Yes & No

Harry Truman put in a grueling week at his desk, working through the stack of 194 bills left behind by the 80th Congress. It was tedious going; each bill, big or small, required careful scrutiny.

North on Coronado. A sample of the small detail of the President's business for the week was H.R. 1730, a relief bill to compensate Mrs. Beulah Hart for the death of her son, Gath Daniel Meeks of Palm City, Calif. On the night of Jan. 9, 1942, just a month after Pearl Harbor, Gath Meeks drove his truck into an area where a secret Army radio installation was situated. Meeks was stopped by a sentry, then allowed to pass. But, on his way out he apparently paid no attention to the sentry's command to halt.

"It appears," wrote the President, "that the sentry thereupon ran after the truck, again shouted 'Halt,' and there being no response to this order, fired one round into the air; that after a short interval, as it did not stop he fired upon it, aiming at the tail light; that the bullet apparently struck the road behind the vehicle and then ricocheted upward, passing through the back of the seat, through Mr. Meeks's body, emerging just above his heart. . . . I am unable to escape the conclusion that Mr. Meeks came to his death through his own negligence. . . . Therefore, while regretting this tragic occurrence, I feel obliged to withhold my approval from the bill."

All told, the President vetoed 19 bills. Most important of them was a bill establishing a National Science Foundation. He disapproved it regretfully, on the grounds that the "complex and unwieldy" administrative setup prescribed by Congress would divorce the foundation from governmental control. Among the 175 bills he signed were one freezing social security taxes at 1% until Jan. 1, 1950, and another (approved reluctantly because it seemed to him inflationary) lifting all consumer credit controls on Nov. 1.

South to Rio. In midweek, the President announced that late this month or early in September he was going to Brazil, where the Rio Conference on inter-American security opens this week. He planned to fly down, stay three days and then board the battleship Missouri for a leisurely cruise back to the U.S.

The day after his Rio trip was announced, the President told a news conference that he would do no more traveling this year; he would not even make the rail junket through the West which some of his political advisers wanted him to take in the fall.

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