Exit Honest Harold

Like a conscience, Harold Ickes is sometimes a nuisance to have around. Last week the President got rid of him.

As soon as he cleans out his personal files, jammed with some 500 old speeches and thousands of letters, he will be gone. And that will be the end of his 13 years as Secretary of the Interior--a longer time than any other secretary before him had held the job.

His long public career began in Chicago, where he worked his way through the University of Chicago, had a try at journalism, got a law degree, hung out his shingle and became an apostle of reform. He was freed from the need of working for a living when he married Mrs. Anna Wilmarth Thompson, a wealthy divorcee. Between cultivating dahlias and collecting stamps, he annoyed Sam Insull, gave his legal talents free to Jane Addams of Hull House.

For 20 years, without losing his reformer's zest, he picked political losers. Then in 1932 he organized Midwest Republican Progressives (the nearest thing to a party label he would pin on himself) for Franklin Roosevelt.

Roosevelt picked the Chicago lawyer and dahlia-grower for Secretary of the Interior. Ickes had dared to hope that he might be made Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Toe to Toe. "Mrs. Ickes' husband" suddenly found himself boss of a $3,300,000,000 Public Works program. He was beset by fixers, agents, Congressmen. As well as he could--and he got pretty good at it--he repelled them. ("We have battled, toe to toe, with the avaricious and ruthless.") He presided with belligerent honesty over the Grand Coulee project, Boulder Dam, a vast $13,000,000 building to house his 4,686 Interior Department employes.

His adviser Mike Straus once declared: "He's ornery, hardheaded, the damndest and most unreasonable hotheaded man you ever saw." Ickes, listening eagerly, crowed: "You see?"

He called big businessmen the "dervishes of Wall St." He rasped that Hugh Johnson had "mental saddle sores." He lampooned Wendell Willkie as the "barefoot Wall Street lawyer." He even fought with Harry Hopkins and earned Cordell Hull's cold antagonism by blasting away at Fascism long before the U.S. was at war.

Be Kind. Honest Harold had always been wired for sound--which Harry Truman may have momentarily forgotten when the Senate asked Ickes to tell what he knew about Ed Pauley. The President said to Ickes: well, tell the truth but be kind to Pauley. But when Ickes got through charging Ed Pauley with an attempt at political bribery, Mr. Truman had only two choices: to withdraw Pauley's nomination as Under Secretary of the Navy, or slap Ickes down. Last week Harry Truman slapped Ickes down, by saying that the Curmudgeon could very well have been mistaken.

Harold Ickes resigned. In a 3,000-word statement he charged that the President's friends "resented keenly the fact. . . I told the truth." Ominously recalling the scandal of Teapot Dome, he stormed: "This kind of political pressure spiritually wrecked the Republican Party in the days of Secretary [Albert] Fall." He warned "of a cloud, now no bigger than a man's hand, that my . experience sees in the sky"-- the cloud of political corruption.

Ickes offered to stay until the end of March. The President, in an icy reply, accepted his resignation, effective in three days. This ended "all" of Ickes' "other governmental activities," said the President.

Mr. Ickes replied acidly: "I assure you that I have had no secret design . . . to hold on to any other office under your jurisdiction."

Question of Self-Respect. Harold Ickes then held a spectacular press conference in the Interior Department's auditorium. His aides, newsmen, photographers and radiomen with recording apparatus swarmed in. In his crusty old voice he made his position doubly clear --either "I had forsworn myself and made false statements under oath or someone else has." He went on the radio: "A man has to live with himself. I have to spend the rest of my life with Harold Ickes and I could no longer, much as I regret it, retain my self-respect and stay in the Cabinet of President Truman." Mr. Truman said that Ickes would not dare to impugn the integrity of the President. "I would dare to dispute the integrity of the President," Ickes retorted, "on any occasion that my country's welfare demanded it." At week's end it was over. Until Mr. Truman appointed a new Secretary (a matter already of much speculation), Ickes' assistant, Oscar L. Chapman, would hold down the job.

With his young second wife, Jane Dahlman, whom he married after Anna Thompson died, Ickes shook hands with 1,500 Interior Department employes.

Then he went to his office and lay down on the sofa. He grunted unintelligibly and closed his eyes. For the moment at least, 71 year-old Harold Ickes was a very tired old man. But only for a moment. Like every man's conscience, he would not be stilled.

-"Gentle" was the word, as Ickes recalled it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.