Unfinished Business

On Franklin Roosevelt's desk, pushed aside during the long weeks of planning the African campaign, lay many an important piece of unfinished domestic business. Last week President Roosevelt studied the problems, called in his advisers, conferred again & again. In Washington, men whose senses are attuned to administrative earthquakes could feel the ground begin to tremble.

Biggest unsolved problem was manpower, growing steadily worse despite dozens of plans, scores of planners, thousands of words of advice, criticism and pious hope before Congressional committees. To the White House went Presidential Adviser Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, whose presence often foreshadows sudden change. To the White House also went Labor's Philip Murray and William Green.

In the President's hands at week's end was the most startling plan yet conceived for shaking up the manpower administration. It called for a Cabinet switch such as Franklin Roosevelt has never made before: Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes to become Secretary of Labor in full charge of manpower and Selective Service, Manpower Commissioner Paul V. McNutt to move into Ickes' old job in Interior, Labor Secretary Fanny Perkins to be shunted aside as Director of the Federal Security Administration.

There were other new blueprints drawn up: the President could take his choice. Many an uneasy eye watched the White House for hints and signs of what was coming. At a press conference, a newsman asked Paul McNutt if he expected to stay manpower director; he answered frankly, "I don't know." Fanny Perkins had not even heard of the proposed shakeup until newsmen told her. A spokesman for Harold Ickes insisted that his boss was perfectly satisfied in Interior.

But changes--big ones--may be on the way. Urging the President to act quickly were five potent Congressional committee heads, New Dealers all, who wanted the whole war organization overhauled and tightened (TIME, Nov. 23). Only four weeks away was the inauguration of a new Congress with only a paper majority for the Democratic Party. Franklin Roosevelt knew, and worked in the knowledge, that unless he overhauled his own war agencies, Congress might do it for him.

Last week the President also: > Was host to Ecuador's firm, friendly President Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Rio, one of the Americas' stanchest Good Neighbors. At the White House President Arroyo was guest at a state dinner, remained overnight, discussed long and earnestly with Franklin Roosevelt the prospects for post-war economic unity in the Western Hemisphere.

>Administered the final, official rebuke to opponents of nationwide gasoline rationing by ordering Rubber Czar William Jeffers and OPAdministrator Leon Henderson to start rationing this week as planned.

> Conferred with some of his Congressional leaders on the molasses-slow progress of the bill he requested for wartime authority to suspend tariff and immigration laws. But at week's end a rebellious Congress still balked at his request.

>Lost an able old White House lieutenant when dour, crafty Charles Michelson, who had taken the skin off scores of Republicans in ten years of speech-ghosting and column writing, decided to retire (at 74) as Democratic publicist.

>Announced that Mme. Chiang Kaishek, wife of the Chinese Generalissimo, was in the U.S. for medical treatment (of a spinal injury suffered in a 1937 auto accident), would be a guest at the White House afterwards.

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