Dusty Battles

THE SECRET DIARY OF HAROLD ICKES:

THE FIRST THOUSAND DAYS, Vol. I (738 pp.)--Simon & Schuster ($6).

That irascible old Bull Mooser, Harold Le Claire Ickes, was 58 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932; he had put in nearly 30 years fighting for lost political causes, and he seemed almost taken aback at finding himself on the winning side at last. He recovered quickly. In 13 years as Secretary of the Interior, Honest Harold (a nickname that made him squirm) became a national institution. His bristling incorruptibility, his old-fashioned reformer's views, his endless suspicions of all other politicos, his Donald Duck temper and acid-tongued campaign speeches made him a figure unique in the New Deal.

He worked twelve or more hours a day, at one point had 16 jobs (among them: Solid Fuels Administrator, Coordinator of Fisheries, Petroleum Administrator). He suffered from chronic exhaustion, and sometimes rose in the lonely hours of the night to dose himself gloomily with whisky in an attempt to sleep. But he somehow found time through the years to dictate 6,000,000 words of private diary.

After Ickes died last year at 77, this mass of personal reminiscence became the object of spirited bidding. The ultimate buyers, Simon & Schuster, announced the event in tones which indicated they had accomplished a major coup. The diary is to be a massive affair, even after editing, but the publishers have run off two pre-publication printings (25,000) of Volume I, The First Thousand Days, and are at least outwardly confident that the work will be received with increasing fervor as succeeding volumes follow it to the bookstores.

Life in the Harem. Anyone who participated actively in the early New Deal will no doubt be fascinated by Ickes' closeup view of its harem-like bureaucracy between 1933 and 1936. As a combination court favorite and whipping boy, Ickes had a magnificent opportunity to observe his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, at work and at play, and the diary faithfully reports his intimate relationship with the President. But the Ickes of the caustic quotes and belligerent campaign speeches emerges only occasionally; like most diarists, the author was simply writing a detailed and essentially formless account of his daily life, and many of The First Thousand Days will be as full of drudgery for the reader as they were for the author.

Ickes nonetheless emerges as an oddly appealing figure. In his own view, he lived in a world full of the rascally, the inept and the misguided. He was so suspicious of evil that he organized a private detective force to keep the Interior Department toeing the mark. He balefully noted that Harry Hopkins, then the WPAdministrator, "is intolerant and impetuous" and is "playing the game of a desperate gambler." Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins talked at Cabinet meetings "in a perfect torrent, almost without pausing to take breath, as if she feared . . someone [would] break in on her." He felt it "little short of impertinent" for Mrs. Roosevelt to dabble in public housing, and added: "Soon I will expect Sistie and Buzzy [Roosevelt grandchildren] to be issuing orders to members of my staff."

Sidetracked Executive. But for all his irascibility with other New Dealers, he was not tempted by Republican suggestions that he might be a presidential candidate in 1936 or 1940; such a course did not seem consistent with honor. He glowed like a schoolboy when he heard that F.D.R. had referred to him as a "great executive." But when the President chose Harry Hopkins' method of spending relief money ("shoveling" most of it out for leaf raking and other make-work jobs instead of following Ickes' advice and spending it all on permanent public works), he felt bound to resign. After Roosevelt talked him out of it he wrote in exasperation: "He sidetracked me. It is almost impossible to come to grips with him."

Ickes went faithfully back to work and campaigned ferociously for F.D.R. in 1936. The First Thousand Days ends with a triumphant report of Roosevelt's victory, and the happy notation that F.D.R. seemed about ready to "move" against the anti-New Deal oldsters on the Supreme Court--a fight in which "I hope to be able to take part." With an air of conscious righteousness, he records a piece of White House scuttlebutt: F.D.R. is about to sack more than half his Cabinet,* but will reappoint Honest Harold.

* He never did.

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