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work faithfully and hear the cases and review them.

Well, of course that proved to be a great job, but on the whole the work was very well done. It was a very time-consuming job. We decided on this. Mr. Mitchell and I went over to see the President and to ask him what-he thought of this. He thought it was fine. Thought it was a good idea. He saw at once, you see, that any decision we made would right away be kicked around in politics: “Oh, the Civil Service Commission is protecting that skunk, so Harry Truman's to blame for that”, or, “The Civil Service Commission is jumping on this man when they shouldn't do it, and Harry Truman is to blame.”

I mean we were, after all, permanent officers of the Government, and this business of letting them have an appeal over our decision to the Loyalty Review Board was a good idea. Truman thought it was an excellent idea.

So then we started to work to get people to be members of the Board. Among other things that we asked the President--not that day, I think, but the second day we went to see him--was with regard to a Chairman. I had come to the conclusion that the Chairman of this Loyalty Review Board should be a Republican. It was a review board, that is an appeals board. It only took the cases that appealed to it, you see.