Nice Work

Harry Truman lay late abed at Blair House; on several occasions he did not rise until after 7, and one day the good wives of 15th Street saw him taking his morning stroll at the incredibly late hour of 8:30. It was one of those rare weeks when being President was very nice work, and Harry Truman made the most of a free & easy schedule.

He had a big list of callers--during the week dozens of old friends from Congress dropped in at the office to shake hands and chat. One day he posed for photographs with five polio-stricken children who will tour the country on behalf of the March of Dimes campaign. The kids were chirpy as crickets. He seemed both pleased and honored when five-year-old Linda Sue Brown of San Antonio took to tweaking his right ear during the proceedings.

His weekly press conference lasted only five minutes and produced only fragments of news. Reporters got headlines out of it only by accenting the negative: the President didn't think that John L. Lewis and his three-day-a-week miners had created a national emergency and he had no intention of invoking the Taft-Hartley Act against them. Both the President and the reporters seemed to be in a rush to get their chores done and their clothes changed for a more entertaining affair--the Democratic National Committee's annual whing-ding for Democratic Congressmen and Senators.

Fellowship. It was the big night of the week for Harry Truman. He took up a position at the door of a private dining room at the Shoreham Hotel and shook hands with all comers for an hour; by then virtually every Democrat of any consequence in the capital had entered and had wormed into the press around the 50-ft. bar. As the company began gathering at white-clothed tables for a buffet dinner, the room was noisy with hoarse laughter and male voices.

The President, who looked relaxed and spruce in a sharply creased grey suit and a neatly knotted dark tie, roared with the crowd as Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn launched the evening speechmaking. The bald, benign and beaming Speaker hoped that the Republicans would win some congressional seats and "give us a two-party system." As a 67-year-old bachelor to a 72-year-old bridegroom, he also gave Vice President Alben Barkley a leer and a nudge on his recent marriage.

"Speak for yourself, Sammy," cried

Barkley in unabashed and happy rebuttal. "Since I got married, such people as Clark Gable, Mayor O'Dwyer, Dick Tracy, Miss America and even the Methodist bishop* who married us have caved in--and I don't believe Sam Rayburn can resist much longer."

Flipper-Flapping. Harry Truman spoke more soberly. He asked the assembled Democrats to remember the party platform and to help him carry it through. Then he recalled that Princeton University was engaged in publishing the complete works of Thomas Jefferson; he hoped that someone would also publish all the writings of Jackson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

"If they do that," said he, "they will find out why the Democratic Party never dies--it is the party of the people."

He sat down amid thunderous applause. Whether from bourbon, the force of oratory, or some obscure and seal-like instinct for flipper-flapping, the Dixiecrats in the room applauded loudest of all, almost as if he had scuttled the civil rights section of the platform instead of praising the whole thing. All in all, the President had a very pleasant week.

The President also:

P: Learned from the Secret Service that exactly 1,925 threats, written or oral, were made against him or his family in 1949. Sample: ". . . The day will come when I will have your heart out and give it to the ants as food . . ." Each letter or threat was investigated thoroughly. Almost 98% of the crank notes came from mentally unbalanced people, says the Secret Service, and a few of the obviously dangerous were committed to asylums or sent to jail. The President's guardians considered it an extremely routine year: Franklin Roosevelt ordinarily got from three to four times as many threats as Truman.

P:Got word that the Ford Motor Co. is building nine seven-passenger Lincoln Cosmopolitan limousines and a seven-passenger convertible for presidential use. Lincoln-Mercury will get only a small rental (about $200 a year for each automobile) but enjoys the attendant prestige.

As a result it was spending $150,000 to make the automobiles look as impressive as possible. One limousine was being equipped with gold trim instead of chromium. It will also have running boards--for the Secret Service. All the cars will boast heaters and radios fore & aft, but not armored bodies or bulletproof glass: these slow down the car, and the Secret Service would rather have getaway speed in case of trouble. And the roofs of all are being made six inches higher to accommodate a silk hat.

*Bishop Ivan Lee Holt doesn't admit to having caved in.

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