Breath of Summer

The days were warm and pleasant, the nights were still cool, and U.S. citizens began to think happily of summer vacations in the mountains, on the shore, or pounding along the nation's sun-shimmering highways. For a change, there was hope in the international air, too. In the smiling rose garden back of the White House, Harry Truman spoke to a group of war correspondents who were off to revisit the wreckage-strewn Normandy beaches on the fifth anniversary of Dday.

On that June day five years ago, peace had seemed simply a problem of lashing shell fire, the stutter of machine guns, a man named Hitler and a man named Tojo. This June, children played on the half-buried landing craft. But peace seemed more elusive and infinitely more baffling, a matter of hard-held purpose in the face of provocation, hard-built strength in the face of shadowy threat.

Even so, Harry Truman told the correspondents, things were not quite so exasperating as they had been even a few months ago. "We are closer to world peace now than at any time in the last three years." he said soberly. Overseas, another responsible voice spoke with the same measured optimism (see INTERNATIONAL).

The optimism was probably no more than a holiday from the tension of the cold war. But like all holidays, it was welcome. The woods and fields from Bangor to Santa Barbara told of June bustin' out all over. Working at his White House desk.

Harry Truman could look out over the formal rose gardens, edged with boxwood. And as he walked back to Blair House at day's end, he could also see, glowing pink and salmon under the ancient elms, the round beds of impatiens, which people also know as the patience plant.

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