27th October, 2022 in History, Society & Culture

How the President of the United State’s secret daily newspaper began

By David Charlwood

President Harry S. Truman stared at the sheet of white paper, his brown eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses. It was marked TOP SECRET and beneath the dramatic capital letters were two pages of typed text arranged under six headings.

The paper was the first ‘Daily Summary’ created by US intelligence services, a report that would go on to become the President’s Daily Brief, informing every occupant of the Oval Office of the goings-on in the world. Truman received the first on Friday, 15 February 1946, the day The New York Times ran a front-page article on the unveiling of the world’s first electronic computer, which the paper conceded ‘may speed [up] engineering’.

The President had specifically requested the document’s creation. He had arrived in office with what he admitted were ‘gaps in my information’. The short summary from the intelligence services helped to fill them. Truman was delighted with it, declaring, ‘at last, a coordinated method had been worked out, and a practical way had been found for keeping the President informed as to what was known and what was going on’.

Truman had become President by accident. Harry S. Truman was only the seventh man in history to find himself in power because of the death of the sitting President. He was the son of a Missouri farmer who had gone from a clapboard farmstead to the White House, promoted from Vice President when Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally succumbed to his litany of maladies in April 1945. Where Roosevelt had been urbane and thoughtful and was descended from a political aristocracy, Truman was a man of simple tastes from the Midwest. A number of the Washington elite were of the opinion that it was not just his tastes that were simple. At Roosevelt’s funeral, one senior US official told the UK Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, who had come to pay his respects, that the incoming President ‘knows absolutely nothing of world affairs’. Disturbingly, it was a largely true observation. Truman was a liberal Democrat who championed what would today be considered typical Democrat domestic positions: expanding social care, increasing wages for the low-paid and improving public housing. The former County Judge was not a diplomat, as Roosevelt had been, but Truman would give a straight answer to a question and possessed what one UK Prime Minister described as ‘power of decision’. When it came to foreign policy, however, the new President was learning as he went along.

Truman took it upon himself to go to night school. He carried on the practice Roosevelt had initiated with the State Department of receiving a two-page daily summary of diplomatic goings-on, recording later in his memoirs that he went over them in detail every evening and ‘never went to bed until I had thoroughly digested the information they contained’. The creation of a similar summary, but for intelligence instead of diplomacy, had seemed a good idea. When news of the document’s existence leaked to the press, the journalist who secured the scoop – which ran under the heading ‘The President’s Secret Daily Newspaper’ – noted that the Daily Brief ‘in the opinion of hisintimate staff, makes him the best-informed Chief Executive in history on foreign affairs’.

There were a number of warning signs in Truman’s first Daily Brief, including a note under the heading ‘French Indochina’ which reported difficulties between the French, who had controlled the area as a colony prior to the end of the Second World War, and Chinese forces, who had liberated it from Japanese occupation. In the coming decades, part of the region would take on far greater significance for the USA’s Commanders-in-Chief, under its local name of Vietnam. At the moment of the Brief ’s birth, however, Truman was simply pleased the document existed. From February 1946 onwards, the neat pages of classified text became a crucial part of the President’s day.

Since 1946, the President’s Daily Brief has continued uninterrupted. From 1946 until 1977 its contents have been declassified, so anyone can access the Central Intelligence Agency’s daily reports to the Commander In Chief. They shed new light on what presidents knew.

In 1946, when the Second World War had only just ended, Truman received repeated warnings that the ally that had jointly defeated the Nazis was now the single greatest threat to global peace. The day-to-day intelligence that crossed the President’s desk painted a chilling picture and reveals the first manoeuvrings in the decades-long rupture between East and West that would become known as the Cold War.

For Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the primary worries of the new divided world was the threat from above: the fear that the destructive power of nuclear weapons which the USA had unleashed on Japan might fall on US cities, delivered by unstoppable ballistic missiles. When the Soviets launched the first satellite into the earth’s orbit, it was a moment met with wonder on newspaper front pages, but with consternation in the CIA’s secret Brief to the President. What it proved was that the Soviets now had a dangerous new ballistic missile. For the years that followed, the Briefs were concerned – wrongly as it later transpired – that the USA lagged behind the Soviet Union (USSR) in missile development.

Following his ascension to office, the USA’s youngest ever President warned the nation, ‘The path we have chosen is full of hazards.’ And every day, John F. Kennedy read about them in his Daily Brief. Almost hidden halfway down one page on 4 August 1962 was a note that eleven Soviet merchant ships were on their way to Cuba. The analysts added, ‘we suspect they are carrying arms’. The report was the first move in the dramatic chess game of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. As the crisis unfolded, the Briefs provided critical intelligence to the President.

The Daily Brief of 22 November 1963 never reached its intended recipient. Kennedy lay dead; his bullet-holed body was carried back from Dallas on Air Force One. His Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson, received the next day’s intelligence report and the ones that followed. It was Johnson who pushed the USA into active combat operations in Vietnam, but the threads of the web that enmeshed Johnson to fight a conflict that changed the culture of his country can be traced back as far as the very first Daily Brief and the reports to Truman on Indochina. Vietnam was a war long in the making and a concern for multiple presidents before it became the bloody conflict it is known as today.

The Daily Briefs also reveal the secret actions of the CIA. Eisenhower’s first briefing concerned a Prime Minister that the CIA were about to overthrow, and the following year, a ‘late item’ added to another Brief told of how a newly installed military government in Guatemala had outlawed the Communist Party in the Central American nation; the Brief deliberately did not mention the role US covert operations had played in the turn of events. The CIA also involved itself in Africa, fuelling a brutal conflict in the Congo that lasted half a decade and claimed thousands of lives.

The President’s Daily Briefs from the 1980s onwards remain under lock and key, but excerpts from a tiny number have been made public. They reveal some disturbing truths about pivotal events of recent history, including that George W. Bush was warned in advance of 9/11: that a shadowy jihadist in Afghanistan named bin Laden had threatened to hijack passenger aircraft to attack the USA. We know, because that was exactly what was mentioned in at least one Daily Brief. It was that attack that triggered the invasion of Afghanistan, a two-decades-long conflict that ended in a chaotic evacuation in 2021, leaving the country once more in the hands of the Taliban.

As one former CIA Director noted in 2015, ‘Today, the PDB is so vital to the White House, one wonders how they could operate without it’, but the following year, a President was elected who would attempt to do exactly that. Donald Trump eventually stopped asking to even receive the President’s Daily Brief, but soon afterwards found himself in a public spat on Twitter over intelligence relating to attacks on US soldiers in Afghanistan. There were warnings in the President’s Daily Brief, but the President had not read them.

Intelligence and American President’s use of it has become a critically important topic in recent times, particularly since the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which President Joe Biden appeared to openly claim on television that the intelligence he had received about the potential fall of Kabul to the Taliban had been wrong. The challenge of keeping the President informed is ever harder in the information age when disinformation is now a weapon of war.

When President Truman cast his eyes over the first page of his intelligence summary in February 1946, he could never have imagined that seventy-six years later it would still exist, although now it arrives in the Oval Office delivered on an iPad. Its aim, as President Obama commented in his memoirs, is to give ‘[a] sense of all that was roiling in the world, the large, the small, and sometimes barely perceptible shifts that threatened to upset whatever equilibrium we were trying to maintain.’

The Daily Brief has proved a resilient document, critical to presidential decision making. The first one was created while nations still reeled from the deadliest war in history, and the last has not yet been written; the CIA still compiles a Brief for the President, every working day.

Extracted from Current Intelligence by David Charlwood