THE PRESIDENCY: New Quarters

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(See front cover)* A White House car with a lady and gentleman on the back seat purred into the private Presidential entrance of Washington's Union Station one day last week. The gentleman was Colonel Louis McHenry Howe wearing his usual high collar, his usual dyspeptic expression. As the car halted the lady leaped out to be greeted by Secretary of State Hull, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, Secretary of the Senate Halsey. Passing them all by, she made a beeline for a little, sharp-nosed, red-faced man who had just driven up in a big, black, shiny 16-cylinder Cadillac.

"Hello," she called. "I didn't know you were back. The last I heard you had fallen out of a tree in Uvalde." The little man's blue eyes twinkled. "Mrs. Roosevelt," said Vice President Garner, "I didn't hurt myself. I jumped from a limb and misjudged the distance to the ground."

Presently Louis McHenry Howe mustered enough strength to get out of the car. At once jocular Mr. Garner turned and started telling him that he looked younger each time he saw him. Mr. Howe forced a sickly smile. But his wrinkled face lighted up in earnest when the Presidential Special from Warm Springs rolled in through the tunnel from the South. His job had come home.

The others climbed up into the official car, to be photographed with Franklin Roosevelt when he emerged on the rear platform to descend by the gangplank. Louis Howe was not in the photographs but he was in the car to ride back to the White House with the President.

The White House luncheon that followed was a hurried, impatient meal. Ahead lay a full winter's work and new quarters in which that work was to be done. Bodyguard Gus Gennerich helped the President into his wheel chair, rolled him the length of the West colonnade to the new White House offices. Before the President departed for Hawaii last July he turned over to the wreckers the small white, structure which Roosevelt I had erected in 1903 on what was the site of th : Presidential greenhouses. Said Roosevelt II: "While I am away from Washington this summer a long-needed renovation of and addition to our White House office building is to be started. ... If I were to listen to the arguments of some prophets of calamity ... I should fear that while I am away for a few weeks the architects might build some strange new Gothic tower or a factory building or per-haps a replica of the Kremlin or of Potsdam Palace. But I have no such fears. . . ."

Neither a Gothic tower, nor a factory building, nor a replica of the Kremlin nor of Potsdam's ornate Neues Palais awaited President Roosevelt's first official inspection last week. As a matter of fact the work of enlarging the Executive Offices had been done so cunningly that it would take a sharp eye to detect the changes from the outside. But on the inside there was ample evidence of what Architect Lorenzo Simmons Winslow, a $4,000-3-year employe of the National Park Service, ably assisted by Eric Gugler, consulting architect, and N. P. Severin Co. of Chicago had done with the $325.000 assigned for reconstruction.

When Gus Gennerich wheeled him up the ramp from the colonnade into the new office building. President Roosevelt was beaming with happy expectation. So were the 120 members of the "gang," as Louis Howe calls the White House office force. They were delighted to have a wholly air-conditioned building to save them from the summer's heat; delighted with the roomy basement offices extending out under the lawn and surrounding a little sunken court with a fountain in its centre; delighted that in place of the beautiful but useless McKim dome over the old waiting room, their palace had got a roomy penthouse where more secretaries and clerks, including those of Mrs. Roosevelt, can do more work more easily.

The President's entry was made through the main addition to the old building, the front wall of which was left unchanged. He had a look at the new Cabinet room, much larger than the old. big enough to accommodate a meeting of the 34 members of the National Emergency Council. Then he passed through a new corridor in which was a stairway leading to the floor below and a side entrance. The stairway was supposed to be a secret exit for Presidential callers who did not want to be stopped and quizzed by the Press in the main lobby. It remained a secret for about two hours. That same afternoon Secretary of War Dern arrived publicly for a conference, departed privately by the stairs. When newshawks failed to see him leave, they investigated, quickly found the secret.

Before going to his own office, the President wanted to see the rest of the building, and Gus Gennerich rolled him around the main floor—through Louis Howe's office with its pale pistachio green walls (about which the President's No. 1 secretary grumbled softly); through the office of Secretary Howe's Secretary Margaret Durand (whose nickname is "Rabbit"); across the vestibule where Captain Clarence L. Dalrymple and Lieutenant Larry Seamen of the White House uniformed police force stand guard to pass legitimate visitors, turn back cranks. The President peeked into the new room set aside for White House correspondents, spied on the wall a large photograph of a chubby, smiling face, inscribed "With the kind regards of Herbert Hoover."

At the rear of the waiting room between four sturdy Ionic columns President Roosevelt found his second line of defense, smiling Pat McKenna who has worked about the White House for 31 years. His job is to switch visitors to their proper destinations: some out of the White House altogether to the departments, others to see burly Assistant Secretary Stephen T. Early who handles the Press; still others to the reception room for delegations of little wigs calling on the President; and a chosen few, who are destined to see the President personally and privately, into the office of Assistant Secretary Marvin Mclntyre, who, at the desk of Roosevelt I, holds the hands of politicians and tycoons, puts them in a happy frame of mind.

Having seen all these arrangements the President rolled into his own new office—oval like the old one but, by his order, two feet wider, two feet longer. Handsomest room in the building, it is decorated with the great Presidential Seal set in the ceiling, has indirect lighting simulating daylight. All the furniture is old except a new duralumin lamp upon the desk. The President found it all just as he had planned it. Waiting in an adjoining office —the only one in the building that is pink instead of green—to take his dictation was Private Secretary Marguerite Le Hand, known to the whole Roosevelt family as "Missy." She, too, was smiling. In fact everyone was pleased with the new offices except the Secret Service men. Chubby-cheeked Richard Jervis, chief of the detail which has been guarding the lives of Presidents since the McKinley assassination (1901), and his able assistant. Colonel Edward Starling, were more than a little worried by all the entrances provided to the President's office. But he was not worried. Gus Gennerich lifted him into his desk chair and he began his winter's work: conferences with Secretary Hull, Secretary Bern, Vice President Garner, Secretary Wallace, Chester H. Gray of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Next day when 200 newshawks turned up for the first regular press conference, the President was ready for them with his usual banter. To all rumors he announced that his future answer would be SCS ("Sewing Circle Story").

Thus White House Offices Inc., in new and enlarged quarters, once more opened wide for business. The head and front of the mythical corporation sat in the oval office in the far corner of the building but his right and his left hand and 120 other auxiliary hands and fingers functioned at every desk and filing cabinet in the whole building. For practical purposes the members of the White House secretariat and the White House staff are so many multiple manifestations of the executive will although each has his own separate name, face and disposition. Most important are:

Louis McHenry Howe, whose official title is Secretary to the President, is in fact the Secretary for secretaries, a member of the President's private as well as official family and his most trusted adviser. Not since Woodrow Wilson's Joseph Tumulty has any President's Secretary had such importance. The Howe-Roosevelt association began 22 years ago when "Louie" was a newshawk in Albany and "Franklin" was a young state Senator. Howe went to Washington in 1913 as secretary to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt, went on the 1920 campaign tour with Vice-Presidential Nominee Roosevelt, and, the year after, sat at the bedside and read to poliomyelitis-victim Roosevelt. Although he has a wife, son and daughter, Louis Howe has lived as much with the Roosevelts as at home, and today has his room (Abraham Lincoln's) in the White House. His health has never been robust and during the 1932 campaign when he worked day & night and slept in his clothes, he lost 32 lb. He takes stairs slowly and detective stories as relief from insomnia, and his old devil, indigestion, which confines him to the slenderest diet, has sapped his vitality in recent months. After his long summer holiday, he was back in Washington last week feeling so much better that he ordered the couch on which he used to lie in his old office removed from his new office.