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Oral History Interview with
LUCIUS D. BATTLE
Washington, D.C.
June 23, 1971
by Richard D. McKinzie and Theodore A. Wilson
[1]
BATTLE: . . . fairly close but somewhat peripheral. I saw virtually every paper that ever went between Secretary [Dean] Acheson and President Truman over the four years of that era, and I sat in on the meetings. I was then assistant to Dean Acheson, and a very close relationship existed between them; he admired President Truman enormously.
I was quite a young man at the time; I was 30. I had those four years with Dean Acheson and then later came back and had a similar job with Dean Rusk for a year or so. Then I was an Assistant Secretary twice, and an Ambassador.
[2]
The interesting thing to me, I think, is the parallel between those administrations and the current one in terms of relationships between the White House and the executive agencies of Government. This is, I think, rather timely. I read last night an article by Dean Acheson in Foreign Affairs, which will interest you; it is very much on the point we're talking about.
I remember most vividly--this is an interesting contrast--two things that happened to me that I think tells something about the nature of the Truman administration. Soon after I started to work for Acheson, General [Harry] Vaughan called me and said, "The Secretary's office is about to receive a recommendation on a problem." I've forgotten what the issue was; it doesn't make any difference. He said, "I think this is very wrong and I very much hope that you will see that the Secretary does not
[3]
follow the advice of the State Department."
The paper came up to me and I read it. It was rather concerned about the fact that the White House had called me and I was--well, it was one of the first times I suppose this had happened--and I went in to see Dean (I did not call him Dean in those days), and I said, "I've had a call about this matter from General Vaughan."
And he said, "Well, what's the recommendation?"
I said, "The recommendation of the Department of State is so and so and so and so, but General Vaughan said . . ."
He said, "Well, I don't care what General Vaughan says." Then he turned to me and said, "What do you think?"
And I said, "I don't really think General Vaughan's right. I think the . . ."
He said, "That's quite enough. You don't even have to talk with General Vaughan if you
[4]
don't want to." He said, "If you have any problems around the White House, you just refuse to talk to them; you don't have to talk to Vaughan if you don't want to." He said, "I'll take it up with the President--whatever." He added, "Don't ever tell me that I must do something because the White House says so. If the President says so, that's a different thing. When the White House says something," he said, "we won't pay any attention to that."
Well, that's a terribly interesting comment in terms of the relationship between Dean Acheson and President Truman and the confidence he had in that relationship and the certainty that he could go on his course and follow what he thought to be right. As long as you had the President with you there was no worry about it.
Now, Admiral [Sidney W.] Souers was the
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executive secretary of the NSC; he was around, but I never had many conversations with him over a long period of time.
I never knew, at any point, of him veering from the perfect balance of his posture and his place in Government. Now contrast that with what happened to me many years later. I came back at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. I had been out of Government for several years. Dean Rusk asked me to come back and to take on a slightly different kind of job as executive secretary of the State Department (which I held for about a year and a half). The first day I came back Dean looked at me--Dean Rusk looked at me--and said, "Look, the first thing I want you to do is to try to get the White House under control." He said, "This is just overwhelming."
Now, he knew that I knew Mac Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger and all the group that were
[6]
around at that particular period. Well, to my absolute astonishment, the volume of mail, memoranda--they weren't going through one channel, they were going all over the building, all over the White House, and Assistant Secretaries of State were writing contradictory recommendations to the President, going through different channels. We tried to get this in order and in time were reasonably successful, not totally successful, but reasonably successful, given the pressures on the White House staff that existed at that time. Mac Bundy is an old friend of mine; I've known him for a long time and we're still very good friends. He and I worked quite well together, but the large activist group that we had around the White House at that time was in sharp contrast to what we had had earlier in the Acheson period.
I think the contrast is even greater today, as you view Henry Kissinger's staff of 100 or
[7]
more, and contrast the degree to which the State Department has constantly been hammered down. But if you read this article I was referring to last night, Acheson makes an exception of his own period in terms of the gradual decline of the influence of the Department of State and a sort of failure of the Department to continually be able to assert itself, with its prerogatives, in the field of foreign policy.
President Truman had two or three qualities I thought were really quite remarkable. They were remarkable in an interesting way, because they, I think, were based on a sense of humility. There were very few people in public life that I admire as much as I admire President Truman, but I think it's a mistake to consider him a brilliant man. He wasn't; he was a limited man, but he had one or two great attributes. One is he knew his limitations.
[8]
He knew that he didn't know everything; he accepted his own limitations, and he did something about them, and that's pretty strong stuff, you know, when you find anybody who is able to--that's pretty good. He put together the best Cabinet that I have ever served with and I have served with quite a number of them.
WILSON: That's a striking statement that's come up again and again. We've had the experience now over the last two years of being in gatherings when Dean Acheson and Averell Harriman and a number of extremely powerful people, strong people; they just comment that this was a good Cabinet, a strong Cabinet, they knew who was boss. With the sort of limitations that we're all aware of, and with the kinds of very strong personalities that were in this Cabinet, we're still at a loss I think to explain the relationship that existed there.
[9]
MCKINZIE: The relationship between Dean Acheson and President Truman, the President being a very salty and a very direct kind of man, and Acheson being an urbane . . .
BATTLE: He's also salty. Well, the friendship surprises me; it was a rather strange friendship. I never would have ever bet on it at all, but it existed and it still exists. I've been with Acheson, President Truman, six or eight people, and spent entire evenings with them both in office and out of office, while President Truman was in office, and really the relationship was quite obvious and very strong, and they both recognized it. They were totally different people. They both had guts about them, a courage and saltiness about them.
Dean's covered with a veneer of Eastern seaboard polish, and Truman is sort of Middle West, but they both had that quality of strength
[10]
and directness that was really pretty remarkable. Acheson trusted me totally, and I went everywhere with him. I went around all over town with him.
I don't recall it ever happened before or after in the State Department, but I would go over with him to see the President--not often, but occasionally. I would often sit in meetings with him with other members of the Cabinet who came over to see him, and I was around. I was in the background; I had no role of my own. It was all sort of indirect by virtue of my relationship with Acheson, but I saw the Cabinet in action in a rather remarkable way at that time. And it was an astonishing thing. There was apparently little backbiting; there was a remarkable sense--except by Louis Johnson, who was a bastard. He really was. But the rest of the group was quite remarkable; there were strong ones and weak ones, but in the main
[11]
they were good. The Cabinet and the level just below the Cabinet were quite remarkable. They had a sense of direction and they sort of knew what they were about, where they were trying to go, and what they were trying to do, and they did it very well.
WILSON: How much of the cohesion was the result in your view of the kinds of problems that so many of these men had had in the Roosevelt administration? We were amazed; of course, [John W.] Snyder and Harriman and Acheson and a number of others had had that experience in trying to get things done during the war and even before, in a very different kind of administrative situation. Is it fair to say they were so grateful, or did it have a sort of different atmosphere?
BATTLE: That might have been part of it, but I think there were two or three elements that contributed greatly to it. First, nobody
[12]
expected President Truman to win; therefore, the group that was around him came into being primarily because President Truman had no obligations. He didn't have to pay off anybody. Therefore, his obligations to make appointments because of large campaign contributions, and political pressures, simply didn't exist. He could do what he wanted to do. And therefore the Cabinet members were appointed because of their worth, their individual worth, and not because of any specif
