A Man Who Understands

Only a polite ripple of applause greeted Frank E. McKinney of Indianapolis when he strode down the aisle in Washington's Mayflower Hotel to accept Bill Boyle's old job of chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As far as the national committeemen could tell last week, big Frank McKinney looked like Boyle and walked like Boyle. Like Boyle, he was a Midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, a machine Democrat, and Harry Truman's hand-picked choice for the job. But the Democrats soon discovered that Frank McKinney didn't talk like Boyle.

"I can assure you," he said, while Bill Boyle stared glumly at the ceiling, "that if there is anyone in headquarters who should not be there, or whose hands are not clean, I shall dismiss him . . ." Then, with a series of broom-strokes, he: 1) demanded, within 48 hours, a detailed description of every committee employee's job, salary and political references; 2) promised to weed out "supernumeraries"; 3) froze all committee expenditures until a new executive committee could audit the budget; 4) declared he would serve without salary. (Boyle was paid $35,000 a year.) "May no act of mine," McKinney said evenly, "ever prove embarrassing to the President, my family, the Democratic Party or myself."

Reversal. When McKinney stopped talking, Fair Dealers and Southern Democrats cheered. Next day McKinney tackled the gravest party scandal of all: he urged the President to see that all U.S. collectors of internal revenue are appointed through civil service instead of political pull. After listening to McKinney, Truman reversed his own stand of three weeks earlier, announced that he would ask Congress to enact the civil-service proposal into law next January.

The forceful new Democratic boss, at 47, is a hardworking, cigar-puffing banker and sportsman with four children. The son of an Indianapolis fireman (now the city's fire chief), Frank McKinney went to work in a bank at 15, and broke into politics in 1934 as the Democratic nominee for county treasurer. The job was a choice plum: by law, the treasurer was allowed to keep a percentage (from 3% to 6%) of all delinquent taxes he could collect. On the strength of his anticipated income (which actually ran between $35,000 and $40,000 a year), McKinney borrowed enough more to buy the controlling interest in Indianapolis' Fidelity Trust Co. From its presidency he jumped profitably in & out of real estate, radio stations, tractor manufacturing and professional baseball (Louisville Colonels, Indianapolis Indians, Pittsburgh Pirates). Last spring he resigned as treasurer of the State Democratic Committee and vowed he was through with politics.

Resignation. When Harry Truman induced McKinney to take the chairmanship, reporters got wind of another fact: McKinney was vice president of a pipeline company which is trying to get a Government priority for 100,000 tons of scarce steel. McKinney wrote out his resignation to the pipeline company and announced he would sell all his stock in it. In any other year this would have been incidental. But in 1951 it was an action louder than words to show that the new Democratic chairman understands what the next campaign is going to be all about.

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