Southern Exposure

If the blustery storm out of the South bothered Harry Truman, he gave no outward sign of it. But inwardly he felt some sinking sensations last week. They came from another storm: a 40-knot northeast wind that whipped up ten-foot waves and tossed, the presidential yacht Williamsburg around like a cockleshell under a bathtub faucet.

Color: Green. The big blow hit the Williamsburg directly abeam as she turned into narrow Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba. Newsmen on the sturdier, broader-beamed Greenwich Bay, preceding the presidential craft, radiotelephoned the Williamsburg: "Can you give us any local color?" The reply: "Only what you can see looking out over the sea."

Aboard the Williamsburg, almost everybody in the President's party was seeing green without looking at the sea. But Harry Truman" did pretty well. When he went ashore a few hours later at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, in Cuba, he alone looked fit. Said the President: "I stood up all right for the simple reason that I didn't get up. I stayed in bed."

At Guantanamo, the President rode around the base in an open car, stopped to greet some 200 children who welcomed him by singing America. One, a freckle-faced twelve-year-old boy, stepped forward to present a scrapbook about the base's school. After a brave start, the boy flubbed his long-rehearsed speech. Harry Truman, who knows how it feels to stumble over lines, leaned down and whispered: "Never mind, son." The boy beamed.

Color Change. A few hours later, the President's airplane put him down at Key West and into seclusion in a white bungalow at the U.S. submarine base. He thumbed through newspapers, which headlined his troubles in the South. Even while he was away he had enraged the South's white-supremacy bloc by visiting the Virgin Islands' Governor William Hastie, a Negro (who wore a button proclaiming: "Forward with Truman"--see cut).

The President had a little work to do. He signed the rent-control bill (a stopgap extension to April 1) and a bill continuing the Government's authority to operate merchant vessels.

Then he went to inspect a submarine, turned up later at the enlisted men's beach for his daily dip and a two-hour sunning. The red of his nose was peeling and turning to tan. He lolled in the sand in a T-shirt and white duck trousers, a canvas helmet shading his face. He looked like a man without a care in the world.

This week, at an alfresco press conference, he refused comment about the Southern revolt. Did he want to talk about his own candidacy? The President said he had been too darned busy to think about it. He joined in the laughter which followed.

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