Second Lamentations

THE SECRET DIARIES OF HAROLD L. ICKES, Vol. II; THE INSIDE STRUGGLE, 1936-1939 (759 pp.)-Simon & Schuster ($6).

A man talking to himself can get a lot off his chest that might otherwise fester there. Not that the late Harold Le Claire Ickes was shy about clearing his chest in public. But to his diary, crusty Politician

Ickes transferred irritations that presumably even he did not care to air aloud. Like the first volume of the diary (TIME, Dec. 7), the second is a characteristic mixture of bureaucratic woolgathering and streaks of incisive candor that will keep historians of the New Deal sorting for years to come.

In The Inside Struggle, it becomes plain that Honest Harold was anything but a happy bureaucrat from the end of 1936 to the end of 1939. His devotion to President Roosevelt did not pay off in the new powers Ickes craved, and the New Deal itself, he thought, was being scuttled by renegade Democrats who had ridden into office on F.D.R.'s coattails. Roosevelt himself seemed to have turned his back on the New Dealers. By the spring of 1939, Secretary of the Interior Ickes was "tired of being doublecrossed and pushed around" by F.D.R., so "sore and bruised of spirit" that he refused an invitation to have dinner and play poker with the President. On another occasion, F.D.R. brought him around with a pleasant note: "My dear Harold, will you ever grow-up?" Roosevelt assured Ickes that "mighty few Secretaries" could do what Harold could. Three months later, Harold was telling his hero: "You are much abler and smarter than [President] Wilson."

"I Drew a Woman . . ." The Inside Struggle is too full of dated political catch-as-catch-can to make consistently interesting reading, but thanks to the Ickes bluntness, there are small rewards scattered throughout. At a dinner for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, "I drew a woman who is a spiritual and physical offense to me ... I suppose that she must be about 60 years old. . . She clutched my arm and drew me close to her steaming and opulent form." Ickes got out of talking to her by pretending he was deaf in his left ear. Of F.D.R.'s Potomac cruises he thought no more than he did of state dinners: "It means sitting on a hot deck hour in and hour out. with little to do except to swat flies." Dinners at the White House were "dull and tiresome . . .

The champagne offered us at the last two dinners was something pretty terrible." And of Kate Smith at a White House musicale: "I thought that she was awful."

But it is his fellow Cabinet members and other politicians who get the roughest treatment. Samples:

Henry Wallace: "The first good chance I get, I will land on him with both feet. I share the view that Henry Wallace is a selfish and not too forthright individual."

Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper: "Dan is full of guile. He is a professional glad-hander and greeter."

Postmaster General James Farley: "He had neither background nor education nor any grasp on national or international affairs."

Vice President Garner: "He was too busy playing politics and drinking with his cronies to do his job properly."

Secretary of State Hull: "His is distinctly a one-track mind."

1 Hate Communism, But . . ." Nothing in the diaries so far shows that Ickes was a great man. They help bear out his reputation for personal honesty, his enormous capacity for work, his dogged loyalty to old-fashioned leftish principles. He was candid enough to say of other New Deal liberals in general: "There personally was more comfort in going along with a bunch of reactionaries who knew where they were and where they were going than in trying to get along with a bunch of prima donnas."

And he was naive enough to say as late as 1939: "I hate Communism, but it is founded on belief in the control of Government, including the economic system, by the people themselves. It is the very antithesis of Nazism." Many a liberal "prima donna" thought the same. Ickes, who died in 1952, lived long enough to learn otherwise.

-Ickes was 64, had that year married his second wife, Jane Dahlman Ick.es, 25.

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