Silence

German wags tell that once, arm in arm, Hermann Wilhelm Goering, Paul Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler strolled for half an hour on Unter den Linden. Nobody recognized them because Herr Goering was in civilian clothes, Herr Goebbels did not open his mouth, Herr Hitler had his hair brushed.

U. S. wags might last week have reported that the whole corps of White House correspondents stood face to face with Franklin Roosevelt and failed to recognize him. Reason: the newshawks paraded into the President's office for a press conference, were met with the announcement that there was no news, were promptly shooed out again.

It had never happened before. The correspondents might pardonably have been excused for failing to recognize conduct so unnatural on the part of the President. It was, in fact, not his native conduct. The true author of his silence was little red-faced John Nance Garner of Texas. When the astute Vice President returned from Uvalde he found the New Deal's many mouthpieces virtually sticking their tongues out at one another in a veritable babble of contradictions. He spoke up in Cabinet meeting to say that he thought a dose of silence would be good for all concerned.

It was a startling suggestion to the New Dealers but Mr. Garner gave good reasons: there was no use in stirring up the country every morning with a new batch of half-considered policies, no use in giving away the contents of the Presidential message to the incoming Congress so that every Republican could prepare a rebuttal. Orders for silence were issued. The President himself took the advice to heart.

Last week the lid was clamped down as never before. The Cabinet met, Congressional leaders came & went, the President's message was revised, policies for 1935 were thrashed out. Such all important questions as how the demands for immediate payment of the Bonus, for inflation, for the 30-hour week, for the Townsend plan could be blocked in Congress or held to harmless proportions were canvassed. And for once the Press & public were kept in ignorance not by a plethora of conflicting information but by a silence undefiled.

P: The President concluded a week of family festivities: 1) by looking in on a party of 70 given for three of his grandchildren, Sistie and Buzzie Dall and Sara Roosevelt; 2) by presiding at a dinner of 60 covers given for Sons Franklin Jr. and John; 3) by attending briefly the dance that followed (see p. 17).

P: The White House got around to requesting Schenley Distilleries, which printed a big picture of the President in an advertisement on the anniversary of Repeal to cease and desist from doing so in future. Before making the request, Presidential Secretary Stephen T. Early called up Alcohol Administrator Choate and found that use of the picture had not been "authorized." called up Attorney General Cummings to ask whether Schenley could not be prosecuted. In all the maze of New Deal laws the Attorney General could find none that entitled him to sue the distillers for their deed.

P:Senator Gerald P. Nye, whose plans for enjoying the spotlight of the munitions investigation were upset by the President's announcement of still bigger plans to take the profit out of war (TIME, Dec. 24), called, by request, at the White House. He emerged mollified. Said he: "We had a very nice visit. . . . There is evidently not the slightest reason for the theory that the President wanted to end our investigation."

P: In Aurora, Mo., Nola Hall, 15, was twitted by her family when she said she would get President Roosevelt to send her a dress for Christmas. Thereupon she sat down and wrote Mr. Roosevelt as follows:

"I have just found out there is no Santa Claus and since you are the next best person, I thought I would write to you and ask for a plaid dress."

Last week she had it. a garish tartan, bearing an NRA label and a price tag for $4.98, with the message: "In answer to your prayer to President Roosevelt."

P: Anxious to hold Bonus enthusiasm in check, the President made public a 1,150-word letter he had written to the commander of an American Legion Post in Texas. Without at any point flatly rejecting the Legion's demand for immediate payment of the Bonus, he explained in detail just why that demand amounted to holding up the U. S. Treasury for $2,320,000,000 over and above the Bonus originally voted to veterans by Congress.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.