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His personality is the master key to the success and fame of Corcoran & Cohen. Historic is the White House party at which Tommy the Cork, playing his accordion and singing his ballads, charmed the Great Charmer. His tenor voice is honey smooth. His quick mind and tongue have a tenoctave range, from airiest wit to profoundest judicial deliberation. He handles people as a virtuoso plays a violin. Beneath his silkiness lies a mental toughness, a counterpart of the muscular toughness that enabled him to build a cabin on Mt. Washington with his two hands, makes him a tireless mountain skier and climber, lets him work 20 hours a day for weeks at a stretch. His shock of water-spaniel hair is greying but he still looks young at 37. Coffee with lots of sugar instead of alcohol for a bracer is one of his rules, though he does drink sociably. He doesn't smoke. Girls have no part in his life, or he successfully conceals the fact. Of his secretary, pretty, red-headed Peggy Dowd with sparkling blue eyes, he says. "God bless her, she's a wonder!" because she can match his working pace.
Conjunctions of dreamy, intellectual Jews and effervescent Irishmen may have ocurred before but never more effectively than in Cohen & Corcoran. Their mutual admiration is boundless. Ben says: "If it hadn't been for Tom, I would never have been heard of." Tom thinks Ben ought to get Cardozo's place on the Supreme Court. They call themselves catalysts—agents who cause reactions to occur without themselves being altered. Despite the seeming change in Corcoran, into a politician with power for the moment as great as Jim Farley's, this remains essentially true. Ambition for high office does not trouble him now because he has more exciting occupations. If he held an important office, he would have to observe rules of the game. As it is. Corcoran & Cohen are beyond the rules. They are engaged in making them.
*Soldiers (at first mostly castrated personal slaves, later conscripts and sons of subject Christians) of the Turkish Sultans from the 14th to 19th Centuries, the Janizaries became so potent that, when they revolted in 1826, thousands of them had to be killed, the rest dispersed, their organization abolished. Says Tommy Corcoran: "We welcome the term. . . . They were really the Civil Service of the Ottoman Empire!"
†But who was still sticking around Washington last week lest the European Crisis require his presence.
*The ablest phrasemaker writing for the U. S. press, General Hugh Johnson last week had fun playing with the President's nicknaming whimsey. The President calls his Secretary of the Treasury "Henry the Morgue." Columnist Johnson toyed with "Harry the Hop," "Fanny the Perk," "Danny the Rope," "Leo the Hen," "Harold the Ick," "Alben the Bark"—then gave up and said: "Try this new White House game on your acquaintances, mah frens."
*Addressing some Young Republicans last June, Representative Bruce Barton held up Tommy Corcoran as a model of industry for Young Republicans to emulate if they want to save their party. "It can be said truthfully of him," said Mr. Barton, "as was said by a contemporary of Sir Walter Raleigh: 'I know that he can toil terribly.' "