National Affairs: Cheshire Exit

From the chaste portals of the White House executive offices last week emerged a figure which the dozens of news cameramen clustering around that famed entrance —and exit—were powerless to record. The figure was James Francis Burke, general counsel of Republican National Committee. What balked the photographers was that the Burke leave-taking of President Hoover’s inner political household was not a formal, visible occurrence but a gradual fading-out process, like Alice’s Cheshire cat, “beginning with the end of the tail and ending with the grin that remained some time after the rest of it had gone.”

Mr. Burke was going, he said, back to Pittsburgh to resume his long-neglected law practice. Added he with understandable pride: “I have been virtually officiating as chairman of the Republican National Committee. . . .”

Causes for Mr. Burke’s departure: 1) A new National Committee chairman (Claudius Hart Huston) who lets no one “officiate” for him; 2) A tendency to “leak” to newspapermen about President Hoover’s political troubles; 3) A cloud cast by Mrs. Willebrandt’s accusation, and never dispelled by his feeble denial, that Mr. Burke sanctioned her religio-political campaign speeches (TIME, Aug. 19); 4) Failure to deal successfully with Southern Hoovercrats; 5) A capacity for arousing antagonisms against the President among heterodox Senators.

¶The Cheshire-cat smile on Mr. Burke’s face as it faded from the White House picture was caused largely by one event: Otto Hermann Kahn, international banker and art patron, declined appointment by Senator George Higgins Moses to serve as treasurer of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (TIME, Nov. 4).