Oral History Interview with Edward F. Prichard, Jr., March 3, 1983

Hellard:Testing one, two, three, four, testing, testing. This is tape number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight in a series of interviews with Edward F. Prichard, on the third day of March 1983. Okay, now we’re ready. It strikes me that the last we were talking about was you had—had left the Immigration Agency—

:Well, I left the Department of Justice. I never was in the Immigration Agency. I was more or less overseeing the Immigration Agency for the attorney general. The head of the agency was a commissioner who was appointed while I was there and I worked with him.

Hellard:Now, where did you go after you left the Justice?

:Oh, I’ve gone over some of this with you. I went to the Office of Production Management—

Hellard:Yes, we did.

:—and the War Production Board. And I worked there and I described some of that.

Hellard:You bet. We went over that. What’d you do next?

:Well, the situation regarding the civilian economy was getting out of hand in 1942. Once we were in the war, there was an immense federal deficit, an immense expansion of the federal government’s role in the economy. That role had been growing ever since about late 1940, but beginning in 1942 there was the imperative necessity of building fifty thousand airplanes, building constantly increasing numbers of merchant ships and transports, repairing some of the damage which Pearl Harbor had done to our navy, increasing the size of all branches of the armed forces, big training camps were being set up, military posts. We can look back just here in where prior to the war emergency we had only one major military post in and that was , originally known as . I always still think of it as . was a very small post, just had an infantry regiment there. But we built two major posts here in : and , which is on the edge of and . We had all kinds of other things, the post at Avon, the signal depot at was expanded nicely, and I think increased to the point where it was employing several thousand people. Over in Paris, my home, there was some kind of an installation over there in the old hotel where they had—were training radio operators or signal people of some kind. This was true all over the country. We were going into a situation where we not only had no unemployment we were going into a shortage of labor. And it was necessary to recruit literally millions of women into the labor force. Unemployment was down to what we might call a fractional level, in which there were more jobs available than there were people to fill them. All this placed a great strain on the domestic economy. People were—were working, earning money, and on the other hand, we were beginning to limit the production of a great many civilian goods. As I believe I said earlier, in—in 1942, after a struggle which had occurred for many—and this was early before I left the War Production Board—that struggle finally resulted in an order which stopped the production of civilian automobiles until the war was over. So nobody could buy a new car anymore, all the cars that were then in existence, the new cars were immediately impounded and could only by released for some military or urgent defense purpose. The demand for hard goods was greatly increased by the procurement programs of the government for planes, which demanded lots of aluminum; for tanks, which demanded lots of steel; for munitions. There were immense demands for certain raw materials that went into uniforms, wool and cotton, demand for gasoline to go into aviation gas, gas for tanks, gas for jeeps. All this put immense pressures on the civilian economy, pressures on supply goods, and pressures on the labor market. The natural result of that was that wages and prices were under great pressure. Now back in 1941, before , and I believe talked some about that earlier, we had this labor-management conference at the White House. I wasn’t working at the White House I was working at the War Labor Board, but as a result of that the labor and the industrial leaders entered into a so-called no strike agreement. And the National Mediation Board was reorganized as a tri-part type agency called the National War Labor Board. Now, this was—this was right after . It wasn’t—it was early ’42. And labor agreed there would be no strikes—that was a voluntary agreement—and management there would be no lockouts. And the president more or less conferred the power, there wasn’t any statute to back it up then, on the War Labor Board to deal with, in other words, wage ceilings. And the War Labor Board had put forth a formula for wage increases which limited general increases in wages to a increase of 15 percent, I believe, dating back to some time in 1940, because that’s when the inflation began, and the 15 percent represented the amount of increase in the cost of living that come prior to the promulgation of that formula, which was called the Little Steel Formula because it was arrived at the War Labor Board in a case involving the so-called little steel companies, which weren’t little they just weren’t U.S.

Hellard:Uh-huh.

:And that remained the wage policy of the federal government during the war. But that meant that there was increased, and terrifically increased, pressure on the government to do something about prices. Now beginning in 1941, we had had some selective price controls. The people who were put in charge of the Price Administration, Leon Henderson and his chief deputy Ken Galbraith, tended to believe in selective price controls, those commodities which were sensitive to the defense economy. Mr. [Bernard] Baruch, who had been the head of the War Industries Board in World War II—World War I, consistently said you couldn’t ever hold the thing in check unless you had a general ceiling on all wages and prices. Well, it turned out that he was right, because during ’42 we continued to have some inflation, and it was threatening to get worse.

Secretary:Excuse me, ( ) called Mr. Prichard—

:All right, will you turn—Economic thing [microphone noise] that’s what led to my going to the White House.

Hellard:Proceed.

:Then during 1942 it became evident that the selective controls weren’t working and that—that if we were going to hold at 15 percent increase in wage rates, we were going to have to do more about prices. Then another aspect of it that was troublesome was that the price control legislation we had in effect exempted farm commodities, which meant that there was no way to limit the inflation of food prices. So in the fall of 1942, the president asked the Congress to pass legislation that put a freeze on wages and prices as of, I believe it was September 15, 1942. And from then on, you could have increases only with the permission of some governmental authority. And the—that was passed by the Congress in September 1942. Well, there then became the question—came forward the question of how that was going to be handled. We had the OPA, Office of Price Administration, which was dealing with price control and rationing. We had the War Production Board that was dealing with the control of raw materials and the handling of some elements of procurement, and we had the armed services with their procurement officers. And we had all these various agencies, the Department of Agriculture and its connection with food. So we—when the president signed that executive order, he was advised that he needed somebody in the White House to coordinate all these domestic economic programs, particularly those that dealt with wages, prices, rationing, and so forth. So he asked Justice [James F.] Byrnes to resign from the Supreme Court and come to the White House and take that over as director of economic stabilization. The idea was that he was to have a very small staff and was not to set up another big bureaucracy, but simply to coordinate the other agencies and issue policy guidelines and settle disputes among the various agencies. But he did need a small staff, and I’m sure that he consulted with his colleague on the court Justice [Felix] Frankfurter. And so he brought into the little Office of Economic Stabilization in the White House, he brought Ben Cohen in, who had had long experience the government, he brought his old law partner Donald Russell from South Carolina, now a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the fourth circuit, later governor of North—South Carolina. And then he brought me, and I’m sure that Frankfurter had recommended me, although I knew Mr. Byrnes, you know, a little more than casually, but not all that intimately. And we immediately start to work. And that is how the government’s general economic stabilization program got into gear. And we dealt primarily with these operating agencies. Office of Price Administration, Department of Agriculture, later there was set up a Food Administration which was sort of independent of the Department of Agriculture but has some ties with it and some staffing from it. And then there was a Petroleum Administration set up in the Interior Department under [Harold] Ickes. Then there was a rubber program set up under a man named [William M.] Jeffers who was sort of a rubber czar because we were running short of rubber. And one of the things that immediately resulted was a broad program of rationing, because it was felt that—that you couldn’t hold prices in check, and wages in check, unless you could have something other than just money limiting the demand for goods and services. So we had tire rationing and we had synthetic rubber program, you know, in which the government set up these plants, financed them to make—take a natural rubber and mix it with synthetics to make synthetic tires and synthetic rubber. We had the rationing of gasoline in order to—primarily not to control oil, because we had plenty of oil, but we weren’t big importers then were probably exporters of oil, but we needed to ration gasoline in order to cut down on the use of tires, save rubber. And then because we had a hard time controlling the price of food we put in a broad program of rationing meat, rationing butter, rationing canned goods, rationing sugar, course we imported most of our sugar, rationing, oh, I’m sure some other food stuffs if I could think of them, maybe coffee. And then we had a control materials program in which, under the War Production Board, all the basic materials were controlled, so that you produced a ton of steel, we could know exactly where that was going, whether it was going for tank, whether it was going for civilian use, whether it was going for munitions, whatever it was going for. So we had very tight control on supplies and demand, and that’s the only way we were ever able to hold prices under control. And indeed there were some right remarkable things. The price of steel basically didn’t go up all during the war. The price of aluminum didn’t go up all during the war, price of copper stayed at twelve cents a pound all during the war. And that was a very difficult time, you know, there were lots of controversies. Every agency wanted to get special consideration for its constituency. Mr. [Harold] Ickes wanted raise the price of oil in order to stimulate the production of more oil. The War Food Administration wanted to loosen up on the prices of agriculture commodities to stimulate more food production. But if we had let everybody raise his particular segment, we would simply have a backdoor method for inflation, so it was a very difficult thing. And at the same time, the labor unions were constantly pushing for wage adjustments, alleging that you needed them in order to get more, a bigger supply of labor in certain factories and certain industries. And of course if you let that go loose, you would have knocked the ceiling off the wage levels. So this was a constant thing that went on. There have been quite a few things written about it. Eliot Janeway, who is a financial writer, still living, wrote a book about it, and some other people have written about it. And it was a very, very interesting, touchy, difficult thing to happen. The Congress was always messing in it, you know, people in the Congress that represented sugar states always wanted sugar to go up, people in the Congress that represented cotton states wanted cotton to go up, people in the Congress was represented the grain producing states wanted grain to go up, people in the Congress that represented copper states always wanted copper to go up, and this meant you had political pressures. And that is where Mr. Byrnes was such an artist. He had close ties with all the leadership and all the membership in the Congress, and they—they believed him to be friendly. He wasn’t just a typical bureaucrat. And yet at the same time, he realized that the—that there had to be a fairly tight reign on these things, so he had work cut out for him, to hold the line. Now in September, this general price thing went into effect and it stayed in until the next spring of ’43. But even so, prices were still creeping up, and they were—the increase had slowed down, but it still was something of an increase. Probably we had an increase in the overall level of prices between late ’42 and spring of ’43 of something like 5 percent, or maybe not quite that much, I can’t remember exactly, but that alarmed us. So in the spring of ’43, the what he called the hold-the-line order, which even further restricted the authority of the control agencies to increase prices. And from the time that hold-the-line order went into effect until the end of the war, we less than a two and a half percent increase in the level of prices, which meant that it finally began to work. Then of course we had a problem of labor shortages and manpower, as I said, unemployment was down to fractional levels or below. But we still had the problem of getting people to work in the place where they were needed. Now, there were lots of people then that wanted a draft of labor, wanted force to come along, just take people on assignment. But a lot of people were very reluctant to do that. So an order was issued that every employer must hire his labor through the U.S. Employment Service. In other words, it eliminated all other means of hiring workers, and that meant that through the employment service you could send job applicant or workers to the employers based on the need for them and the priorities. And that helped to stretch the supply of manpower. Another thing that was done was that there was—with the labor shortage there was a lot of necessity to train workers in order to find new people just to take advantage of the skills that were needed. And probably the best, the most successful of these programs—we had vocational schools and we had all kinds of training—but the best thing that was done was to break down the jobs from complex to simple occupations, and to train workers on the job. That was the most successful program we had. And the labor unions, because they had representation in the War Production Board, the labor unions were cooperative in this even though it ran counter—counter to their traditional ways of dealing with the crafts and the various skilled occupations. And this meant that the usefulness of the labor force and its productivity were greatly increased over what it would have been if you had used the traditional methods. Now, I’m describing this in a very general way. We had lots of fights on legislation, there was, there were strikes—United Mine Workers particularly had a couple of strikes—and the president on one or two occasions had to seize the coal mines. And so it was a constant battle. But that was what we worked on. Finally, sometime in ’43, the need for coordination grew so much greater that Justice Byrnes was moved up to be the director of the whole mobilization effort, Office of War Mobilization. And Judge [Fred] Vinson from Kentucky, later chief justice, was named to succeed him as director of economic stabilization. Now, I worked as kind of a liaison between them until Justice Byrnes resigned in 1944, and then Justice Vinson was named to the—succeed him as director of war mobilization. But those are the—the people that worked with us. I’ve named most of them. Another was Paul Porter, later a very prominent Washington lawyer, native of Winchester [Kentucky], and a few others. But we never had a great big staff.

Hellard:How did Justice Byrnes develop his rapport with the—the members of Congress?

Prichard:He’d already had it. He’s been in Congress since the [Woodrow] Wilson administration. He was United States Senator from South Carolina for, I would say, you know, what, ten or twelve years.

Hellard:So you—so he had—had been one of them, that’s why they—

Prichard:Oh yeah. And Judge Vinson was the same way. He had been a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. I think that’s part of the reason they were chosen, is their closeness to members of Congress.

Hellard:Well during this same period of time, what was Phil Graham doing?

Prichard:He had gone into army intelligence and was abroad.

Hellard:That’s right you mentioned that. You stayed—you stayed the duration of the war, then?

Prichard:Uh-huh. Joe Rauh had gone to the Philippines, or at least, you know, was there when [General Douglas] MacArthur came back, I mean, he had been where MacArthur was before he went Australia I guess. And—

Hellard:While you were in the White House, were you politically active?

Prichard:Oh, in a sort of unofficial way. The only time I was politically active in the overt sense was in the summer, late summer of 1944 when I took leave from my job to go to New York and work with Bob Hannegan and Paul Porter in the Roosevelt campaign for reelection in 1944.

Hellard:And what was your function there?

Prichard:Oh, I helped organized panels of speakers, worked a little on speeches, things of that sort. Kind of a handyman. And then, I was trying to think of any other political activities, but that was the main one, that was in the late summer and fall in 1944. Of course the things I was doing at the White House had a lot of political connotation, but I wasn’t in any overt political activities.

Hellard:Did you get much direct contact with the president when you were with the White House?

Prichard:Intermittent. Certainly not daily contact.

Hellard:Can you recall some of those occasions?

Prichard:Oh yes, I can remember meetings we had, for instance, about the coal strike, when some of us felt that if the government was going to seize the mines that the government ought to negotiate a contract with the United Mine Workers for the period when the mines were under government control. And the president was absolutely adamant in refusal to do that. He was very much opposed, and always was, for the government, the federal government to recognize or negotiate with labor unions in connection with public employment. Most of the rest of us, including Justice Byrnes, felt that it would be the best thing to do, but the president never would do it. Then, oh, another thing I can remember is I was in several meetings with him involving the Bretton Woods Conference, which was up in New Hampshire, where Justice Vinson went. That’s where the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were first started. I did not go to Bretton Woods [in July 1944], but I took an active part in the preparation of it. I was in several meetings that dealt with the—

Hellard:What did you do connection with that?

Prichard:What would I do?

Hellard:What did you do?

Prichard:I would mostly sit and listen, I mean—

Hellard:No, you said you had a big part in the development of the World Bank and—

Prichard:No, I didn’t say I had a big part. I said the Bretton Woods Conference did. I was not at the Bretton Woods Conference, but I had some part in the preparation of it.

Hellard:Well, what did you do in preparation?

Prichard:Well, I talked with people in the treasury, talked with people in the White House that were working on it, and some of the other agencies of government, and sat in on a few of the meetings and listened, might have chimed in an occasional comment, but I wasn’t—I wasn’t looked on as a senior adviser. I would say most of the impact that I had was through others. Now I would, as I say, quite occasionally sit on meetings, but I was generally expected to be fairly quiet. There was a famous occasion when there was a big conference about leaks, and the president was mad because people were leaking things, and he had a bunch that was over there and raised the devil about it. And then when we got through, you know, we all swore we wouldn’t leak. And then he turned to me and said, “But there are a few things that need to be leaked now.” He said, “There’s one story that I would like to see you, Prich, leak to Drew Pearson.” And I said, “Mister,” he told me what the story was, and I said, “Mr. President, I already have.” [Hellard laughs] And—

Hellard:You going to let us know what the story was?

Prichard:I’m trying to remember what it was. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. It probably was something that related to a dispute between the Food Administration and the Price Administration about agricultural prices. Those things were always in the paper. Then one of the things that I had a major impact on, unofficially, was the president’s dissatisfaction with the leadership of the War Production Board. Donald Nelson had been named the head of it. And Nelson and his chief deputy Ferdinand Eberstadt were at loggerheads, and the president felt that the thing was so torn up by division that he was going to have to do something about it. And I felt, and some others felt, that the president probably ought to do something that he wasn’t quite ready to do then, which was to get rid of Nelson and appoint Charlie Wilson, the head of General Electric, not General Motors, there were two Charlies, you know, who was a deputy, Nelson as the head of it. But Byrnes sold the president on the idea that he should appoint Bernard Baruch, because he thought that would be a great confidence builder and so forth. Well, several others, Ben Cohen and I, thought that was terrible. Baruch was kind of an old pooh-bah and a public figure, but really he would have been a mischief maker trying to run that agency. And he was old and careless and kind of a showoff and we thought that would be disastrous. But Byrnes got the president to sign the damn letter to Baruch offering him, more or less commanding him, to take this position. Well, Justice Byrnes held possession of that letter on his desk, and the rest of them were all worried about what to do. And so I called Wayne Coy, who was head of the Office of Emergency Management, which was kind of a little management agency that kind of assisted all the defense and war agencies, and he was—had been deputy director of the budget and was very close to the president and the budget director. So I talked to Wayne Coy about it, and he thought it would be a mistake. So we concocted a means by which to—to abort this. And I called a friend of mine, Bob Nathan, who was director of planning at the War Production Board and a friend of Nelson’s, and I told him—and other others agreed with me—but I told him, I said, “Bob, only way you can stop this is for strength and leadership by firing [Ferdinand] Eberstadt,” who was his deputy that he didn’t get along with. And I said, “If he does that, that’ll knock this thing in the head, and then Don can step down in a few weeks and let C. E. Wilson take his place.” Well, Nelson had a press conference and announced that—that he was firing Eberstadt and making C. E. Wilson his chief deputy. And then in a few weeks, he did resign, and Wilson was appointed successor. And I’m afraid that I had, you know, played a trick on my boss Justice Byrnes because I didn’t—I didn’t tell I had done that, and he was always puzzled about how that happened. And Eliot Janeway in his book wrote it up and was very—he was a stooge of Baruch’s, and he had a vicious attack on me for doing that. He was telling the truth about it being mean and vivid, [Hellard laughs] but I think it was the right thing. I’d say that’s one place where I had a major impact. And I would say my greatest impact generally was not in the advice I gave the president, which was intermittent and very junior, but in the impact on the decisions that were made at the next level by Judge Vinson and Judge Byrnes, which were very strong decisions and helped to hold the domestic economy in line.

Hellard:Do recall any other instances where you and Justice Byrnes or Justice Vinson, then, held different views?

Prichard:Not many. Usually we were all the same. We… [Harold] Ickes recommended an increase in the price of oil; Judge Vinson and I vetoed that. One of the Railroad Labor Board recommended an increase in the wages of railroad workers that we saw was too great. Judge Vinson vetoed that. Usually I found myself in agreement with Judge Vinson and most part with Justice Byrnes. Oh, I’m sure there were minor matters we might have disagreed on, but not of anything major.

Hellard:During this time did you see much of Justice Frankfurter?

Prichard:Sure, sure I did. I mean, very frequently, socially. And he’d have me up to lunch at the Court and have me to dinner, saw a lot of him. But I don’t—he didn’t interfere in any of the work we were doing.

Hellard:At what point did you leave the White House?

Prichard:I guess I left when Judge Vinson left, after President Roosevelt died. Now, there was a brief period when I was in the army. I went in service in—in—in—in sometime late summer of ’43, and was sent to Fort Custer [in Michigan]. And then after two or three months there, I was given a medical discharge and went back to the White House in the fall of ’43. I remember it was in the fall because I was up at Fort Custer when the Kentucky gubernatorial election occurred, I believe, in 1943. But Judge Vinson, you see, left the White House after President Roosevelt died to become head of the federal loan agency that was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and all the federal lending agencies. I went over there with him, but he wasn’t there, oh, a very short time when Secretary [Henry] Morgenthau [Jr.] resigned from the treasury and Judge Vinson went to become secretary of the treasury, which was in the spring or early summer of 1945. I was in the White House the day President Roosevelt died, attended his funeral. Can remember very well where I was when he died, when I learned of it. I was up at the Cardinal Hotel a block away from the White House getting a shave. I use to go up there every day. And being a bachelor and able to waste a little money, I’d get a barbershop shave and a massage. And I was stretched back in that chair when it came over the radio. I’ll never forget it. And time I got back, President [Harry] Truman had already been sworn in. Judge Vinson was just coming back from the ceremony. But I made my mind up about that time that I was going back to Kentucky in a very few months, and I told Judge Vinson that. So I went with him just to help him get a-—acclimated to the Federal Loan Agency, or FC, whatever you call it. Then I went to the treasury with him for a couple of months for the same reason. But I had always intended to come back to Kentucky when the war was over.

Hellard:Had you had occasion to meet Vice President Truman?

Prichard:Oh yes, yes, I met him during the campaign, and I met him during the time, brief time he was vice president, went to a dinner out at Bob Hannegan’s house. I became very close to Bob Hannegan, who was postmaster general and chairman of the Democratic National Committee during this period. Worked with him in the campaign, Roosevelt and Truman, as I told you before. And Bob and I were very close. He died rather young. I guess in the early 50s, but—I mean early 50s in—in that decade, but we were very close. And—

Hellard:What were your impressions with Truman?

Prichard:Well, when I first knew him, I thought he was a fellow with some common sense and all right, but I didn’t then see the qualities that later distinguished him as a president and as a leader. But I didn’t see that much of him. He was—he, you know, he reminded me very much of the kind of politician I knew in Kentucky, a lot of them. And he was informal and terse, pleasant to be with, but I must say that I didn’t have—I—my general impression when President Roosevelt died was that we were in a hell of a fix. And it was only later, and really only after I had returned to Kentucky, that I began to realize what a really good leader President Truman was. I didn’t really see it. That’s one case where I overlooked a lot of things.

Hellard:What do you think his outstanding qualities as a leader was, what made him such a good leader?

Prichard:Decisiveness, common sense, courage, knew a good deal of history. He was honest. He was in many ways a good politician, new the political game, was a good speaker when he cut loose from his manuscript and just said what was in his mind. He was not polished orator, but he had a lot of wit, terse, humor. He was—

Hellard:Do you recall any of your—any of your—any specific meetings you had with him?

Prichard:Oh, not a whole lot, because I think he was rather hostile to me when he first came in as president. I think he—he felt that a lot of the Roosevelt people thought he was inferior and thought he was inadequate and was suspicious of him, and so he became suspicious of them. Matter of fact, he had my wires tapped when he first came in. And Dee Huddleston told me within the last few months, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that he had found that out. I wasn’t surprised because he told Judge Vinson, you know, that he thought I was a kind of a Roosevelt loyalist and didn’t think of him. And I expect when he tapped my wires, he heard me call Frankfurter, with whom I talked frequently just in the general way, that I thought some of the people around Truman were less than distinguished. But see, that was before he had really dis-—displayed all these qualities. And later on, he got some very good people. But he had a man named John Synder that later became Secretary of the Treasury, that I didn’t think much of, and two or three people like that. Jake Barterman, who was his naval aide and later on the Federal Reserve Board. But, you know, I only saw the small boy side of him at that time, and I realized later that I was very wrong and underestimated him.

Hellard:Did Justice Vinson leave the White House? I take it he and Truman were close.

Prichard:Yes, very close.

Hellard:So he didn’t leave because Truman came in?

Prichard:No, no. Truman asked him to go to the Federal Loan Agency. See Jesse Jones had—they had this big ruckus over Jesse Jones being fired as Secretary of Commerce and the president wanted— [microphone noise] —Roosevelt—

Hellard:What are you looking for?

Prichard:A match.

Hellard:( )

Prichard:—President Roosevelt want to put Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce and the only way he could get Wallace confirmed was to move—

Hellard:There you go.

Prichard:—was to separate the Federal Loan Agency from the Commerce Department, Jones having held both positions. And so that position was vacant when Truman became president, and that was a very powerful position, the Federal Loan Agency. The RFC had billions of dollars to lend, and it financed many of the activities of the government, you know, through off, what you call off-budget loans. And so his choice of—of Fred Vinson was highly popular politically, and, oh no, he didn’t—and by that time, the war was over, and the general feeling was that we ought to loosen up on all the wartime controls, which was a mistake. It was done too soon. Then when Morgenthau resigned [as secretary of the treasury in July 1945], Vinson had been on the House Ways and Means Committee and been very powerful, you know, tax writer and legislator during the New Deal period, so appeared to be politically an ideal person to go to the treasury. And all those were signs of Truman’s confidence, hell, Truman made him head of the Federal Loan Agency, made him secretary of the treasury, and then made him chief justice. Oh, he and Truman, they played cards together, they were very close. I expect Judge Vinson was in many ways personally closer to Truman than he was FDR. But I had already made up my mind to go back to Kentucky. But I think that—that President Truman made some unfavorable comments about me to Judge Vinson, but Judge Vinson was not the kind of person to back down on somebody he liked, and he told Truman he was going to keep me there as long as I wanted to stay. And Truman acquiesced in it. And Judge Vinson never did suggest to me that I ought to leave, because he knew that in the first place that I had already planned to leave shortly after the end of the war. And after I helped him get settled in the treasury, I was ready to go home, and that’s— And Judge Vinson and I had one disagreement, really our only one, that brief period when he was at the treasury, he wanted to repeal excise properties tax, which had been on all during the war, in a single bite. And I felt that was too inflationary and we ought to repeal it in two or three bites. Well, he went ahead and did it they way he wanted to, and I think that helped give us the postwar inflation. But he felt that it was necessary to get investment and full employment going to do it. And he had a good argument, and I had a good argument. I think I had the better argument, but he was secretary of the treasury and I wasn’t. And we parted on most amicable terms. I was at his funeral, and we continued to be very close. And I don’t have any doubt that when I got in my troubles, which we’ll talk about later, that he went right to President Truman and urged him, with every strength at his command, to give me a pardon. I don’t have any doubt about it.

Hellard:What was the general sense of the inner circle, the Roosevelt inner circle, when the—at the time Roosevelt—Truman took over?

Prichard:Oh, I’d say that the predominant feeling was that was inadequate.

Hellard:Was there any sense of panic, or what?

Prichard:Well, sense of discouragement, wasn’t panic exactly. No, just a feeling, which later changed greatly, but there was just a feeling. You know, Truman had not been a dramatic figure other than his chairmanship of the Truman committee investigating, you know, war contracts and things like that. He hadn’t been—he had some good things in his records, but, you know, people didn’t think of him as a president. He was chosen primarily because the president decided [Henry] Wallace was a political liability in 1944. And Truman was a kind of a middle-of-the-road Democratic senator, border state.

Hellard:The Truman Committee is the committee that investigated Happy Chandler?

Prichard:That’s right. And whitewashed him, whitewashed him. And he showed his gratitude by blackening Truman every time he could and still does.

Hellard:Did Happy support the Dixiecrats?

Prichard:In 1948 he certainly did. The first name on the petition to put Dixiecrat electors on the ballot was Mildred Watkins Chandler. And the chairman of the Dixiecrat party in Kentucky was Orville W. Baylor.

Hellard:What, the other thing I wanted to ask you about Truman, what was the sense in Washington when—when the atomic bomb was used? Was there any real understanding of what—what had been unleashed?

Prichard:No, really not. You know, I suppose that in the certain sense the first, particularly by people who—who hadn’t known about it, didn’t know all the repercussions, was that it—it had brought a quick end to the war. I think it was only later, and first among the sophisticated scientists and people that knew all the ins and outs, the secret of the atomic bomb was kept very closely. Most of the people, even the top levels of the government, didn’t really know what the Manhattan Project was in detail. About all I knew was that it was a very high explosive, you know, and in fact Justice Byrnes took such a skeptical view of it—

Hellard:Wait a minute… Okay, Justice Byrnes took…

Prichard: Took such a skeptical view of it that he urged Judge Vincent, who was his successor, to try to stop it and halt it. Not on the grounds that it was a danger to world peace, but on the grounds that it was probably a waste of money.

Hellard: Well, in your, in your work, as coordinating these various materials and so forth, did you know the materials were being fed to the Manhattan Project?

Prichard: Oh yes, vast quantities; and we also knew that it was extremely secretive, that even Donald Nelson when he was chairman of the War Production Board wasn’t really told the whole truth about it and that it was a very tightly guarded thing.

Prichard: I really think that maybe it’s about time to desist, if you don’t mind.

Hellard: No sir, that’s fine.