Archives and Special Collections Mansfield Library, University of Montana Missoula MT 59812-9936 Email: [email protected] Telephone: (406) 243-2053 This transcript represents the nearly verbatim record of an unrehearsed interview. Please bear in mind that you are reading the spoken word rather than the written word. Oral History Number: 391-010 Interviewee: Mike Mansfield Interviewer: Don Oberdorfer Date of Interview: September 9,1999 Project: Don Oberdorfer Interviews with Mike Mansfield Oral History Project Don Oberdorfer's notes prior to recorded interview of September 9,1999 Made me coffee automatically when I came in. Didn't look good - very thin and pale. Seemed to say (if I understood correctly) he had been having trouble regaining weight after his operation. Mind as good as ever. Wearing a red (crimson?) US Marine Corps tie, with the Marine emblem, and Marine tie clasp. A lightly checked shirt. This tim e a belt rather than suspenders. Says he hasn't given up smoking his pipe, and still had a can of Prince Albert on his desk, but I haven't seen him smoke it for months. Sits on the soft in his office, sometimes with his arms folded across his chest, hands on the opposite upper arm, in a posture that was often seen when he was majority leader. His legs often crossed in a relaxed way. Clearly he is comfortable with me. Sophie Engelhard Craighead told me last night that Mansfield had called her himself to warn her of my call, and that he seemed quite interested in the project. I told him I had been in touch with her - "great girl, Sophie" he said. As I left the office, he called out behind me, "Tap 'er light" 1 Mike Mansfield Interview, OH 391-010, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. The following is the recorded interview with Mike Mansfield Mike Mansfield: Drove home every summer with Anne. I stayed here. Don Oberdorfer: Drove all the way across the country. M M: Three thousand miles. DO: Probably took three or four days. MM: Went through Pittsburgh, then. You couldn't go around it. Went through Chicago then, you couldn't go around it. Five days, 3,000 miles. God. Hard to believe. DO: And when she got home, she would probably do a little campaigning for you or something like that. M M: Oh she did. She got me into politics. DO: Well, I'm happy to tell you I'm making good progress. Yesterday I finished the first draft of the proposal that I'm sending up to New York to my literary agent for this book. M M: You didn't make it before Labor Day then? DO: No, I tried. Came close. Came close. But, this is 58 pages long, single spaced, 14-point type and then she will then circulate that to some publishers in New York and I'm sure before the fall is out I'll have a publisher who sounds like he's going to do a good job with the book and I'll go further. In the meantime, I talked to Sophie Engelhard Craighead out there in— MM: Wyoming. DO: In Wyoming, yes. And she's going to help me. She'll be—I don't know, sometime in the next few months—she'll be in Washington. She doesn't know when exactly, but we will get together. MM: Great girl, Sophie. DO: Yes. She was nice and she told me that you called you. That was awfully nice of you to do that. So, I'm coming along and in the process of putting my thoughts down for this outline I came across a number of things—questions—that I had which came out of these documents that I was looking at and so forth. So that's what I wanted to ask you about. One of them is, you wrote a letter to some woman in Connecticut about your parents and this is written in 1986. You said, "M y father was a construction worker in New York until he broke his leg, and then became a hotel porter." I was trying to pin this down with what happened first, whether he had this fall. 2 Mike Mansfield Interview, OH 391-010, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. M M: What lady in Connecticut? DO: Here's the letter. MM: I don't even remember the letter. That's what I had heard. I haven't said it much because I only knew him as a hotel porter. DO: But I do know that he had a fall in a construction site. M M: He had a game leg. I have heard, I don't know where, that he had fallen from a roof. But didn't know it. I didn't remember it. But I do remember him as a hotel porter. DO: Right. Yes. Okay. MM: So I just know he was a hotel porter. I also heard he was a bartender, but I don't know. DO: Here's another one. This I keep coming across and I don't know if there is any truth to this or how it got started: "Mansfield also spent six weeks on Pacific island, across the bay from Vladivostok." [during the period after the A.E.F. was withdrawn from Siberia.]* M M: No. That was a lie. DO: I didn't think it was true, but it keeps recurring. I guess once it gets into these papers it just keeps coming up. M M: No, I think I said that once, but it was a lie. DO: Somebody wrote that "with Maureen's encouragement, Mansfield considered running for office as early as 1936. In 1937 he became active in the University's Teachers Union," etc. etc. MM: That's correct, but at that time I wasn't considering running for office, I was becoming more interested in politics because of my wife's interest in politics. About 1938 I really began to get interested and we began to do a little figuring. It seems to me that I was considering it first. I met a fellow called Pete Meloney [Meloy], I think he's still alive in Helena, an attorney; he's about 82 or 83. M-E-L-O-N-E-Y. [He mean Meloy.] He was a student, a law student. We got to be kind of friendly, politically speaking, and personally. We discussed running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Congress. I'm not sure, but I think Pete was interested in State Office of Public Instruction, and I was more so in Congress. We talked about it, that was about '38. When I say we, I mean me and Maureen. We ruled out State Superintendent of Public Instruction and thought about Congress. Pete, I think, became a State Senator from Helena. He was from Broadwater, or Thompson, towns in Broadwater County. Got to be a judge 3 Mike Mansfield Interview, OH 391-010, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. in Helena. I had a letter from Pete, oh, several years ago, in which he told me he was in the 80s and retiring. DO: He was living in Helena you think probably? M M: Lived in Helena and I'm sure he would be in the phone book. DO: Yes. I'll have to call him. Good. Now, here is one that may come as a surprise to you. When you set pesky reporters down the trail to trying to find out things, they do a little research. You had thought that you and [Senator] Elbert Thomas (were) called in by Truman to discuss the Japanese surrender. MM: Not together. DO: Yes, but I think the story is a little different. In August 10th, 1945, you went to see President Truman. Here are his notes on the meeting. [Shows him the notes. Long pause.] MM: Sounds okay. DO: The subject was, of course, as he said, your desire to make another trip to China. But that happened to be the day that the White House heard the news that the Japanese wanted to surrender. That particular day. MM: Wouldn't know, but I wouldn't be surprised. DO: But, I do know. And I think that you and he may have discussed this because you talked to an Associated Press reporter—maybe at the White House, or maybe back at the capitol, I'm not sure—but the AP ran the following story, little story: "Washington, August 10th, Congressman Mansfield said after a White House meeting that President Truman was determined that Japanese surrender must include the outright capitulation of the Kwangtung army in Manchuria and all other forces." MM: Sounds right. DO: So clearly you and he had some discussion about the terms of the surrender in China. MM: I wouldn't disagree with that, but I couldn't give you any details. DO: Then, about eight days later, you and Senator Thomas appeared on an NBC television program together to discuss the subject of Japan after the surrender. And there there was discussion about what to do about the Emperor. Okay, by that time the surrender terms had been agreed to, announced, and the question was, is it all right for the Emperor to remain. Thomas did see Truman that same month, however it was in company with a number of 4 Mike Mansfield Interview, OH 391-010, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. medical experts, the purpose was to discuss the expiration of something of the Nurse Training Act.