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HARRY S. TRUMAN

1945–1953

Harry S. Truman, a tidy man himself, was offended by Roosevelt’s freewheeling style as an administrator. He believed that government should be orderly, that promoting rivalries between members of an administration was disruptive, and that loyalty was the most important unifying principle for an administration. Truman’s background was also a clear contrast to Roosevelt’s. He had spent most of his adult life in Missouri organization politics and in the U.S. Senate, which limited his circle of acquaintances and his knowledge of bureaucracy.1

It was his sense of order and loyalty, and his background in the Senate, that determined the way he would conduct the business of the presidency. In the words of Richard Neustadt, who was there, “Truman’s White House rather resembled a senatorial establishment writ large.”2 Just as Truman came between Roosevelt and Eisenhower, so his vision of running the government lay halfway between the designed chaos of his predecessor and the structural purity of his successor.

On assuming office after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Truman invited the members of his inherited cabinet to remain in their posts, but it did not take long for the new president to realize that he must have his own team. Within three months he had replaced six of the ten department heads. Ultimately, twenty-four men would serve as his cabinet officers. Four of the first half-dozen appointees were or had been members of Congress (only three had been during Roosevelt’s three-plus terms). Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson, a former congressman from Kentucky, proved to be a person of exceptional perception. But Truman’s eye for talent was not always so sure. When Vinson was moved to the Supreme Court in 1946, the president replaced him with John Snyder, an orthodox banker without Vinson’s breadth, who, like Postmaster General Robert Hannegan, was an old friend from Missouri. Continuing the tradition, Hannegan doubled as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.3 Secretary of State James Byrnes and a holdover, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, had been Truman’s rivals for the vice presidential nomination in 1944. Both proved disloyal according to Truman’s definition of loyalty and were eventually asked to resign. For his second- and third-wave cabinet appointments, Truman generally sought people with long experience in the departments and even chose a career bureaucrat to supervise the Post Office. Undersecretaries and assistant secretaries such as Oscar Chapman at Interior and Charles Brannan at Agriculture were promoted to the cabinet. By and large the later appointees were an improvement in quality.4

Overall, Truman’s appointments were a blend of stunningly capable patricians, unimaginative professionals, and incompetent cronies. He generally picked superb people for the important jobs, however, and ordinary or even unqualified people for the less important ones. There were exceptions, of course. Truman never had a topflight attorney general, and Louis Johnson was one of the least successful secretaries of defense. But the key posts in foreign policy and national security went to such luminaries as George Marshall, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Robert Patterson, Robert Lovett, Will Clayton, Paul Hoffman, David Lilienthal, and Averell Harriman. Many of these appointees were part of the American aristocracy, products of élite schools and long-held wealth, who had been brought into government by the Hyde Park Roosevelt and had little in common socially with the former haberdasher from Independence. Their relations with Truman were highly formal, but it was clear that they held him in affection and were deeply devoted. The contrast with the performance of some Truman friends in the administration, those with whom he shared a comfortable intimacy, was striking. Secretary of State Marshall won the Nobel Peace Prize; White House appointments secretary Matthew Connelly went to jail for conspiring to fix a tax case.

At first Truman believed that the cabinet should be analogous to a board of directors, “the principal medium through which the president controls his administration.”5 Cabinet meetings dealt with more substantive questions than they had during the Roosevelt era, and he sometimes even asked members to vote on major issues. Yet even then collective advice proved useful primarily on matters of tactics and political strategy. For example, when he announced to the cabinet that he planned to send aid to Greece, he requested their opinion not on his decision but “on the best method to apprise the American people of the issues involved.” (They suggested a presidential address to a joint session of Congress.)6 Gradually he drew back from the board of directors concept: powers delegated could be powers lost, and Truman, while modest about himself as president, was zealous in protecting those prerogatives that he felt were inherent in the presidency. Moreover, after the outbreak of the Korean War he began to hold weekly meetings of the new National Security Council, in effect a cabinet subcommittee, thus further lessening the utility of full cabinet sessions.

At first Truman intended to return the White House staff to its prewar size—secretaries for press, correspondence, and appointments, plus a handful of general assistants. But under the pressures of an increasing workload, he reversed himself. Within a year the White House, in addition to the three traditional secretaries, took on the following configuration:

Assistant to the president (John R. Steelman). The appointment of the former head of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service reflected the seriousness with which the president viewed labor-management relations as a national problem (116 million days of work were lost because of strikes in 1945) and the ineffectuality of his secretary of labor, Lewis Schwellenbach. Negotiations in major disputes such as those in the railroad and steel industries were conducted in Steelman’s White House office. Steelman also acted as coordinator of federal agency programs and policies, which meant that he concerned himself with those cabinet-level problems that were beneath presidential attention, and he served as the route to the president for the minor agencies that were without direct access to the Oval Office.

Special counsel (Clark Clifford). The office remained as defined by Samuel Rosenman: the most important position on the White House staff for domestic policy formulation. It also controlled the speechwriting process and was responsible for reviewing congressional bills and executive orders. In addition to his other duties, Clifford, who first joined the Truman White House as a naval officer, handled liaison with the Pentagon and the State Department.

Administrative assistant (Charles Murphy). Unlike Roosevelt, who used troubleshooters to deal with Congress on an ad hoc basis, Truman gradually looked to Murphy as his coordinator of congressional messages. When Murphy replaced Clifford as special counsel in 1950, he continued his congressional liaison work but did not assume Clifford’s responsibility for coordinating national security. Some duties were a function of the office and others a function of the officeholder.

Administrative assistant (Donald S. Dawson). As staff coordinator for personnel and patronage, Dawson maintained the files from which Truman made appointments, except for those in the customs houses and the federal courts system. He also handled the arrangements for the president’s trips and political appearances.

Administrative assistant (David Niles). A holdover from Roosevelt’s staff, Niles had special responsibility for liaison with minority groups.

Other administrative assistants had more generalized assignments and usually served as aides to Steelman, Clifford, or Murphy. The presence on the White House staff of such men as David Lloyd, David Bell, George Elsey, Richard Neustadt, and David Stowe was in itself a development of some note, the beginning of a cadre of supporting staff for senior presidential aides.

Categorizing the duties of key staff members somewhat underestimates the extent to which Truman parceled out assignments “on the basis of who was available” (as Lloyd recalled the system).7 Nevertheless, functional divisions in the presidential office were now emerging in sharper form. No one on Roosevelt’s staff had had either labor-management responsibilities similar to Steelman’s or such a continuing involvement in congressional relations as Murphy.

Equally important, a simple description of White House assignments veils what Clifford called “two forces fighting for the mind of the president,” a dynamic that was to have significant consequences for the balance of power in the Truman administration. The fight over what was to become known as the Fair Deal developed along classic liberal-conservative lines. The chief conservative advocates were Steelman and Treasury Secretary Snyder. The liberals, led by Clifford, included Murphy, Leon Keyserling of the Council of Economic Advisers, and several members of the subcabinet, such as Oscar (Jack) Ewing, director of the Federal Security Agency; Oscar Chapman, undersecretary of the interior; and David Morse, assistant secretary of labor.

As Clifford remembered,

I think it was Jack Ewing who first suggested the idea that a few of us get together from time to time to try to plot a coherent political course for the administration. Our interest was to be exclusively on domestic affairs, not foreign.… We wanted to create a set of goals that truly met the deepest and greatest needs of the people, and we wanted to build a liberal, forward-moving program around those goals that could be recognized as a Truman program.

The idea was that the six or eight of us [meeting each Monday evening in Ewing’s apartment] would try to come to an understanding among ourselves on what direction we would like the president to take on any given issue. And then, quietly and unobtrusively each in his own way, we would try to steer the president in that direction.

Naturally, we were up against tough competition. Most of the cabinet and the congressional leaders were urging Mr. Truman to go slow, to veer a little closer to the conservative line.…

Well, it was two forces fighting for the mind of the president, that’s really what it was. It was completely unpublicized, and I don’t think Mr. Truman ever realized it was going on. But it was an unceasing struggle during those two years [1946–1948], and it got to the point where no quarter was asked and none was given.8

Of his own role, Clifford said, “If I rendered any service to President Truman … it was as the representative of the liberal forces. I think our forces were generally successful. We had something of an advantage in the liberal-conservative fight because I was there all the time. I saw the president often, and if he wanted to discuss an issue, I was at hand.”9

The liberal forces prevailed. For example, Truman vetoed a bill to extend the life of the wartime Office of Price Administration, which liberals felt was too weak, and the Taft-Hartley bill, which curbed union activities, both actions urged by Clifford and opposed by almost the entire cabinet. Clifford’s skills—vastly greater than his opponents’—well may have been a factor. But he also was pushing the president in a direction that was clearly in keeping with the president’s instincts.

There is nothing unusual, of course, about struggles within an administration. They are inherent in a structure of government built on the separation of the departments along interest-group lines, and Roosevelt had designed his whole theory of management on conflict. Yet as a rule of thumb, there had always been a distinction between cabinet officers (policy advocates and managers) and White House aides (facilitators, mediators, and performers of personal and political services). This changed somewhat in the closing years of the Roosevelt administration when the president, preoccupied with the war and in ill health, allowed Rosenman and others greater leeway in shaping domestic programs. But Clifford’s performance during five years under Truman was of a different magnitude: since he acted primarily as a presidential adviser on policies and programs rather than on ways and means, the theoretical line between cabinet and White House staff began to blur. And as Clifford’s experiences illustrate, in any conflict between the two the law of propinquity is apt to govern.10

Besides Steelman, Clifford, and their assistants, there were others, distinctly different characters, who shared administrative duties at the Truman White House. Ithiel de Sola Pool would later write, “Every president has felt the need to surround himself with a small group of mediocre men whose main qualification is loyalty.… In every administration they have gotten the president into trouble by their lack of moral perspective.… The president needs loyal personal assistants, yet they are dangerous.”11 Truman’s mediocre men included military aide Harry Vaughan, appointments secretary Matthew Connelly, Donald Dawson and George Schoeneman of the patronage operation, and Dr. Wallace Graham, the president’s physician. They were people Truman liked to have around. They were comfortable. They were fun. Some of them also were accepters of petty graft, mink coats, freezers, and free hotel rooms and were friends of fixers. Collectively their activities became known as “the mess in Washington” during the 1952 presidential election campaign.12 That Harry Truman, of unexcelled personal integrity, could have tolerated their presence says something about his background in machine politics, about his sentimentality and sense of loyalty, and about his deep-seated need for companionship. A president, even more than most, needs friends. The post of court jester has a long history. Indeed, the persistence with which court jesters have been found in the company of presidents seems to attest to some useful service that they perform—“yet they are dangerous.” Recent presidents have protected themselves by keeping their court jesters out of government or by making sure that their governmental duties were not substantial. Truman’s problems resulted from giving assignments of state to his court jesters.

There were definite patterns to the way Truman spent his days.13 Mornings were devoted to what he called customers—often legislators. Afternoons were spent on the more serious business of government—meetings of the cabinet and National Security Council and sessions with the budget director. Time was measured out sparingly; meetings rarely lasted more than a half hour, individual appointments often less than ten minutes. The only times the president was alone were early in the morning and late at night, when he could study or merely catch up with the bureaucratic conveyor belt that constantly deposited papers on his desk. Almost everyone who came into his office wanted something. His days were predetermined by other people—VIPs who asked for time with the president, officials who needed decisions—or by the cycles of government (in January he saw a great deal of the budget director because the budget cycle was reaching its climax). Private meetings were scheduled twice a week with the secretary of state and once a week with the secretary of defense, but none was scheduled on a regular basis with any member of the domestic departments. All cabinet members may have been equal, but some were more equal than others.

In addition to his own accessibility to members of Congress, after the 1948 election Truman assigned two low-level White House aides, one for the Senate and one for the House, to handle Capitol Hill requests for favors. They served under appointments secretary Connelly and did not deal with important legislation. The operation was rated “relatively ineffectual” by other Truman staff members.14

Press conferences were held about once a week, only half the frequency that they were in Roosevelt’s administration. Truman lacked his predecessor’s skill in dealing with reporters; his maladroit handling of some questions, such as at one point leaving the impression that he was considering the use of the atomic bomb in Korea, created special problems for his press secretaries. (It is probably only coincidence that two of them died in office.) In time Truman came to regard the press as often unfair to him and his administration. When a reporter prefaced a question by saying that he was puzzled, Truman snapped, “You’re easily puzzled. You’re always speculating about something you don’t know anything about.”15 As self-protection, he was briefed by the White House staff before each press conference. Toward the end of his presidency the briefing included a notebook containing possible questions and answers, a practice continued by subsequent presidents. Press conferences were no longer an informal give-and-take around the president’s desk, in part because the press corps had grown too big. Conferences were now held in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building. For the first time, too, they were recorded and portions released for radio use.

Truman seemed always to have time for budget business, however, and the period from 1947 through 1949 is considered by some as a golden age when the Bureau of the Budget took on enormous importance in the White House organization. The close involvement of the bureau in shaping and directing administration policy was a product of Truman’s interests and budget director James E. Webb’s notion of his agency’s role. The president later wrote, “The federal budget was one of my most serious hobbies, but it was also much more than that. In fact, I regarded it as one of the most serious of the responsibilities of the president—a responsibility that never failed to prove thoroughly fascinating.” He claimed that he spent “twice as much time on the preparation of the budget as any former president ever did.”16 Most presidents soon become bored with the tedious juggling of figures that Truman found so fascinating and delegate these responsibilities for fine-tuning policy priorities. It is beyond coincidence that the two presidents who had served on congressional appropriations committees, Truman and Ford, have had the greatest personal involvement in preparing the federal budget.

As relations between Truman and his budget director became more intimate, Webb emerged as a principal adviser to the president, as distinct from adviser to the presidency, the prime role assumed by past directors. Neustadt reported that Webb “broke precedent by making his subordinates freely available to White House aides, on their terms, for their purpose.” The Clifford-Murphy axis in particular used Budget Bureau people as its personal backup staff. The interchange of personnel was such that, according to Neustadt, “in 1953 fully a third of the outgoing Truman assistants had come to the White House staff from the career service in the Budget Bureau.” Starting in 1948 the bureau’s legislative clearance operation moved from “negative protection of president and agencies to positive development and drafting of Administration measures.”17 Policy often was formulated by working teams, with the bureau’s Legislative Reference Office functioning as secretariat. Only the advent of the Korean War and the usual loss of energy that afflicts an administration whose days in office are numbered caused some diminution of the Budget Bureau’s influence.

While Truman was in the White House, Congress sought for the first time to shape the institutional presidency. The Employment Act of 1946 added the Council of Economic Advisers to the Executive Office and the National Security Act of 1947 added the National Security Council.18 Both were attempts to structure in statute the president’s information systems. But although Congress could mandate advice, could a president be forced to listen?

At least one economist has called Harry Truman “indifferent to the complexities of economics.”19 In this regard he was no different from his predecessor, or for that matter from most of the presidents who have come after him. No professional economist has ever been a major party candidate for president. Rexford Tugwell had proposed that Roosevelt create a federal economic council attached to the executive.20 Roosevelt instead chose to gather economic advice from his constantly shifting inner circle, some of whose members were economists. His several changes in economic policy may be attributed to changes in advisers. As a posthumous reaction to his ways of conducting the affairs of state, Congress decreed in 1946 that, starting with Truman, presidents would have to have a pride of professional economists in the Executive Office. A president’s economic advice would come from a council, not a solitary adviser, and its three members would be confirmed by the Senate, a provision that had never before been attached to presidential aides. A new joint committee of Congress would monitor the council’s recommendations. Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney, a principal supporter of the measure, made his intention clear: “This … is a bill to restore the functions of Congress.”21

For the first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Truman chose Edwin G. Nourse, vice president of the Brookings Institution and generally regarded as a moderate conservative. The other two members, John D. Clark and Leon Keyserling, were liberals. Nourse reported,

After the lapse of a little more than a year, it can be said that there has been no single case when [Truman] has called upon us in any specific situation for counsel in his study of any matter of national economic policy. While he has accepted the material which we have presented to him for use in the Economic Report and passed it on without material change and with only minor omissions, there is no clear evidence that at any juncture we had any tangible influence on the formation of policy or the adoption of any course of action or feature of a program.22

This situation had at least three causes. Nourse was not in sympathy with the policy tendencies of the administration. At the same time, he believed presidential economic advisers could and should be “scientifically objective,” somehow outside the political implications of their data. And there was an unfortunate chemistry between chairman and president. Keyserling would later contend that “Dr. Nourse was simply unable to adjust himself to the nature and the problems of the Presidency. He could never understand that the president of the United States has too many things to do to engage in long bull sessions on economics of the kind that take place at The Brookings Institution.”23 Viewing the relationship from the president’s perspective, Gerhard Colm, a member of the initial CEA staff, thought that perhaps Truman kept his distance because “he did not feel equal to discussing economics with a man whom he respected as a great scholar and authority.”24

After Nourse resigned in 1949 and the chairmanship was assumed by Keyserling, whose views of the White House operation were more realistic and whose views of policy were more in tune with the president’s, the council became a serious contending force in devising administration policy. Unlike the Budget Bureau, which had a monopoly in its primary area of concern, the CEA still had to negotiate with the Treasury, Commerce, and Labor departments and the other elements of government that took strong stands on the direction of the economy. However, freed of operating responsibility (with the exception of preparing the economic report) and located in proximity to the president, it had ample opportunity to develop and to expound its judgments within the higher reaches of the administration. Moreover, the council was given a small but competent staff, eight professionals at first, most drawn from the ranks of government economists. Their networks of friendships were invaluable in keeping the CEA in touch with the agencies and in avoiding the type of insensitivity that could have hampered a new entry in a crowded field. Harold Smith, for example, expected bad blood to develop between his Budget Bureau and the new council; that did not happen, and it was not insignificant that two of the early CEA staff members came from the bureau.

Congress was wrong in its belief that it could direct the president to accept economic advice; the experience with Nourse graphically proved that. But it was right in believing that the presence of professional economists in the White House could result in additional sources of information and analysis, which the president absorbed, often through his personal staff, sometimes by osmosis. The lesson of the CEA was that a president could be aided in policymaking by this type of expertise if his experts were congenial enough to gain his attention—this could not be taken for granted—and if they could provide him with information that was immediately and politically useful. Ironically, it was Nourse who correctly summed up the CEA’s proper role: “The success of the Council as an institution, the importance of the place it occupies and the value of its work will be just what the president makes them.”25

The National Security Act of 1947 and its 1949 amendments were meant to unify the military and to create a new system for advising the president—the National Security Council. The original members of the NSC were the president (chairman), the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the three military service secretaries (who were at the same time removed from the cabinet), the chairman of the new National Security Resources Board (a standby mobilization body that was later merged into the Office of Defense Mobilization), and such other department or agency heads as the president might choose to give membership. The 1949 amendments dropped the service secretaries and added the vice president. The Central Intelligence Agency was placed under the NSC, but it has never really been regarded as part of the Executive Office. In theory, the NSC would help the president define broad national policy. The State Department would then know what policy to implement in its conduct of foreign relations, the military would know the policy for which it must devise strategic and logistic plans, and the National Security Resources Board would know the policy for which it must prepare mobilization plans for industry, labor, and raw materials.

Truman at first viewed the NSC with appropriate suspicion. There were some, particularly in the Pentagon, who hoped to use it as a vehicle for committing the president to their department’s positions. Truman had to make sure that the council would be limited to giving advice. He chose to accomplish this in part by not attending council meetings: if he was not there, he could make no instant commitments, although he justified his absence by contending that council members would speak more freely if he was not in the room. He rejected a proposal to give the executive secretary the authority to see that NSC decisions were carried out. The staff, he felt, should not be insinuated between him and his principal advisers, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. His momentous decision to intervene in Korea was made without formally consulting with the NSC. (He did, of course, meet with his key officials, some of whom were council members.)

The war, however, convinced him that the NSC could be used to greater advantage. The council began to meet weekly, with the president in the chair. A senior staff of eight persons drawn from the departments was assembled—a precursor of Eisenhower’s Planning Board. The first executive secretary had been primarily a briefing officer; the second now became a staff director as well. NSC papers began to be developed in the Executive Office, rather than in the departments. Although Truman was not prepared to turn the NSC into a comprehensive policymaking system, he did discover that when molded to his terms it could serve him as a convenient way to get staff work done. Without fulfilling its congressional backers’ original expectation of defining broad national policy, it nonetheless had its uses. It provided the excuse for Truman to regroup his advisers into a sort of war cabinet with its own secretariat. Thus again Congress failed to bind a president to its intent; again a president chose to use or not use a body that Congress had unilaterally imposed on the institution of the presidency; and again, perhaps serendipitously, a president found functions for a staff to perform after it had been given to him.

The shape of the modern presidential organization that was beginning to be defined at the end of the Roosevelt administration started to come into sharper focus under Truman: the greater differentiation of staff functions; the building of staff to support chief presidential assistants; the moving of policy advocacy into the White House; a blurring of the distinction between the Executive Office and the White House Office in the use of Budget Bureau personnel by White House aides; and the grafting onto the White House of the CEA and the NSC. Most important was the public’s acceptance of the president as the locus of federal government responsibility.

In 1947 a Republican Congress, looking forward to the election of a Republican president the next year, approved a bill to set up the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government. One of its stated objectives was “defining and limiting executive functions.”26 While Truman might have viewed himself as the commission’s target, he was enthusiastic about the undertaking and promised and delivered the full cooperation of his administration to the commission’s chairman, Herbert Hoover. Hoover threw his prodigious energy into the assignment, serving as his own staff director and placing his personal imprint on all the commission’s work. The first of the nineteen reports of the Hoover Commission appeared in 1949, and its first recommendation was to give the president continuing powers to reorganize federal agencies unrestricted by limitations or exemptions. It also recommended that the Executive Office of the President should be strengthened, that the president should have stronger staff services, and that he should have complete discretion over how the augmented White House staff should be used.27 Newspapers such as the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News, which had greeted Roosevelt’s efforts to implement the Brownlow report as a “dictator bill” and an “aggrandizement of the president’s constitutional powers,” now hailed the Hoover Commission’s recommendations and wrote of a strong, unified executive as “a prime requisite of republican institutions.”28 Herbert Hoover, the last president before the modern era, had come out of retirement to legitimate the Rooseveltian concept of the presidency. It was symbolism of some potency.