The Facts of Life

Harry Truman showed that he knew how to step up and take on a fight. Over the wrathful objections of Senate President Kenneth McKellar, he nominated David E. Lilienthal for another nine-year term as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The President coolly announced the appointment only 24 hours after beet-nosed Mr. McKellar and his Tennessee colleague, Senator Tom Stewart, had called at the White House to try to head it off. Said McKellar: "We protested with all the vigor and zeal we have."

Loud-mouthed Kenneth McKellar had been roaring against businesslike, liberal-minded TVAman Lilienthal for several years, had carried on a patronage feud with him with all the passion of a home-state mountaineer. But last week McKellar discovered that, despite his new power in the Senate, he had been boxed in. Good friend Truman had already enhanced the McKellar prestige by inviting him to attend Cabinet meetings; the Senator from Tennessee could ill afford a last-ditch patronage row at the very start of the Truman Administration.

In appointing Lilienthal the President had risked a test in Congress, but it looked as though McKellar would have to be content. Politician McKellar was in the hands of a man who knew the business too.

The Payoff. If Harry Truman could act with political acumen and courage, he could also act like an old-line party man. Day after he nominated Lilienthal, he just as coolly paid off a political debt to the late ex-Convict Tom Pendergast, who had sent him to the U.S. Senate.

The President sacked the man who had sent Boss Pendergast to the penitentiary: Maurice M. Milligan, U.S. Attorney for western Missouri. For this post. Truman nominated Sam M. Wear, Springfield attorney and Democratic State chairman of Missouri.

Once, on the Senate floor, Truman had brought blushes to the faces of other Senators by a violent attack on Milligan. Only a few weeks before Franklin Roosevelt's death he had tried to block Milligan's reappointment. Senator Harry Truman had never forsworn his allegiance to his old and disreputable boss, nor his grudge against Milligan. President Truman was the same man.

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