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President's Foe. Since March 4, 1933 Mark Sullivan has paid just two social visits to the White Houseone for tea, one for Sunday supper. But he never misses Franklin Roosevelt's semiweekly press conferences, standing grim, silent, apart while the bantering President gets a laugh out of his favorites by assigning most Press cracks at the New Deal to "Old Mark." Journalist Sullivan, who was not elected to the Gridiron Club until 1925, has always been a solitary worker, but today he is marked off from his colleagues more than ever. That is partly because of his intimacy with President Hoover, partly because of his age and reserved temperament, partly because of his books. But chiefly it is because he belongs to a sober, fact-grubbing tradition of Washington correspondence of which other famed practitioners like Clinton W. Gilbert. Richard Oulahan, Samuel Blythe. Herman B. Kohsaat, are either dead or permanently retired from the scene. Foreign to him is the new school of gossipy key-hole correspondents like Paul Mallon, Drew Pearson & Robert S. Allen, whose contributions to history are such works as The Washington Merry-Go-Round. From his fellow punditsWalter Lippmann, David Lawrence, Frank Kent,* who almost never appear at a Presidential press conference he differs in his lifelong habit of getting the facts for his cerebration at firsthand.
