ARMY & NAVY: Scandalous Spats

• Share

Room No. 2034 m Washington's Munitions Building is the office of Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring. A few paces down the hall is the office of Assistant Secretary of War Louis Arthur Johnson. Their lairs might as well be in separate buildings. For Messrs. Woodring and Johnson never visit each other. Only when absolutely necessary do they speak to each other. When official business requires them to communicate, they do so in writing or through harried subordinates. Mr. Johnson despises Mr. Woodring. Mr. Woodring distrusts and despises Mr. Johnson, who for 27 months has gunned for Mr. Woodring's job.

When the U. S. Army was a peacetime starveling, this Kilkenny cat-spat was just another bureaucratic brawl. With war abroad, rearmament aswing, and the Army in expensive expansion, the case of Woodring v. Johnson is now a stench in Washington. Last week Franklin Roosevelt took a look at the war in his War Department, let the public have a peek, and, after a year's scandalous delay seemed to be about to end it. Up to last week he actually did no more about it than he had since he first turned mild little Mr. Woodring and big, explosive Mr. Johnson loose on each other.

The only war concerning the President was Depression I when Harry Woodring came out of Kansas to be Assistant Secretary in 1933. When Secretary of War George H. Dern died in 1936, President Roosevelt was in the midst of a re-election campaign and the easy thing to do was up Harry Woodring. In 1937, having failed to work up much enthusiasm for mild Mr. Woodring, the President chose for Assistant Secretary a go-getting West Virginia lawyer and Legionnaire, Louis Johnson. Reports that Mr. Johnson had been promised his boss's job soon reached the newspapers and the boss. Secretary Woodring thereupon set himself to keeping his job and getting rid of Mr. Johnson, bringing to that effort a hitherto unsuspected vigor. Assistant Secretary Johnson set himself to running the War Department, acting very much like a No. 2 man who had been made No. i in all but title.

Used though they are to their private brand of internal politics, Army men are taught to expect at least a show of decent order at the top. The indecent disorder at the top of the War Department improved neither their morale nor their respect for civilian democracy. Two years between his upper and nether bosses brought Chief of Staff Malin Craig near to distraction and collapse before he got out last June and turned his cross over to brilliant, patient General George Catlett Marshall.*

As though dissension in the War Department were not enough, Washington recently was treated to one of the strangest episodes in New Deal Fantasia. The President's undercover men (Janizaries Corcoran & Cohen) began to shoot at Louis Johnson who all along had been trustfully waiting for the President to make peace by giving him Harry Woodring's place.