Boner?

As a bewildering mixture of disarming candor and foot-in-mouth politics, it was one of the most extraordinary press conferences since Harry Truman entered the White House. The President began by remarking that he had no special announcements to make; he threw himself open for questions. Up popped the Buffalo Evening News's white-haired Jim Wright. "Mr. President," he said, "I have been trying to reason out this food conservation program at breakfast this morning without an egg. Are you going to have the chickens go without grain on the seventh day of the week?"

Harry Truman grinned appreciatively. What we're after, he said, is grain. He said he knew that people sometimes feel they have been imposed upon, but this is an attempt to do voluntarily in a free country what other nations have to do with police-state methods.

Maine's nimble May Craig thought he was dodging. "Mr. President, if you eat more chickens, wouldn't there be less chickens to eat the grain?" Harry Truman replied that that was like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg.

"Do you mean to suggest," asked lanky Alden Todd of the labor-owned Federated Press, "that consumer controls are policestate methods?" They are, necessarily, said the President emphatically. Any methods that you have to enforce upon the people are police-state methods.

"Would you say that other consumer controls and price rationing are police-state methods?" another newsman asked.

Yes, said the President; they are. He said that was true of the Office of Price Administration during the war. You had to have it that way in an emergency. Yes, he added, that would apply to rent controls, too.

Any control that is enforced by the state, said the President, is a police method of getting the people to cooperate. And sometimes it has to be done. But in a free country it should be done with the agreement of all the people.

That ended the conference. Scrambling for the pressroom, the newsmen knew they had a headline for the day. Harry Truman, although he' had once pleaded with Congress for retention of price control, now seemed to be against any Government regulation whatever. And he seemed to have thoroughly confused police-state edicts with rules freely adopted in a democracy by congressional action.

The first time he had mentioned "police state," Clark Clifford, his chief speechwriter, who was sitting behind him, had visibly stiffened. One big part of Democratic campaign strategy was sure to be an attempt to blame high prices on the Republicans, to insist that the G.O.P. had sent them sky-high by scuttling OPA. And here was the President, head of the Democratic Party, damning all controls as tools of dictatorship. It might well turn out to be the political boner of the year.

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