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A Look Back ... The President's First Daily Brief
For more than 60 years US Presidents
have received a daily, multi-source intelligence digest. President Harry S.
Truman received his inaugural Daily Summary on February 15, 1946. Although that
first summary was crude by modern standards, it marked the start of a
fundamentally new mission for US
intelligence: providing strategic warning to the nation's highest leaders.
In late January 1946,
President Truman wanted his new Central Intelligence Group (CIG) to solve a
particularly rankling problem. As he later recalled, when he succeeded the late
Franklin Roosevelt the previous year, there had been "no concentration of
information for the benefit of the President. Each Department and each
organization had its own information service, and that information service was
walled off from every other service." Reports came to Truman from all
over, with no one outside the White House evaluating the range of information
collected by the US
government. He wanted order imposed on this situation.
Director of Central
Intelligence Sidney Souers assembled a team, obtained cables and reports from
the various departments, and forwarded the first Daily Summary within weeks of
the President's tasking. That first Daily Summary was a two-page mimeographed
sheet with six items. The lead was a report from the US Embassy in Paris, which said that forged "secret protocols"
allegedly signed by the United States
and the Soviet Union at the 1945 Yalta
conference had found their way to European newspaper editors. Brief notes on
Germany, Turkey, Yugoslavia, China, and French Indochina filled out that first
day's news. There were no graphics, no color, and no mention of "internal
security" issues, as the CIG covered only foreign intelligence matters.
Indeed, the Daily
Summary was not an "all-source" publication; its CIG editors would
not receive access to signals intelligence for several more months. (It would
be six years before a renamed daily brief for the President would include items
citing the decrypts).
The President had not
specifically authorized this type of "current intelligence" reporting
when creating the CIG in January 1946, and not everyone in Washington liked the new Daily Summary. In
fact, Secretary of State James Byrnes complained that it infringed on the State
Department's duty to furnish the President with information on foreign affairs;
he felt the point so strongly that he complained to Truman in person.
Byrnes lost. A Daily
Summary was what President Truman wanted, and that was what he got. The publication
was sent to the White House
in the afternoon. Truman read it during the evening and discussed it with his
senior staff the next morning.
CIG heard from a White
House aide a year later that "the President considers that he personally
originated the Daily, that it is prepared in accordance with his own
specifications, that it is well done, and that in its present form it satisfies
his requirements." Truman wrote in
his memoirs that “Here, at
last, a co-ordinated 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….The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency…became, usually, my
first caller of the day.”
Posted: Feb 06, 2008 03:18 PM
Last Updated: Feb 15, 2008 07:14 AM
Last Reviewed: Feb 13, 2008 04:35 PM