THE PRESIDENCY: Seizure

"The mystery of where Truman has been heading," noted one political commentator* recently, "can be answered simply. All his skills and energies—and he has been among our hardest-working Presidents—have been directed to standing still ... to work himself back close to the center spot of indecision from which he started." In his abrupt seizure of the nation's $10 billion steel industry last week, Harry Truman decisively brought to an end the immediate threat of a critical strike. But his action left the dispute over steel itself, and the future of the whole wage-price stabilization program, right where it started: tangled, confused—and more embittered than ever.

The midnight strike deadline was only 90 minutes away when the face of the President appeared on the nation's television screens. The voice of Harry Truman came through the loudspeakers: "I have to think about our soldiers in Korea . . . the weapons and ammunition they need . . . our soldiers and our allies in Europe . . . our atomic energy program . . . our domestic economy." Said the President: "We are faced by the possibility that at midnight tonight the steel industry will be shut down. This must not happen."

Compounded Errors. If Harry Truman had acted on that sound premise to force a settlement in steel, no one could have questioned his course. After five months of negotiations, hearings and mediation, the steel dispute had come to a dead stop. It was a deadlock compounded of errors and intransigence on all sides: steel's long refusal to make any wage offer at all without the guarantee of a price increase; the C.I.O. steelworkers' insistence on the full recommendation of the Wage Stabilization Board (a wage package of 26.1¢ an hour plus the union shop); the Government's overoptimism about a settlement.

But Harry Truman did not see that the blame for the deadlock rested on all three parties. The man who two years ago thought he had no authority to seize the coal mines now claimed the power to take over the steel mills "by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States." Then, in a flood of intemperate language unmatched since his rawhiding of the striking railroad workers in 1946,* the President launched into an angry dressing-down of the whole steel industry.

Letting 'Em Have It. As the President told the story, the recommendation of the Wage Stabilization Board was entirely "fair and reasonable." The steelworkers had accepted the WSB proposal. The companies had not. Why? Because they want "to force the Government to give them a big boost in prices."

Truman went on to examine the "facts" of the industry's profits (see BUSINESS). They were high enough, he insisted, to absorb the full cost of the union's demands. He did not mention other facts: that the profit figures he used were profits before taxes; that the union shop was one of the major stumbling blocks in the whole dispute. Instead, in his best (or worst) fighting style, he let the companies have it: