"Think I'll Buy It"

With a pair of enormous binoculars dangling from his neck, President Harry Truman trotted around Maryland's Andrews Field last week to see what the Air Force was doing about the future. As awed as any other layman, he looked over Boeing's record-breaking B-47 Stratojet with General Ike Eisenhower, impishly poked his glasses into a C82 Flying Boxcar where photographers were waiting to snap his picture. Crawling out of the tailless YB-49 Flying Wing, the President commented crisply: "Think I'll buy it." (Nobody reminded him that the Air Force had canceled orders for more because of presidential budget cuts.)

As the guests--many of them Congressmen--settled into the wooden stands, the Air Force cut loose with everything it had. F-80s whooshed by, skimming the ground, stunting singly and in tight formation. The spectacular eight-jet Flying Wing took off and zoomed upward, followed by the six-jet B-47, trailing clouds of smoke from 18 rocket units. In a race of bomber v. fighter the B-47 Stratojet walked away from the F-80, then was outrun by the swept-back F-86, which has already clocked a record 670.981 m.p.h. For a roaring finale the Air Force sent 16 huge, cigar-shaped B-36s lumbering overhead.

Later, Harry Truman said he thought the whole show had been magnificent, though he wondered "where it will all end." He meant the cost: his most persistent question was "How much?"

Last week the President also:

P:Finally added up the bill for White House repairs: $5,400,000 to construct a fireproof, steel & concrete interior which would stand on its own foundations inside the existing exterior, like a self-contained house within a house. Talking it over with congressional committeemen, Harry Truman remembered how he had first noticed signs of trouble when "the big, fat butler brought me my breakfast one morning and the floor shook." What finally convinced him was the day the bathroom floor sagged perilously and he imagined himself plummeting through the floor, bathtub and all, during a reception in the Blue Room.

P: Took notice of the Rankin pension grab (see The Congress) with a little speech to officials of the Veterans of Foreign Wars: "I hope it will be possible for you to help me to help the veterans of this country understand that this United States is theirs . . . and there are certain limits to which its financial welfare cannot be stretched."

P: Sent up to Congress his long-awaited anti-inflation bill, with stand-by powers to control prices, wages and scarce materials, put Government in business for itself if private enterprise failed to meet what the Government thinks its production should be.

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