Like Death & Taxes

Harry Truman's nomination for the presidency was apparently in the bag. Last week Frank Hague's New Jersey Democrats pledged their "militant support" of him; Kentucky's Senator Alben Barkley flatly predicted that he would be nominated and elected.

The South was still grumbling. Memphis' Boss Ed Crump snarled: "I'm for anybody except Harry Truman. Any good Democrat will get my vote." But he added that there was no truth in reports that Southern states would hold a rump convention. Even without the South, Harry Truman seemed to be in. National Chairman J. Howard McGrath announced that his rock-bottom figures showed the President with a minimum of 900 of a possible 1,234 votes on the first ballot.

The smoke from the Eisenhower fireworks seemed to be drifting away, and the boom for Justice William 0. Douglas had collapsed. This week, Americans for Democratic Action, the last sizable Democratic bloc outside the South still holding out against Harry Truman, sourly conceded defeat. A.D.A., which had favored both Ike and Douglas, admitted that the President could get the nomination "if he persists [in pursuing it] with the power of his office." In other words, they would be for Truman, but without enthusiasm. When Eleanor Roosevelt, a prominent figure in A.D.A., emerged from a White House chat with the President last week, she told newsmen that she was not even going to the convention.

Last week the President:

P: Raised no objection when the Federal Housing Administrator appointed his younger brother, J. Vivian Truman, 62, to a $7,100 job as district FHA director for western Missouri.

P: Swung decisively into action when he heard that the Veterans Administration had ordered a New Mexico veterans' hospital closed, right in the middle of Secretary of Agriculture Clint Anderson's campaign for U.S. Senator. He promptly authorized Anderson and New Mexico's Senator Carl Hatch to announce in his name that the hospital would not close after all.

P: Nominated capable Dr. John L. Lewis Jr., unobtrusive son of the United Mine Workers' obtrusive John L., for appointment as senior assistant surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service.

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