THE PRESIDENCY: Nice Work

Harry Truman lay late abed at Blair House; on several occasions he did not rise until after 7, and one day the good wives of 15th Street saw him taking his morning stroll at the incredibly late hour of 8:30. It was one of those rare weeks when being President was very nice work, and Harry Truman made the most of a free & easy schedule.

He had a big list of callers—during the week dozens of old friends from Congress dropped in at the office to shake hands and chat. One day he posed for photographs with five polio-stricken children who will tour the country on behalf of the March of Dimes campaign. The kids were chirpy as crickets. He seemed both pleased and honored when five-year-old Linda Sue Brown of San Antonio took to tweaking his right ear during the proceedings.

His weekly press conference lasted only five minutes and produced only fragments of news. Reporters got headlines out of it only by accenting the negative: the President didn't think that John L. Lewis and his three-day-a-week miners had created a national emergency and he had no intention of invoking the Taft-Hartley Act against them. Both the President and the reporters seemed to be in a rush to get their chores done and their clothes changed for a more entertaining affair—the Democratic National Committee's annual whing-ding for Democratic Congressmen and Senators.

Fellowship. It was the big night of the week for Harry Truman. He took up a position at the door of a private dining room at the Shoreham Hotel and shook hands with all comers for an hour; by then virtually every Democrat of any consequence in the capital had entered and had wormed into the press around the 50-ft. bar. As the company began gathering at white-clothed tables for a buffet dinner, the room was noisy with hoarse laughter and male voices.

The President, who looked relaxed and spruce in a sharply creased grey suit and a neatly knotted dark tie, roared with the crowd as Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn launched the evening speechmaking. The bald, benign and beaming Speaker hoped that the Republicans would win some congressional seats and "give us a two-party system." As a 67-year-old bachelor to a 72-year-old bridegroom, he also gave Vice President Alben Barkley a leer and a nudge on his recent marriage.

"Speak for yourself, Sammy," cried

Barkley in unabashed and happy rebuttal. "Since I got married, such people as Clark Gable, Mayor O'Dwyer, Dick Tracy, Miss America and even the Methodist bishop* who married us have caved in—and I don't believe Sam Rayburn can resist much longer."

Flipper-Flapping. Harry Truman spoke more soberly. He asked the assembled Democrats to remember the party platform and to help him carry it through. Then he recalled that Princeton University was engaged in publishing the complete works of Thomas Jefferson; he hoped that someone would also publish all the writings of Jackson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

"If they do that," said he, "they will find out why the Democratic Party never dies—it is the party of the people."