Texas Jack Back

An old man with a red, chicken-hawk beak and whiskery white eyebrows bobbed off the train in Washington's Union Station one day last week. He paused, silent while photographers snapped his familiar beady-eyed, scowling squint, then stepped briskly into a long black limousine, and rode off towards the Capitol.

Three days before, Vice President Garner, in khaki shirt and khaki pants, had been squatting on the front porch of his home in Uvalde, Tex., telling newsmen that the only thing that interested him was four setting bantam hens and his eight-acre "patch." Two months ago, just after his Presidential aspirations had gone up in cigar smoke at the Democratic Convention, he had gone to ground in Uvalde, and there he had stayed. When he was asked about his plans, and whether he thought of returning to his duties in Washington, he replied: "Tomorrow is only a day away. You can always make up your mind tomorrow." Washington wondered last week what had suddenly inspired Texas Jack to come back.

One answer might have been found in an editorial in the Scripps-Howard El Paso Herald-Post, which had said accusingly: "John Garner has not been aiding in the struggle to make the nation secure--the nation which in the last 40 years has honored him with high position and paid him and his wife-secretary $500,000 for their services. . . . He has sulked among his goats. It is not of record, however, that John Garner has refused the $2,500 in salary to which he is entitled, but has not earned. For 40 years the taxpayers have trained John Garner in the ways of legislation and of governing, and today in one of the gravest crises in history, he loafs. Texas is humiliated."

It was a jab which might have pierced a thicker hide than Texas Jack's. Many of his colleagues in Washington wondered, too, why Mr. Garner had not even gone to the funeral of his old friend William Bankhead, Speaker of the House.

Back in Washington, Texas Jack comported himself as if he had never been away. Clamping his teeth on an unlighted cigar, he shook a few limp hands, slapped a few backs, announced heartily: "Just feel my arms, feel those muscles in my legs. Boys, I'm hard as nails." One of the first things he asked was why Congress did not adjourn.

It was something a weary Congress had often asked itself while Texas Jack was sunning himself in Uvalde. But it still had some jobs to finish: the last deficiency bill, the $1,469,000,000 supplemental defense appropriation, the Excess Profits &-Amortization Bill. Conferees had ironed out differences between the House's version of the Excess Profits Bill and the Senate's. Congress hoped to pass it this week. Passed by the Senate and sent to conference was the Ramspeck Bill, which permits the President to fold into the Civil Service system approximately 200,000 Government employes through noncompetitive examinations. Congressmen were beginning to see some hope of adjournment when, at week's end, came news of the Axis-Japan pact.

Utah's Democratic Senator Thomas, who frequently speaks for the White House, spoke also for Congress: "No President would want the responsibility at such a time of remaining on duty alone. It is common sense that we stay." Congress might take short recesses. But hope of adjournment had vanished like dew before the Rising Sun. Unless he chose to take French leave again, Texas Jack would have to forget his setting hens and stay in Washington like the rest of them.

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