Those "Rumor Mills"

Ever since Eleanor Roosevelt left Washington last April, the 70 members of the Mrs. Roosevelt's Press Conference Association (founded in 1941) have faced technological unemployment. Bess Truman simply wasn't giving them anything to write about. Last week the President of the M.R.P.C.A., who is the New York Daily News's bland, blue-eyed Ruth Shick Montgomery, served notice on the new First Lady that she had better change her attitude--or else.

Taking over vacationing Washington Columnist John O'Donnell's envenomed spot in the News, she unreeled 800 words of innuendo directed at Mrs. Truman. When Madame Chiang Kai-shek visited the White House she had been so sorry, Ruth wrote, that Mrs. Truman was away in Missouri. Ah. but actually--Ruth confided to the Daily News's 2,000,000 readers--Mrs. Truman had been in the White House all the time.

Then she cooed: "Now, most Washingtonians are convinced that Mrs. Truman intended no slight in not receiving Madame Chiang. It is the sort of misunderstanding which could undoubtedly have been cleared up overnight--long before the rumor mills began grinding out their bitter chaff--if the distaff side of the White House maintained any sort of 'diplomatic' relations with the press."

The chickabiddies of the club, who had been complaining that Ruth had not been forceful enough in presenting their case, wondered whether they had not underestimated their president. She has been underestimated before. She likes to tell about the morning she slipped into a hotel suite under a waiter's arm, and made herself an unwelcome third party at Jimmy Cromwell's breakfast with Wife Doris Duke (who was wearing a sable coat and hair curlers).

For this and similar contributions to journalism, Ruth Montgomery was assigned to Washington last year, in January was elected president of the White House girls' club. She was the only woman among the twelve reporters permitted to attend President Roosevelt's funeral in the East Room. Since then, what with Mrs. Truman refusing to hold press conferences, she has had only scooplets to boast of: she was first with the backstairs report that the Trumans were cutting down the servants' staff, first to discover what colors the Trumans had painted the upstairs rooms.

The day the Madame Chiang column appeared, Ruth Montgomery met Mrs. Truman at a cocktail party. She was re-introduced to the First Lady by a friend who said, "Of course you read Ruth's column." "Oh, yes. I certainly did," said Mrs. Truman--and smiled sweetly.

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