Sixth Degree

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. As the four-motored Sacred Cow headed west from Washington's Boiling Field, the coal and railroad strikes, the food crisis, the failure of the Paris conference seemed left behind. Harry Truman was off on a 30-hour weekend in Missouri, his seventh trip away from Washington in 1946, his 16th since taking office.

At the Grandview, Mo. airport to meet him were his mother, who had been in bed with a cold, his brother, Vivian, and his sister, Mary Jane Truman. Visitors were banned. After a night in Kansas City's Muehlebach Hotel, the presidential party drove some 50 miles to 97-year-old William Jewell College at Liberty.

There, under a rust-colored banner bearing the legend "Trust in God and Work," the President received his sixth honorary degree, and extemporaneously admonished the nation: "Work, work, work! . . . Let me tell you a secret. Leadership isn't worth very much unless there are a few workers and followers. That is true on the farm . . . the coal mines . . . the railroads . . . the automobile factories . . . the mills. Get in line. ..."

The applause was polite. Smiling a trifle grimly, like a man about to practice his admonitions, Harry Truman emplaned for Washington.

Last week the President also:

P:I Called War & Navy Secretaries Robert Patterson and James Forrestal to the White House, bluntly told them to iron out their merger differences by May 31.

P: Appointed New York Industrialist Charles Ulrick Bay as Ambassador to Norway, to succeed veteran Diplomat Lithgow Osborne.

P: Read a Gallup Poll showing that 61% of the nation's voting Democrats favor Truman for President in 1948 (runners-up: Henry Wallace, General Dwight Eisenhower, James Byrnes and Edward Stettinius.)

P: Sent to Congress his plan for the reorganization of the Government's unwieldy administrative machinery.*

* The plan would 1) elevate the Federal Security Agency to Cabinet status; 2) lump all Government housing under one agency; 3) abolish the office of U.S. High Commissioner to the Philippines (July 4 is Philippine independence day); 4) scrap the NLRB function of conducting strike ballots; 5) transfer the jobs-for-vetefans function from Selective Service to the U.S. Employment Service; 6) transfer the Office of Contract Settlement to OWMR.

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