Round & Round She Goes

THE TRUMAN MERRY-GO-ROUND (502 pp.)--Roberf S. Allen & William V. Shannon--Vanguard ($3.50).

In 1931, Reporters Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen whirled to journalistic fame on the Washington Merry-Go-Round. The book, and its continuation in a daily column of the same title, told the backstairs story of Washington politics with all the urgency of a cloakroom whisper, and the crusading fervor of a revival meeting.

With 20 years of hard riding, most of the political animals on the original Merry-Go-Round have worn out or fallen off. The Truman Merry-Go-Round gives the once-over, not very lightly, to their replacements. Despite a substitution on the team of authors,* the Merry-Go-Round is the same noisy journalistic contraption it was in 1931. But its calliope will hardly attract as many customers; it has all the drawbacks of an imitation, all the creaking and wheezing of an old model. Author Allen is a confirmed New Dealer, disappointed in the Fair Deal and as suspicious of the G.O.P. as if it were still headed by Warren G. Harding.

"Spear Carrier." Thus the new Merry-Go-Round brushes Harry Truman off as little more than "a spear carrier from the mob scene," and deplores his "government by crony." Yet the G.O.P., say Allen & Shannon, is worse--a "Dark Age Brigade" full of "Piltdown men" and "mental Charley horses" with "intellectual constipation, verbal diarrhea and varicose egotism."

But if Allen & Shannon whirl through their chore by rote, they also pause long enough to give out a good many brass rings. Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft gets a grudging tribute but a high one: "He never ducks an issue." Illinois' Paul Douglas is described as "outstandingly the ablest man in the Senate ... for solid intellectual force."

Some of their other judgments are more debatable. Of Vice President Barkley they say, without giving any indication that they have conducted their own poll, that no one doubts "his complete capability to take over the biggest job in the world on a moment's notice and fill it creditably." And of Dean Acheson the new Merry-Go-Rounders sum up: "the greatest Secretary of State since Henry L. Stimson."

"Mr. President . . ." Many readers will disagree with Merry-Go-Round's political judgments and be bored with its unending succession of paste-up biographical sketches. But few will fail to enjoy its deadpan vignettes of Washington life. In one of these, a brief speech by Senator Homer Capehart, the occasional mystery and sadness of representative government are epitomized.

The Senator rose and said, apropos of nothing:

"When I look about me, Mr. President, and see the intelligence displayed on the faces of members in the Senate, and when I look at the members of the House of Representatives and see the intelligence displayed on their faces, and when I meet officials of the administration and see the intelligence displayed on their faces, when I look about me and see so much intelligence displayed, I wonder what, after all, we are thinking about."

*Allen, who hopped off the Merry-Go-Round column in 1942 (for three years in the Army), later started a column of his own, worked this time with William V. Shannon, a 23-year-old Harvard M.A.

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