Old Veteran

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CURMUDGEON --Harold L. Ickes--Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

"If, in these pages, I have hurled an insult at anyone, be it known that such was my deliberate intent, and I may as well state flatly now that it will be useless and a waste of time to ask me to say that I am sorry."

With these characteristic words, Harold Le( )Cla(i)r(e)* I ekes throws a drawerful of gantlets into a gallery of faces and squares off. In his 350 pages Curmudgeon Ickes knots himself up in every possible variety and paradox of his personality, exposing himself mercilessly to his own doubletalk. To discourage any who might feel sympathy for America's most vilified celebrity, Ickes never fails to put his worst foot forward, to beg for brickbats ("Me? I don't mind.") Few readers will be deceived by this psychological strategy. Out of these ungainly, ranting pages it is Harold Ickes, not his enemies, who emerges with self-respect, however camouflaged, and integrity, however raucous.

No Common Man. "America's No. 1 Curmudgeon, or Sour Puss" was born (1874) in Pennsylvania, the second of seven children. "I was raised to dust and sweep and wash dishes and knead dough and baste the beef and turn (and burn) the toast and flip flapjacks. ... I was pinch-hit nursemaid, wood chopper, fire builder and tender, chicken executioner--more useful than ornamental . . ."

Harold had only a "vagrant ambition" to be a carpenter, and rebelled against the "ghastly fate" of maternal direction. By the age of 16 he had read "almost 1,500 books," including Prescott's history of the U.S. and the Bible. Most impressive work, he found, was called Immersion v. Sprinkling, "because it was passionately controversial." From being a devout Calvinist, young Harold rebelliously turned away from "formal religion," accepted the Sermon on the Mount as "good enough."

Drugstore Demon. Harold's first job was in an Altoona drugstore, where he one day "dispensed laudanum for paregoric," nearly died from the fright of his mistake. In 1890 he shifted to his uncle's drugstore in Chicago and saw a new world he despised. "The 'filthy rich' drove behind high-stepping horses drawing ornate equipages from which tall-hatted coachmen and footmen surveyed their surroundings with a truly devastating scorn." For three years Harold Ickes glared at "the intangible ingredients out of which a careful architect was to build a robust curmudgeonly character." He learned to mix Seidlitz powders in such a way that a glassful would explode "into the nostrils and the eyes" of a customer he disliked.

Ickes went on to college (University of Chicago), paying for himself almost entirely by odd-jobbery and teaching Eng lish to Scandinavians at a public-school night shift. His food for some months was "one 15-c- meal a day," and when he won his sheepskin in 1897 his clothes were "too shabby and worn" for him to go up to the platform for it. Newspapers helped to keep him warm in bed -- the only period in his life when the Chicago Tribune helped him to sleep.

At $5 a column, Ickes was hired by the Chicago Record. Warned the city editor: Never use the tautological phrase "old veteran." (All veterans, insisted the editor, were old.) Ickes promptly wrote "old veteran" into his first piece of copy, survived, and was offered a staff job at $12 a week. He rejected it, switched to the Chicago Tribune and became a regular reporter Bilious Bertie. It is at this stage that the Tribune's Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick first appears, never to be ab sent again for more than a few chapters.

The Colonel was to haunt Harold Ickes like the cloaked villain in a melodrama, sometimes under the Ickesian aliases of "McComic" or "Bilious Bertie, the bingy bully."

"A Republican with the seed of the un born Progressive in me," young Ickes went back to the Record, became a political writer eager to help run the political mobsters out of Chicago. When he met stalwart, aggressive John Maynard Harlan, youthful aspirant for Chicago's mayoralty, Ickes began the first of a series of backbreaking, second-fiddle jobs under men he picked for their honesty and principles. Whether the party was Republican, Progressive or Democratic soon became immaterial ; Ickes went for the man.

Hoover Is Hoover. Apart from a chance meeting in Paris with Colonel McCormick, Ickes' war experience as a Y.M.C.A. field man was not unpleasant.

"After 17 years in the front-line trenches of Chicago politics, the First World War . . seemed almost tame." He returned to the America of President Wilson ("that damned Presbyterian hypocrite" was how T.R. described him to Ickes), soon to be come the America of Harding ("nominee of those turbulent, grasping, selfish men").

He presided (1920) over the last meeting "of the remnants of the Progressive rear guard," worked as Illinois campaign manager for Hiram Johnson as Republican nominee for President ("he would have made a great President") and shuddered when Coolidge won. When Hoover came on the scene ("to me Hoover has always been -- well, Hoover") Ickes voted for Al Smith.

But he was becoming "more and more weary of politics. I didn't mind so much being on the losing side ... I even took some pride in it. ... At the best it was like rubbing one's fingers firmly over a nutmeg grater." But by 1932, Campaign Manager Ickes was in a position "remindful of the frustrated female who has often been a bridesmaid but never a bride." (He was "plainly," he admits, "not the vote-getting kind.") He watched breathlessly when two Senators (his friends Cutting and Johnson) were in turn offered, and declined, the Department of the Interior. He was in a haze of pessimism when the President-elect detained him alone after a conference and remarked:

"Mr. Ickes, you and I have been speaking the same language for the past 20 years. ... I have about come to the conclusion that the man I want is Harold L. Ickes of Chicago." "It was just like that," says Author Ickes, "and it wouldn't happen again in a millennium." At this point Harold Ickes regretfully robs the reader of the book's real climax -- an account of his years in the Administration. While still "a member of President Roosevelt's official family," he explains, "it isn't altogether my fault that I cannot season this particular dish with mustard and cayenne pepper and tabasco sauce as you may have expected me to do." Adds he: "Some day I will write a sequel -- a bloody one!" Meantime, he heaves a whole hive of hornets at his recent opponents.

*Thunder rolls on the Potomac when reference is made to Curmudgeon Ickes' middle name. Spelled sometimes Le Clair, sometimes Le Claire or LeClare, the correct spelling has never been discovered. Ickes intimates who have put the question, and survived, hint that LeClare is Ickes' most-favored version of his mosthated name.

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