Brightest Boy in Class

In his office in the White House, Presidential Press Secretary Charles G. Ross had just finished briefing correspondents on the progress of the Truman-Attlee meetings (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Sitting in his big leather chair, lean, long-faced Charlie Ross leaned back to light a cigarette, waited for the television men to set up their cameras so he could repeat part of the briefing for them. It had been a hard, crisis-crowded day, and he looked bone-tired. Suddenly, the cigarette fell from his lips and he slumped sideways in his chair. Within seconds, Charlie Ross was dead of a heart disease.

Life in Independence. In the death of Charles Griffith Ross, 65, Harry Truman lost not only an able press secretary but one of his closest friends. They grew up together in Independence, Mo., graduated together in Independence High School's class of 1901. Their teacher, Miss Tillie Brown, liked to say: "Oh, Harry Truman wasn't my brightest boy. Charlie Ross was."

He proved it by graduating from the University of Missouri a Phi Beta Kappa, then tried the newspaper business for three years, on small Midwestern papers and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When the University of Missouri set up its new journalism school, Charlie Ross went back to teach, stayed at it for nine years before he went back to the P-D and a top-drawer job as head of its new Washington bureau.

Under him, the bureau became one of the best in Washington. Besides Ross, it included crusading Paul Y. Anderson (who won the Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing the Teapot Dome scandal), Raymond P. ("Pete") Brandt, now head of the P-D bureau, and Marquis Childs.

Charlie Ross, a good, painstaking reporter, had won a Pulitzer Prize himself for his 1932 series on "The Country's Plight--What can be done about it?"--a scholarly, thoughtful and fair-minded examination of the Depression and the remedies the Hoover administration was applying. In 1934, Ross went back to St. Louis to boss the P-D's editorial page. But he was too good a reporter to be a brilliant editorial writer; his editorials were long on balance and facts, short on opinion. In 1939 he was back in Washington again as contributing editor of the PD, covering the political scene.

No Nonentity. When Harry Truman became President, Ross wrote for the P-D a cool, detached judgment of his old friend: "He has been called an average American, but he is better than average. He is not a nonentity and no Harding. He may not have the makings of a great President, but he has the makings of a good President." One of the first things President Truman did was to persuade Ross to give up his $35,000-a-year job with the P-D and become press secretary at $10,000 (later raised to $18,000).

Charlie Ross worked night & day to serve him, helped guide him on matters of high policy, wrote or edited most of his speeches, was a calming, steadying influence on impetuous Harry Truman. Ross never tried to cover up legitimate news, although occasionally reporters thought he was not telling all he should.

In eulogy of Ross, the President said: "The friend of my youth is gone . . . We all knew he was working far beyond his strength. But he would have it so . . . More and more we came to depend on his counsel on questions of high public policy which he could give out of the wealth of his learning, his wisdom and far flung experience . . . We shall miss him ..." Said Elmer Davis in his ABC broadcast: "He worked himself to death, a common disease in Washington."

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