Watchdog

There was no joy in Congress last week as word quickly wound through the Capitol corridors that North Carolina's well-loved Representative Lindsay Carter Warren had finally accepted Franklin Roosevelt's thrice-offered appointment as Comptroller General. With long faces his colleagues pumped Lindsay Warren's hand saying: "Congratulations, Lindsay, but damn you for taking the job." In the House press gallery reporters paid a rare tribute--started a collection for a farewell present.

The job was no sinecure, but it had a double attraction for this able, efficient veteran of 16 Congressional years: a guaranteed 15-year tenure at $10,000 a year, a chance to keep his family with him in Washington where ailing Lindsay Jr., 16, could be close to the best medical treatment.

On Oct. 1, when Warren moves his papers to the red brick Old Pension Office Building on Judiciary Square, he will take a post which demands all the painstaking concentration which often made him better informed on House bills than their authors. When the late niggardly John Raymond McCarl (see p. 62) occupied the office, Washington dubbed him "Watchdog of the Treasury" for such piddling practices as forcing General John J. Pershing to pay for his own Pullman ticket after he had lost his voucher. Franklin Roosevelt, who cares little for such trivialities, was glad to see McCarl's term expire in 1936. After an unsuccessful attempt to abolish the post, he offered it to Warren, who promptly refused. This time, with billions going for defense, the President needed more than ever a man he could trust.

It was a hard decision for Lindsay Warren. At 50 he has many a good legislative year ahead, and the folks back in North Carolina's First District have always been satisfied. A bullnecked, leathery man's man, he thrives on the frugal, quiet outdoor life of Washington, N. C. ("Little Washington"), where he lives with his wife and three children in a two-story frame house on Main Street. He likes weekend trips to Little Washington; sitting on the rail fence in front of Arthur Mayo's office on Main Street and talking politics with the boys; fishing in old clothes at Kitty Hawk and Hatteras with Postmaster Billy Culpepper and Bruce Etheridge of Manteo and Dudley Bagley of Currituck; winning a little change at poker during the long winter nights (there is an undenied story that he roundly shellacked the President at poker during a weekend trip); motoring around the countryside in his three-year-old Buick, talking potato and tobacco crops with his farmer constituents; looking out his windows at flower-festooned boats on the Tar River during the spring tulip festival.

The morning after he made up his mind, Warren contributed a final, typical gesture. At 6 a.m. he phoned the members of his district's Congressional committee, received their promise to appoint his longtime secretary, balding little Herbert Bonner, as his successor, thus saving the jobs of his own appointees. Then, with mind at ease, he accepted.

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