Lucky Star

It was going to be Harry Truman on the first ballot, just as Harry Truman had said all along that it would be. Through all the stop-Truman scrambling of the week before the convention, the President had never doubted that the nomination would settle down on him. Never for a moment had he considered stepping aside. Harry Truman is a man with faith in his lucky political star.

Returning from Bolivar, Mo. last week, he was asleep when his special train reached St. Louis after midnight. His physician, Brigadier General Wallace Graham, woke him. He told the President that newsmen aboard the train had just got word of Eisenhower's semi-demi-final refusal to be a candidate. They wanted the President's comment. Solemnly, Harry Truman said: "General Eisenhower is an honorable man."

Time to Commune. Back in Washington, Harry Truman did nothing, sat back and waited for the opposition to collapse. With his family in Missouri, the President had one of his quietest and loneliest weeks in the White House.

He saw a few callers--mostly pro-Truman Democrats. Certain of his own nomination, he thought most about the vice presidential spot, and kept his telephone line busy with calls to Howard McGrath, Les Biffle and Oscar Ewing, his personal envoys in Philadelphia. But much of the time he was alone. Said an aide: "He needs a little time to commune with himself."

While he communed, the last little fires of opposition sputtered and died out.

Chicago's little Jake Arvey hustled to New York City, talked long with Mayor Bill O'Dwyer and Maryland's Senator Millard Tydings. They thought there might be one last hope to snag General Eisenhower. Envoys had been knocking on the general's door at Columbia University. Jake Arvey sat up most of the night at the Stork Club, waiting for word that never came. The next afternoon, on the plane back to Chicago, Jake Arvey penciled his and O'Dwyer's capitulation. Jimmy Roosevelt caved in soon after.

The next to go down were the Douglasites, led by ex-OPA Boss Leon Henderson and his amateurish Americans for Democratic Action. Leaving his summer cabin in Oregon, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas doffed his big cowboy hat, turned on his hoss wrangler's accent, and said: "I never was a-runnin', I ain't a-run-nin' and I ain't goin' tuh." Henderson, who submitted to a Hollywood make-up man's art before he went on television (see cut), had nobody else to offer.

Then it was the Southerners' turn. South Carolina's Senator Olin Johnston, bitterest of the Truman-haters, surrendered abjectly. For weeks he had trumpeted a demand that the National Committee ask Harry Truman to withdraw. But when the committee called him to hear his protest, Olin Johnston had not a word to say. The Southerners, after a dispirited all-Dixie caucus, settled on broad-faced Ben Laney, Governor of Arkansas, as their protest "favorite son" candidate.

Painted In Red: Pepper. The last gasp came from a loose coalition formed by the C.I.O.'s Political Action Committee, a sprinkling of liberals and a handful of Southerners. What they wanted was a, man "of liberal, progressive democracy."

They had no trouble talking Florida's florid Senator Claude Pepper into being their candidate. Deadpan Claude Pepper, onetime champion of Russia, onetime apologist for Henry Wallace, onetime defender of Harry Truman against the Dixie rebels, and the last drummer in the Eisenhower parade, made the most of the spotlight. He strode into the abandoned Eisenhower headquarters, bussed his wife at the cameramen's request and proclaimed that he would "accept the draft." Said Claude Pepper: "This is no time for politics as usual."

Next day the word "Eisenhower" was stripped from posters in the headquarters' windows; in its place went the word "Pepper"--painted in red--just under the words "The People's Choice for President." But Claude Pepper was not even the choice of his own Florida delegation.

No one strong enough to take the nomination from Harry Truman wanted it. And no group which wanted it was strong enough to take it away.

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