National Affairs: The President's Week, Mar. 24, 1941

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Last week the President:

> Asked Congress to set up small Senate and House appropriations subcommittees to confer regularly with him in order to keep informed of his activities under the Lend-Lease Act.

> Nominated bluff, lean Howard Owen Hunter as WPA Commissioner.

>Asked Congress for another emergency Naval appropriation of $300,841,820. Five days later a U. S. Navy flotilla of two light cruisers, four destroyers showed up in Auckland, New Zealand. Purpose of the trip: "good will and recreation."

>Made Harry Lloyd Hopkins executive secretary of the intra-Cabinet four-man Defense Ministry (TIME, March 10). Since Mr. Hopkins cannot work more than six or seven hours a day, a smart young New Dealer, handsome Oscar Cox, a Treasury assistant, was assigned to act as legal adviser to Hopkins. The move in effect put Hopkins in as the nearest Roosevelt approach to a Defense Tsar, such as Bernard Baruch was in World War I. But Mr. Roosevelt will continue to run things, with the team of Knudsenhillman assigned more & more to the physical workshop of defense.

This week:

> On his 36th wedding anniversary, shook hands with a man who had also been present at the wedding: James Sloan, red-faced Irishman who was in charge of White House Secret Service agents in 1905 (President Theodore Roosevelt gave away his niece Eleanor) and who is still on duty daily at the entrance to the White House executive offices.