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The President said he was too busy to fool with politics. That night his Janizaries were not too busy to huddle, pick able Attorney General Robert Houghwout Jackson to lead Administration forces against Wendell Willkie. Messrs. Willkie & Jackson have clashed before (at Manhattan's Town Hall in 1938; and in a magazine-radio debate last spring, when Bob Jackson accused Lawyer Willkie of twisting legal facts in a piece about the Supreme Court). Clear last week was the line of their campaign debate: concentrated Governmental power v. concentrated private power.
Bob Jackson retired to mull over his assignment, did not stoop to participate in the first, ragged salvos at Wendell Willkie. Said irrepressible Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes: "The difference between Dewey and Willkie is the difference between a pinwheel and a skyrocket." Said Texas' acid-tongued "Tawm" Connally: Mr. Willkie has "an electric background, an electric personality and an electric campaign chest. . . . Mr. Willkie had better prepare for a blackout in November.'' Such remarks were the typical opening shots of a dawning campaign. What knowing correspondents pondered was the similarity—and the implication—of statements by Jim Farley and House Speaker William Brockman Bankhead.
Mr. Bankhead: ". . . If the voters wish to place the executive in control of forces which are somewhat foreign to our usual American way of life. . . ."
Mr. Farley: ". . . The question is ... what sets of forces, economic and social are to conduct our Government—the historic American processes, or some new and somewhat foreign methods of concentrated control. . . ." This seemed to be Jim Farley's way of hissing "Fascism." Wondering citizens judged that the Democrats would have to come cleaner than that to stop Wendell Willkie.
Last week the President:
> Signed a bill which 1) requires some 3,500.000 aliens in the U. S. to register, be fingerprinted (at their local post offices); 2) provides fines up to $10,000, imprisonment up to ten years for written, spoken or printed words which "in any manner cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces. . . ."*
> Invoking further emergency powers, authorized the U. S. Treasury to control (and if need be, seize) any U. S. or foreign vessels in U. S. ports. Immediate object: to keep such French prizes as the Normandie (now docked in Manhattan) from falling into Nazi hands.
> Sorrowfully penned a note to White House Doorman Patrick McKenna. who was dying in Georgetown University Hospital (see p. 55). Pat McKenna was a balding, Irish ball of a man who went to the White House in 1903 with Roosevelt I, used to watch over William Howard Taft when he fell asleep at his desk after lunch. Devoted equally to Roosevelts I & II was Pat McKenna. Wrote the President last week, begging Pat McKenna to get well: "Come back soon. I need you."