Harry Truman faced the cameras with the corners of his mouth turned down into his chin. Before him was the Defense Production Act handed up by Congress. There were no jolly Congressmen beaming over his shoulder waiting eagerly for a pen. As he snatched up a black and gold fountain pen, he mumbled loud enough for some reporters to hear: "The worst I ever had to sign." He scratched his signature, then brusquely cut off the photographers (toward ward whom he usually is friendly), saying that he had two telephone calls and a party waiting for him. The party was for old friend George J. Schoeneman, retiring-chief of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, who is leaving just as the bureau is wading through shake-ups (in several cases with scandals attached) in St. Louis, San Francisco, Boston and New York.
"I Have Reluctantly . . ." As the President stalked away from his desk, his staff handed out a prepared statement opening with what has lately become a Truman cliche: "I have reluctantly signed . . ." The DPA would not keep prices down, it would push them up, he charged.
The bill was the work of a Southern Democrat-Republican coalition against him, so he couldn't really put the blame simply on the G.O.P. He tried to get the same effect by concentrating his fire on two Republican amendments: the Butler-Hope amendment, wiping out slaughter controls on beef, and the Capehart amendment guaranteeing business a pre-Korea profit, which the President characterized as "like a bulldozer, crashing aimlessly through existing price formulas, leaving havoc in its wake."
The President had to sign the bill, because if he didn't, the Government's emergency defense powers would expire in just five hours. He promised labor some sort of formula for "reasonable adjustments in wages." It turned out, a few days later, to be a plan to allow the nation's 15 million union men to hop on the escalator system, their pay rising as the cost of living does.
Boyle Recoil. Political embarrassments trailed the President all week. He told his press conference that he was still looking into charges that Democratic National Chairman Bill Boyle took fees from a St. Louis firm just before it got a big RFC loan (TIME, Aug. 6). He had hurried to defend other cronies when someone said that they had been caught with their morals down. But he kept a glum, tight-lipped silence about Boyle.
Before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, Illinois' Fair Dealing Paul Douglas said the magic words "personally obnoxious," which by senatorial courtesy is supposed to make all other Senators vote against the President's choices for two federal judgeships in Illinois. The President had pointedly ignored Douglas' recommendations. At week's end, before Harry Truman's nominations could be put to a vote, the Administration begged off, asked a week's delay.*
Last week the President also:
¶Scheduled a flight to San Francisco for Sept. 4 to address the Japanese Peace Treaty conference.
¶Got word that Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain and her husband had accepted an invitation to be the Trumans' guests in Washington, Oct. 24-26.