Fun & Troubles

Friendly, gregarious Harry Truman had his fun during his half-week trip to Missouri with Winston Churchill. Their Baltimore & Ohio private train was out of Washington less than an hour when the President walked its length, shaking hands with reporters, cameramen, secret service men, crewmen. Up in the cab of the diesel engine he delighted himself and cameramen by pulling on a pair of cotton work gloves and sitting at the controls while the long, blue train rumbled through the West Virginia hills.

Churchill stuck to his bedroom for much of the journey. But the President was on the rear platform at almost every stop, offering his hand to anyone who could reach it. At St. Louis, on the return trip, he appeared on the platform with his striped pajamas showing under the topcoat he had thrown over his shoulders.

Signs of Urgency. After his Columbus speech, the President boarded his "Sacred Cow" plane for Washington. There the fun abruptly ended; Harry Truman plunged at once into a half week of work.

Domestic troubles would not stay down. He had an urgent problem to meet: the railroad strike threatened for this week. The President took the immediate heat off it by invoking the Railway Labor Act, appointing an emergency fact-finding board. But he resisted heavy pressures to intervene in the 16-week-old General Motors strike (see below). Following through on his plan to see labor leaders regularly, he talked long and (he reported) pleasantly with John L. Lewis and the A.F. of L.'s Carpenters' William L. Hutcheson.

The President went back over parts of his wage-price policy, gave Economic Stabilizer Chester Bowles the signal to tell U.S. business the vastly complex new regulations under which it now must operate (see BUSINESS).

Troubles with Congress occupied the President. He talked with Connecticut's Senator Brien McMahon on how to push through his apparently stymied bill for a civilian commission to control atomic-energy research. At his press conference, brisk Harry Truman bristled when a reporter asked about another bogged-down piece of legislation: the universal military training bill. Snapped the President: he had done everything he could possibly do, including a personally delivered message of recommendation; he could not order the Senate and House to pass it.

Signs of Spring. Work was piled on his desk. He left it long enough to award Medals for Merit for wartime services to the F.B.I.'s stocky J. Edgar Hoover, the ODT's leathery John Monroe ("Steamboat") Johnson, the Association of American Railroads' President John Jeremiah Pelley.

After two days in Washington, Harry Truman was ready for another change of scene. He went off for a cruise on the Williamsburg, but not just to revel in the first signs of spring in the wooded hills along the Potomac. With him went his three White House secretaries, his labor adviser, John R. Steelman, and a pile of official reports.

Last week the President also:

P: Signed legislation covering methods of disposal of $17 billion worth of war-built surplus merchant" ships.

P: Held a Cabinet meeting and talked twice with Treasury Secretary Fred M. Vinson about U.S. policies at the international monetary conference (see INTERNATIONAL).

P: Scotched rumors that Secretary of State James F. Byrnes would resign and that Postmaster General Robert Emmet Hannegan would quit as Democratic national chairman.

P: Became the first honorary life member of the newly formed Reserve Officers' Naval Services.

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