The General is Retired

"I am sure you don't like me any more --and I don't blame you. But I am equally sure that you know in your heart . . . that in whatever you might ask me to do, I would serve you faithfully and loyally. . . ."

So wrote General Hugh S. Johnson, appealing to the President to reappoint him as a brigadier general in the Army Reserve. The War Department had approved General Johnson's application for his fourth reappointment, but last week the President turned him down.

General Johnson, 58, with 42 years in the Army or the Reserve, leaped into the air with an anguished cry, then bore the smart like the Old Ironpants he is. At a press conference he said that he had asked for the reappointment as "just an expression of willingness to serve," and made public his letter to the President.

Even the President's critics admitted that pruning the overpadded Reserve was necessary, but, coming the week after he had called Lindbergh a Copperhead, this Presidential potshot looked to many too much like personal revenge. It appeared more like revenge to them when they remembered the days when General Johnson, red-faced, thick-framed, husky-voiced, had been, except the President himself, the most arresting figure in the New Deal.

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