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One afternoon early last October a happy, jaunty Irishman, whose bantam-sized body houses an almost inhuman store of nervous energy, strolled into his four-room apartment in Washington's elegant Shoreham Hotel. With sly casualness, fully aware of the dramatics of the occasion, he said to his wife: "Well, Maude, I've just given up my job." The job was that of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court—which had seemed, 16 months before, like the pinnacle of achievement to a man born on the wrong end of famed, aristocratic King Street in Charleston, South Carolina.
When Franklin Roosevelt appointed
James Francis Byrnes to the Supreme Court in June 1941 he remarked that he wished he were Solomon: he would like to cut Jimmy Byrnes in two, put half of him on the Court, leave half in the Senate, where Jimmy had been a super-politician, a knowing, super-successful leader. Now Franklin Roosevelt had called Jimmy off the bench and installed him in a White House office as Director of Economic Stabilization with such broad authority that only Franklin Roosevelt remained more powerful. Perhaps Franklin Roosevelt now wished he were a super-Solomon and could divide Jimmy into three.
In the Left Wing. In the three months that Jimmy Byrnes has functioned as the U.S. economic czar of World War II, the U.S. people have heard but little more of him than when he operated within the cloistered walls of the highest court. Every morning, shortly before 9 o'clock, a White House car calls at the Shoreham, takes Jimmy to his high-ceilinged office in the White House east wing (Jimmy delights in calling it the left wing). Jimmy sits at a huge, unlittered desk with one telephone.
Jimmy hardly moves from this room all day. Like his boss at the other end of the White House, he has lunch at his desk at 1 o'clock. He talks frequently with the President by telephone, sees him two or three times a week. Most of his day is taken up with conferences with the great layer of civilian and war-agency administrators below him; there are telephone conversations with Senators and Representatives, reading of reports and memorandums, plotting of strategy with his seasoned idea man, Benjamin Victor Cohen. (Except for idealistic Ben Cohen, Jimmy Byrnes's staff consists of but three others: Donald Russell, his onetime law partner in Spartanburg, ex-Washington Reporter Samuel Lubell, and corpulent Office Secretary Edward Prichard.) At 7 o'clock the White House car takes Jimmy Byrnes home for dinner; usually he takes a brown Manila paper envelope full of reports with him. Almost his only relaxation is walking his wire-haired fox terrier, Whiskers, along Washington's tree-lined streets at night.
Order 9250. In its simplest terms, Jimmy Byrnes's job is to rivet a lid on civilian economy that will prevent an uncontrolled inflation from breaking out. In the words of Executive Order 9250, he is directed to "formulate and develop a comprehensive national economic policy relating to the control of civilian purchasing power, prices, rents, wages, salaries, profits, rationing, subsidies and all related matters"; and is given the absolute power to order any Government administrator to carry out the points of that policy.