Soft Pedal

THE PRESIDENCY

Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who liked to needle Republicans with provocative statements during their conventions, Harry Truman soft-pedaled politics last week. He seemed to have no interest in what was being said about him at Philadelphia; not until the second ballot did he turn on the television set in his office. Later, secluded in his study, he watched the convention's climax.

Before the convention, his political advisers had put Tom Dewey just behind Arthur Vandenberg in their rating of candidates hardest for Harry Truman to beat. With Earl Warren's nomination for Vice President, Democratic strategists gave up any remaining hope of carrying California.

Advice from the South. White House visitors whistled to keep up their courage. Tom Dewey was very much a conservative, they said, and thus very much open to attack as representing special interests. The GOPlatform was "nothing but the reiteration of promises they have failed to keep in the past." Candidate Truman was "definitely encouraged" about his chances, the visitors said.

The President did get some encouragement. Old Bill Green predicted: "The Republicans certainly won't get much labor support." From Chicago came word that Jake Arvey, who had been thumping for Ike Eisenhower, admitted that Harry Truman "has picked up a lot." The President also got some advice. Mississippi's John Rankin came out of the President's office and suggested that the secessionist Dixiecrats might stay hitched if the Democratic platform went no further on civil rights than the generalizations of the 1944 plank --which proclaimed that "racial and religious minorities have the right to live, develop and vote equally with all citizens."

Slogging through a week of routine, his desk clogged by 263 bills, Harry Truman waited until after the G.O.P. nomination to give Congress another poke. He denounced its bill to admit only 205,000 displaced persons as "flagrantly discriminatory" against Jews, then signed it with "great reluctance."

Last week the President also:

P: Signed the $6 billion appropriation for the foreign-aid program; the one-year extension of the reciprocal trade bill, with regret that it was not for the usual three-year period; the draft bill; appropriation bills carrying almost $10 1/2 billion to bolster the Army, Navy and Air Force; the $573 million waterways and flood-control bill (TIME, May 31).

P: Appointed James Grover McDonald, 61, a member of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine in 1946, to be the first U.S. diplomatic envoy to Israel. His title, pending full U.S. recognition of Israel: Special Representative.

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