The Rooseveltian legacy was that the reach of the presidency had been expanded and that the people’s expectations of what government could and should do had been forever altered. Whether the growth of government would outstrip a president’s ability to oversee its activities was a challenge Roosevelt left to his successors.
3
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