Irritated Man

Underlip clamped over upper, knuckles on his desk, Harry Truman faced his questioners. He had just declared the railroad tie-up "intolerable in an emergency" (see Labor), and announced that he had told the Army to "take appropriate action." Had he any news of progress in the dispute between the switchmen and the railroads? a reporter asked. Truman said that they were still talking with each other, that, as the reporters knew, an agreement had been signed. Harry Truman paused, then burst out angrily: the railroad union leaders acted like a bunch of Russians; they went back on their signature.

He Dared ... Such outbursts of presidential temper had been coming with increasing frequency in recent months. At his press conference last week, the President was plainly feeling irascible again. He answered all questions with the same half-throttled irritation. Reminded that some Congressmen were threatening to fry the fat out of the budget, he thrust out his jaw and declared that they had said that last year and ended up adding a billion or so. It was a good, tight budget, he said truculently, and he dared them to do anything to it.

Mr. Truman also pitched into Arkansas' Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright and his subcommittee's report condemning White House influence in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (TIME, Feb. 12). He had spent ten years in the Senate, said Harry Truman waspishly, but he was happy to say he never wrote a report like that.

The report was asinine. In fact, the only objective of the report seemed to have been a reflection on the President himself. He had never brought pressure on the RFC, on any other agency except in the public interest. There may have been some mistakes; the man who makes no mistake is the man who never does anything. He just couldn't get what they were driving at, said Truman. As soon as the chairman got back to town--he left town when he found out the President wanted to see him--maybe he could find out what they were talking about.

That Oxford Blank-Blank. Truman's dislike for Rhodes Scholar Fulbright was a long-standing one, dating from Fulbright's suggestion after the Republican victory in 1946 that Harry Truman should appoint a Republican Secretary of State and resign in his favor, following the English parliamentary pattern. In his private conversation, Truman has since referred to Fulbright as "that overeducated, Oxford blank-blank."*

Now the fat was in the fire. On Capitol Hill, angry Senators immediately announced that they would pursue their investigation of the RFC to the limit. This week Truman defiantly replied by renominating every one of the five RFC members. From Miami Beach Chairman Fulbright said that he left Washington not because he knew the President wanted to see him (he hadn't heard he did) but to fulfill a speaking engagement of several months' standing. "I do not wish to seem disrespectful to the President," said Fulbright, "but this statement of the President is not true."

Last week the President also:

P: Picked up a telephone and called Herbert Hoover in New York. "Mr. President, this is Harry Truman," said Harry Truman. He asked him (and Hoover agreed) to lend his prestige in appealing for the grain needed by famine-threatened India (TIME, Feb. 12). This week Truman formally asked Congress for authority to ship India the 2,000,000 tons of grain.

P: Got a pleasant surprise when New Zealand's Prime Minister Sidney G. Holland stopped in on his way home from London and told him: "I have come here making no requests of any kind. For whatever we need, we are able to pay for out of our own resources." Said Holland: "He threw up his hand and saluted me."

*Other blasts of recent memory: the famous angry letter to Music Critic Paul Hume for his review of daughter Margaret's singing; his slap at the Marine Corps ("they have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's"); his crack at the mineworkers' John L. Lewis ("for your information, I wouldn't appoint John L. Lewis dogcatcher").

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