A Most Happy Evening

From the middle of the speaker's dais, Harry Truman looked out happily over the main ballroom of Washington's Mayflower Hotel, bright with autumn flowers and massed flags. The cream of Democratic womanhood was there--India Edwards, 54, boss of the party's women workers and a rising queenmaker, Nellie Tayloe Ross, who runs the U.S. Mint, Minnesota's Eugenie Anderson, new ambassador to Denmark--to celebrate another Democratic victory in "the making. Between the diamondback terrapin soup and the baked seafood canape, White House Press Secretary Charlie Ross approached the dais with a sheaf of figures in hand. Harry Truman rose, grinning, and without waiting for the formality of an introduction, said into the mike: "I have some early election returns. Lehman and O'Dwyer seem to be winning. It looks pretty good." After the Boston ice cream pie had been cleared away, the President rose again to announce "the latest returns on the Lehman-Dulles fiasco -- and it will be just that when Lehman gets through with him . . . We have a report that the New York Times and the New York Daily News -- both Dulles supporters -- concede to Lehman and O'Dwyer." Said beaming Harry Truman: "It certainly is a most happy evening." The Old Man, Too. While the ladies whooped it up, the President launched into a few appropriate, off-the-cuff remarks. "Every woman in the great state of New York has done her best," he said with a bow to the assembled members of the Women's National Democratic Club. "That means she's gone to the polls and had the old man go too ... I will tell you that 2% more women vote than the men, and if we don't look out, we will probably have a feminine government some day. I don't think we'd be in a bad way, do you?" And the President of the U.S.

winked gaily at the happy diners.

For a few more minutes he chatted on, about the new responsibilities of the Demo cratic party about his dream of bringing Point Four development to the backward areas of the world. Said the President: "I am more than convinced that the Democratic Party, the party of the people, will continue to do [the] job for the welfare of this nation, and for the welfare of the world." Term Indefinite. Then Harry Truman went back to Blair House, where he stayed awake until 11 o'clock listening to the late returns which nailed down the Demo cratic victories. Next day he confided to guests at a 64th birthday party for Secretary Charlie Ross (the prize gift: an imperial gallon of Scotch from White House reporters) that the election had been a wonderful satisfaction and that he had received even more messages of congratulation than he had after his own triumph a year ago.

Last week the President also:

P: Proudly displayed a certificate making him an honorary transport pilot, and the first of 500,000 new identification cards for members of the Army's Organized Reserve Corps. Rank: "C-in-C." Expiration date: "Indefinite."

P: Turned up at a luncheon given by the National Conference of Christians and Jews and promised to keep plugging for his civil rights program. Said the President "I don't see how we can do otherwise than pass this legislation."

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