Coffee & a New Role

While five coffeepots boiled and bubbled in the background, Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt last week sat down at a Washington press conference to launch a new organization. To old Washington hands, the sight of Eleanor Roosevelt sending a new committee down the ways was indeed familiar. In more than two decades, she had served as foster mother, guiding light or honorary whatnot to a whole fleet of organizations, from the Communist-front American Youth Congress to the Daughters of the American Revolution. .

Her new organization is the National Issues Committee, tacked together by a group of assorted Washington liberals headed by Philip Schiff, Washington director of the Jewish Welfare Board. The founders, aiming toward a nationwide network of "committees of correspondence" and a $100,000 annual budget (contributions tax-deductible), wanted a celebrity as chairman. Mrs. Roosevelt accepted enthusiastically. She had noticed "a disturbing . . . probably reactionary" trend in the U.S., and she thought the committee could reverse it by explaining national issues to the people "in an understandable form--not on a partisan basis but on a liberal basis."

The new launching did not cause much of a splash in the Washington political waters. Said Robert Humphreys, publicity director for the Republican National Committee: "It's going to be a left-wing Americans for Democratic Action ... I regard it with complete indifference." Sighed Humphrey's opposite number, Democrat Sam Brightman: "Life was a lot simpler when you just had the Democratic, Republican, Vegetarian and Prohibition parties."

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