Tom Steed Remembers Harry S. Truman
Tom Steed Remembers Harry S. Truman
Lazalier: Congressman Steed, you recall the administration of Harry S. Truman quite vividly. Tell us what you consider the most important decisions made in the Truman administration.
Steed: First, I’d like to say that there is a book which purports to have somebody’s idea of the most important decisions of every president we’ve had. The ones they attributed to Mr. Truman – most of them only had one – in Truman’s case they had two, and I’d like to read what they are: New doctrine, decision to contain Soviet expansion was one. The decision to resist communist invasion in Korea was the other. Now, I disagree with that. I think his order to drop the atomic bomb was by far the most important decision he made, or any other president, for that matter.
Lasalier: Did President Truman elaborate on his decision to drop the bomb?
Steed: There have been a lot of stuff written about how he felt afterwards, and how he felt during the time that he had to make the decision, and I copied here – I’d like to read it because it was his exact words that he used when he was answering a question from a college student in New York of how he felt and why he did it. His quote was this: “It was a question of saving hundreds of thousands of American lives. I don’t mind telling you that you don’t feel normal when you have to plan hundreds of thousands of complete final deaths of American boys. Boys who were alive and joking and having fun while you’re doing your planning. You break your head and your heart trying to figure out a way to save one life. At that time, invasion of Japan was the only way to end the war. The name given to our invasion plan was ‘Olympic,’ but I saw nothing godly about the killing of all the people that would be necessary to make the invasion. Casualty estimates called for 750,000 Americans: 250,00 killed, 500,000 maimed for life to make the invasion. I could not worry about history or what history would say about my personal morality. I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right. You know the rest.”
Lasalier: That certainly was a monumental decision and has had an effect on the United States and the world since that time.
Steed: When you think of the 750,00 lives of his own country and hundreds of thousands of lives of the enemy country - to even an enemy it’s hard to want to murder him en masse. I can imagine the many hours the president must have spent as he approached the time he had to give that fatal order.
Lasalier: Well, Harry Truman’s administration was full of turmoil, full of controversy, and another issue that comes to mind was the 1948 Democratic Convention, in which there seemed to be a split in the party over the civil rights plank in the platform. The Dixiecrats – Southern Democrats – walked out and Harry Truman got the nomination, and went on the campaign. Seems as though you have some person remembrances of that, don’t you Congressman?
Steed: I think that the people think that politicians will grab any opportunity to get a higher office. Well, of course, you know, Harry Truman tried every way in the world to avoid being made the vice-presidential nominee. President Roosevelt was very determined to recruit him. You see, Wallace had made a flop of being vice-president and the president wanted to get rid of him, but he had to find somebody to put in his place. Truman was the chairman of the committee that was exposing graft and cheating with war contracts and becoming quite a nationally popular man because he had saved the taxpayers lots of money, and putting rascals out of commission. So no matter how hard they tried, he wouldn’t even agree to get on the telephone and talk to Roosevelt about it. And I think that the best thing I’ve ever read about that particular incident is in the book his daughter wrote about him. If you don’t mind, I’ll just read a little of what she wrote about it:
Bob Hannigan, who led the move to draft Truman, finally lured Truman into his room so he could arrange for Truman to talk personally to the president. Although Truman refused, Hannigan got the president on the phone anyhow. Roosevelt’s voice came over loud and clear. “Bob, have you got that fellow lined up yet?” Roosevelt asked. “No, Mr. President,” Hannigan said, “he’s the contrariest Missouri mule I’ve ever dealt with.” Roosevelt replied, “well, you tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war, that’s his responsibility.” Hearing this, Truman said, “well, if that’s the situation, I guess I’ll have to say yes, but why in the hell didn’t he tell me that in the first place.”
So, you see, he was not an ambitious fellow. I wondered what he would have thought if he had had any vision at all of what he was getting into when he became vice president, because up to that time, you know, vice presidents hadn’t been very important.
Lasalier: Not very important, but he seems to have been acceptable to the Democratic Party in 1948. As a matter of fact, he did come all the way through across Oklahoma in 1948 on his whistle stop campaign, didn’t he?
Steed: Oh, yes, everybody thought he was a dead duck, you know. The big press of the country laughed at his idea that he could get reelected and all that, and he went out barnstorming, and he took this famous campaign train. My wife and I and Elmer Harbor (?) and his wife left Shawnee. We drove down to Texas and met the train down there and came on up to Oklahoma City on a whistle-stopping deal. And, the interesting thing about it was, he was booked to make a nationwide radio broadcast in Oklahoma City and it was going to cost a considerable amount of money. And Elmer Harbor (?) and a bunch of other wealthy Democrats who were riding on the train raised the money. And by the time they got to Paul’s Valley they had enough money to pay for the broadcast. They gave a highway patrolman the money and he raced into Oklahoma City so by the time the train arrived they could rush Truman to the radio station and he made the national speech.
Well, the next morning we were starting out east on the Rock Island, and of course, we were going to hit my home town of Shawnee about 6:30 in the morning. It would be the first time a president ever set foot in the town, and I was pretty concerned, because I figured nobody would be up that hour of the morning. It would be a small crowd and it wouldn’t look very good for me. And when the train pulled in and the president and Senator Kerr and myself walked out onto the platform and half the town was there. I never loved people so much in my life. We went on to Seminole, Wewoka, and Holdenville, and on down. By the time we got to McAlister, it was Carl Albert’s time to take over and they went on to Muskogee. But all the time he was going through my district, he and I were in that car alone most of the time, and one time his daughter came in and we visited a little bit and she told me to never make the mistake of asking him to play the piano and play him a waltz because of them hated it, especially her! But after he saw the crowds, after we finished Holdenville, before I left the car, he told me “You’re going to win.” He said, “We’ve had good crowds with friendly people. They like you. And so, I’m going to be seeing you in Washington.” And so the president’s prophecy was right.
We had one unusual experience. When we got to Seminole, the train was pulling out and he was peering through the window, trying to look down and see the main street. Of course, you know, you have to look uphill on the main street in Seminole from the depot, and I said “Mr. President, what are you looking for?” And he said, “Aw, just was curious to see what kind of a town this made. Back in the early boom days I came down here looking for a building so I could open a clothing store. I wasn’t able to find one and the only way to get out of town was on a train and I went off down this main street clear to the north end of it, and came back on the wrong side.” He said it had no paving. All the oil field equipment was being hauled by horse-drawn vehicles then, didn’t have trucks. He said the mud was about knee-deep all over the place. He said “I didn’t have time to go way back down to the end of that street and come back on the other side, and I didn’t want to wade through mud that deep, and have to have muddy clothes all the way to Kansas City. So I looked up and saw two great big Swedes wearing hip boots, and for $2 they’d carry me across the street piggy back and that’s how I got out of there without getting mud all over me.” I said, “Well, I wonder what that fellow would think if he ever learned that he had carried a future president on his back piggy-back.”
But he liked to remember things like that. As we went along, he asked me all kinds of questions – what’s the economy here? What do people do? How much unemployment? Everything you could tell him about it. Then he’d work that into his speech in that community, so he could localize it. He was very good at that. His speeches were amazing. He would just have one word here, see I was watching him, and they were just clues and he just adlibbed the rest of it. He could change it that was fromtown to town. You know, one of the most embarrassing things in the world when you’re a politician and you congratulate everybody in Lawton when you’re in Chickasha, and you kind of wished you’d checked out where you are first. And strangers to the state like a candidate running for a national office will make that mistake – it would be easy to anybody, but not him. He had his whole campaigning down. I think he kind of figured that he campaigned an individual. No matter how big of a crowd it was, every individual in there was a special person to him, and he wanted to identify in a personal way with each and every one of them.
Lasalier: He just seemed to be able to project himself to the individual, and both of you won in 1948 and got in Washington, D.C. as a member of Congress and the President. Did you have any personal contacts with Harry Truman?
Steed: Yes, of course, I had several. It gave me the opportunity to ask him personal questions. One day I asked him, “Mr. President, what’s the most pleasant thing you remember in all your politics?” He’d been a local county judge and everything before he got into the Senate, and then he got into the vice presidency, and then presidency. And he said “Aw, that day after the election, when the Chicago Tribune, which had lambasted me all through the campaign, came out with a huge headlines – Dewey Wins! – aw, I enjoyed myself that day!” So I figured he was pretty human after all because I would have, too.
Now down here at McCloud, Oklahoma, in those days the farmers had a coop that they raised blackberries. They were very fine domesticated blackberries and being an unusual delicacy, you see, I thought one way to ingratiate myself to my colleagues would be to give them all a box of blackberries. I had arranged with some friends to have them fly some crates of blackberries up there so I could do that. And then the coop people down at McCloud thought it would be nice if they gave some to the president. So I had a friend on the White House staff and I called him and I told him could I give the president some blackberries. And he said “Well, I’ll see and call you back.” Everybody said the president didn’t accept gifts personally, you know. And he will only accept gifts unless they could be turned over as state trophies after he was gone, you see, he wouldn’t take anything personally. Actually, all the time he was president, he did accept two gifts personally. One of them was a turkey from the American Turkey Producers coop, and the other was my blackberries. This guy called back before the day was over and he said “The president would be delighted to accept the blackberries. When can you get them here?” He said, “By the way, we’ll need three crates! Two for him and one for the staff.” I got the blackberries up there and I had arranged for pictures of him accepting them. They took the blackberries in direct and I had to go in through the secretary’s office. By the time I got in his office, he’d already ripped the cover off the blackberries and was eating them, and the secret service guy was about to have a fit because he was not supposed to eat anything until they decided it was safe. On the end of the box or crate was an advertisement for the coop. And even the name of the farmer whose farm this particular box of blackberries came from was stamped on it. And they wanted to make a picture for us, you know, and one of the secretaries said “Mr. President you can’t do that, that’s got advertising on it.” And he looked down and said “Oh, that’s just a bunch of darn farmers. That ain’t advertising.” And I’ve still got the pictures.
Well anyhow, that was the end of that, and he was very grateful about it. I was very delighted that I could have done something other members of Congress couldn’t do. I got the president to accept a present. And they all were kind of amazed that I did it, until they ate some of my blackberries. I gave each one of them some, and they said “No wonder. He must have known about them in advance.”
Anyhow, I guess a year or year and a half later I’d forgotten all about it, and I got a call to come down to the White House late one afternoon. And I had only been there a very few times and only in mob scenes – you know, that is when freshmen are included, when they invite everybody. Well, I went down there and there wasn’t anybody around the gate, and I thought I must have made a mistake, surely I’m off base here. And I almost drove away, but I went up the gate and asked and they said, “yes, he’s waiting for you, go on in. Park you car right up there inside the grounds.” So I went in and everybody said, he’s waiting for you up on the balcony (you know, they built a balcony after they redid the White House.) I go out there and there was a little marble top round top table with a bottle on it without any label and two glasses and two chairs. And we did the normal greetings, and looked down over the beautiful scenery of the Washington Monument and the Potomac River. And finally he said “It’s time to test the wine.” So he poured the wine, and he said “Aw, that’s the finest blackberry wine that ever passed my lips.” Well I don’t know much about wine, but I sure did tell him I thought it was good, too! He said “I made blackberry wine out of those blackberries you gave me. Bess and I stayed up until midnight crushing those berries.” I said, “With all the help you’ve got how come you to do it?” He said, “And let them spoil those berries?” He said, “They wouldn’t know how to make wine out of it.” He said, “You know, in my family for four generations we’ve celebrated every birthday and every anniversary with a dinner and blackberry wine. And as a kid in Missouri, I to out every year and gather wild blackberries to make that much wine. Here lately I haven’t had the chance to do any blackberry picking and that was why I was so glad when you wanted to give me some blackberries. Have you ever tried to drink this blackberry wine you buy at a liquor store?”
I was really amazed, you know, that the President of the United States was literally a wine maker. So after that, every time I saw him he’s always say “there’s my blackberry man.” So I guess it was a good way to get acquainted, when you think about it.
Lasalier: Well, he seemed to be a down-to-earth president, and of course there was another decision which came along in the next year, 1950, to have to go into war to send American troops into Korea to fight against the North Koreans. The big problem in that war had to be Douglas MacArthur and President Truman’s decision to fire Douglas MacArthur got him an awful lot of heat.
Steed: Well, you see, MacArthur being a general he wanted an all-out war. He wanted to go invade China and do the work and like a fighting general would be inclined to think. Well, Truman was under high pressure at the danger if they went beyond a certain point – if they went beyond the Korean part of and bringing China into it might trigger another world war. The facts were very strong that this was the wise course - they could settle this thing short of that. At any rate, the law says that the president is the commander-in-chief and military people are trained to take orders and obey them. And he went out there, remember, and saw him on a ship and they had a conference. He gave him direct orders and MacArthur disobeyed them and he fired him. I was in the House chamber when MacArthur came back as a deposed commander and made his famous speech where he ended up with “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” It was a very tearful thing and, of course, he had been a great general and everybody hated to see the thing wind up that way, but still you had to support the president because it was his responsibility and his duty and his right, and if you change that system then you don’t have what we’ve always been so proud to have – a democratic form of government.
Lasalier: Now, on the MacArthur side, was there a bit of partisan politics there? Seemed like the bulk of those who supported MacArthur were Republicans.
Steed: Well, of course, that could have been true of people that didn’t even know MacArthur if they were strongly partisan and didn’t like Truman. It could have generated from both sources. And, of course, Truman – you can’t be an all yes or all no guy and very undiplomatic like Truman, you know, and not have a few people that don’t like you because this making direct decisions is a dangerous business sometimes.
Lasalier: President Truman didn’t care much for music critics, and, as you say, he sometimes lacked a little bit of tact when he addressed individuals or groups and you had made reference to a story that his wife and daughter would like to tell on him.
Steed: Well, the most commonly repeated Truman story all the time that he was in Washington dealt with the word ‘manure.’ And, of course, Truman was very positive and sometimes he wanted extra emphasis so he’d use that word. And so, some of the ladies who knew Mrs. Truman real well got her off and said, “you know, he’s president now and you ought to tell him to quit using that word.” And she said, “I wouldn’t dare; it took me 10 years to get him to use that word instead of something worse!” He kept on using the word whenever he felt strongly about something. He was so positive, though, that I think one of the strangest things - most unusual things – that I kept hearing after he was out of the presidency was that guys would say, “you know, I used to hate old Truman, I’d get so mad at him. But I wish I had him back. He was the last president I know that when I was mad I knew why I was mad.”
Lasalier: There’s a song that’s been out recently, “Harry Truman, Where Are You Now That We Need You?” That would certainly hold true about President Truman. He made some outstanding decisions. The Marshall Plan - aid to Europe, for example, and, of course, those appropriates had to come through your House of Representatives.
Steed: Yes, and you know, but he had that direct way about him so that even though it was a new idea like the Marshall Plan, he could get you down there, sit down, and just talk turkey with you and convince you that it was worth the effort. He could show you what the consequences not to do it would be as well as the gain if you did do it. He didn’t have the persuasiveness that Bob Kerr had, but he just didn’t use a whole lot of words. He just said, “you know, it’s so-and-so if you do, and so-and-so if you don’t. And just take your choice.” It made it easy for him to get support in the Congress that might have otherwise been difficult. I think people out there on the hill – even his enemies – knew that he wasn’t a cheap publicity seeker, that he was very serious about everything that he did.
Lasalier: Well, he was also very serious about his attitude about his family and about his daughter, Margaret, and her piano playing. And a lot of people giggled and they thought it might have been a off-the-cuff comment, his reference to the columnist – Walter Winchell?
Steed: Yea.
Lasalier: . . . at the time that he called him an S.O.B.
Steed: He paid that compliment to Drew Pearson, too. He didn’t have any trouble letting you know if you were on that list of his. But, you know, he was a dirt farmer; he used to be a clerk in a bank; he done a whole lot different things, so he probably had a better all-around relationship to how the average American working for a living out in the boondocks felt than most presidents ever did.
Lasalier: Let me ask you kind of a ringer question, Congressman, that might embarrass you a little bit, but I’m not going to worry about that. Do you know of any national political figures today who might fall into the same kind of category of being a down-to-earth political leader as Harry Truman.
Steed: Well, right off the bat, of course, you put him in such an unusual category all by himself that it would be hard to think of anybody else more or less like that. I would think that if there are very many of them around they’re the ones that are like he was – they just don’t want any more of politics and they’d rather go fishing or something. We have some people that I think would be alright, but I don’t know, this Congress has changed so much since I went there that I don’t know how to describe it. They don’t seem to have the same idea of what they are there for that I thought we went there for. When I made my last trip up there earlier this year, I was in the cloak room, and of course, you know, you have the privilege of the floor if you’re ever a member, and seeing a lot of my old friends and all. And they were unanimous in saying “how lucky you are not to be here. This place has changed so much.” And, of course, you read in the paper how – can you imagine – here we have, in June, and a fiscal year starting October 1st, and we haven’t passed one appropriation bill yet, and we have 13 of those, plus the supplementals.
Now to give you an idea of what it’s like. The last bill I took on the floor as the Chairman in my last year, I was on the floor 17 hours with that bill. I had already had 140 hours of hearings on that bill. There was a whole lot of things have to be done before the normal appropriations to run this government are completed, and I don’t know what this fussing around about this budget thing – you know, the funny thing about that is, that that doesn’t have any direct bearing on spending money at all. It just puts a limit on how much you can spend. You can spend less than that, but not more than that. And it doesn’t go to the White House at all. The president has nothing to do with that. These are rules for the House and Senate to go by. We have all kinds of rules. They are in-house sort of things. That what the budget thing is. And of course, the president has a much more powerful way to handle the spending of this government than that Budget Committee, and I don’t know why they haven’t - maybe they don’t know it yet, but, you see, anybody knows that there is so much division in the House and Senate now that there’s no way you could override a presidential veto on anything. Well, if a president vetoes an appropriation bill he can do it, but he has to send a message to tell them why he did it. It may just be one item in there that he did it for. And he just says, “until you take that item out, I won’t sign it.”
So you see with the pressure or power of veto, he could control any appropriation bill or any amount of money in it. If you’ve got a billion dollars in it and he only wants half a billion, he’ll just veto it and send it back to you. You got to accept it or kill the whole bill. They haven’t got him any bills yet. And when he fusses around and grandstands around about great victories over the Budget Committee – I voted against creating it in the first place – it’s a monstrosity – it’s cost more money than its ever going to save – it’s a power-grab thing for certain members and they’ve got all this malarkey in it and people don’t understand it. So, for instance, they put a limit on how much I could appropriate of the postal subsidy. Well, to their surprise, after the bill was finally finished, I had 250 million dollars that I saved that was less than they said I could spend. But the reason I could do it and they didn’t – they didn’t know what they was talking about and I did! And I had another bill that they put limits on and I went 141 million dollars under that and they still don’t know how I did it. There’s just no way they can know. And yet, they go around grandiosely setting limits on what all you can do and it has to be – they’ve got a loophole, you know – anytime that somebody really wants a goody, they can pass a resolution and exceed it on that item. So this means it’s a – I bet you that – I told them on the day they passed it, I said “You guys are going to live to see the day you regret this, and the day will come when you get rid of it because it will tie you in a knot so bad you’re going to have to.” And it’s almost paralyzed the government.
Lasalier: Well, and Congress, up on the hill, Congressmen and Senators can talk to each other and work out their problems and down at the White House, the president’s got only his advisors, and he’s going to have a lot of advisors who will see things only from the perspective of the White House. Now, what can a president do when he’s got to blow off steam? He can talk to his wife only about so much. And most of the time, not her. How did Harry Truman – how did he unload?
Steed: Well, he had cronies. They all do. They come down – they have a big table and they’d come down there in the evening and have a little bourbon and play a little poker and tell a few jokes – all presidents enjoy jokes. It’s the one thing that they can listen to that doesn’t bother them, see? Everybody who sees them wants to tell them something. . . No, they can do it. One of Harry Truman’s favorite stunts was that he walked early in the morning, you know, he drove the Secret Service and the president and everybody else crazy. And he walks real fast! Well, these fat, slobby reporters had a hard time keeping up with him and the television crews with all their equipment just couldn’t at all. And he’d say, “well, do anything you want, as long as you keep up with me!” So they finally got to where he made his walks mostly by himself because they were more than they could handle. Lyndon Johnson used to like to walk around on the Capitol grounds, and he’d apt to be walking in his shirtsleeves when it was zero as he was with an overcoat in the summer – just whatever he has on, he takes off. Well, I had to dog trot to keep up with him, and I tried to avoid strolls with him because he’s got long legs and walked fast, too. But they have ways to relax. They don’t say much about it. But you take – when you’ve got John McCormick and old Carl Vincent and Lyndon Johnson and Dirkson. . . .
Lasalier: Sam Rayburn . . .
Steed: . . .and all those guys, you see, in the House we’d play gin rummy. There’s no party – there’s no distinction or anything else. Good freshmen gin rummy players are just as popular as the dean of the House. It’s a funny thing, but this is the way they let off steam. They can cuss and give each other a bad time and talk about how dumb they were playing. . . this is an outlet for tension. They – some of them play golf, and you ought to hear them on the golf course – they have to almost put ear stoppers in to talk about where that ball went. But, they are very human. They are much like everybody else. Of course, you see, I wouldn’t want to be president for one reason. They have a telephone in the bathroom! You’re so busy that you can’t even go to the bathroom without having a telephone follow you – that’s too much for me. But it’s necessary because when it’s midnight in America, you know, we have things going on at noon somewhere else in the world. And so the president never knows when he goes to bed how many times he’ll be waked before the night’s over.
Lasalier: Did Harry Truman have any kind of a relationship with any of . . . well, I suppose that Herbert Hoover was the only president still alive, or ex-president still alive.
Steed: Well, see, a lot of things I tell you . . . I got to where he’d let me ask him personal questions. I always got permission first, but I found out he’d have old Hoover come down there, well, sometimes two nights a week and at least once a week all the time. And I said, “Mr. President, after the way we racked old Hoover around, us Democrats, how come you have him coming down here all the time and talking to you?” And he said, “It’s very simple.” He said, “ He’s the only living man that knows what I go through with all day.” He said, “Any president who has a former president whose shoulder he can cry on is a lucky man.” He said, “He’d be luckier if he had several.” But he said, “You have no idea how lonesome this office is, and the only time it’s not really lonesome is when you’re talking to some other guy that sat here before you and he knows exactly what you’re going through,” and he said, “it’s the best therapy I have.” He said, “The man is a great American. He wouldn’t mislead me for anything in the world. I can tell him the most intimate things. He’s shared most of these secrets before I did.” And he said, “He’s a man that you have to have no restriction. You can talk freely with him.” And he said, “He’s – I’m very proud to have him here.”
Lasalier: He’s been there before.
Steed: He’s also . . . I asked him one day about his . . . some things about his staff and he made a chart of the office. And he had a circle, and he had 31 things that he was all at once. He said. . . I came up at another time, I asked permission to ask him a question, and, you know, when Vaughn got in that stuff about deep freezers or something. And I said, “Mr. President, you put a man on your staff and give him honor and trust and everything, and then he lets you down,” I said, “why do you defend him?” And he said, “well, I could pinch his head off.” And he used a qualifying word or two for emphasis. But he said, “I have these other thirty guys to think about.” He said, “They are all anonymous. They come down here to help me be president. They can get none of the glory, and if I make them take the blame – see, the buck has to stop with me.” He said, “They are all watching how I handle this guy, and if I throw him to the wolves,” he said, “I’ll be getting resignations in the next 10 or 15 days.” He said, “You know, half of my staff are making the lowest salary working for me than they’ve made in years.” But he said, “I need their brains.”
And then, that’s how this book that I told you about that has the duties of the president listed in it came about. I got one made and then Mr. Carter brought it up to date when he got there. But, you know, there’s over 5,400 Acts of Congress excerpted in that book today that says ‘the president shall do this.’ Vice President Rockefeller came in my committee room one day and we showed him this book and he stayed there a couple of hours reading it and he nearly threw a fit. He ended up, said, “I should have seen you guys before I took this silly job.” And he said, “Listen to this – can you imagine. . .?!” And he went on just reading through that book. Well, actually, one of the staff men went through there and he found laws that require the president to be in 32 places in the same identical time. That’s why you have to have a lot of help. That’s why, when a president makes a mistake of bringing some good old Georgia boys up there with him that don’t know where the men’s room is, why the pros in Washington make monkeys out of them. The president needs the finest, most skilled brains in America because he has to deal with all that sort of thing. How could you be president and make decisions on space or nuclear energy without having the world’s best brains there to help advise you? You’re never going to find a man that knows a fraction of all these things he has to make decisions on. Without a very highly skilled staff he’s not going to be a very good president. And this is . . . you see, the president we’ve got right now has got some staff troubles. People are fussing among themselves. And it’s not good for the president, it’s not good for the country. He’s got enough worries without having to worry about quarrelling and petty staffers. I always feel sorry for the president.
People said, you know, that I had to handle Nixon in all that ordeal. I was handling his budget. Somebody . . .and, of course, I did what my duties were. My job was to give him the tools of his office and I did. You only have one president at a time. I could hurt the president . . . I could hurt the country if he was the president, but I couldn’t hurt him because he was fixed by statute, you see, his salary and everything. Well, I said, you know, you only have one president at a time. I didn’t put him in there. But what are we going to gain by trying to be petty enough to cut him out from the things that the very nature of the office forces him to have to cope with. It’s peanuts for him to have 800 people on his staff. You know, they . . . it takes probably 50 of those people just to open the mail everyday. And another 50 to answer the telephones. You know, a lot of people have no idea the magnitude of the flow of everything that goes on down there. It really doesn’t have anything to do with the president, but they are part of the White House workload.
So, I got along with everybody at the White House because I was chosen by the House of Representatives. . . see there are three branches of government, and this is a very sensitive point, where the Congress deals with the Chief Executive on the tools of his office, because we have to provide them for him. And his ability to perform it has a lot to do with whether we do that properly or not. Well, I was the guy that had to ‘do the do it.’ I thought I’d belittle the House of Representatives if I tried to make any kind of hanky-panky out of the responsibilities that I had. I never tried to use that to influence presidents or get favors or anything else. As a matter of fact, I did such a good job, that they’d go out of their way to offer to help me if I had a problem. It’s not like the papers say, a lot of time. I feel sorry for anybody that’s president. I don’t see how anybody that knows what I know about it would ever want to be that anyway.
Lasalier: Well, speaking of former President Richard Nixon, various quotes have come forward from observations made by Harry Truman about Richard Nixon before, and during, and after the presidency of Nixon. Do you recall him making any comments about Nixon?
Steed: Oh, I remembered them at the time, but I don’t have any right at my fingertips now because it’s kind of a dead issue. It’s water under the bridge and I think the sooner forgotten the better because it – whatever influence it had in making things straighten up and fly right has already happened, and I’m sure that he couldn’t help but feel some sorrow for the man because he was so experienced in how staffers that you trust and all can make a fool out of themselves and when they do, they make one out of you, see? And having gone through that, I’m sure that he got more sympathy for Nixon than he did himself. I talk to Nixon several times a year. I talk to him, oh, two or three months ago. He called me about something. He says that he only made one mistake and that was when he told the first lie on the cover-up. He said from that time the world began to unravel. He said it took a thousand lies to cover the one lie, and then the fat was in the fire, and he said “There’s no way I’ll go to my grave and know why I was silly enough to make that first mistake.” He said, “It wasn’t even important.” And, of course, looking back on it, you can see that, but at the time, I guess, he just didn’t think about it.
Lasalier: Well, we can rest assured that historians will never grade Richard Nixon the same level as Harry Truman, but back to President Truman. How would you grade him on domestic issues, and then on foreign policy?
Steed: Well, you see, I’m not a . . . very much of a educated person on history and things, but I’ve read enough to know that circumstances make greatness in men – they become historically famous because of things that they had to fight with. Now, Truman, for instance, came along with the atomic bomb, and that made him an immortal. He’ll always be the first man in all history that gave that order. So, most of the presidents – if you hadn’t had a Civil War, how would Abraham Lincoln have won the place in the history of the world that he did? If things had had have been ordinary and every day and not very exciting, he might have passed on the scene as unknown as some of the other presidents did.
So, Nixon will go down as a man who broke the circle on the Mid East – or the Far East – and I think it will be remembered very favorably for that. Now, Truman, he just had one crisis after another. They were terrific things. And I think that history is going to say that met them very, very courageously, and very wisely, and I think one of the reasons was that he knew he wasn’t the smartest man in the world, so he just tried to get a hold of every smart man he could when he needed them. And, the man that’s willing to use some other man’s knowledge can be pretty smart sometimes. And Truman, I guess, was – he didn’t have that – some of these presidents, you know, that White House spotlight is so intoxicating – it’s so powerful, and it makes fools out of people, and some of the White House staff get to be pretty darn foolish. I don’t know why some people can’t stand to be in the spotlight without it making them do crazy things. But, ah, you know, you can see it on television if they span that camera out over a crowd, people make all kind of funny faces and everything else. It’s just something in people that cause them to do those things, but I don’t think any of that bothered Truman. He had been – he was a dirt farmer, and he never forgot where he came from and he never forgot the ordinaries of life and the realities and I think it did him a lot of good. And I think that if you go up to his home in Independence and his library and all and you’ll find that what he preserved and wanted the world to remember him by was almost entirely what would beneficial for somebody else and not much to add to his glory.
