Boss Man & No Man

THE PRESIDENCY

"Boss man," boomed a voice from the shadowy crowd at Hyde Park, N. Y.'s railroad station one night last week, "You're out in front now. Show'em your heels!"

On a platform of the special train returning him to Washington after a restful week-end at his mother's farm, the nation's Boss Man gave a cheerful waggle of his head. "There's something in that," said he.

Franklin Roosevelt is by no means an exception to the rule that a U. S. President, like plain citizens, needs an occasional friendly cheer to lift and reassure his spirits. No more is he an exception to the rule that a President also needs a friend with the gumption to remind him that he cannot always be right, offer sympathetic but searching criticism of his plans and purposes, occasionally say "no" to his bright inspirations. More impulsive than most, Franklin Roosevelt had such a salutary intimate in the late Louis McHenry Howe. Since that devoted little secretary took to his deathbed more than a year ago, impartial White House correspondents have noted with increasing frequency that the President's other advisers are prone to be carried away by his warm enthusiasms, to cheer him on with a chorus, in effect, of "Boss man, show'em your heels!"

While he held the post of Assistant Secretary of State, Raymond Moley appeared to be Franklin Roosevelt's most affectionate Brain Truster. Relegated to unofficial advising in the columns of Vincent Astor's Today, Editor Moley has lately evidenced a decided mind of his own. To the tasty editorial sauce he pours on New Deal objectives, he has begun to add strong dashes of vinegar for New Deal performance.

Two months ago Editor Moley roundly denounced the Roosevelt tax proposals as unsound and destructive (TIME, March 23), has kept hammering away at them ever since. "Let us have an end of generalities about 'co-operation,' 'confidence' and 'breathing spells,' " he barked last month. "The Government will not have done its part in solving the unemployment problem until it breaks specific log-jams."

Particularly bitter about his White House friend's failure to launch an adequate housing program. Editor Moley rose before the National Association of Manufacturers in Manhattan last fortnight, blamed "petty bickerings" and "inordinate ambitions" inside the New Deal.

"This Administration . . .," wrote he last week, "is too often undiscriminating in its interest in the novel, too likely to accept the new merely because it is new." Last week-end observers who had begun to suspect a sharp personal rift between the President and his onetime favorite Brain Truster were surprised to learn that Critic Moley had been taken for an overnight cruise to Chesapeake Bay aboard the new Presidential yacht. As the Potomac sailed back up the Potomac in a pelting rainstorm next day. wiseacres wondered whether Editor Moley was talking up to President Roosevelt in person as he had talked in his editorials and speeches, whether the onetime Columbia professor was preparing to replace Louis Howe as the Boss Man's much-needed "No Man."

P:Breaking into a busy, quiet week of conferences and desk work, President Roosevelt motored over to the Naval Hospital one day for a call on his ailing Secretary of the Navy, Claude Augustus Swanson. Bedded after a bathroom skid brought him a broken rib early last February, the 74-year-old Secretary developed pleurisy a week later, hung at Death's edge for many a day. Now convalescent, Secretary Swanson rolls about in a wheel chair, takes short walks around the hospital grounds for two hours a day, spends his afternoons in a haze of cigar smoke and reminiscence with visiting cronies. Relishing his freedom from social and official cares, the aging Secretary has asked his doctors to stretch his stay as long as possible. With the Assistant Secretaryship left vacant by the death of Henry Latrobe Roosevelt, the Acting Secretary of the Navy for two months has been Admiral William H. Standley, Chief of Naval Operations.

Few days after the President's visit, it was reported that Secretary Swanson. would shortly resign, to be succeeded by Rhode Island's Democratic Governor Theodore Francis Green. Source of the rumor: Governor Green.

182;After two days in command of the Sixth Corps Area, post assigned him seven weeks after he had been ousted from his Eighth Corps Area command for referring to WPA funds as "stage money" (TIME, March 9), Major General Johnson Hagood asked President Roosevelt for immediate retirement, promptly got his wish. Said he: "I have been restored to command and this has been taken by my friends as a vindication. But under the circumstances I do not feel it will be of any advantage to the Army for me to remain on the active list for another year. Furthermore, there are certain phases of the case in question which make me feel I cannot do so without a sacrifice of my personal dignity and professional prestige."

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