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The itch to play politics overcame him again in 1924 and he ably commanded the Coolidge western campaign. In 1928 he looked around for another Presidential winner. He looked at General Dawes and looked away. He looked at Secretary Hoover, saw his popular appeal, pitied his political inexperience. Again he took command, this time of the Hoover preconvention campaign, doing a miraculous job of amalgamating the heterogeneous Hoover following. After the nomination, Mr. Hoover begged him to stay on as Western manager. Reluctantly he did. There was less begging, less reluctance, to get Mr. Good into the Hoover Cabinet.
"Sir James" he is sometimes called for his courtly manners. He is full of funny stories, at which he cackles broadly himself. Behind the affable exterior is a sharp business-like personality that achieves difficult objectives. What he knows or thinks about the War Department it is impossible to say, but until last week he probably knew and thought very little about it.
That, and the political debt owed him by President Hoover, were partly what made the Republican New York Evening Post call his "a rather ignoble appointment."
The Post, with many other good G. O. Papers, was "disappointed" in Mr. Hoover because, under ill-disguised pressure from the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan, he had rejected William Joseph Donovan, a prize Hooverite but a Roman Catholic and a Wet. Before the eager Donovan eye were juggled first the Attorney-Generalship, then the War portfolio. Mr. Hoover finally had to withdraw both. The best he could offer his good friend was the Governor-Generalship of the Philippines, which Col. Donovan refused, leaving Mr. Hoover to wonder if he had been disloyal to an old friend.
Before getting the War portfolio, Mr. Good declined the Postmaster-Generalship. Knowing politicians as he does, he did not wish to traffic in party patronage. But Mr. Hoover wanted him in his Cabinet as congressional contactman.
Attorney-General. William DeWitt Mitchell, as a Minnesota boy, yearned to be an electrical engineer. Fishing in the Mississippi, he carried screws, coils, wire and switches in his jeans as well as worms and tackle. His father was by way of becoming a distinguished justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court when the callow son said he had no use for law because he "never knew a lawyer who amounted to very much." He played the mandolin and mumble-dy-peg, went to Lawrenceville. played lacrosse, went to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale.
Within two years there the charms of electricity faded. He returned to Minnesota to enter the State University, to become a lawyer. His practice began and continued with "the greatest law firm between Chicago and the Pacific coast," later known as Mitchell, Doherty, Rumble, Bunn & Butler. Pierce Butler was long senior partner before his advancement to the Supreme Court of the United States.