Morning Stroll

Fully an hour before Harry Truman tumbled out of bed at his usual 6 a.m., an earlier bird in the same nest had beaten him to it. In the stillness of Blair House, another President, Brazil's Eurico Caspar Dutra, also true to his old-soldier habit, had already shaved and breakfasted. Coming down stairs later, Harry Truman invited his overnight guest along on his regular morning stroll. Long before the high priests of protocol were up to bother them, the two Presidents ambled leisurely in the capital's cool, clear morning.

Harry Truman had been General Dutra's guest during the Rio de Janeiro defense conference in 1947 and the U.S. President was returning hospitality in the homely, natural way he likes best. Accompanied only by two Secret Service men and an interpreter, Guide Truman led his guest through the White House grounds. Along the curving iron back fence he pointed out where the Potomac once flowed before it shifted course, and told a story, probably apocryphal, about another early-rising American President.

It was a legend which Truman loves to retell. The sixth U.S. President, John Quincy Adams, he said, delighted in early-morning plunges off the backyard riverbank. One morning an enterprising newspaper woman, Anne Royall, trapped President Adams in swimming, sat on his clothes and demanded an interview. In the buff and chin-deep in the water, Adams surrendered, and sounded off about the day's issues until Newshen Royall retreated with her story.

Strolling on across the Ellipse, Harry Truman led his guest to the foot of the Washington Monument, and told Dutra how schoolchildren had paid for the monument with their pennies. After 40 minutes, the two Presidents were back at Blair House.

Truman and his good friend Dutra (who is a head shorter) also got together at a more sensible hour of the day to eat a few slices from a seven-tier cake prepared in honor of Dutra's 64th birthday (see cut). When they got down to more serious talk, the two Presidents agreed to begin negotiating a treaty to stimulate foreign private investment and U.S. technical assistance for Brazil. In flowery Portuguese, Dutra assured a joint session of Congress of Brazil's enduring friendship. When the Presidents parted, Eurico Dutra handed out his bread & butter gifts: for President Truman, a silver cigarette case, and for Bess Truman, a handful of Brazilian semiprecious stones.

Otherwise, it was not a week in which gifts were bestowed on Harry Truman. Last week, the President also:

P: Withdrew, after once vowing that he never would, the nomination of his old poker pal, former Governor Mon C. Wallgren of Washington, as $14,000-a-year chairman of the National Security Resources Board. The Senate Armed Services Committee, which did not think ex-Senator Wallgren was up to the job, had pigeonholed the nomination for three months.

P: Learned that his military aide, Major General Harry Vaughan, will not get to wear his medal from Argentina's Juan Peron, after all, because a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee refused to authorize it. The fight over the medal had inspired Truman's "s.o.b." blast at Columnist Drew Pearson.

P: Nominated former Wall Street Lawyer John J. McCloy, to be the first U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. McCloy resigned as president of the World Bank (see BUSINESS).

P: Pressed a gold telegraph key which spun a new generator at Washington's Grand Coulee Dam, making it the world's most powerful hydroelectric plant.

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