Assistant President

Room 301 in St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minn, has light-cream walls and a southeast-corner view, the patient noted. To the Clinic staff, even to his brisk, dark-haired Nurse Mary Conway, the patient was just another one of the 100,000 who come to Mayo's each year. But to Franklin Roosevelt, anxiously reading the wired reports, the man in 301 was much more important.

Harry Hopkins, 53, was back at Mayo's for the third time in seven years, for his second major stomach operation. The first came in 1937. Specialists concluded that he had worried himself into gastric ulcers as WPAdministrator. Mayo's removed a portion of the Hopkins' stomach, doubted his chances of recovery. He suffered on, somehow. Then, in 1938, the President called in Army & Navy doctors, who experimented for a year with novel drugs. When Hopkins finally pulled through, no one was certain which drug--if any--had turned the trick. (That was WPA's toughest year, when Scripps-Howard Reporter Tom Stokes won a Pulitzer prize for exposing the use of the relief vote in re-electing Kentucky's Alben Barkley.)

During the next year Hopkins spent more weeks at Mayo's. His trouble seemed to be that his stomach simply would not digest food; osmosis would not take place unless he took medicine that added acid to his stomach. So long as he took his medicines, he kept going. But on trips he often forgot. After the London and Moscow Conferences in 1941, he had to be rushed to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda. He returned from Teheran and Cairo worn down and sniffling, went to Florida to rest, wound up last week in Rochester.

When Harry Hopkins, who comes closest to being the real Assistant President of the U.S., is not at work, the President has more visitors, more decisions to make, more troubles. Hopkins, besides being the one real Roosevelt confidant, holds a dazzling combination of official posts. Ill but indefatigable, he works in snatches over long hours, drops for occasional catnaps in odd places. His coworkers--who are almost always hero-worshipers--credit him with a whopping memory and a steel-trap mind.

Officially, Harry Hopkins is: 1) the President's special assistant, 2) a member of WPB and OWM, 3) chairman of the Munitions Assignments Board, the top U.S.-British Unit which, with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, allocates all United Nations war equipment. Unofficially, Harry Hopkins often serves as the President's eyes, ears, hands, feet, brains. His bony shoulders are piled high with the war's weightiest military secrets. He shuns human contacts outside his job. By nature outspoken and gregarious, he frankly tells reporters why he avoids them: he knows too much and he loves to talk.

If Hopkins now needs several months to recover, the President will have lost the valuable services of his closest friend at a time when he needs him most.

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