Spreading Itch

The itch to tell all had spread among retired White House hands. In the Saturday Evening Post, gurgling, roly-poly George E. Allen turned up last week with a one-shot article on "My Two Years with Truman." By Allen's account the two years had been fun for Allen but not so much fun for his good friend Harry Truman--a man of "exaggerated modesty" who had inherited all the problems of the Roosevelt Administration.

To embarrass Truman's close friend, California Oilman Ed Pauley (wrote Allen), ex-Attorney General Francis Biddle filed the famed California oil tidelands suit. "Harold Ickes, after failing to get assurance from Truman that he could remain in the Cabinet indefinitely, used the Pauley case as an excuse for quitting in a blaze of righteous indignation. . . .

"Henry Morgenthau [then Secretary of the Treasury] . . . kept wanting to know where he stood [with Truman] and finally, one day, put the question point-blank to the President. What happened then reminds me of the epitaph I once saw on a tombstone in a Western mining town :He kept asking for it until he got it.' "

It Won't Be Easy, To explain how the President could have "ead Henry Wallace's Sept. 12. 1946 Madison Square Garden speech--which ran completely counter to the Truman foreign policy--and then told Wallace to go ahead, Allen talked fast but vaguely. "Truman had been genuinely fond of Wallace. . . . He was eager to convert Wallace to ... the necessity for firm dealing with the Soviets. . . . So he accepted the Wallace speech, partly on misplaced faith in his Cabinet officer's loyalty to the Administration. . . . After the Wallace speech was delivered, Truman had a horrified awakening. He talked with Wallace at great length and discovered, to his increased dismay, that Wallace's anti-British, pro-Russian views were even more extreme than his speech had indicated. He slept on it, and then personally asked for Wallace's resignation."

Allen, who laughingly took himself out of the 1948 presidential race, made some prophecies: "Dewey will beat Taft and Vandenberg for the privilege of trying to beat Truman; it won't be easy." To the list of Democratic vice-presidential prospects, "I should add the generally overlooked name of Governor Mon Wallgren of Washington State; indeed I should place his name high on my list." (In Olympia, Wash., Governor Wallgren promptly announced that he would accept.)

In Collier's last week, Big Jim Farley swung into a second lap of his "Why I Broke With Roosevelt" series with recollections of some candid talks he had had with F.D.R. about fellow Democrats.

P:On Henry Wallace: "Henry would like to run for President. However, I'd rather have a fellow like Ickes . . . Ickes will go through with whatever he has in mind. But you never know what Henry will do."

P:Harold Ickes: "I think Harold Ickes is responsible for many of the stories that leak out of the Cabinet. I think he tells them to Drew Pearson."

P:On loyal but fidgety Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.: "Henry works himself up. ... I'll have to rub his brow and he'll be all right."

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