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A fat man in a floppy hat piled out of a dusty sedan at the White House door last week, shook hands with the doorman, stopped to gab a while with the President's personal secretary and ambled in to see the boss. Harry Truman exclaimed, "Well, look who's back," and jumped up to pump the fat man's hand.
How was he? He was fine, down to 198 lbs.; the neuritis was gone; and how was the boss? The President told him how he was (fine) and how things were going (not so good), while the fat man's moon face worked fluidly with sympathy and concern.
He'd been reading the papers, he said, when the President had finished. He figured it this way: it was time to sit back now. Give the country a rest, things would pick up now and production would start to go. Well, goodbye now, he said; he had to get back to his own job.
The dusty sedan rolled away from the White House and around Lafayette Square to the headquarters of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
So did roly-poly George Edward Allen return to Washington after five weeks in the hospital and in Atlantic City. Harry Truman was mighty glad; there was no one he would rather have around than George. Congress was gone and there would be a lull, but he needed all the help, advice and laughs he could get. So it was good to have George back with the rest of the "gang."
The Prompters. In the White House the word "gang" does not necessarily have a sinister connotation. Most U.S. Presidents have had their gangs, some big, some little, some called one thing, some called another. Jackson had the "Kitchen Cabinet"; its chief cooks were two Kentucky editors, Amos Kendall and Francis Preston Blair. Wilson had Colonel House. Teddy Roosevelt had his "Tennis Cabinet," the "high-minded and efficient set" of young men which included Gifford Pinchot and James G. Garfield. Harding had Harry Daugherty and Albert Fall, who belonged to his official Cabinet and doubled as part of the gang out of meetings. Franklin Roosevelt had a whole school of brain-trusters, advisers, special assistants and above all, Harry Hopkins.
That U.S. voters have no voice in the selection of such prompters and choremen—who may exercise far-reaching power—is a fact that concerns practical as well as academic politicians. But there is nothing that can be done about it: the executive branch has grown too large for close and effective democratic control. The nation can only pray that its White House gangs are men of competence and high principle.
The 1946 Gang. Harry Truman's gang is large, loose-knit, amiable and loyal. Some members, like Judge Samuel Rosenman, serve only part time. Others serve as specialists, like David K. Niles, a New-Dealing Bostonian inherited from F.D.R., who advises on problems of minority groups (currently, U.S. Zionists). At least one, Major General Harry Vaughan, holds a kind of honorary membership. Vaughan, who once burbled from the pulpit of an Alexandria, Va. church "I don't know why a minister can't be a regular guy," has one quality which endears him to the President: he is what Harry Truman calls a regular guy.