Good-Will Week

Harry Truman was feeling pretty relaxed. Younger brother J. Vivian Truman was in town for a visit and the brothers lolled around Blair House a few evenings talking about the crops, the cattle and the chickens back home on the farm. At the President's press conference, a reporter asked whatever happened to his threat to hop a train and carry the Fair Deal issues back to the people. Well, said the President, that one was always just on the shelf and maybe it wouldn't be necessary.

The only time he got his dander up at all in public during the week was over, of all things, traffic laws. Before the President's Conference on Highway Safety, Truman condemned lax state drivers' examination laws, including those of his own Missouri. "Terrible!" cried the President. "Why a man can go down to a drugstore [in Missouri] from an insane asylum and spend a quarter and get a license to drive anywhere in the state."

Last week the President also: P:Gave another posy to the American he admires most, George C. Marshall, at a dinner on the second anniversary of the Harvard speech which launched the Marshall Plan. Marshall would be remembered more as a great peacemaker than as a great soldier, Truman predicted."I believe that in the years to come we shall look back on this undertaking [the Marshall Plan] as the dividing line . . . between the old era of national suspicion, economic hostility and isolationism, and the new era of mutual cooperation to increase prosperity throughout the world." P:Appointed Mrs. Georgia Neese Clark, 49, Democratic National Committeewoman from Kansas, as Treasurer of the United States. A former actress, later a bank president and storekeeper in Richland, Kans., Mrs. Clark got her reward for political labors: $10,000 a year, use of a limousine, the pleasure of seeing her signature* on all U.S. folding money. P:Received a new bow tie from a caller, Michigan's new Democratic governor, G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams, who had been given a whole box of them. The onetime haberdasher whipped off his four-in-hand, skillfully knotted the bow tie without looking in a mirror.

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