Once again, Washington was bubbling with rumors of Cabinet changes. The week's hottest story: Secretary of the Interior Harold LeClare Ickes, fed up with trying to find out where he stood, had told Harry Truman flatly that he would quit at the end of August.
With the other Cabinet officers, Curmudgeon Ickes, one of the original Roosevelt members, had laid his resignation on Truman's desk when the President took office in April. Then, as Truman gradually shed six Roosevelt men from the Cabinet, it began to look to Capital quidnuncs as though Ickes were for it. The rumors sent the Curmudgeon's blood pressure up.
Last week Washington insiders whispered that just before Truman left for Potsdam, impatient, testy Harold Ickes had handed him a letter saying he would wind up his affairs Aug. 31. It was not another resignation—which might be turned down—it was just a letter saying he was through. The President asked him to wait. But Harold was firm.
Straws in the Wind. There were also shouts & murmurs about War Secretary Stimson. When 77-year-old Henry Lewis Stimson still stayed in his job after V-E day, the dopesters had been confounded. But by last week, with Stimson at the Big Three meeting in Potsdam, the hum-buzz was that Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy might soon succeed his boss. Under Secretary Bob Patterson was tabbed as a possibility for the Supreme Court vacancy. Another rumor: that Stimson might be replaced by big, bald blowhard Louis Johnson, ex-Assistant War Secretary, ex-national commander of the American Legion, old-line West Virginia Democrat.
In the Navy Department, political scuttlebutt swirled around the able head of Jimmie Forrestal. It had started in June, when Harry Truman appointed John Lawrence Sullivan, ex-Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, to the post of Assistant Navy Secretary for Air. Nervous politicos noted that Sullivan, a politically wise New England Democrat, was in considerable contrast to Jimmie Forrestal, an ex-banker, a "Roosevelt Democrat" and distinctly not a politician.
Navy men grimly muttered that if the talk did not die down something might happen—to the loss of the Navy.