Birds & Budgets

It was a long, hard week for Harry Truman. Each morning he chatted and chaffed his way through ten appointments, and each afternoon he thrashed about, thigh deep, in the budget. Outside his oval office early in the week an unseasonably warm sun drenched the White House's south lawn. Inside, a hustling Truman was as busily in-season as a department-store clerk in the Christmas rush.

The budget was at the top of his work list. With Budget Director James E. Webb and Assistant Director Frank Pace Jr., he dug into his daily fiscal sessions with the stern attitude of a bank examiner. He startled Webb and Pace with his grasp of budget problems. He piqued military chieftains by refusing to raise the lid on the $15 billion limit which he had clamped on 1949 military expenditures. He was firmly convinced that a larger amount would do more harm than good to the nation's economic structure.

Early in the week he sent Webb to the Senate Civil Service subcommittee with a recommendation for a $1,500,000-a-year salary increase for top Government officials. This would boost the pay of Cabinet officers from $15,000 to $25,000, under secretaries from $10,000-$12,000 to $22,500, assistant secretaries from $10,000 to $17,500. One executive position not included in Truman's raise request was the presidency.*

The Feathered Tom. The parade of White House callers included all sorts of men on all sorts of missions: labor leaders, turkey growers, Senators, foreign diplomats, politicians, old friends, ax-grinding congressmen, lobbying mayors and gift-bearing citizens. A delegation from Truman, Minnesota (which had voted against him, 267 to 241) dropped in to invite the President to attend the town's 50th anniversary.

A delegation of turkey growers presented him with two turkeys for his Christmas dinner in Independence this week. When they uncrated the big, bronze, 40-lb. Minnesota bird and the bred-down ("apartment size") 14-lb. white Beltsville turkey on his office porch, a photographer asked the President to chuck one under the chin. He did--and the white turkey got flapping mad. "That's one tom that got into the White House," beamed a bystander, "and he's a turkey." The President grinned.

In midweek, Athenagoras I, the magnificently bearded, black-robed Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, strode into the Oval Room to bid an enthusiastic goodbye to his "beloved President" before departing for Istanbul to assume his new post as Ecumenical Patriarch. He kissed the President's forehead.

Before the Patriarch left, the President's desk phone rang. On the other end of the line was W. J. Pace, a farmer of Alamance County, N.C. Farmer Pace was calling because he is the proud owner of the one-millionth rural telephone installed by the Bell system since V-J day. He and the President chatted for a short time, and Mr. Truman learned that there are now 2,330,000 rural telephones in the U.S.

Also in the line of presidential duty, Harry Truman accepted a season pass for Washington's professional basketball team, the Capitals, and autographed a basketball for the team owner. He was given two rugs (gifts from the Australian Wool Board), eight plucked ducks (from an old friend just back from a hunting trip), a dozen violently red neckties and a white pine desk. In turn, he presented each member of his staff with a brown leather bookmark bearing a gold-embossed Christmas message : "I'd rather have peace than be president." He will not send out any official Christmas cards this year.

Christmas in Independence. By week's end neither Truman's patience nor stamina seemed to be ebbing. He still walked briskly home each night to Blair House with a briefcase full of homework. This week he would join daughter Margaret and wife Bess for his Christmas turkey dinner and a week's respite in the white frame house at 219 North Delaware Street in Independence. From there, on Christmas Eve, he will push a button which will light, by remote control, the Christmas tree on the south lawn of the White House. From there he will speak to the nation on Christmas Eve and then go back to his homework: his State of the Union speech and his budget message.

* Webb himself suggested that the President's salary be doubled, to $150,000 a year. Next day, Herbert Hoover told the subcommittee that even with a raise the high income tax would leave the President almost as hard up. He suggested that the presidential expense account be increased instead.

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