The Distinction Is Different

When President Harry Truman starts talking off the cuff, his advisers are never sure whether he's going to wind up with a blast at Wall Street or a side remark that sets his State Department to explaining that U.S. policy on Russia is unchanged. But when he dropped in at the Statler Hotel one night last week for a little off-the-cuff talk at a National Planning Association dinner, the President was all primed with a theme to suit his audience.

"You know," said the President, "we plan our day's work. We plan the houses in which we are going to live--if we can afford to build one, and we can't, these days. And then we plan our public buildings and our private buildings. We plan cities now--and towns. But when we talk about planning the things we want to do economically, we are charged with being Communists and fellow travelers."

The whole trouble, Harry Truman thought, was just a matter of semantics (see EDUCATION). "Instead of the word 'planning,' the people who find fault with us when we talk about planning for economic purposes are thinking about controlled economy, not planned economy. The distinction is different, if you analyze it closely."

Looking back at past U.S. depressions, from Martin Van Buren to Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman got a good-natured laugh when he mentioned his own 1921 bankruptcy--"when the businessman got into politics," meaning himself. But he turned dead serious when he talked of the need for preventing any such panics in the future by "planned" (i.e., not controlled) economy. Said the President: "It is absolutely essential that the economic structure of the United States of America remain absolutely sound and prosperous, for the simple reason that ... we have become the symbol of what governments should stand for--the welfare of the people . . ."

Last week the President also:

P: Finally found a job for his old friend and Washington State's ex-governor, Mon Wallgren: chairman of the National Security Resources Board, at $14,000 a year.

P: Went up to Capitol Hill at the invitation of Missouri's Democratic delegation to see how St. Joseph steaks compared with Kansas City's. The verdict: just as good.

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