Partner to Power

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by K. Ward Cummings


  Clifford believed giving in to the miners would make Truman look weak and could hurt the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming elections. He advocated for an uncompromising insistence that Lewis fulfill the terms of the signed agreement. During a particularly heated exchange after a few drinks in the second-floor residence of the White House, Steelman and Clifford debated their points directly to the president. In the end, Truman decided in Clifford’s favor.

  The president had the US attorney general file a lawsuit against Lewis accusing him of contempt of court for not adhering to the terms of the agreement, and the union was slapped with a fine of $3.5 million. In addition, Lewis was personally fined, to the tune of $10,000—the equivalent of $100,000 today—with the threat of jail time if he failed to pay up. Lewis made repeated attempts to reach the president, hoping to negotiate, but on Clifford’s advice, Truman refused his calls. Accepting his loss, Lewis called a press conference and announced that the miners would honor their commitments under the contract. Clifford had gone toe to toe with Steelman and won.

  Prevailing in his struggle with Lewis and Steelman elevated Clifford to the pinnacle of Truman’s advisers. His promotion was unwelcome news to Steelman as well as to Vaughn, who had watched Clifford’s swift rise from assistant naval aide to naval aide to White House counsel with growing unease, worrying that Clifford might replace Rosenman as Truman’s number-one adviser.

  If there was any lingering confusion about who was Truman’s right-hand man, it was laid to rest on the day Truman asked Vaughn to surrender Rosenman’s large West Wing office to Clifford and to move into Clifford’s modest office on the other end of the White House. When Rosenman left, Vaughn had been quick to seize his office, recognizing the importance of proximity to the president, whose office was next door. By giving Clifford Rosenman’s old office and his old job, Truman was communicating to his inner circle that Clifford was now his most important adviser—a remarkable achievement, given where he started.

  III

  Finding Truman’s Voice

  As Clifford settled into his role as Truman’s counsel, he came to be involved, to some degree, in every major decision Truman made. Clifford was at Truman’s side, for example, when the president decided to undertake a major government reorganization. Leading a consolidation effort throughout the executive branch, with Clifford’s help Truman recast the federal government—in particular, the national security structure16—into a more efficient and responsive tool, one that would give the president better control of domestic and international affairs.

  Truman’s reorganization comprised three main goals: a downsizing of the federal government to match diminishing postwar burdens; a reshaping of the military to address the emerging threat of Soviet expansion; and the development of his own national security advisory apparatus within the White House. Of these three goals, downsizing the government would happen with the least effort on Truman’s part.

  When FDR entered the White House in 1933, approximately five hundred thousand people worked for the federal government. By the time Truman took over twelve years later, the number had risen to more than three million. Much of that growth was associated with the war and with efforts to stand up New Deal programs. Now that the war and the Depression were over, hundreds of thousands of men and women were leaving the government for opportunities elsewhere—relieving Truman of the burden of having to find a way to dismiss them. Dealing with the problems associated with the national security system would be far more challenging.

  Truman knew that any reorganization of the country’s national security structure must begin with the military, which had long suffered from the effects of disunity and inter-service rivalry. In fact, during the war, there had been so much infighting in the military that Truman thought the US was lucky to have won at all. “We must never fight another war the way we fought the last two,” he once said. “I have the feeling that if the Army and Navy had fought our enemies as hard as they fought each other, [World War II] would have ended much earlier.”17

  At various times, Secretary Marshall, Defense Secretary James Forrestal and President Truman himself were each credited with espousing the virtues of greater cooperation among the military agencies, but nothing ever seemed to get done to address the problems. Truman resolved to be the first president to change this.

  Some trace Truman’s idea of military reform to the famous Elsey Report of 1946, a comprehensive national security analysis based on the famous “Long Telegram” written by renowned American foreign-policy expert George Kennan. The report was largely the work of its namesake, Truman adviser George Elsey, although Clifford enhanced it by soliciting and incorporating ideas from others and edited it to appeal to Truman’s sensibilities.18 The report argued that the Soviet Union was emerging as a major threat to the US and that the president needed to change direction in his foreign policy in order to meet the challenges of the situation.

  The foreign-policy successes for which Truman would later become known—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO and the policy of “containment” with regard to communism—were all reactions to international events, but they were influenced heavily by what he learned from the Elsey Report. The legislative platform Truman created to help him institute these policies was the National Security Act of 1947, and Clifford was essential to its passage.

  Behind the scenes, as Truman’s point person for guiding the bill through Congress, Clifford contributed substantially to the creation of the CIA, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even the Defense Department—an agency that he would lead himself some years later. Clifford wrote for Truman the letters to Congress explaining the rationale for the reorganization. He acted as Truman’s liaison between the army and the navy to iron out differences between the two departments. He helped draft various versions of the legislation. It was his idea to house the National Security Council in the White House rather than in the Pentagon under the control of the secretary of defense. And it was he who drafted the executive orders to implement the reorganization when the legislation passed Congress.

  Clifford played another, less obvious role in the process, without which the reorganization might have happened quite differently. He was Truman’s eyes, ears and voice. Other presidents’ attempts at reorganization had failed largely because the navy and the army actively opposed them. On Truman’s behalf, Clifford fought all the petty turf battles that would have been undignified for a president to fight. Clifford gathered intelligence and brought it to Truman; together they would analyze it to determine how to implement their agenda. Clifford sat in all the meetings that were beneath the office of the president and steered them in Truman’s favor.

  Though the reforms Truman established in 1947 would not take full effect for months, and what we recognize today as the National Security Council would not emerge until much later, they ultimately made the White House the unqualified leader in the shaping and articulation of the nation’s foreign policy. As a result of Clifford’s actions on Truman’s behalf, no president would ever have to suffer the same frustration as Truman did in May 1948 when he brought his secretary of state to heel in the Oval Office.

  IV

  Clifford: Partner to Power

  Like Louis Howe, Clifford represents the chief-of-staff model of presidential right hand. In Clifford’s case, in his capacity as White House counsel, he functioned like a chief of staff, though the title did not yet exist. Today the White House counsel functions as one might expect a counsel to, with defined legal responsibilities, but in Clifford’s day the duties of the position were significantly broader.

  In the Truman Administration, the responsibilities of today’s chief of staff were divided between two positions—the White House counsel (Clifford) and the assistant to the president (Steelman). The former was responsible for helping the president with policy planning and synthesis. The latter oversaw White House operations. A visitor to the executive mansion in 1948 might easily r
ecognize that Clifford was the most powerful member of Truman’s staff, but on paper he and Steelman were regarded as equals.

  The next president, Eisenhower, combined the duties held by Clifford and Steelman into a new position. Doing so helped prevent the overlapping of responsibilities—which had been a frequent source of friction between those two men. Eisenhower placed this new position, his chief of staff, at the top of the White House chain of command—on a par, in many ways, with his cabinet members.

  As White House counsel, Clifford was followed by notables including Ted Sorensen, who worked for President Kennedy; Lloyd Cutler, who worked for Presidents Carter and Clinton; and Fred Fielding, who worked for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. None of the thirty-six men and women who succeeded Clifford, however, enjoyed the same level of sweeping influence as he did—with the possible exception of John Ehrlichman, who was a key player in the Nixon White House. Because Nixon’s circle of advisers shrank as the Watergate scandal grew, Ehrlichman quickly became one of the most powerful people in the administration.

  Clifford would serve as Truman’s chief adviser for three years, helping the president win a surprising reelection campaign in 1948 before leaving to establish a lucrative Washington legal practice. He would return to the highest levels of government only once more, twenty years later, to become secretary of defense to President Lyndon Johnson.

  Even with the changes to the federal bureaucracy instituted with Clifford’s help, the US government was still a writhing, unwieldy behemoth. In order to gain better control of an executive branch that was too massive to maneuver, Truman’s successor, President Eisenhower, with the help of his closest aide, Sherman Adams, would introduce an organizational framework that would permanently change how subsequent presidents oversaw White House operations.

  Eisenhower is credited with the creation of what we recognize today as the White House chief of staff. Afterward, every US president would have one, and this person often would be the president’s principal adviser. Yet Eisenhower’s chief, Sherman Adams, remains the most powerful one to date. The scope of his influence would become clearly apparent to all involved in the autumn of 1955, when together, he and the president guided the country through what in less capable hands might have developed into a major constitutional crisis.

  POWER BY PROXY

  Three months to the day after this photo was taken, President Eisenhower suffered a debilitating heart attack. Afterward, his chief of staff, Sherman Adams—pictured here during their golf outing in New Hampshire—kept such a tight grip on power in the White House that advisers started referring to him as “the abominable ‘no’ man.”

  A man like Adams is valuable because of the unnecessary detail he keeps away from the President.1

  —President Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Since the founding of the American republic, the vast majority of presidents have acted as their own chiefs of staff.2 The need for a change only arose in the twentieth century as the size of the White House staff mushroomed to match the explosive growth of the federal government. After taking office in 1953, President Eisenhower granted his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, viceroy-like authority over the scope and direction of White House operations and domestic policymaking. For Adams, the immensity of his responsibilities would come into full relief during the weeks following Eisenhower’s heart attack in late 1955. The president’s illness would test the limits and loyalties of his cabinet, and, by the time the crisis fully subsided, the presidency would be forever changed.

  Eisenhower’s heart attack introduced uncertainty into a White House culture that he had worked hard to make appear serene and predictable. As he lay unconscious in a hospital in Denver, not only was the public unsure of how the government would operate without him, his own agency heads wondered as well. Eisenhower had assembled in his cabinet a team of extraordinary men, many of whom could have been president in their own right. This first great crisis of his administration might have driven a wedge into the cabinet had it not been for the efforts of four men who would literally hold in their hands the life and legacy of the president…

  Howard Snyder, Eisenhower’s doctor, confirmed the suspicions of many critics that he was in over his head as White House physician when his initial misdiagnosis almost cut the president’s life short. Snyder would spend the rest of his days telling and retelling a carefully embroidered and misleading account of the critical first hours following Eisenhower’s heart attack in order to conceal his embarrassing error…

  John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, an evangelical Calvinist who once considered disowning his own son for choosing to become a Catholic, was one half of a powerful foreign-policy team with his brother Allen, the director of the CIA. Together they personally oversaw the overt and covert foreign affairs of the nation. Eisenhower’s sudden illness, a huge jolt to the status quo, threatened everything Dulles and his brother had built together. If he wanted to retain his almost complete control of foreign-policy matters, he would need to cleverly sidestep a power struggle with not one, but two of the most influential cabinet members…

  Richard Nixon, the young and inexperienced vice president, was struggling to stay relevant in an administration that frequently regarded him as a liability. Eisenhower’s incapacitation gave him the opportunity of his dreams: to lead the nation through a crisis and thereby secure his claim to the unofficial title of “president-in-waiting.” But it would be ripped from his grasp even before he knew what had happened…

  And Sherman Adams, the president’s chief of staff—and the widely recognized power behind the throne—would be caught “on the back foot” as forces within the cabinet mobilized to challenge his power.

  Each of these men would play a major role in how the administration navigated the crisis. Outside of the White House, the public saw an administration striding confidently with the nation’s affairs well in hand. But inside, the mood was less certain as the gathering of alpha males, each used to the sound of his own voice, circled Eisenhower’s empty chair like hungry vultures.

  I

  Liars’ Club

  Adams was just ending a month-long tour of military installations in Europe when he learned of Eisenhower’s heart attack. It had been an exhausting trip, and Adams was looking forward to resuming his routine back in Washington. While waiting in line for his flight home from Scotland, he was recognized, pulled aside and given the news.

  Drizzle blew sideways across the tarmac as he approached the plane. The image of the legendarily vigorous Eisenhower lying helpless in a hospital bed must have dominated his thoughts as he mounted the stairs. Like most of the public, Adams knew only sketchy details about Eisenhower’s condition. He would not get the full picture until the next day, when he called the president’s press secretary, James Hagerty.

  At 2:30 a.m. on September 24, 1955, President Eisenhower was awakened from a restless sleep by a sharp pain in his abdomen. He and his wife, Mamie, slept in separate rooms, so, with difficulty, he raised himself out of bed and walked across the hall. Mamie awoke to find the president standing above her in the dark, breathing hard and clutching his chest. She walked him back to his room and helped him into bed. Thinking that he might be experiencing another one of his regular bouts of indigestion, she convinced him to take milk of magnesia. Then she lay down beside him, rubbing his back in the way that always calmed him, until he fell asleep. What happened next depends on who was asked and when.

  For years, much of what was known about the president’s heart attack came from his personal physician, Dr. Howard Snyder,3 whom Mamie phoned soon after the president fell asleep. Over the years, as he retold the story, Snyder’s description of the events of that morning grew more elaborate and boastful of his skills as a physician. In his favored version, he arrived at the Eisenhower family home to find the president in pain, which he immediately recognized as a heart attack. He administered a series of drugs to relieve Eisenhower’s discomfort and to prevent further damage to his
heart. Once the president was out of danger, Snyder administered a second dose of morphine to enable him to rest comfortably. He allowed the president to sleep late into the morning; then, after calling in a leading Denver cardiologist to confirm his diagnosis, Snyder had the president moved to nearby Fitzsimons Army Hospital.

  If this was indeed what happened, Snyder should be commended for his quick thinking, his discretion and his discipline. But this is not how events actually unfolded.

  In his 1996 book, Eisenhower’s Heart Attack,4 University of Texas professor Clarence Lasby argued that Snyder initially misdiagnosed the president’s condition and the delay of appropriate care exacerbated his ailment. Even more damningly, Lasby’s research reveals that Snyder’s actions suggest that he deliberately tried to cover up his mistake. Even a cursory review of Snyder’s efforts on that morning show that Snyder was clearly operating under the assumption that the president was suffering from indigestion, not a heart attack.

  According to Lasby’s research, at six in the morning, Snyder telephoned the president’s driver to inform him that a car would not be needed until later in the day because the president was not feeling well. Afterward, he called the president’s private secretary to convey the same message. Mindful of the press conference held each morning at eight, Snyder then called Murray Snyder (no relation), the president’s deputy press secretary, to inform him that Eisenhower had an upset stomach and would have a delayed workday. Based on Dr. Snyder’s information, Murray reported at the eight o’clock press conference that the president was suffering a stomach ailment, and he made a similar announcement at his eleven o’clock press conference. That would be the last time Eisenhower’s illness would be described as indigestion.

  When the president awoke around eleven that same morning with no change in his condition, Snyder realized that something more serious than indigestion must be affecting him—yet he took no extraordinary measures to determine the source of the symptoms. Instead he permitted Eisenhower to rest two hours more. Only when it finally dawned on him that Eisenhower must have had a heart attack did he seek outside assistance. He called Dr. Byron Pollock, the chief of cardiology at Fitzsimons Army Hospital outside Denver, and asked him to come at once and to bring an electrocardiograph machine.

 

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