Rude Noise

Like a shotgun blast in a cornfield, Harry Truman's crack about too many "Byrds in the Congress" set off indignant flappings and cawings over Capitol Hill. The old cry of "purge" rang through its tiled corridors. The President was annoyed that the crack got out; he hadn't meant his caller (A.V.C. Chairman Gil Harrison) to repeat it. At his news conference he refused to amplify the remark, declared that he was not interested in purges. The people, he said tartly, would take care of that.

But Harry Truman was willing enough to purge some Congressmen if he could. He had failed in his all-out attempt to repeal the Taft-Hartley act because too many Democrats had voted against it. His legislative leaders were dejectedly advising compromise. Labor leaders came in to commiserate and to counsel.

They found Harry Truman determined as ever. The trainmen's A. F. Whitney sent a wire ("When is it wrong to get a bloody nose when you are right?"), then appeared himself. In a letter, Harry Truman replied: "I am much in the same frame of mind you are . . . The compromisers got nowhere as I was sure they wouldn't, and they never had any consideration for me." This sounded like a slap at Speaker Sam Rayburn, who tried to put over the compromise. Press Secretary Charles Ross hastily explained that there had been a double misprint. The letter should have read: "The compromises got nowhere . . . and they never had any consideration from me."

Then A.F.L.'s President William Green stomped in to tell the President that A.F.L. would be willing to take a new Taft-Hartley substitute--the Sims bill--with some changes. He came out of the White House shaking his head: "We're willing to give a few inches, but he's not budging at all."

At week's end, the labor-conscious President heard a rude noise from his own home town. An A.F.L. painters' union complained that the summer White House in Independence, Mo. was being painted by a non-union painter.

Last week the President also:

P: Slipped out to watch the Washington Senators beat the Boston Red Sox 5-4.

P: Signed the emergency joint resolution making funds available to pay some 15,000 federal employees (including himself) until the end of the fiscal year. In a scorching message, he blasted a clause in it which had delayed his signature. The clause, put in at the insistence of California's Senator Sheridan Downey, friend of the big West Coast landholders, denied Reclamation Commissioner Mike Straus and California's Regional Director Richard Boke their pay.

P: Spent a happy fifteen minutes exchanging Bible quotations with Isaac Halevi Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Israel.

P: Got a telephone call from Galloway Calhoun, imperial potentate of the Shrine, who was stranded in Hawaii by Harry Bridges' waterfront strike, and wanted Shriner Truman to do something. Secretary Matt Connelly told him there was nothing the President could do.

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