New Quarters

(See front cover)* A White House car with a lady and gentleman on the back seat purred into the private Presidential entrance of Washington's Union Station one day last week. The gentleman was Colonel Louis McHenry Howe wearing his usual high collar, his usual dyspeptic expression. As the car halted the lady leaped out to be greeted by Secretary of State Hull, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, Secretary of the Senate Halsey. Passing them all by, she made a beeline for a little, sharp-nosed, red-faced man who had just driven up in a big, black, shiny 16-cylinder Cadillac.

"Hello," she called. "I didn't know you were back. The last I heard you had fallen out of a tree in Uvalde." The little man's blue eyes twinkled. "Mrs. Roosevelt," said Vice President Garner, "I didn't hurt myself. I jumped from a limb and misjudged the distance to the ground."

Presently Louis McHenry Howe mustered enough strength to get out of the car. At once jocular Mr. Garner turned and started telling him that he looked younger each time he saw him. Mr. Howe forced a sickly smile. But his wrinkled face lighted up in earnest when the Presidential Special from Warm Springs rolled in through the tunnel from the South. His job had come home.

The others climbed up into the official car, to be photographed with Franklin Roosevelt when he emerged on the rear platform to descend by the gangplank. Louis Howe was not in the photographs but he was in the car to ride back to the White House with the President.

The White House luncheon that followed was a hurried, impatient meal. Ahead lay a full winter's work and new quarters in which that work was to be done. Bodyguard Gus Gennerich helped the President into his wheel chair, rolled him the length of the West colonnade to the new White House offices. Before the President departed for Hawaii last July he turned over to the wreckers the small white, structure which Roosevelt I had erected in 1903 on what was the site of th : Presidential greenhouses. Said Roosevelt II: "While I am away from Washington this summer a long-needed renovation of and addition to our White House office building is to be started. ... If I were to listen to the arguments of some prophets of calamity ... I should fear that while I am away for a few weeks the architects might build some strange new Gothic tower or a factory building or per-haps a replica of the Kremlin or of Potsdam Palace. But I have no such fears. . . ."

Neither a Gothic tower, nor a factory building, nor a replica of the Kremlin nor of Potsdam's ornate Neues Palais awaited President Roosevelt's first official inspection last week. As a matter of fact the work of enlarging the Executive Offices had been done so cunningly that it would take a sharp eye to detect the changes from the outside. But on the inside there was ample evidence of what Architect Lorenzo Simmons Winslow, a $4,000-3-year employe of the National Park Service, ably assisted by Eric Gugler, consulting architect, and N. P. Severin Co. of Chicago had done with the $325.000 assigned for reconstruction.

When Gus Gennerich wheeled him up the ramp from the colonnade into the new office building. President Roosevelt was beaming with happy expectation. So were the 120 members of the "gang," as Louis Howe calls the White House office force. They were delighted to have a wholly air-conditioned building to save them from the summer's heat; delighted with the roomy basement offices extending out under the lawn and surrounding a little sunken court with a fountain in its centre; delighted that in place of the beautiful but useless McKim dome over the old waiting room, their palace had got a roomy penthouse where more secretaries and clerks, including those of Mrs. Roosevelt, can do more work more easily.

The President's entry was made through the main addition to the old building, the front wall of which was left unchanged. He had a look at the new Cabinet room, much larger than the old. big enough to accommodate a meeting of the 34 members of the National Emergency Council. Then he passed through a new corridor in which was a stairway leading to the floor below and a side entrance. The stairway was supposed to be a secret exit for Presidential callers who did not want to be stopped and quizzed by the Press in the main lobby. It remained a secret for about two hours. That same afternoon Secretary of War Dern arrived publicly for a conference, departed privately by the stairs. When newshawks failed to see him leave, they investigated, quickly found the secret.

Before going to his own office, the President wanted to see the rest of the building, and Gus Gennerich rolled him around the main floor--through Louis Howe's office with its pale pistachio green walls (about which the President's No. 1 secretary grumbled softly); through the office of Secretary Howe's Secretary Margaret Durand (whose nickname is "Rabbit"); across the vestibule where Captain Clarence L. Dalrymple and Lieutenant Larry Seamen of the White House uniformed police force stand guard to pass legitimate visitors, turn back cranks. The President peeked into the new room set aside for White House correspondents, spied on the wall a large photograph of a chubby, smiling face, inscribed "With the kind regards of Herbert Hoover."

At the rear of the waiting room between four sturdy Ionic columns President Roosevelt found his second line of defense, smiling Pat McKenna who has worked about the White House for 31 years. His job is to switch visitors to their proper destinations: some out of the White House altogether to the departments, others to see burly Assistant Secretary Stephen T. Early who handles the Press; still others to the reception room for delegations of little wigs calling on the President; and a chosen few, who are destined to see the President personally and privately, into the office of Assistant Secretary Marvin Mclntyre, who, at the desk of Roosevelt I, holds the hands of politicians and tycoons, puts them in a happy frame of mind.

Having seen all these arrangements the President rolled into his own new office--oval like the old one but, by his order, two feet wider, two feet longer. Handsomest room in the building, it is decorated with the great Presidential Seal set in the ceiling, has indirect lighting simulating daylight. All the furniture is old except a new duralumin lamp upon the desk. The President found it all just as he had planned it. Waiting in an adjoining office --the only one in the building that is pink instead of green--to take his dictation was Private Secretary Marguerite Le Hand, known to the whole Roosevelt family as "Missy." She, too, was smiling. In fact everyone was pleased with the new offices except the Secret Service men. Chubby-cheeked Richard Jervis, chief of the detail which has been guarding the lives of Presidents since the McKinley assassination (1901), and his able assistant. Colonel Edward Starling, were more than a little worried by all the entrances provided to the President's office. But he was not worried. Gus Gennerich lifted him into his desk chair and he began his winter's work: conferences with Secretary Hull, Secretary Bern, Vice President Garner, Secretary Wallace, Chester H. Gray of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Next day when 200 newshawks turned up for the first regular press conference, the President was ready for them with his usual banter. To all rumors he announced that his future answer would be SCS ("Sewing Circle Story").

Thus White House Offices Inc., in new and enlarged quarters, once more opened wide for business. The head and front of the mythical corporation sat in the oval office in the far corner of the building but his right and his left hand and 120 other auxiliary hands and fingers functioned at every desk and filing cabinet in the whole building. For practical purposes the members of the White House secretariat and the White House staff are so many multiple manifestations of the executive will although each has his own separate name, face and disposition. Most important are:

Louis McHenry Howe, whose official title is Secretary to the President, is in fact the Secretary for secretaries, a member of the President's private as well as official family and his most trusted adviser. Not since Woodrow Wilson's Joseph Tumulty has any President's Secretary had such importance. The Howe-Roosevelt association began 22 years ago when "Louie" was a newshawk in Albany and "Franklin" was a young state Senator. Howe went to Washington in 1913 as secretary to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt, went on the 1920 campaign tour with Vice-Presidential Nominee Roosevelt, and, the year after, sat at the bedside and read to poliomyelitis-victim Roosevelt. Although he has a wife, son and daughter, Louis Howe has lived as much with the Roosevelts as at home, and today has his room (Abraham Lincoln's) in the White House. His health has never been robust and during the 1932 campaign when he worked day & night and slept in his clothes, he lost 32 lb. He takes stairs slowly and detective stories as relief from insomnia, and his old devil, indigestion, which confines him to the slenderest diet, has sapped his vitality in recent months. After his long summer holiday, he was back in Washington last week feeling so much better that he ordered the couch on which he used to lie in his old office removed from his new office.

His devotion to Franklin Roosevelt has its obverse in that he does his jealous best to keep others from growing equally close to his idol. Other close Presidential friends such as Lewis Douglas and Raymond Moley have come and gone (and sometimes come again) but Louis Howe has maintained himself in a place unique and apart, the President's closest counselor.

Marguerite Le Hand is next to Louis Howe, the senior member of the Roosevelt entourage and, like him, dwells in the White House. She was a stenographer for the Shipping Board when she was hired for the Democratic Vice-Presidential campaign of 1920. She has never left the Roosevelts since. She handles all the President's personal affairs, knows his literary style so well that he can glance at a letter, direct "Say yes" or "Say no" and the answer she writes cannot be told from a Rooseveltian original.

Marvin Hunter ("Mac") Mclntyre, like most of the White House assistants, is an ex-newshawk. During the War he helped handle Navy press relations, afterwards worked for Roosevelt in the 1920 campaign. Later he mooned around the Navy press room, tried to peddle freelance stories on the plight of the fighting fleet. From Pathe Newsreel Louis Howe got him back for the pre-convention campaign in 1932. A genial fellow whose hollow cheeks and sunken eyes belie his good disposition, Marvin Mclntyre made himself valuable as Franklin Roosevelt's contact, first, with the Press, later with politicians and bigwigs. He lingers perpetually in the Presidential offing, chatting with those to whom the President wants to be nice without seeing, with those who are waiting their brief moment in the Presidential presence. He is the welcomer and the handshaker and in Washington he is the member of the White House staff Who dines out at all functions. He is, in short, the reflection of Franklin Roosevelt's engaging smile.

Stephen Tyree Early is Franklin Roosevelt's Master of Newshawks. Unlike skinny Mr. Howe and skinny Mr. Mclntyre, he is a big, fat-jowled fellow, of the type that appeals to Postmaster General Farley. His newspaper experience was largely gained as an Associated Pressman in Washington. His business now is to jolly the Press along, see that the "boys" obey the White House rules on quoting and not quoting the President, bark out his angry displeasure at those who do not play his game. For those who dance to his piping he frequently finds good jobs as pressagents in various Government bureaus. He is also given credit for conceiving the President's "fireside" broadcasts and arranging them at such intervals as to maintain the maximum amount of public interest.

Such is the White House Secretariat, the immediate tools with which Franklin Roosevelt operates his executive machine. But there are others. August Adolph ("Gus") Gennerich, Presidential bodyguard and attendant, was a strapping six-foot member of the New York City Police Force when Franklin Roosevelt, as Governor of New York, took him into his private household. Secret Servicemen Richard Jervis and Edward Starling, with their many understudies, flit about the White House office like substantial ghosts, keeping a hawkeye on everyone who comes and goes. Ira R, T. Smith, with mustache and gold-rimmed glasses, opens all the mail and routes it to the proper secretaries. Louise Hachmeister, the President's personal switchboard girl, does not know what the great men of the U. S. look like, but recognizes all their voices. Executive Clerk Rudolph Forster has been the permanent connecting link from one White House Administration to another for the past 38 years. The only man in the U. S. whose sudden appearance on the floor of the House or Senate can stop the deliberation of either body is Messenger Maurice C. Latta whose job is to carry Presidential messages to the Capitol. These are the faces the public sees. But above stairs and below stairs and in a dozen stenographic cubbyholes a hundred others perform the daily tasks which enable Franklin Roosevelt to do his job as President of the U. S.

* Front cover: Louis McHenry Howe (top, left): Stephen Tyree Early; Marguerite Le Hand; Marvin Hunter McIntyre (lower, right).

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