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Man In a Blue Suit. Striding down the street, compact Jimmy Byrnes looks like Jimmy Cagney doing an impersonation of the late George M. Cohan. He has some of the Cohan philosophy: live a clean, honest, extrovert life, get your work done, don't gossip or meddle in other people's business. Although he loves to tell salty tales of the Old South, no one has ever heard him tell an off-color story, few have ever seen him laugh at one. He once described his wants as: "Two tailor-made suits a year, three meals a day, and a reasonable amount of good liquor." The suits are almost invariably blue; his favorite dish is "real" gumbo, a well-stewed concoction of tomatoes and okra.
When Jimmy Byrnes went to the Supreme Court, there were raised eyebrows in legal circles because he had never before sat on the bench. He surprised His colleagues by his passion for work; he brought to the Court a strict sense for interpreting the will of Congress. Jimmy Byrnes was restless on the Court; he longed to be in the thick of his country's battles. But in leaving what must have seemed to him an exacting job, he jumped into one a thousand times more grinding. For to attempt to keep stable the economic life of the greatest country in the world during the greatest of its dislocations calls for the pooled knowledge of the greatest of its economic and political thinkers and a will to fight till hell freezes over.
Jimmy Byrnes's friend and World War I counterpart, Bernie Baruch, had a vast store of knowledge gleaned from business experience; once he had the facts on which to base a judgment, he backed that judgment with a furious will. Jimmy Byrnes need never apologize for not being Bernie Baruch. His varied talents lie in other directions. If his will has more often been bent toward compromise, he has, at least, bent it toward securing action. No pure theorist could fill his shoes; Jimmy Byrnes has been the catalytic agent who could fuse warring factions into achieving some goal.
He has been the smooth worker, the student of human relationships, the advocate of getting things done (perhaps at a cost), the shrewd estimator of the public mind, the charming advocate of the cause he believed in, the great believer in common sense. For this job Byrnes's very great talents may or may not be enough. No warring country has ever clamped a tight lid on inflation; perhaps no one man can do it in the U.S. Jimmy Byrnes will soon know.