National Affairs: Fireworks & Fourth

Twenty-two years of shrewd, faithful political counsel to Franklin Roosevelt put Louis McHenry Howe into the White House in March 1933 as No. 1 Presidential Secretary. Two years later a combination of heart disease, pleurisy and asthma put the President’s best-loved, most-trusted adviser, supposedly dying, under an oxygen tent in his White House bedroom.

Last summer he dropped almost entirely out of the national spotlight when White House remodeling caused him to be removed to Washington’s Naval Hospital. Last week the approaching Presidential campaign brought Invalid Howe back briefly into the news when an Associated Pressman went to his hospital bed, interviewed him for the first time since he fell ill. Perched on an elbow, his pent-up thoughts tumbling out in a staccato jumble, the gnarled, gnome-like little oldster crackled:

“No one can forecast yet anything like what lines the campaign will take. . . . There’ll be less spellbinding, less soap-box stuff. . . . All the old issues have fallen down. Prohibition is out of the way, thank heavens. Tariff has simmered down to a compromise. . . . States’ rights—the Republicans are trying to steal our clothes on that issue. . . .

“Personal liberties? . . . Lord bless you, you can’t even sing in the bathtub in an apartment house without running the risk of a jail sentence. There is not much in our lives but what is bound by law. . . .

“The weakness of the present Republican management has been its disposition to shoot off all their fireworks now, instead of waiting for the campaign. That reminds me of the boy who gets so eager that he just has to buy a giant firecracker three days before the Fourth of July, and then on the night of the third he simply can’t stand it any longer and gets up and fires it off.”