Cats

This week Eleanor Roosevelt curled her claws, wrote in My Day: "And so Mr. Wendell Willkie has been nominated. . . . I do not know Mr. Willkie, but the headline in one of the metropolitan papers yesterday said: 'Willkie aims at unity, defense and recovery.' ... In heaven's name, will anyone aim at anything else? Sometimes I wonder whether we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something. ..."

A master at saying indefinite things is Mrs. Roosevelt's husband. He was never in better form than last week. For his first press conference after Utilitarian Willkie was nominated, Mr. Roosevelt was 20 minutes late. Said he with a grin: the elevator (to his second-floor quarters) had stopped; somebody had turned the power off; he did hope that there was no connection with what had happened in Philadelphia. Correspondents saw the President glance at his secretary, Brigadier General Edwin M. ("Pa") Watson, heard Mr. Roosevelt stage-whisper to a companion: "He is grinning like a Cheshire cat." And well might Pa Watson have grinned: he won a $25 bet on Wendell Willkie's nomination.

Time to watch Franklin Roosevelt is when he is in just such a lightsome mood. Correspondents watched & listened when the Christian Science Monitor's Richard Strout put a grave question. Did the President plan to invite Wendell Willkie to the White House to fashion "a common front" on foreign affairs, take that momentous subject out of roiling campaign politics? Mr. Roosevelt said he had not thought about it, but would be very glad to see Mr. Willkie (who had said in Philadelphia that he would be delighted to see Mr. Roosevelt). The correspondents marked a Roosevelt-Willkie conference large in their future-books, remembered that President-elect Roosevelt in 1932 was similarly called in by Herbert Hoover.

What newsmen most wanted to know, and none dared ask, was what, if anything, the nomination of Wendell Willkie had done to Mr. Roosevelt's thoughts about Term III. Whatever the answer (the U. S. will have it after the Democrats convene July 15), G. 0. P.'s Willkie turned the last trace of Third Term opposition in the Democratic Party into a frantic demand that Mr. Roosevelt run. Even old Jack Garner, who seldom forgives and never forgets, sadly made up his mind that Franklin Roosevelt was the only Democrat who could beat this man Willkie. Janizaries like Tom Corcoran (see p. 53) trumpeted that Mr. Roosevelt now had no choice left; party hacks let it be known that his refusal to run now would be gross betrayal of the Party. Then came a pause, a susurrant scratching of New Deal heads. Until last week no one had stopped to think what Mr. Roosevelt might do if the G. 0. P. came up with a red-hot candidate who would also be a powerhouse as an administrator. All in all, Wendell Willkie got no greater tribute than the one thus implicitly paid him in Washingon last week.

The President said he was too busy to fool with politics. That night his Janizaries were not too busy to huddle, pick able Attorney General Robert Houghwout Jackson to lead Administration forces against Wendell Willkie. Messrs. Willkie & Jackson have clashed before (at Manhattan's Town Hall in 1938; and in a magazine-radio debate last spring, when Bob Jackson accused Lawyer Willkie of twisting legal facts in a piece about the Supreme Court). Clear last week was the line of their campaign debate: concentrated Governmental power v. concentrated private power.

Bob Jackson retired to mull over his assignment, did not stoop to participate in the first, ragged salvos at Wendell Willkie. Said irrepressible Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes: "The difference between Dewey and Willkie is the difference between a pinwheel and a skyrocket." Said Texas' acid-tongued "Tawm" Connally: Mr. Willkie has "an electric background, an electric personality and an electric campaign chest. . . . Mr. Willkie had better prepare for a blackout in November.'' Such remarks were the typical opening shots of a dawning campaign. What knowing correspondents pondered was the similarity--and the implication--of statements by Jim Farley and House Speaker William Brockman Bankhead.

Mr. Bankhead: ". . . If the voters wish to place the executive in control of forces which are somewhat foreign to our usual American way of life. . . ."

Mr. Farley: ". . . The question is ... what sets of forces, economic and social are to conduct our Government--the historic American processes, or some new and somewhat foreign methods of concentrated control. . . ." This seemed to be Jim Farley's way of hissing "Fascism." Wondering citizens judged that the Democrats would have to come cleaner than that to stop Wendell Willkie.

Last week the President:

> Signed a bill which 1) requires some 3,500.000 aliens in the U. S. to register, be fingerprinted (at their local post offices); 2) provides fines up to $10,000, imprisonment up to ten years for written, spoken or printed words which "in any manner cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces. . . ."*

> Invoking further emergency powers, authorized the U. S. Treasury to control (and if need be, seize) any U. S. or foreign vessels in U. S. ports. Immediate object: to keep such French prizes as the Normandie (now docked in Manhattan) from falling into Nazi hands.

> Sorrowfully penned a note to White House Doorman Patrick McKenna. who was dying in Georgetown University Hospital (see p. 55). Pat McKenna was a balding, Irish ball of a man who went to the White House in 1903 with Roosevelt I, used to watch over William Howard Taft when he fell asleep at his desk after lunch. Devoted equally to Roosevelts I & II was Pat McKenna. Wrote the President last week, begging Pat McKenna to get well: "Come back soon. I need you."

*Said the alarmed New York Times. ". . . Any author, publisher, bookseller, newsdealer or even a citizen engaged in private conversation might be held guilty by an excited jury. If the clause were strictly construed, several of the leading speakers at last week's Republican National Convention might be in danger "

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