Whispers in the White House

The inside struggle for power in the White House is a struggle as thick with political intrigue as the palace politics of a French court.

The men around the President--Tommy Corcoran, Harry Hopkins, Ben Cohen, Adolf Berle Jr., William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, William Bullitt, Robert H. Jackson, Samuel I. Rosenman, and the other "brain guys"--pass unrecognized on any streets but Washington's. The views of each of these Presidential advisers differ radically in practically every respect except devotion to the Boss. Berle and The Cork enthusiastically dislike each other; Hopkins has "stabbed" Corcoran so often that the Janizariat often wonders if there is a fresh spot left for the knife. What they all now think of Associate Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy could not be printed, although not many months ago they spread rumors that Murphy was a saint in a sack suit.

As the President turned again to business, finance and industry for help in the defense crisis, as the defense program became not just one new bureau but the whole Washington operation, the mutually distrustful Janizariat found a new unity, began to scheme how to regain their lost control.

Some of the truth about the incredibly tangled situation leaked out from Washington last week in little whiffs of rumor, in planted "true stories" circulated by each interested faction. The whole truth would have to wait for historians. In general outline, the plan appeared to be like this: On or about April 1 the President is to appoint Corcoran as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in charge of air. Perhaps sooner, Robert Lovett* will be made Assistant Secretary of War in charge of air. Robert Lovett, 45, a World War I Navy ace, publicly an unknown, is an able, coolheaded New York investment banker (a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.), sympathetic to the New Deal, came to Washington through his partner, W. Averell Harriman, the 49-year-old financier soon to go on London duty with Ambassador John Winant. Corcoran & Lovett, according to the plan, are to work as a team of New Deal Beaverbrooks on the major defense problem: airplanes.

The PDQ. OPM is scheduled to be replaced by a new super-super defense agency, when 1) the Lend-Lease Bill is passed, 2) the "tooling-up" period of defense is well along (TIME, Feb. 24). The superagency, known to wisecrackers as the PDQ, is to consist of four Cabinet members: State, War, Navy, Treasury. This setup would keep the defense and aid-to-Britain programs directly under the President, would permit straight-line production by the single-order system: Britain to the Treasury to Army and/or Navy to Britain, under State Department counsel, with Winant, Cohen & Harriman as London receivers and order placers.

The chairman of this supergroup, corresponding to Bernard Baruch in the World War I effort of the U. S., should, by rank and weight, be the Secretary of State. But sainted Mr. Hull, full of years and ill health--and no New Dealer--is not to be it. The New Dealers, who admire Mr. Hull but not his views, will just have to await his retirement.

When Mr. Hull is out of the picture, the New Dealers plan to replace him by William O. Douglas, Associate Supreme Court Justice, who is ruthless, fast, tough-minded and young (42). Justice Douglas still has a finger in all Janizariat pots, sees the President at least weekly, and has recently informed himself thoroughly on defense progress. But he cannot step from the bench to any less than a Cabinet post.

The New Dealers have an ingenious temporary solution: appoint an executive secretary to the four-man intra-Cabinet Defense Ministry, make him the Baruch pro tem. The logical man for this spot, they agree, is Harry Lloyd Hopkins, fresh from his study of England, and with hourly access to the President's inmost ear. But Hopkins, still frail from stomach trouble, cannot work more than seven hours a day, so the plan is to support Hopkins with bright young "brain guys" who will work with Corcoran & Lovett.

The Janizariat generally believes that Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, 78, may retire after the present Court term (June 2). Retirements of Hughes and Hull, plus the present McReynolds vacancy on the Court, would permit a three-way move: Douglas to replace Hull, Associate Justice Harlan Stone to replace Hughes as Chief, New Dealers Jimmy Byrnes and Attorney General Jackson to fill Court vacancies.

One part of the scheme on which there seemed to be no general agreement was: what to do with New York City's frisky-witted Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. The War Department? But Mr. Stimson hangs on, apparently to the satisfaction of the President. Some of the Janizaries wanted LaGuardia as the U. S. Beaverbrook of air production, assisted by Messrs. Corcoran & Lovett. Some wanted New York's Senator Mead appointed Postmaster General, and LaGuardia sidetracked into the Senate. Some wanted him as executive secretary of the new four-man Defense Ministry or PDQ. And some wanted to forget about him until they needed his help.

The "Knudsen Myth." One very necessary preliminary to the whole plan: the U. S. public must be disabused of its belief that OPM Director William S. Knudsen is a great man, competent to handle defense. Several weeks ago, in gossip columns which float New Dealers' balloons and in dispatches by honestly misled correspondents, a new discord began to creep into the chorus of praise for big-boned, amiable, unpolitical Mr. Knudsen.

Not only Knudsen's friends were alarmed. Many a New Dealer resented the move as a mistake; key defense writers were begged "not to blow up the Knudsen myth," on grounds that public confidence in defense progress would be unnecessarily shaken if General Motors' mighty man were shown to be only an assembly-line operator. On succeeding days, in the Knudsen-friendly Detroit News, and in Navy Secretary Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News, appeared suspiciously similar Washington dispatches "exposing" the "undercover attack" on Knudsen.

Last week the New Dealer plan appeared to be well under way. Around OPM was fear and gloom; production was beginning; but politics was being produced faster than ordnance (see p. 14). OPMites could see a nightmare vision of a day when Knudsen would be merely a wandering figurehead of good will, visiting factories and making Rotary luncheon talks; when Sidney Hillman would be a memo-writing figurehead, representing labor conciliation.

In U. S. factories, Army camps and shipyards, the defense program whirred powerfully on, somehow. The fruits would soon begin to show, roaring overhead, rumbling over the ground, sloshing through the sea. And about that time, if their plan went well, the New Dealers would be safely in the saddle again.

How much did the President know about these intrigues? Nobody could give a satisfactory answer to this question last week. His position appeared to be somewhat ambiguously aloof. This usually buoyant man of middle age--last week he was tired and under the weather--had abjured politics, had declared that there was no place in this national emergency for political scheming. Last week he was a great President, or a potentially great President, working in his study on great affairs of state. But all around him in the White House could be heard the ratlike sounds of politics, the scurryings and whispers.

* Not to be confused with Robert Morss Lovett, old liberal warhorse, now government secretary of the Virgin Islands.

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