Good Start

The Government of the U.S. launched upon the new year--a year, Franklin Roosevelt said, of "great promise." The nation's capital hummed with the hustle & bustle of a new Congress getting down to work. It was stirred by the President's message on the State of the Union. It was breathless atthe gigantic budget he proposed for the new fiscal year.

Washington was off to a good start, and the mood of Franklin Roosevelt showed it. At press conferences, he no longer chain-smoked his cigarets or ran his massive hands through his thinning hair with nervous regularity. He laughed more easily.

For his State of the Union message, he had abandoned his plans for a fighting speech full of urgent recommendations for expanded social security and other plans dear to his own heart but anathema to many a Congressman. Instead he spoke in broad outlines, with friendly, conciliatory gestures. Probably bitter fights were inevitable between this Congress and the Administration, but the President had at least postponed them. Not since the first "honeymoon days" of his Administration had Franklin Roosevelt received such an overwhelmingly favorable reaction to a speech. Not since the first days after Pearl Harbor had Washington seemed so united on the broad objectives of winning the war and the peace.

The President also:

> Made two appointments which were almost unanimously praised: ex-Senator Prentiss M. Brown of Michigan, to succeed Leon Henderson as director of the Office of Price Administration, and Federal Judge Wiley B. Rutledge Jr., to succeed Economic Czar James F. Byrnes as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

> Made one appointment which was almost unanimously decried: tall, smooth Edward J. Flynn, successful Boss of The Bronx and unsuccessful chairman of the National Democratic Committee, to be the President's personal Ambassador and Minister to Australia. To critics who failed to find any diplomatic qualifications in the background of hard-bitten Politician Flynn, this looked like the worst kind of lame-duck appointment. Cried Wendell Willkie: "The appointment is ... revolting to all decent citizens. The difference between the high professions of President Roosevelt's and Vice President Wallace's speeches and the Administration's low political performance is a tragic paradox."

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