Men Around the Man

The phrase "Brain Trust" is happily dead, of overexertion. U. S. citizens tend more & more to think of their President as an independent, secretive, isolated individual existing in a near vacuum of his own making. Independent he is to a degree: he once said truly that only the President could speak for the President. Secretive he can be (about Third Term, for instance). But he is not isolated. Around him, on the pedestal where Presidents must live, are men on whom he relies. In seven years the make up of that group has changed several times. In 1933 it centred on Raymond Moley, in 1935 Rexford Guy Tugwell was one of its leading figures, and Corcoran and Cohen were in the ascendant. As the President sets out on his Third Term odyssey, the complexion of the group has changed again.

Harry Hopkins is uniquely the President's friend, counselor, confidant. Somewhere within the lean and hungry Hopkins frame, the burning Hopkins mind, the President found a quality and a kinship which he found in no other human being. Alone among the men around The Man, Harry Hopkins can (but does not) boast that he is both trusted and used without stint. His latest use: to supplant Jim Farley, command the axmen realigning the Democratic Party for the Third Term campaign and thereafter.

Robert Houghwout Jackson, Mr. Roosevelt's Attorney General, is the man whom the President admires above all others: for honesty, brain power, practical New Dealism, skill at interpreting and applying New Deal law. But lacking in his tie to the President is the inner intimacy which binds Roosevelt and Hopkins.

Felix Frankfurter is one of two U. S. Supreme Court Justices whose frankly close relationship with the White House is new in U. S. history. Wise, fecund Justice Frankfurter still supplies the New Deal with Happy Hot Dogs (example: brilliant young Henry Hart of Harvard's law faculty, who is working this summer in Mr. Jackson's Department of Justice). Anglophile Felix Frankfurter also continues to supply the President with advice; of late, their contact has become less & less formal, more & more personal and therefore more telling in its influence upon Roosevelt thinking and policy--both domestic and foreign. The other Justice who is also a White House counselor is William Orville Douglas. Subject: SEC, which he once headed and still discreetly nursee from the bench.

Tom Corcoran & Ben Cohen are not, as many a columnist has reported, on the way out. Their continued survival simply proves an old Roosevelt axiom: that the President's advisers are specialists, whom he calls on when he has a problem they can deal with. Ben Cohen is the New Deal's legal draftsman, not so busy as he used to be now that the emphasis is off new reforms, but still on call. Tommy Corcoran is the decisive, ruthless doer. Example: he recently arranged the shift of alien control from coddly Fanny Perkins' Labor Department to the control of Bob Jackson and Solicitor General Francis Biddle. Smart, loyal Mr. Biddle is a Jackson libertarian who seldom sees the President, but writes many a memo for him and his counselors, and is already swatting at Wendell Willkie. Public relations adviser to the President is ardent New Dealer Lowell Mellett, onetime Scripps-Howard editor, newest member of the group, notable because like Wendell Willkie he is a native of Elwood, Ind.

Harry Hopkins possibly excepted. Franklin Roosevelt has no one, general adviser, no "Assistant President" (Raymond Moley tried to fill the role, got booted out for his pains). Such facile young "killers" as Corcoran & Cohen understand this facet of their chief, do not sulk when they are neglected for days on end. Harold Ickes does not understand, wrings his heart because he cannot be all things all the time to Franklin Roosevelt, who nevertheless esteems and frequently consults explosive Mr. Ickes.

Of the 531 U. S. Senators and Representatives, only two are now close to the President. They are: South Carolina's canny, catch-as-catch-can Senator Jimmy Byrnes; Texas' steady, durable Sam Rayburn. Nebraska's Norris has slowed with age; Wisconsin's La Follette is too isolationist (and for that reason may not have the badly needed support of the White House in his race for re-election this fall). Among the so-called New Deal "militants" in the Senate (Minton, Lee, Pepper, Wagner) not one has the force & fury to attract Franklin Roosevelt. But there is another reason for this insulation from Congress: Mr. Roosevelt after seven years of New Deal politicking is genuinely, desperately bored with professional politicians as a class.

Cordell Hull, maneuvering skillfully in Havana (see p. 20), and his Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, are Franklin Roosevelt's mainstays on all-important Foreign Policy. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, the splintered War Department's Henry Stimson (see p. 20), and their ranking officers (Stark, Marshall), along with Industrialists William Knudsen and Edward Stettinius, Labor's Sidney Hillman, are often at the White House to talk and administer Defense (see p. 77). A curious, fateful fact about Franklin Roosevelt is that none of these men--not even Cordell Hull--belongs to the President's innermost Inner Circle. They are professionals or emergency specialists with whom the President must and does consult and cooperate; but between him and them, there is no natural affinity.

Much closer to Franklin Roosevelt are the men to whom he turns for simple fellowship. The President knows that what he tells safe, sound Henry ("Henny Penny") Morgenthau will not pop out in some gossip column the next morning; for that reason, the Secretary of the Treasury rates higher as a friend than as a policy-making official. New York's Appeals Court Judge Sam Rosenman, a Roosevelt crony since 1929, is half friend, half counselor: he may arrive with the rough manuscript of a Presidential speech, stay to gossip about old times in Albany, or to ease some useful protege into a key Federal spot. Another intimate of long standing, though he seldom appears in the public eye, is Mr. Roosevelt's onetime (1925-33) law partner, Basil O'Connor, who is personal lawyer both to the President and to Sara Delano Roosevelt. Still another, surprisingly enough, is onetime Attorney General Homer Cummings, who by running the Department of Justice on the basis of political patronage put the New Deal on many a spot. Tommy Corcoran once asked Sam Rosenman why grubby Homer Cummings was kept so long in the Attorney-Generalship. Rosenman answered: "You probably have forgotten that Cummings notified the Chief of his nomination for Vice President in 1920."

The men around the President are sev eral groups, reflecting the uses he has for them, and his personal liking. Those who attract his mind are usually those who fight a brilliant kind of intellectual guerrilla warfare which their opponents call outright unscrupulous. All are New Dealers to the core--which perhaps explains Mr. Roosevelt's refusal up to now to surrender one jot of the New Deal in the interest of Defense. Yet, Harry Hopkins again excepted, the President's warm, confiding friendliness is reserved for men who are comfortably conservative, cautious, even stodgy by the standards of Mr. Roosevelt's young brilliants. Nor is this out of character: Franklin Roosevelt the New Dealer, the experimenter, the Third Termer is also Squire Roosevelt, man of property, whose greatest joy is to go home to his acres in the Hudson Valley.

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