Wisdom Disowned

A certain amount of unemployment, say from 3,000,000 to 5,000,000, is supportable. It is a good thing that job-seeking should go on at all times; this is healthy for the economic body.

This pronouncement by then-President Harry Truman was tossed off in a tradition-breaching exclusive interview that he gave New York Timesman Arthur Krock during the 1949-50 recession, and it had some cool-eyed economic truth in it. But last week, with the economy in a Republican recession (mid-March unemployment: 5,198,000), politically touchy Harry Truman publicly disowned his rare bit of economic wisdom.

Truman was appearing before the House Banking and Currency Committee to prescribe a damn-the-deficits recession cure: a $5 billion tax cut, plus plenty of extra federal spending. Iowa's Republican Representative Henry O. Talle reminded him of the 1950 remark on unemployment. Snapped Harry Truman: "That exclusive interview never happened. It came out of the air."

In the Times next day, Newsman Krock, 71, told his side of the story: the 1950 interview was submitted to the White House before publication, and Truman's press secretary assured Krock that the President had pronounced the text "accurate in every detail." Furthermore, at his press conference shortly after the interview ran in the Times, Truman had tartly defended a President's right to give an exclusive interview if he felt like it. The committee's Democrats tried to block a Republican attempt to get Krock's reply in the record.

Cooled off by week's end, Truman admitted, after all, that the exclusive interview did indeed take place, wrote explanatory letters to Newsman Krock and Banking and Currency Committee Chairman Brent Spence.

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