NEW YORK — He went to the White House living quarters to hand President Franklin D. Roosevelt top-secret messages. When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, he decoded the news and took it to President Harry S. Truman.
He wrote policy papers and speeches for Truman, including many delivered on the celebrated “whistle-stop’’ campaign that led to Truman’s come-from-behind election victory in 1948. He even found time to redesign the presidential flag.
George M. Elsey did all this in his 20s and 30s, and when he published his memoir, “An Unplanned Life,’’ in 2005, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote that Mr. Elsey had probably produced the final eyewitness testimony about those tempestuous times.
One of the last survivors of the inner sanctums of the White House during and immediately after World War II, Mr. Elsey died Dec. 30 in Tustin, Calif. He was 97.
During the war, Mr. Elsey was a naval officer working in the Map Room, the nerve center of communications on the ground floor of Roosevelt’s White House. He sometimes wheeled the president and his wheelchair around the room. He bumped into Winston Churchill one night in a dark hallway and transmitted secret messages to Joseph Stalin.
After Roosevelt’s death April 12, 1945, Mr. Elsey continued working in the White House under the new president, Truman, as an aide to Clark Clifford, the president’s chief naval adviser.
As Truman, a Democrat, prepared for his 1948 campaign, Mr. Elsey, a former Republican, wrote a memo in 1947 advising him that he could win only by being “controversial as hell.’’ The next year, Mr. Elsey put together a team that collected local lore for Truman to use on his railroad campaign. Life magazine called him Truman’s “whistle-stop expert.’’
After Truman’s upset victory over Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, he made Mr. Elsey one of his six administrative assistants. When Mr. Elsey resigned in 1951, at 33, Truman told him, “It would be impossible to list the many valuable services you have performed.’’
George McKee Elsey was born in Palo Alto, Calif., and grew up near Pittsburgh. He studied history at Princeton and Harvard. At 24, he was in Washington doing research for a PhD in history under a Harvard fellowship. Hoping to serve in naval intelligence, he joined the Navy Reserve and was commissioned as an ensign after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was assigned to the White House Map Room after Roosevelt decided to staff it with reserve officers so that career officers could be assigned to combat.
Mr. Elsey was alone on night watch in May 1943 when a message from Stalin came in. Stalin, whose forces were locked in combat with Germany on Soviet soil, was demanding that the Allies open another front in Western Europe. In a crisis meeting, Roosevelt, a visiting Churchill, and their top aides settled on an evasive answer, which Mr. Elsey transmitted. It would be another year before the Allied invasion at Normandy.
When Truman succeeded Roosevelt, the functions of the Map Room traveled with him. In the summer of 1945, Mr. Elsey accompanied the president to occupied Germany for his meeting in Potsdam with Churchill and Stalin to negotiate the division of postwar Europe.
On the ship home, Mr. Elsey received a top-secret message, decoded it and handed it to the president. A presidential order had been carried out. “Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima 5 August at 7:15 p.m. Washington time,’’ the message said.
