Truman Reportedly Had FBI Tap Rival’s Phone

Six weeks after President Harry S. Truman took office, he ordered the FBI to tap the phones of Washington power broker Thomas Corcoran, according to a report Saturday.

The tap spanned 2 1/2 years (1945 to 1948) of conversations between the prominent New Deal lawyer and many movers and shakers in the capital, The Nation magazine reported.

In transcripts of the recordings that the magazine obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Corcoran called Truman “dumb” and said that the President thought he could “surround himself almost entirely with mediocre Missourians and run the greatest country in the world.”

Corcoran also called liberals, including Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, “a bunch of guys that had the world in their hands last year” and are now “a helpless bunch of sheep.”

The magazine report suggested that Truman ordered the tap for a number of reasons, such as Corcoran’s support of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for vice president and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s own animosity toward Corcoran.

It was only one of a large number of wiretaps conducted by the FBI during Hoover’s 48 years as head of the agency.

Hoover, who first proposed the tap to Truman’s advisers, was resentful of Corcoran’s efforts to depose him as head of the FBI. An FBI profile of Corcoran in 1964, one of the documents obtained under Freedom of Information law, said, in part: “We have had considerable difficulty with Corcoran in the past.

“In 1940, it was reported that Corcoran was the ‘brains’ behind a campaign to smear the director and have him removed as FBI director.”

More importantly, the magazine said, Corcoran had opposed Truman’s nomination as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate.

The magazine said that the Corcoran wiretap was a “turning point. It set up an informal precedent for the FBI to get the White House to sanction political wiretapping.”

Corcoran, who was instrumental in drafting some of the most important legislation during the Roosevelt Administration, died in 1981.