Forgive & Forget?

Facing newsmen at an open-air press conference in Key West, suntanned Harry Truman seemed as cool and casual as his floppy blue slack suit. For the time being, at least, the President just wanted to forgive and forget.

Actually there was not much more that he could do. Administration strategists on Capitol Hill had sent word that now was the time for persuasion and compromise, and Harry Truman was plainly determined to ruffle congressional feathers no further.

A slight edge crept into his voice when someone brought up the subject of the Dixiecrat rebels. They are not good Democrats, Harry Truman snapped. But except for that one outburst his whole mood was one of friendly conciliation.

On the whole, the President said, most of the members of Congress are fundamentally all right. Sometimes they get a little excited. But he pointed out that Congress had been delayed almost a month by the Inauguration, that it had just gotten started.

This week, after a fortnight in the Florida sun, he was back in Washington to try out his new good-neighbor policy at firsthand. Any break between the President and Congress, he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors, was mainly in the imagination of "troublemakers" who "start a gleeful chorus about how the Congress has thrown the whole Democratic program overboard." If anyone wanted to junk the Fair Deal, it was the pressure groups, and the worst of them all, he said, was the real-estate lobby, "the real enemy of the American home."

But, Harry Truman insisted, "basically the Congress and the President are working together and will continue to work together for the good of the country. We are going to agree on a lot more things than we disagree on. And when the final score for this Congress is added up, some of the selfish pressure groups are going to be pretty badly disappointed."

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