How Long a President

There are in the Senate 16 Democrats who in 1928 supported the La Follette Resolution condemning a third term as "unwise, unpatriotic and fraught with peril to our free institutions." One is Arizona's Ashurst. Another is bumbling Alben Barkley. Last week, to embarrass them, Nebraska's Edward Burke invited them to his sub-committee hearings on his proposed Constitutional amendment limiting a President to one six-year term, to explain their support of a third term for Franklin Roosevelt. They hedged. Rumbled Alben Barkley: "A wise man may change his mind, but a fool never does." Quipped Henry Fountain Ashurst: "I am confronted with such a situation that I must vote . . . for a third-termer rather than a third-rater."

There were no such easy answers at the hearings. There Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, once Franklin Roosevelt's Under Secretary of the Treasury, gravely warned against the danger of an "ambitious man concentrating too much power into his own hands"; New Deal supporter and College President William Eddy said: "The election of Mr. Roosevelt next November may well prove to be expedient, but his candidacy while in office has been a calamity."

Most solemn warning came in a message from Historian James Truslow Adams, too ill to attend the hearings in person: "Even in the United States the power of one man has become almost overwhelming. The longer it lasts, the more strongly entrenched it may become. If we break with usage and tradition and allow a man to retain such powers for twelve years in stead of eight, why not for 16, 20, or for life? Our world is changing fast and it can always be said that there is a crisis."

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