Oral History Interview with
George M. Elsey
Mr. Elsey held several White House positions throughout the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
Washington, D.C.
March 17, 1976
by Jerald L. Hill and William D. Stilley
See also: George M. Elsey Oral History, by Charles T. Morrissey of the Harry S. Truman Library.
[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Notice
This interview was conducted by William D. Stilley and Jerald L. Hill as part of a intern and independent study project at William Jewell College in March 1976, under the direction of the Political Science Department of William Jewell College. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.
Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate
the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.
RESTRICTIONS
This transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of William D. Stilley and Jerald L. Hill.
Opened
July, 1985
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri
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Oral History Interview with
George M. Elsey
Washington, D.C.
March 17, 1976
by Jerald L. Hill and William D. Stilley
[1] STILLEY: Mr. Elsey, what was your position in the White House prior to being promoted under President Truman?
ELSEY: I was on duty in the White House Map Room on April 12, 1945, when Vice President Truman succeeded to the Presidency on President Roosevelt's death. The Map Room was an intelligence and communications center staffed jointly by young Army and Navy officers. Our job was to keep the President
[2]
informed at any hour of the day, any day of the week, on progress of the war on all fronts. We had a constant flow of information coming in from the War and Navy Departments, dispatches of all kinds, and some information from State Department as well. In addition, we were the secretariat for the Presidential communications with Prime Minister [Winston] Churchill and Marshal [Joseph] Stalin, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and theatre commanders like [Dwight D.] Eisenhower, [Chester] Nimitz, and [Douglas] MacArthur, and so on. So I was there at the time of the Vice President's accession. I had met Mr. Truman only once during his Vice Presidential years, when he was at the White House to meet President Roosevelt and the President brought him by the Map Room.
As everyone knows, and as President Truman himself was the first to state, he was very il1informed about military and political affairs. He had not been briefed by President Roosevelt or by others of the Cabinet on some of the most major decisions that were coming up; he just didn't know a darn thing about. And he was
[3]
extremely conscious of the lack of background and so he was very, very eager to soak up as much information as he could as quickly as he could from the kinds of material we had in the Map Room.
The Chief of Staff to the President, to President Roosevelt--and he carried on under President Truman--was Admiral William D. Leahy. That's the equivalent of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff title today.
Admiral Leahy had me prepare in those early weeks of the Truman term, many memoranda on various issues that were up between the U.S. Government, and the Soviet Government, and the British Government and so on. Sometimes they were very short, just a page or two, sometimes they were a bit longer. From the very onset we knew that the President would be meeting that summer--the exact date and place were not certain--but would be meeting that summer with Churchill and with Stalin, so much of my work in April and May and
[4]
June was preparing background data for President Truman to use at the Potsdam or Berlin Conference. As a result, I came to see him more often and know him better than anyone as young and as junior in rank as I was at the time would have ordinarily have had the opportunity. I did go with President Truman to Potsdam, and there were only two of us. We had a portable Map Room, just another young officer, Captain Frank Graham, U.S. Army, and I. So, having our Map Room right in the President's--just a couple of doors away from his bedroom and study--again we would have had an extraordinary opportunity for young people to see the President in an informal fashion and for him to get to know us.
Soon after we were back from that conference, of course, V-J Day came and the war ended. Almost immediately I began to work with some of the new Truman staff members, whom he had brought to Washington; Commodore [James K., Jr.] Vardaman, the Naval Aide; the Assistant Naval Aide, Clark
[5]
Clifford--working with them as a staff assistant on all kinds of demobilization matters and transition matters from war to peace.
A couple of the issues that Mr. Truman, President Truman, was very much interested in at that point, were universal military training, and the whole question of postwar organization of the armed forces. Should there be a single military force? Should there be a single department, or should the Air Force come out from under the Army and be independent; and, if so, what would the relationship of it be to the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps. Things like this that were not only intrinsically important to the security of the country, but were pretty red-hot political issues, with Capitol Hill and Congress having some very strong views. I was thrown right into the job of analyzing, writing memoranda, comment, writing commentaries on proposals that came from Capitol Hill--draft legislation introduced. So, here again was an opportunity to work a
[6]
little more closely and see the President a little more than, again, somebody as junior as I was would have normally have had.
Clifford became Special Counsel to President Truman in July '46 and although I was still in uniform, I became his assistant and worked with him in that role. Clifford, as you probably know, quickly turned into President Truman's major speechwriter, and this brought him and me into contact with just almost literally every agency of Government, because the President's speeches concern all kinds of things; agriculture, foreign policy, military affairs, labor relations, budget, everything there is, all issues. So, in short order I found myself running all over town, talking with all kinds of people, on all kinds of subjects, and learning how very much I did not know about all kinds of things.
That's basically it. By '47, '48 this continued. I was by then a civilian continuing to be the Special Counsel's special assistant. As the
[7]
'48 campaign came along, by now, by '48, Truman had a pretty well organized White House staff. People like Charles Murphy, David Bell, David Lloyd, Richard Neustadt, others were in the family, not all of them were full-time working at the White House, but they were in Washington; Budget Bureau and elsewhere. A11 of us were hard at work on helping the President shape his programs, platform, issues that he intended to campaign on.
After the election in '48 1 took a several month’s leave of absence to return to active duty in the Navy on a special project that I had begun in the Map Room and had not been able to finish. When 1 returned to the White House in August of '49 the President named me as one of his Administrative Assistants and remained in that spot until December of 51.
By that time the foreign aid program was a very major effort of our Government. Averell Harriman was foreign aid administrator, and Harriman asked me to join him working full time
[8]
for him in his efforts to coordinate military assistance, economic assistance, and technical assistance, popularly known in those days as Point IV. So, I remained with Harriman the final. fourteen months of the Truman administration.
That's a capsule. Now you can take it from there and ask questions on any aspect o£ it. I have mentioned all of that quickly so that you'll see when my role changed, and the variety of
things that I dealt with changed through the years. So, when somebody says what did you do at the White House, I have to counter with, "Tell me what year you're interested in and I'11 tell you what I did that year," because it was an evolution, it changed through the period from '45 through '53.
STILLEY: Back when President Truman first became President, how soon after that did he learn about the atomic bomb? How involved were you in the Map Room with the learning of this and his decisions?
[9]
ELSEY: I can't tell you exactly how quickly he learned. It would certainly have been in a matter of days if not hours. That's the sort of thing the Secretary of War [Henry L.] Stimson; Secretary of the Navy [James] Forrestal, and Admiral Leahy would have briefed him on. I don't know exactly when it was, but it certainly was within the first two or three days of his administration, because they, and General [George C.] Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the Army, spent many, many, many hours with the President in the early days of April '45 running over all the major matters that were up for decision, or events that were coming up. At that point the first test bomb had not been exploded. It was not exploded until July 17th, I think--a couple of months off. So, it was still a developments it was not a certainty. As for those of us in the Map Room, we were aware, and had been for some three years, of the work going on in this area, because of the President's correspondence and cables, all very, very highly classified,
[10]
of course, with Churchill on the subject. We handled them all--they went through our hands. So from the spring of '42 right on up to the moment of the first bomb drop in Hiroshima, we were--those of us in the Map Room--generally aware of the kind of work that was going on and the state of progress of the Manhattan Project.
STILLEY: Is there any particular reason why President Truman wasn't informed on certain matters before becoming President? You mentioned that he was rather unprepared about certain decisions to be made.
ELSEY: Well, my answer to that has to be a pretty subjective one. I don't think there is any documentary or factual evidence that will help us answer it. Part of it was President Roosevelt's health, part of it was due to the relations of President Roosevelt with his former vice Presidents. He and Vice President [John Nance] Garner, who was his Vice President for the first eight
[11]
years of his term, had never been close politically. Their philosophies were quite different. Garner was conservative in the sense of conservative Southern views of the period, the 1930s. Garner was out of sympathy with most of FDR's New Deal, and the two simply were not intimate friends. Henry Wallace, who was FDR's Vice President in the third term, increasingly found himself at odds with Roosevelt and others of the Roosevelt administration, on matters of foreign policy. And Wallace was simply not trusted by the military leadership of our high command in the Army and the Navy. They didn't like the people that Wallace associated with. They quite literally did not think he was to be trusted with military and foreign policy secrets, and this attitude was well-known to President Roosevelt. So the major events, strategies, matters like the atom bomb, were just things that FDR wouldn't talk to Wallace about.
We had no reason to believe he felt that way
[12]
about Truman. He had dumped Wallace. If he felt that way about Truman he would obviously not have chosen him to be his Vice President in the fourth term. But Roosevelt's strength was running down, his health was not good. In the campaign weeks and months, both men were out on the road a good deal. Prior to the election there wasn't much time for this. Between the inauguration January 20 and April 12th, Roosevelt was in Washington very little. He left the day after the inauguration when he sailed to Yalta; and when h |
