THE PRESIDENCY: Holiday in Virginia

It was traditional Fourth of July weather. Under hot, clear skies Harry Truman rolled south in a 17-car presidential motorcade along U.S. Highway 29, through the red Virginia farmland, past the old battleground of Bull Run. At every town, little flag-waving crowds gathered to watch him. Near Charlottesville, while 2,000 people assembled in front of the high-pillared porch of Thomas Jefferson's old hilltop home, Monticello, he delivered his Independence Day address (see col. 1). It was a happy, historical week's end.

But it had been an acrimonious week. The last hope of cooperation between the Both Congress and the President seemed to have run out. Harry Truman had already vetoed five bills. Early in the week he had signed the rent-control bill (TIME, July 7), but with gall in the ink: "I have chosen the lesser of two evils . . . this legislation marks a backward step in our efforts to protect tenants against unjustified rent increases. ... It is unthinkable that the Congress would actually take steps to make more difficult or even impossible the efficient administration of the Government's present activities relating to housing and home finance." He urged an investigation of the real-estate lobby and its "ruthless disregard of the public welfare."

When the Treasury-Post Office appropriation bill reached his desk, he angrily pounced on a slash of $20 million for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which would cut deeply into the staff of enforcement officers. The "fallacy" of such shortsighted penny-pinching and the "gross inadequacy" of the bill, said the President, would be painfully evident in the annual loss of $400 million in unpaid taxes. He thought the "vast majority" of U.S. taxpayers were honest, but he also implied that a chiseling minority could now succeed in evading the law. But, like the rent bill, he indicated, it was a choice between evils. Holding his nose and glaring at Congress, he had signed.

He spent the afternoon and one more day in Virginia, enjoying the holiday from Washington's steamy heat, strolling over the wooded, 210-acre estate of Stanley Woodward, State Department protocol chief, going to a cocktail party given for the press by Admiral William F. Halsey. Then, at the wheel of an open convertible, he drove back to Washington at a steady 50-mile clip (several times hitting 65 on the straightaway). At Memorial Bridge a Secret Serviceman took over and Harry Truman rode soberly on to the White House, to pick up his cudgels.