The Politician

The 13-car special train clacked alongside the muddy, swollen Potomac, through the apple-green Appalachians and across the Midwestern flatlands into the West. At the end was a bulletproof special car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and inside it was pessimism-proof Harry Truman, bound for the hunt.

Abrim with amiability and the verbiage for threescore political speeches, the President was off on a 16-state, 6,400-mile tour. Officially he was going to dedicate Washington's Grand Coulee Dam; actually, he had taken to the hustings and the back platform once more to lay fire on the Republicans, resell his Fair Deal and solicit votes for the Democrats in 1950's off-year congressional elections. Traveling with all the trappings of campaign time (including Mrs. Truman and daughter Margaret, 19 White House aides, 57 newsmen), the President quickly fell into the relaxed, chatty mood of his victorious "whistle stop" tour of 1948.

At brief stops along the way he shook hands with local Democrats, accepted a batch of birthday cakes (on Monday he was 66) and traded good-natured sallies with trainside crowds. By the time he reached Galesburg, Ill., which had not been visited by a President since William McKinley stopped there in 1899, the President was drawing crowds and sniping away at the Republicans who opposed his foreign policy ("They can't see beyond their noses"). At Lincoln, Neb., in the heart of the farm belt, he got around to the first of nine formal speeches of the tour. Opposition to the Administration's Brannan Plan, said the President, was "the same kind of mudslinging, name-calling opposition that you hear every time we bring up a new proposal for the benefit of the people."

The firing from both sides was getting an early start. Republicans plotted specific answers to every Truman speech, stepped up their attacks on his snowballing budget deficit and the portside list of his Fair Deal. This time the President lacked a keynote as succinct as his "worst Congress in history" battle cry of 1948; Harold Stassen last week tried to give the Republicans as simple a credo to hurl back. "President Truman," said Stassen, "is the cleverest politician . . . and . . . the worst President ever to occupy the White House."

Harry just kept traveling, talking, shaking hands and looking for votes. He insisted with a smile that his exploration was nonpolitical. But, said Harry Truman, it takes a politician to become President.

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