Presidential Portraits

Head up, smiling, vital, masterful, Franklin D. Roosevelt looked steadily last fortnight into a battery of news cameras. Well their operators knew that the results would be indistinguishable from hundreds of similarly posed portraits, but the Press demanded that the appearance of the President of the U. S. on his 54th birthday be recorded. When the photographers seemed satisfied the President relaxed, took off his nose-glasses, dropped his head, rubbed his eyes strained by the dazzling flashes of magnesium bulbs. Alert, Harris & Ewing's cameraman snapped & flashed again. Result was a picture in which President Roosevelt appeared to be a tired and discouraged man, with head down, hand to face.

Harris & Ewing is Washington's oldest and most conservative picture agency. Specializing in official portraits, it customarily takes great pains to curry official favor, stay in officialdom's good graces. In releasing this unusual photograph, however, Harris & Ewing did not merely neglect to explain the circumstances of its taking but captioned it as follows: "PENSIVE PRESIDENT PONDERS PROBLEMS. Washington, D. C. President Franklin Roosevelt, posing for photographers on his 54th birthday, is caught in a meditative pose. The photo was made a few minutes after he conferred with Secretary Henry Vallace, Solicitor General Stanley Reed, Attorney General Homer S. Cummings & others on financing the new agricultural program."

That was too much even for the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune, which lashed out: "To snap an informal photograph of the President at the moment that he happens to be rubbing his nose and then to publish it over captions implying that the attitude reveals weariness of spirit, despair or silence under attack is as flagrant a piece of misreporting as it would be to distort the clear meaning of his reply to a press-conference question."

How President Roosevelt felt about Harris & Ewing's feat was revealed last week when his Press contact man, Assistant Secretary "Steve" Early, issued an order that hereafter all White House photographs of the President must be made by cameras on tripods, that all shutters and bulbs must click and flash in unison and not until the President is posed. That edict marked the last step in President Roosevelt's recent retreat under a barrage of press photography.

When Franklin Roosevelt became President, his cheery, mobile face was a delightful relief to White House cameramen weary of recording the frozen gloom which had become Herbert Hoover's face during his last two years in office. In his turn President Roosevelt, determined to set a Presidential high in frank, free, friendly treatment of the Press, had Secretary Early give the photographers a White House room to loaf in, proved most patient and generous in allowing himself to be snapped in all manner of unstudied, and sometimes thoroughly unheroic, attitudes. Though presumably annoyed, he made no public remonstrance even when a lingering photographer caught him greeting Mrs. Roosevelt with a kiss on his return from a 1934 vacation trip (see cut).

The furor over candid camera photographs in the White House began a year ago when, before and during the signing of the Brazilian Trade Agreement, Thomas D. McAvoy unleashed his tiny Leica with specially sensitized film, snapped pictures of the unaware President glancing at letters and orders, puffing out his cheeks, pursing his lips, gulping a drink of water

(TIME, Feb. 25). The President and his publicity advisers were not displeased with the results.

Since 1931, however, the hardest anti-Roosevelt whisper to down has been the one about his health. One day last April an Associated Press photographer snapped the President at a baseball game yelling and popping peanuts into his mouth. Worse was a photograph he took in which a trick of light had made the President look ghastly pale. Its publication brought the White House a storm of anxious letters inquiring about the President's health. Distraught, Secretary Early declared a ban on all candid cameras around the White House.

Evidence of how the relationship between the President and his Press photographers had cooled since then appeared in Manhattan last month when he went to dedicate the American Museum of Natural History's Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. Wanting something fresh and topical, cameramen were ordered by the White House secretariat to picture the President in only one pose, while speaking. They turned in no photographs at all.

As against the Press's desire for newsworthy pictures, it seemed probable last week that most citizens would sympathize with the President's insistence on respect for his privacy and dignity. But on one score news photographers have repaid his past graciousness in full. Just as mention of his lameness in print is ordinarily avoided, so no Press photograph or cinema newsreel ever shows Franklin Roosevelt rolling in his wheelchair or walking awkwardly with the aid of his stick.

Last week Wisconsin's Supreme Court ruled that anyone may name a cigar after the President, use his picture on the box. Reversing a lower court ruling by which a Milwaukee manufacturer had been enjoined from producing a "Franklin D. Roosevelt" cigar because another firm had got one on the market ahead of him, Chief Justice Marvin B. Rosenberry declared: "The fact that it is in poor taste and shocks our sense of propriety . . . does not make it illegal or unlawful."

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