THE PRESIDENCY: The Week Things Went Wrong

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Harry Truman has never cared for Shangri-La, Franklin Roosevelt's old vacation hangout in the Catoctin Mountains near Thurmont, Md., but last week, under Mrs. Truman's urging, he reluctantly consented to pay it a weekend visit. It was a gloomy trip. The weather was enough to make even a President say, "I told you so»—the temperature went down to 40°, it rained & rained, and daughter Margaret developed a miserable toothache. When Harry Truman got back home, White House aides guessed that Shangri-La would never see him again.

It was a prophetic beginning for the week. The war news from Korea continued to be encouraging, but everywhere else the President looked, things seemed to be going wrong. Congress was bent on compelling him to lend money against his will to Franco, and was loading his war-powers bill with restrictions he didn't want. When Virginia's mild, inoffensive Senator Willis Robertson called about something else, the President stared at him with cold and glittering eyes and expressed his outrage at Congress in direct, unvarnished words.

This was hardly over before the President got a hatpin-sized jab from a new di rection: the deadpan announcement from the railway unions that they proposed to strike, after he had just been assured that they would not. At his press conference next day, the President seemed to be seething with repressed indignation against the union leaders.

But that wasn't all. His Navy Secretary got himself in a jam and had to be rebuked. And Douglas MacArthur, speaking his piece on Formosa, got the President so worked up that he ordered the General to withdraw his remarks. It was the kind of week during which a President might well ask himself why he had ever gotten into politics in the first place.

With so much confusion, and so many divided counsels, denials and rebukes, it was also a tough week for the country.