What for Jimmy?

At the President's summons, ex-War Mobilizer Jimmy Byrnes came up from South Carolina again last week, twice sat in long conferences with Harry Truman. The visits of the man who had been Senator, Supreme Court Justice and Assistant President to Franklin Roosevelt set political dopesters to doping anew. Consensus : Jimmy Byrnes would be Secretary of State—within 90 days.

Even the wisest of the dopesters was ready to admit that this was" a guess. The President had dropped no hint of what he planned, and neither had canny, sharp-eyed Jimmy Byrnes himself. But there was plenty of reason for believing that Byrnes, who had resigned a few days before Franklin Roosevelt's death (partly because of a huff over the three-votes-for-Russia deal at Yalta), was going back to work.

By now everybody knew that Harry Truman was not satisfied with his State Department, which had never known too much about Franklin Roosevelt's international dealings. Next to Harry Hopkins, Byrnes probably knew more than any man. Furthermore, he had his own on-the-spot judgment of the personalities and intentions of Stalin, Molotov & Co., and it was the kind of hard, realistic judgment that Harry Truman was likely to hear with confidence.

All this did not necessarily mean that Byrnes was going to replace Ed Stettinius, now or later. Washington was only sure that Big Ed's department was in for a shakeup. Jimmy Byrnes might figure in it from the inside, or the outside.