the nation.
An act of aggression such as this creates a very real danger to the security of all free nations. The attack upon Korea was an outright breach of the peace and a violation of the Charter of the United Nations. By their actions in Korea, Communist leaders have demonstrated their contempt for the basic moral principles on which the United Nations is founded. This is a direct challenge to the efforts of the free nations to build the kind of world in which men can live in freedom and peace. This challenge has been presented squarely. We must meet it squarely.
Relations between the general and the president deteriorated over the following months as MacArthur issued his own foreign policy statements, including threatening to attack China. His repeated defiance finally prompted Truman to action in early April 1951. “So the staff won’t have to read it in the papers, I’m going to tell you now that I fired MacArthur yesterday,” Truman told his aides on the morning of April 10. “Frank Pace [the secretary of the army] is in Japan or Korea—I don’t know exactly where—he is going to tell him. I’d kind of like to announce it myself.”
What Truman did not know was that the order had been slow reaching Pace, which in turn delayed MacArthur hearing the news. Rumors shot around Washington that night that the Chicago Tribune would report that the general was about to resign, prompting Truman to wire MacArthur directly firing him and to order White House press secretary Joe Short to announce the resignation to the press at 1 am. “I wasn’t going to let the SOB resign on me,” Truman told Elsey the next day. “I wanted to fire him.”
Murphy and the speechwriters worked all day April 11 on a radio address for an unpopular president—his approval rating in the 20s—to explain why he had sacked a widely admired general. Truman and his staff finished freezing the 10:30 pm speech shortly before ten. Truman went into correspondence secretary William Hassett’s office, moved some books off his sofa, curled up, and took a short nap, rising in time to address the nation.
At 10:23 pm, presidential assistant Averell Harriman, a former ambassador to Russia and to Great Britain, and a foreign policy expert, asked Elsey if there was any mention in the speech of MacArthur’s replacement, General Matthew Ridgway. There was not. The two men quickly wrote a sentence and at 10:26 walked it into the Oval Office. Elsey paper-clipped the handwritten insert to the speech.
The speech mostly focused on the reasons for the Korean conflict. The president mentioned MacArthur only at the end:
I believe that we must try to limit the war to Korea for these vital reasons: to make sure that the precious lives of our fighting men are not wasted; to see that the security of our country and the free world is not needlessly jeopardized; and to prevent a third world war. A number of events have made it evident that General MacArthur did not agree with that policy. I have therefore considered it essential to relieve General MacArthur so that there would be no doubt or confusion as to the real purpose and aim of our policy.
The MacArthur incident had an unexpected side effect for Elsey. A little over a week after Truman fired the general, he ordered Elsey to leak to The New York Times confidential minutes of a meeting between the president and the general the previous October at Wake Island. This set Elsey afoul of Joe Short, who neither forgot nor forgave. For months he quietly sniped at Elsey until the longtime aide was on the verge being reassigned to active duty as naval historian in the Mediterranean. Instead, Elsey joined the staff of Averell Harriman in the Mutual Security Agency. After the Truman presidency ended, he joined the Red Cross. Except for a stint with Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford at the end of the Johnson administration, Elsey worked for the relief organization until retiring in 1990.
In June 1951, Kenneth Hechler was reporting to Truman on how the president had looked giving a speech on television. When he mentioned that the audience could see the president turning the pages of address, Truman mused that he had heard about a gadget that might be of use: “Say, I understand that the president of CBS has a new thing called a ‘TelePrompter’ which will bear some looking into.” This was in keeping with Murphy’s ongoing desire to improve Truman’s delivery, including, as he put it in a September 1950 memorandum to Truman, using “improvements in the mechanical arrangements” for speeches. “Particularly, we should explore thoroughly the possibilities of reading from a screen for television purposes.” But Truman never used the machine—it was not his style. “He was a little suspicious of any gimmick that made it appear that he was faking his sincerity of communication,” Hechler later noted.
On January 19, 1953, as the administration was closing down, someone jokingly asked Hechler if he was going to come into work the next day. “Sure, why not?” Hechler said. So on the day that Dwight D. Eisenhower became the thirty-fourth president of the United States, Hechler went to his office. The officials of the new administration were too busy slapping each other—and him—on the back to question who he was or what he did.
When the White House personnel director circulated a memorandum restricting access to the White House mess, Hechler’s name appeared on the cleared list, so he kept eating there until one day, sitting at the common staff table, someone asked who he worked for. The special counsel, Hechler replied—attracting the attention of a gentleman sitting at the end of the table. “I’m the special counsel,” he said. “What do you do for me?”
Hechler, who would go on to serve nine terms in Congress and sixteen years as secretary of state of West Virginia, had been at the White House for long enough that he could not be fired without cause—and being a Democrat was not a sufficient cause. Finally after several more weeks he received a note telling him that his services were no longer required—he had “completed” his “assignment.”
THREE
“Sometimes You Sure
Get Tired of All This
Clackety-Clack”
MARCH 4, 1953
The news electrified and quickly obsessed official Washington. “Stalin Gravely Ill After a Stroke; Partly Paralyzed and Unconscious; Moscow Discloses Concern for Him,” The New York Times’s triple-decker headline read. Word the following day that the Soviet leader had succumbed spurred a flurry of activity and speculation. Stalin’s death represented an opportunity: The Cold War was less than a decade old and his passing threw it into flux. Here was a chance to end the standoff before it became a hot war.
President Dwight Eisenhower convened his cabinet two days later, a meeting that speechwriter Emmet Hughes, listening from the staff seats, found “impossible to describe as inspiring.”
Eisenhower himself summarized the problem his government faced. “Ever since 1946, I know that all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies, and what we, as a nation, should do about it,” Ike said. “Well, he’s dead. And you can turn the files of our government inside out—in vain—looking for any plans laid. We have no plan. We’re not even sure what difference his death makes.”
One man trying to sort it out was C. D. Jackson, the president’s top assistant for Cold War planning. A once-and-future Time reporter, Jackson had, along with Hughes and others, worked on Eisenhower’s campaign speeches. Cloistered in the Commodore Hotel in New York City, they had fired drafts off to the candidate’s train. Now in the White House Jackson worked with the State and Defense departments through the Psychological Strategy Board to plan Cold War strategy.
Eisenhower had brought Jackson into the administration in part as a counterbalance to the staid, immovable Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. “Granted that Dulles was a man of great moral force and conviction, he was not endowed with the creative genius that produces bold, new ideas to gain hitherto unattainable policy goals,” White House chief of staff Sherman Adams later wrote. Ike hoped that Jackson might provide that spark.
Under Jackson’s guidance, the board was working up a post-Stalin plan meant to capitalize on the uncertainty the dictator’s death would bring in the Soviet bloc. An Eisenhower speech was its keystone. The wisdom of such an address was the subject of much debate within the administration. “It is difficult to see any great advantage in the present situation in a public message or speech by the President,” Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, Eisenhower’s nominee to be ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote to Emmet Hughes four days after Stalin’s death.
As Hughes summarized in a memorandum to Eisenhower the next day, March 10, “All this resolves itself into a clear, simple conflict between two propositions: A. Presented a unique opportunity to exploit the deep and inherent weaknesses of the Soviet sys
tem, we cannot afford to fail to act affirmatively and quickly. B. Presented with a situation of unknown potentialities, we can well afford to give the internal stresses of the Soviet system time to become acute—and, in the meanwhile, nothing is better calculated to increase Soviet nervous strain than studied American silence.”
Hughes leaned initially in the direction of inaction—there was little point, he believed, in saying something just for its own sake. He wished to avoid “verbal improvisation, in lieu of serious national policy.” He knew that in this case the policy and the speech were inexorably linked—and that as the speechwriter, he was in a unique position to exercise influence at that nexus. “I now came to appreciate again the curiously strategic value of being the source of presidential words that must be persuaded, somehow, to flow,” Hughes later wrote. “I resisted and evaded all exhortations to write some compelling rhetoric for the occasion.”
Hughes, thirty-two, had joined the White House staff only reluctantly and with an understanding that his tenure would be brief. “Emmet was a loner. He wanted to do everything himself,” recalled Robert Kieve, his assistant. “And he did it rather brilliantly.” Quick-witted, ironic, and impatient, Hughes was a tall, lean, sharp-featured man, with dark hair. A former editor of Life, one friend recalled him as “a dashing fellow.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 8
