Talk & Action
This week the White House flag was run up to full staff. The official period of mourning for Franklin Roosevelt was over, and Harry S. Truman had ended his first month as President. He also had moved across the street from Blair House, and the White House began to reflect the easy informality of the brisk Mid-westerner's family life.
Bess Truman had found the living quarters freshened up by painters and carpenters. On moving day there was little commotion. Daughter Mary Margaret's piano was hoisted to the second-floor living room, but most of the Truman furniture had been sent ta Independence, Mo. Mrs. Truman's mother, Mrs. D. W. Wallace of Independence, was there to help with the settling down.
For the Trumans' first weekend in the White House came the President's 92-year-old mother, Mrs. Martha Truman, and his 55-year-old sister, Miss Mary Truman. Harry Truman had sent the big presidential transport plane (which carried Franklin Roosevelt to & from his transatlantic conferences), his naval aide and a Secret Service man to Grandview, near Kansas City, to bring Mrs. Truman to Washington for Mother's Day.
Family Man. Jolly and chipper, and carrying a bamboo cane, the President's mother thoroughly enjoyed her first flight. At the capital, she was greeted by her son and granddaughter, then stepped into a swarm of cameramen. A little flustered at first, she quickly regained composure, said to the President: "Oh, fiddlesticks. If I'd known that, I wouldn't have come."
After his mother's arrival, Harry Truman spent as little time as possible in his oval office, did much visiting with his mother, wife, sister, mother-in-law, and another family guest, Brother-in-Law Fred Wallace. For the first time as President he let a work day go by without calendar appointments.
On Sunday the President, wearing a red rose at his lapel and accompanied by all of the family group except his mother, went to the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md. In its chapel he led the nation's observance of a day of prayer in thanksgiving for victory. Then Harry Truman visited ailing Cordell Hull, a patient at the hospital.
Open Door Policy. It had been a busy week. The President had more than 60 appointments, many of them with members of the Congress. The door was still open, presumably would continue to be to all national legislators. The President also went to Capitol Hill again to lunch (roast lamb, no butter) with the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, and to talk German reparations with Edwin W. Pauley and Dr. Isador Lubin, chairman and vice chairman of the U.S. delegation to the Allied Reparations Commission.
At the White House Harry Truman talked, notably, with Jimmy Byrnes (see below), Moscow Ambassador W. Averell Harriman (on the Polish question), Mrs. Anna Roosevelt Boettiger (on Yalta), General of the Army George C. Marshall (on plans), Budget Director Harold D. Smith (on cuts in expenditures), Senator Walter F. George and Representative Robert L. Doughton (on .taxes).
The President also:
P:J Signed a bill extending the Selective Service Act to May 15, 1946, He wrote that he approved it reluctantly, did not like what the Army did not like--the amendment calling for at least six months of pre-combat training for 18-year-old inductees. <[][ Appointed Lieut. Colonel Joseph V. Hodgson, now in Europe, as U.S. Commissioner on the United Nations Committee to Investigate War Crimes, to succeed Herbert Pell, resigned.