Moley's Hymn

POLITICAL NOTES Moley's Hymn

"Moley, Moley, Moley, Lord God Almighty" was a much-quoted squib in Washington during the first New Deal, when Professor Raymond Moley was indeed mighty in the Brain Trust. While Mr. Moley was serving Franklin Roosevelt and accumulating a reputation for vanity, he was also storing away a vast stock of personal notes, memoranda and unwritten recollections. Last week the written sum of it appeared in book form, a good 20 years before Franklin Roosevelt might normally have expected himself and his early administration to be thus exposed from within.

Raymond Moley's After Seven Years* breaks all the rules. It is an unexampled chronicle of the years 1932-35 in U. S. Government (the last four of his seven years he was on the outside looking in); rich in broken confidences, intimate quotations, facts from the political bedroom. It could have come only from a bitter, frustrated, able man who once was close to the President. By letting the Saturday Evening Post serialize 100,000 of his 190,000 words, Raymond Moley did not make things any better with his outraged successors in the Janizariat. They belittle it as the garrulous grousing of a "shellshocked veteran," note the overtones of its author's bruised ego. But they do not question its essential facts. In the Moley gallery :

> Franklin Roosevelt is a changeable, charming, warmhearted, gullible, formidable man. ". . . When crossed he is hard, stubborn, resourceful, relentless," Moley wrote to his sister Nell in 1932. ". . . He seems quite naturally warm and friendly . . . because he just enjoys the pleasant and engaging role, as a charming woman does. . . . The frightening aspect ... is F. D. R.'s great receptivity. So far as I know he makes no effort to check up on anything I or anyone else has told him. I wonder what would happen if we should selfishly try to put things over on him."

> Moley's nominal superior in 1933, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, is shown as a singleminded, sincere, intellectually limited man, subjected to a succession of groveling humiliations. A devastating chapter is the account of the torpedoed world Monetary and Economic Conference in London 1933. In it, Author Moley makes out Cordell Hull a simpleton let down by his Chief, the President a pitiable ignoramus "saying two plus two made ten" who didn't know beans about the international money system which he blew sky high.

> Janizary Tom Corcoran, whom Raymond Moley introduced to palace councils, appears as a perennial sophomore. Author Moley blandly notes a private talk with Corcoran. Said Corcoran, explaining how he would get around Franklin Roosevelt's implied promise to put the late Joe Robinson on the Supreme Court: ". . . There aren't any binding promises in politics. There isn't any binding law. You just know that the strongest side wins."

Moley: "How do you choose a side, as you call it, Tom?"

Corcoran: "You have a feeling in your viscera, perhaps."

> Corcoran, begging Moley to help him draft a 1936 campaign speech for the President : "You write the music. He only sings it."

> Vice President Garner, warning Moley about his poor newspaper publicity: "Stop exposing yourself or you'll get your butt spanked."

> After Raymond Moley began to edit Today (now, with him, merged with Newsweek), he had a chat with Franklin Roosevelt. "Did I realize, I was asked, that when I made a speech or wrote an editorial I was quoted by the Republican press only because of the fact that I was formerly a member of his administration? It took a minute to answer that one as gently as I knew I must. . . ."

*-Harper ($3). Columnist Walter Winchell this week gossiped that when a Cabinet member asked Mr. Roosevelt what he thought of the Moley memoirs, the President replied: "... I trusted him."

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