At 62

Harry Truman floated atop successive waves of crisis like a bold bather frolicking in the breakers. Troubled waters mounted mightily, surged thunderously in his direction, broke magnificently over the President's head. From the foamy surf Harry Truman bobbed up every time, splashing and spouting lightheartedly.

In the week of his 62nd birthday, apparently nothing could shake him.

He pitched horseshoes to whet his appetite for a birthday luncheon party in the office of Attorney General Tom Clark. The party was gay. Even the six Supreme Court Justices present guffawed when the finically dressed President put on a roguish Texas sombrero. Carefree as a boy, Harry Truman sliced a toothsome birthday cake with three flickering candles--for the past, present and future.

If either the present or future was somberly tinged, no reflection showed in Harry Truman's face. Next day at his press conference a newsman asked for comment on gloomy newspaper views of U.S. policy in Europe. The President smiled. Hindsight is a great thing, he cracked. What about the coal crisis? The President kept his neck in. He would cross each bridge as he came to it, he said.

Last week the President:

P: Received from New York's Fordham University an honorary LL.D. (his fifth) with a speech stressing the significance of veterans' education: "Ignorance and its handmaidens, prejudice, intolerance, suspicion . . . breed dictators [and] wars. . . . We must look to education ... to wipe out that ignorance which threatens catastrophe."

P: Sent to Congress a bill to offer U.S. weapons to any Western Hemisphere good-neighbor which subscribed to ''peaceful and democratic" principles.

P: Nominated Pennsylvania's chunky Representative John W. Murphy, articulate Democratic member of the Congressional Pearl Harbor Investigating Committee, to be U.S. District Judge for middle Pennsylvania.

P: Ordered the State Department to vacate its gingerbread, high-corridored building across the street from the White House to make way for the Budget Bureau, Office of Economic Stabilization and other executive agencies. State will move to the War Department's pre-Pentagon building on Virginia Avenue.

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