Hold that Tiger!

When he got the hook after two months and three days as a political whitewing, Newbold Morris began acting for all the world like a tiger being dragged out of a meatshop. "We've got rid of Howard McGrath, and it took only two months," he cried. "If they gave me six months we would have gotten others." Judge James P. McGranery, McGrath's successor as Attorney General, he added, was "a real whitewasher."

Although Morris had managed to do little during his tour in Washington but print up some questionnaires, make enemies, and get asked embarrassing questions about his part in a highly profitable tanker deal (TIME, March 24), it was a fairly impressive exit--noisy, dramatic and calculated to leave the listener with a mental picture of Newbold grinding malefactors up like pecans between his strong, white teeth. But last week, bounding back onstage again for a series of curtain calls, he started talking just like Newbold Morris and ruined the whole effect.

Working fast, Morris dictated a series of six articles, entitled "What I learned in Washington," for the New York World-Telegram & the Sun. It could have been fairly adequately summed up simply by printing sentences one and four of article No. One. They read: "I found the Federal Government in Washington a wonderland" and "I found out that those who say I'm a political dope are right."

Then he hastened to take back what he had said about Judge McGranery. Speaking at a Washington press club luncheon, he said he regretted his rash statement and offered to make a public apology. And he seemed to have come around to thinking that Howard McGrath was more to be pitied than censured. "I hope," he said, "that he will return ... to useful public service." He thought Harry Truman was a fine little fellow too: "Harry Truman has guts [and] his instincts are humble."

In an appearance before a congressional committee, Morris made it plain that he was against corruption and thought Washington was full of it, but he never quite got around to saying where and what it was. In reviewing his unhappy two months, he said, in effect, that everyone had politely sabotaged him and that he had decided to bide his time and see which side the President would back. But in the end the President backed nobody and both he and McGrath had ended up "lying around like bodies in the last act of Hamlet."

But if he did nothing else during the week, Morris did manage to write a line which could serve beautifully as his political epitaph: "They think I'm something like Alice in Wonderland coming down here," he recalled having told President Truman, "They don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe I don't speak the right language."

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