National Affairs: A Pretty Penny

The Atlanta Journal's Washington correspondent, Ralph Smith, is a quiet, iron-grey, genial Southern gentleman who manages to cover the news without ever seeming to hurry. Newsman Smith, uniformly good-humored (unless someone clapper-claws his idol, Georgia's Senator Walter George), is not given to hysteria. But last week House clerks told him that the Seventy-Seventh Congress, in its first 100 days, had voted appropriations totaling $16,091,543,000. For his readers' benefit, he spelled it out: "sixteen billion, ninety-one million, five hundred and forty-three thousand dollars." Newshawk Smith then went off in a small spray of...

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