News Blanket

As an adept hand in managing the press, Franklin Roosevelt knows when to make news, when not to make it. Last week, in the midst of the sharpest U. S. diplomatic crisis since the World War (see col. 2), his cue was not to make it.

For the aftermath of the sinking of the gunboat Panay kept news of the business slump off front pages, even blanketed the defeat of the Wages and Hours Bill (see p. p). If the latter was not inconvenient so far as it reassured business, both kinds of news were nonetheless damaging to Administration prestige.

Above all Franklin Roosevelt does not like to hear the word depression. When a reporter asked whether recession was growing worse, he passed off the question with airy knowingness, saying--"Oh, that depends on what newspapers you read.'' He announced, however, that he would resume his conferences with utility heads with whom he wants to start construction programs (TIME, Dec. 6).

The only newsy answer that he gave to any question served to bring the subject back to the pressing but rather more comfortable topic of foreign relations. Asked in cleverly-framed words whether he considered that holding a national referendum on declaring war would be consistent with representative government, he answered, flatly, "No."

P: In a letter to Chairman Pat Harrison of the Senate's Finance Committee, the President recommended amending the Social Security Act to provide standard payments for 1,100,000 additional prospective beneficiaries, including 175,000 national & certain other bank employes, 180,000 seamen, and 800,000 persons, now 60 or more who, by the existing statute, would get a small lump sum payment instead of annuities in 1942.

P: Diplomatic convention provides that when a new Ambassador arrives in Washington, he array himself in a cutaway, pay a formal call at the White House. By mutual agreement, this procedure was dispensed with last week in the case of Dr. Don Leon de Bayle, newly appointed Minister from Nicaragua, who arrived at the White House in a business suit, greeted the President in his office instead of the stately Blue Room, puffed a cigaret while the President chatted with him for 15 minutes.

P: To Louisville, the President sent Secretary Marvin McIntyre to represent him at the funeral of the Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Robert Worth Bingham, who died suddenly last week in Baltimore (see p. 22).

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