George McKee Elsey was born in California and grew up in Kansas and western Pennsylvania. After earning his undergraduate degree at Princeton, Elsey was a graduate student in history at Harvard when he became a Naval Reserve Officer. After the U.S. entered World War II, he worked in the Map Room of FDR’s White House.
He continued working at the White House during the Truman administration and later at the Pentagon with Clark Clifford during the Vietnam War. Elsey also held important positions in the Red Cross and private industry.
He was married to the late Sally Phelps Bradley, a fifth-generation Washingtonian. Until recently, he continued to live in Washington. He is now back in California, near his two children.
Elsey started writing “An Unplanned Life: A Memoir” so his grandsons would have a record of his career.
It is now in its third printing by the University of Missouri Press.
Do you think it would be possible for a young person to have a career like yours?
The White House was then a very small, intimate place. But now [it] is a vast bureaucracy with layers and layers of people and it’s unlikely that any young person would have the opportunities that I and my colleagues had to have close associations with presidents.
What is the most important personal quality someone needs to have a successful career in Washington?
We read all the time about people who tripped because they crossed the line in some way that would be to their temporary advantage.
You can’t do that: You have to have personal integrity in every aspect of what you do.
What events from your careers stand out most?
I can pick out three that are particularly memorable. Number one was May of 1943 when I witnessed, overheard and watched a debate between Churchill and his staff and Roosevelt and his staff over what the next steps were going to be after the Allies had cleared out North Africa.
The British wanted to stay in the Mediterranean; the Americans were ardent and were preparing for a cross-channel invasion, what became Normandy. To … listen, just as a fly on the wall, as Roosevelt and Churchill and their chiefs argued basic strategy was fascinating.
Another was Harry Truman in 1948 when, in the middle of October in the middle of Minnesota, I was sitting alone with him and he rattled off the 48 states and their electoral votes. He didn’t think he was going to win; he knew he was going to win. He wasn’t trying to impress me; I was simply doing the arithmetic for him.
This was what the man believed. Nobody else in the country believed it, but he did and he did win.
Another memorable episode simply because it was so completely unpredictable was when I was with the Red Cross, the astonishing business of receiving Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Who, who had been in World War II, could have possibly conceived of something like that?
How do you think the Red Cross has fared after Katrina and the bad press they got about their response?
All of us share in the blame, we weren’t prepared, and when I say “we,” I mean everybody. I think the Red Cross has recovered nicely.
We understand that we were at fault, just as everybody was at fault, and we’ve done our best to overcome. I was at the Red Cross convention this year, which was their 125th anniversary, and the tone was upbeat. People said, “Yes, we weren’t as prepared as we should have been. This is what we’re doing about it, this is how we’re going to be ready for whatever comes next.”
Why did you not have any interest in serving in the Kennedy Administration, unlike many of your former colleagues?
I knew I could never possibly … have the same kind of contacts and associations that I had with Roosevelt and Truman. I’d had such satisfactory jobs that I felt I’d performed pretty darn well; I’d have been lost in the bureaucracy and Kennedy already had colleagues and staff around him.
But when Clark Clifford asked me to join him at the Pentagon to try to get us out of Vietnam, I felt so deeply … I jumped at that chance.
What were your favorite places in the D.C. area?
The canal, the Great Falls, Rock Creek Park, and just going down to the Mall and picking any one of the museums: Let’s try this one today. There are so many things to do in Washington.
What I realized once I got away from Washington is that you have to pay to go to places [like that]. That’s something that Washingtonians don’t appreciate. They don’t realize the riches and glories that are there.
