To the County Fair

There was no sign that trouble weighed upon the President. Full of carefully creased, double-breasted calm, he ripped through another heavy week of work. He wore his usual wide smile as he had his picture taken with Oscar Berger, Czech caricaturist, and with Mrs. Enit Kaufmann, U.S.-naturalized Czech painter, who sketched an unsmiling President at his desk.

He had no news for a press conference, but held one, nevertheless, and invited questions. He got 34 of them in ten minutes. One: did he think the U.S. was swinging back to an isolationist mood? The answer: he did not think so, and if the U.S. ever got to that point it would be on the road to ruin. Up came a ticklish question: what was his reaction to London reports that Russia considered U.S. policy in Japan too soft, that Russia wanted an Allied Control Council? The answer: the machinery for Allied expressions on policy was set up; the Russians had never expressed dissatisfaction. Did he expect a visit from General MacArthur? No, unless the General feels that a visit is necessary.

Important Man. The President had two distinguished foreign visitors: 1) Canada's Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, en route to London; 2) Philippines President Sergio Osmena, to talk trade arrangements. For another visitor, this week, the White House prepared to roll out its red carpet and the Army polished its best brass. The President invited Marshal Zhukov, Russia's representative on the Allied Council in Germany, to the U.S. as a return compliment for Moscow's warm reception of General Eisenhower. But it was evident that official Washington considered barrel-chested Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov to be somebody more than a Hero of the Soviet Union, defender of Moscow and Stalingrad, captor of Berlin. Joseph Stalin's political confidant and possible heir was listed in the protocol books also as an Important Man.

The President worked on his atomic bomb control message to Congress and on a radio talk he will make this week to open the $115,000,000 National War Fund Campaign. He was getting the decks cleared to do some more traveling. This weekend he will fly out to Caruthersville on the Mississippi in southeast Missouri (pop. 6,612) for its County Fair. He has not missed one there in twelve years. From Missouri last week Mrs. Truman and daughter Mary Margaret returned quietly to the White House.

Last week the President also:

P: Let Foreign Economic Administrator Leo Crowley go (see The Administration).

P: Nominated J. Howard McGrath,41-year-old Democratic governor of Rhode Island, to be Solicitor General.

P: Borrowed a fellow Missourian, 47-year-old Democratic Judge John Caskie Collet, from the U.S. District Court, to be stabilization administrator in OWMR (to which ousted William H. Davis' duties were shuffled).

P: Rehired former Attorney General Francis Biddle to be the U.S. member of the Allied tribunal trying German war criminals.

P: Appealed (as Colonel Harry Truman of the Field Artillery Reserve) to discharged servicemen to join Reserve outfits.

P: Asked Congress to slash $28,692,772,000 off the Army's appropriation (thus contemplating an Army of 1,950,000 men by mid-1946).

P: Made public a stinging letter he had sent to General Ike Eisenhower about treatment of Jewish refugees in Europe (see FOREIGN NEWS).

P: Dropped in, unannounced, on the Supreme Court to see Ohio's Harold Hitz Burton sworn in as a Justice.

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