Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess
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,