U.S. At War: Right-Hand Man

For his second appointment of the week the President picked another old pal of his—his World War I buddy, Edward Daniel McKim, beefy, brown-haired Omaha insurance-agency executive. Ed McKim was named chief administrative assistant to the President, a job held in the Roosevelt administration by Louis McHenry Howe and later by Marvin Mclntyre.

Like Colonel Harry Vaughan, the President's military aide, Ed McKim's friendship with Harry Truman began in uniform. They first became acquainted as members of Missouri's State Guard, and both were in France with the 129th Field Artillery, 35th Division, when Harry Truman became commander of Battery D. (At that time Ed McKim did not like his battery commander—thought him schoolteacherish and sissified; soon he would have "gone through hell for him.")

Last fall Ed McKim, still calling Harry Truman "my captain," accompanied his onetime commander on the campaign, kept things running on the Truman train in mother-hen fashion.

When Franklin Roosevelt died, Ed McKim happened to be in Washington on a business trip. As a close friend, he was at Truman's side from the minute he took over in the White House. It was Good Friend Ed McKim who, when the Trumans moved from their apartment to Blair House, gathered up their bric-a-brac, rode on a truck with it to the White House.