"Little Picayunish Things"

John Steelman, sometimes dubbed "Assistant President," is the man who keeps things from piling up when the boss is away. Recently, moon-faced John Steelman found himself at the bottom of a pile.

His boss, Harry Truman, was a little disappointed by the way the Vinson business had turned out (TIME, Oct. 18), and had decided to try something else. So White House advisers, including the President's military aide, Major General Harry Vaughan, cooked up another idea to spring at a strategic moment in the political campaign.

This one was to be an executive order. It would bristle with "whereases." It would be written in language which could not fail to convince everyone that Mr. Truman, while a candidate for reelection, nevertheless was still Mr. Johnny-on-the-job. High officials who later had it quoted to them (few ever actually got to see it) remembered such phrases as "unfriendly country" and "mobilization to meet an attack." Whereas the country was so ill-prepared for attack, the document continued, the Defense Department was ordered to organize the nation's reserves and report progress within 60 days.

"My God, Jim." The President, well pleased, went off on his political trip to the Midwest, leaving Assistant President Steelman to bring the document to flower and deliver it to Defense Secretary James

Forrestal. The document was placed before Forrestal one noontime while he was having lunch with his three service secretaries and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Most of the men around the table were flabbergasted and appalled. Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall went back to his office, called Forrestal four hours later and gasped: "My God, Jim, do you know what that means? That is virtually a declaration of war."

Forrestal had already acted. The story around the Pentagon was that he telephoned Steelman and told him that the wording of the order was unthinkable. He sent the document to Major General Harold Bull, deputy director of G3, with instructions to take out the "unthinkable" passages and write an order which could be issued without scaring the wits out of the whole nation, if not the world. When General Bull finished his draft it was forwarded to Harry Truman on his campaign train.

Family Secret. It was this draft which the President issued. Even though it was toned down, the proclamation still created some stir. The President felt obliged to reassure the country that all was well; and that the outlook for peace, he thought, was even improving.

Actually, stripped of its more startling "whereases," the order was a rehash of some of the recommendations made last summer by Assistant Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray with the idea of strengthening the nation's debilitated reserves. The Truman order called for little more than: 1) better reserve training programs, 2) more facilities for Army and Air Force Reserve Corps and the National Guard.

Administration officials, not quite recovered from the Vinson fiasco, did their best to keep the whole affair a family secret. Mr. Steelman picked himself up, brushed himself off and tried to look both innocent and unruffled. "There was some talking back and forth when I presented the draft at the Pentagon," he recalled. "When the President goes off and leaves me in charge, I don't have time to pay much attention to little picayunish things."

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