(4 of 5)
He awakes at 6:30 a.m., reads newspapers for several hours, checks over a brief case of papers on his night table. After breakfast, he arrives at 9 o'clock at the vast, gloomy, dark-paneled cave which is his Secretarial office in the Commerce Department. There he works until 4 p.m. From 4 to 8 he works in his tailored-to-order light pickled-pine office in Washington's brand-new Lafayette Building, home of RFC. Then he dines, usually with only his wife—he married Mary Gibbs of Mexia, Tex. in 1920—and is ready for the evening's poker, bridge or work. Usually it is work. His weekly work schedule is reven days. He likes whiskey, but not to the point of risk.
Man for man. he gets along better than anyone else with everyone in Washington.
One of the most ardent admirers of this man of one idea is a man of many—Tommy (''the Cork") Corcoran, whose one real Washington title has always been special counsel to RFC.
If jobs were wives, he would be the patriarch of polygamists. He is as busy as the classic one-armed paperhanger. Primarily, he is Secretary of Commerce and Federal Loan Administrator. As such, among other duties, he has charge of and ultimate responsibility for strategic war materials, loans to industry, financing the purchase of electrical and gas equipment, Federal housing mortgages, disaster loans, the Census, weights & measures, patents, steamboat inspection, the Export-Import Bank; he is a director of the Textile Foundation, member of the Council of National Defense, the Federal Board for Vocational Education, the Smithsonian Institution, Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, Foreign Service Buildings Commission, National Munitions Control Board, National Archives Council, Commodity Exchange Commission. He is ex officio a member of so many boards that there is no accurate count.
Everywhere he has moved in his men.
Emil Schram manages RFC; in November Jones delegated active administration of his Commerce Department to big, spectacled Wayne Chatfield-Taylor, Under Secretary. Jones, as part-author and part organizer of the national defense program has even greater responsibilities, even wider problems. He works as a team-member with the Defense Commission, with the State Department, the other Cabinet offices. Primarily he works with Franklin Roosevelt. And they work well. The President knows Congress will give more to Jones without debate than he can get after a fight. The Texas titan suits Roosevelt's needs. Jones's knack of making profits while lending money to people and countries who can't borrow anywhere else suits Congress—and the whole situation suits Jones.
The shoe he thus plants on the national economy is a size n shoe. He is one of the steadiest users of the telephone in the country; often, for hours at a stretch, he picks up and puts down the telephone in ten-second conversations, in which he says only "yes" or "no." He is not an intellectual, not a theorist. He writes all his own speeches, painfully and awkwardly, draft after draft. He would like to be President. John Garner (once it was Will Rogers) has been his nearest crony for years.