Clean House, with Termites

Key West was a gloomy and unfamiliar place. Angry grey-green rollers thundered up against Truman Beach, thick black clouds scudded across the sky, and a misty rain dripped down the shutters of the Little White House. Harry Truman awoke, turned over, peered disgustedly out the window and went back to sleep for an extra half hour. It had been like that for days, and the President was getting a little bored with the endless rainy-day banter, and with life on the cold and clammy beach.

Fidgeting to get back in harness, he celebrated the first sunshiny day of the week by breaking out one of the natty summer outfits he had brought down with him--dark blue shirt with white border, green worsted slacks, white buckskin shoes --and held the only press conference of his vacation. For a full 40 minutes on the flowered lawn of the Little White House, the President posed for the photographers, patiently answered questions, and unburdened himself to the reporters with an ease and informality impossible to attain in his crowded Washington conference room.

A Niche in History. Harry Truman was nearing his sixth anniversary in office, and he had something to say about it. Several of his predecessors, said History Student Truman, had suffered at the hands of the press of their day, Washington most of all. But they had still found their niche in history. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Cleveland had won recognition. Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt would find their places, too. For himself, said Harry Truman fervently, he only hoped when the history books were finally written that he would be remembered as an apostle of peace who had helped to prevent World War III.

"All a President of the United States can do," he continued, "is to endeavor to make the Government--the Executive branch--run in the public interest. I have striven very hard to accomplish that purpose . . . No President can be correctly evaluated during his term, or within twenty-five or thirty years after that term ... It takes an objective survey of what has happened and what was trying to be accomplished to decide whether the President has been a success or not. And you can't decide that now or here, and neither can I."

The tales of scandal and fraud hovering over his Administration, said the President, were just not true. He would answer that point-blank and categorically. His house was always in order; it was a clean house. His people were honorable men, and he would not have them if they were not.

Molasses & Mink. There could be no doubt that Harry Truman obviously and passionately believed what he had said. And no one suggested that his Administration was about to come crumbling down about his ears, as did Harding's in 1922. But there were certainly some termites eating away the beams, whether Harry Truman could hear them or not.

There had been White House Doctor Wallace Graham playing the cotton market (he didn't have the "slightest idea" cotton was a commodity, he explained); there were the Five Percenters; there was Personal Aide Harry Vaughan caught with his pudgy fingers deep in war-scarce stocks of molasses, grain and building materials --and now the RFC and mink coats.

It was a mark of the President's own stubborn brand of loyalty that he chose to overlook the damage some of his underlings were causing to the record of his Administration--on which the voters will pass long before the historians get around to the job.

By week's end the President had seen his fill of surf and cloud, sun and sand, readied himself to fly home three days earlier than planned. So that no one would think stubborn Harry Truman was worried about the trouble over RFC or the bitter attacks in Congress, Press Secretary Joe Short pointedly announced that Margaret would be visiting Washington; the President was hurrying back home just to see her before she left to go back to New York.

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