The President's Powers

The reporters were as curious about the President's health as about his opinions. No less than 173 of them jammed the oval White House study for their first look at Franklin Roosevelt since his return from the South.

They saw a healthy tan on the familiar face. The lines around his eyes seemed to have disappeared. He no longer drummed the arm of his green leather chair with nervous fingers. But the face was thinner. The top of the head was unequivocally bald. Suddenly, seeing him now after a month's absence, newsmen who have been seeing him once or twice a week for eleven years were struck by the realization that Franklin Roosevelt at 62 is an old man. His health, it appeared, was going to be all right now--provided he does not overwork. For one thing, announced Secretary Steve Early, he will no longer entertain business visitors at lunch.

Temper--Bad. The New Dealing Chicago Sun's Thomas F. Reynolds usually sympathetic to the President summed up his press-conference impression of the President in seven words: "Health--apparently good. Temper--bad, very bad."

Franklin Roosevelt seemed indeed to be spoiling for a fight. When Newscaster Earl ("Punkinhead") Godwin--who always sits beside the President's desk and is a press conference favorite--brought up the subject of the Montgomery Ward seizure (TIME, May 8), the President replied that he knew someone would ask that question, someone looking for trouble. Meekly, Earl Godwin demurred that he was not looking for anything of the kind. But the President was prepared: in his hands he held a brief, typewritten history of the Montgomery Ward battle.

History Lesson. The President, who likes to lecture his audience as if they were college freshmen, cleared his throat. Not very many lawyers lounge around pressrooms, he remarked, but there really is such a thing as the law, and such an agency as the Department of Justice. And the law setting up the Justice Department provided that the Attorney General should be legal adviser to the Government of the United States. That law is still on the statute books, the President declared, and it works.

He then reviewed the steps leading up to Ward's refusal to obey the War Labor Board and sign a contract with the union. They had the right to refuse, the President said; sure, they had the right, just as any citizen has the right to tell a policeman who is going to arrest him that he doesn't want to go to jail. But the policeman has the right to take him there.

The President raised his voice. He was just giving the correspondents a little history, he said, which the country does not know. If this were the old-type press conference, he said, he would just say that the press had not let the country know the facts. But now that radio is represented at the conference, he would say that the press and radio did not let the country know. With an air of finality, the President said he was not charging or asserting anything; he was just stating a fact.

Bedtime Story. The White House correspondents, though not unused to being the President's whipping boys, scribbled angrily on their note pads. The President continued his lecture. There used to be bedtime stories, he said, about children who saw things under their beds. That was a very bad habit. When he was vacationing in the South he could look down on the whole Montgomery Ward incident (he raised his hands to show from what a height he had observed it), and that was just what was happening. A lot of people in this country were seeing things under their beds because they had not got over their childhood habits. Perhaps that was an allegory, the President added, but when the returns from the union election were in, people could stop looking under their beds.

He then undertook to cross the Ward case off the books, with permission to quote. Said he: "If the election shows that the union does not have a majority of the employes, that will end the case. On the other hand, if the election shows that the union has a majority, then the management has declared that it is willing to continue its contract and that will end the case."

As soon as the lecture ended, the President was challenged by Mrs. Elizabeth May Craig, pert, irrepressible correspondent for a group of Maine newspapers. Said May Craig: everything the President has said about the case, she had read in the newspapers and heard over the radio. Smilingly, the President doubted her word. Where did she read it? At the tag end of some newspaper stories? Surely not in the lead, he said, for he had read the papers thoroughly on his vacation and he had not seen such an account. He had, he added, been specializing in reading newspapers.

No End in Sight. Plainly, the President was anxious to get the Ward case off the nation's front pages and, if possible, out of the nation's mind. He acted swiftly on the tested maxim that it is always good politics to remedy your mistakes quickly but never admit having made them.

Three hours after the press conference, with a haste almost as noticeable as that with which it had bundled Sewell Avery out of his plant, the Government returned Montgomery Ward to its owners. The President had not even waited for the NLRB election ballots to be counted. (The union won, hands down.)

By this swift action, the President had sidestepped in time's nick a court decision on the legality of the Government seizure. Next morning, as U.S. District Judge William H. Holly mounted his bench in Chicago, he carried a newspaper clipping in his hand. The news, he said somewhat sadly, made any decision from him unnecessary. Forthwith, he ordered all copies of his decision destroyed. His secretary told reporters, with equal sadness, that it was "a literary gem."

But the case would not end as easily or as quickly as Franklin Roosevelt hoped. Both the union and Sewell Avery denounced the President. Said one union officer: "The seizure of the plant has been a farce." Another lamented: "The President withdrew his hold over Ward's when his help was needed so much by the union." Sewell Avery, who returned to his green-carpeted office on his own two feet, denied that he had ever said he would continue the old contract with the union. He still objected strenuously to maintenance of membership, and denied WLB's right to force it on him. Said he: "The election was of no consequence, except that it shows the dominance of racketeering methods." Tactically, the case was right back where it was before the union struck.

The Larger Issues. Beyond the maneuvering in Chicago, which might go on for months, the larger issues remained. At the eleventh hour last week, Attorney General Biddle filed a brief in Chicago in which he sought to explain and justify the sweeping powers he had claimed for his boss.

He had claimed that: 1) "no business or property is immune to Presidential order"; 2.) in time of war the court should not substitute its judgment for that of the Executive; 3) "the President, as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, has the power and responsibility, irrespective of any statutes, and can act in such an emergency." Though there would now be no Supreme Court review of these claims, Senate and House committees showed no intention of dropping their investigations.

Columnist Walter Lippmann struck close to the heart of the problem when he wrote: "This episode is one illustration of a general slovenliness, which we need to check, on the whole question of how the civilian and military powers are related. One of the worst examples is the sentimental and rhetorical use of the term 'commander in chief to imply that the President governs by a kind of vague and inclusive martial law. The true conception of the commander in chief is, I think, quite the opposite: it is that because this is a republic, the President, who is a civilian and because he is a civilian, is always supreme over the military power. To talk as if he were a kind of generalissimo is a total reversal of the meaning of commander in chief."

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