Lady About Town

Across the top of Page One, the Washington Star (circ. 226,573) splashed an eight-column banner: GENERAL EISENHOWER SUBMITS RESIGNATION. The story, under the byline of Columnist Doris Fleeson, reported that Ike's resignation "is at the White House." Columnist Fleeson had scored a small beat. Capital newsmen had been nibbling at the story, but none had said straight out that it was on the President's desk. The Star's confidence in Doris Fleeson's sources was not misplaced. Next day, the White House confirmed the news (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

As the top newshen in Washington and one of the capital's best political reporters, Columnist Fleeson gets her share of scoops for about 70 papers that carry her column. But her reputation depends more on her backstairs reporting of political plots & counterplots. Her pipelines into the Administration are so well placed that her columns on what the Fair Dealers are thinking often reveal what the Democrats will do long before they are ready to announce it or are quite sure themselves.

For example, last week she gently suggested that Vice President Barkley was getting a little old (74) to be thinking of running for President, an opinion, she says, that Truman also holds and that Barkley himself is coming around to. It well illustrated her talent for criticizing her friends in a motherly voice without losing them as friends--or sources.

Drawing-Room Beat. Columnist Fleeson gets so much fun out of her job that friends who see her gadding about sometimes wonder when she works. The answer is: all the time. Says she: "People sometimes talk to me about things other than politics," but not very often. With a combination of ladylike charm, blazing indignation and air-burning profanity, she manages to like and be liked by almost everybody in the capital.

In an average week she is likely to be busy for dinner almost every night, and never miss having lunch with "someone," which means anybody from Navy Secretary Dan Kimball to Eleanor Roosevelt. After Newbold Morris was roughly handled by a congressional committee for his part in the tanker deals (TIME, March 12), Columnist Fleeson carted him home to cheer him up with a home-cooked meal--and, incidentally, get a column out of him.

Back-Room Training. Politically, Columnist Fleeson considers herself a "nonpartisan liberal." She got her first real taste of politics early, in Sterling, Kans. (pop. 2,239), where her father had a clothing store and more or less "ran the town from the back room." After graduating from the University of Kansas, she went East and got a job on a small Long Island paper. In 1927, she graduated to the New York Daily News. "There," she recalls, "we learned to hit 'em in the eye. We belonged to the who-the-hell-reads-the-second-paragraph school." She still tries to hit 'em in the eye, writes fast in a flat, straightforward style.

In 1930, she married News Columnist John O'Donnell and wrote a "Capitol Stuff" column with him for eight years. But in the early '40s the two had a falling out. Among other things he had developed a bitter hatred for Roosevelt. Doris Fleeson got a divorce from the column and O'Donnell. She did a short term as a war correspondent for the Woman's Home Companion, then settled down to columning in Washington, where she set up a home in Georgetown for herself and her 20-year-old daughter, a Vassar student. Says she: "I hit people hard sometimes," but they seem to take it because they know "I do that to everyone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.