THE CABINET: Exit Johnson

Louis Arthur Johnson last week joined the company of men who once served Franklin Roosevelt. In that company (Lewis Douglas, John Garner, Raymond

Moley, Rex Tugwell, Jim Farley, John Hanes, et al.) were some of greater stature than the departed Assistant Secretary of War. But among them was none more loyal at the start, more bitter at the finish.

How loud, indiscreet Mr. Johnson was appointed Assistant Secretary in 1937 and told that he soon would be Secretary; how he and measeling Secretary Harry Hines Woodring were allowed to frustrate each other and the War Department for three racking years—even for gossipy Washington, this was a story too old, too petty in detail to bear extended repetition last week. What Washington did buzz about was the cynical climax of that story.

By law, the Assistant Secretary of War is no official underling. His responsibilities (for purchasing Army equipment, planning to mobilize the U. S. man-&-money-power for war) outweigh those of most full-fledged Cabinet members. That Assistant Secretary Johnson, despite his sundry deficiencies, had done a standout job, one of his harshest critics (Columnist Hugh Johnson) admitted last week. That Louis Johnson’s new boss, Republican Secretary Henry Lewis Stimson, should not want to keep an ambitious, embittered assistant was understandable. That the President at such a stage of Defense (see p. 17) should have tossed out the one War Department executive who knew most about the job was not so understandable.

Yet Franklin Roosevelt encouraged gullible Mr. Johnson to go to the Democratic Convention in Chicago last fortnight, put out feelers for the Vice-Presidential nomi nation, go down ignominiously with 16 others of the faithful who were sacrificed to Henry Wallace (see p. 12). Disillusioned Mr. Johnson crawled back to Washington. There he wrote a letter to “My Dear Mr. President,” black with reminders that at the President’s request he had passed up his last chance to resign with dignity when Henry Stimson was appointed; that “my Commander in Chief and longtime friend” now left no alternative but resignation. Louis Johnson sighed that he would go back to his law practice (in Clarksburg, W. Va.), signed himself “obediently yours,” hopped off to California in an Army plane.

Mr. Roosevelt in a reply to “Dear Louis” regretfully accepted, said that he did so only at Mr. Stimson’s instance, then actually invited Louis Johnson, who could not work under Mr. Stimson, to work over him as a Presidential assistant (“my eyes and ears . . . reporting to me on the continuing progress of the entire national defense program”). Offhand, it did not look as if there were a spot where aggressive Mr. Johnson’s talents would be of less use, or where his equal talent for getting in other people’s hair would wreak greater havoc with the Defense program.

New Man. Every Assistant Secretary of War since 1921 has been a veteran of World War I and an American Legionnaire ; all but two have been lawyers. Louis Johnson’s successor failed to fill these requirements in one notable respect: Robert Porter Patterson, although he belongs to the Legion, is in no sense “a Legion man” in a job which the Legion long since took for its own. Major Patterson was decorated for bravery in the A. E. F., served in the same division with, but barely knew, Colonel Henry Stimson. After World War I, when both were distinguished attorneys in Manhattan, they became firm friends. Soon after Henry Stimson became Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State, able Republican Robert Patterson was appointed to the U. S. District bench in New York. Franklin Roosevelt last year upped him to the Second (New York, Connecticut, Vermont) Circuit Court of Appeals to succeed Judge Robert Manton, convicted of conspiring to sell decisions of his court.

Now 49, Judge Patterson was wearing an Army private’s blue fatigue overalls when he got his new job last week. In fact he was on the lowest detail which an Army private can get: kitchen police (taking out garbage, chopping wood) at the Plattsburg training camp. Colonel James I. Muir, the camp commander, forthwith ordered him out of the kitchen, was relieved to catch K. P. Patterson just before he began his menial chore.

By most accounts, Robert Patterson’s appointment was a good choice. But the new Assistant Secretary will have to hump himself to do credit to Franklin Roosevelt for making a change at such a time. Said Columnist Hugh Johnson: “It [the Assistant-Secretaryship] is no task for an amateur. . . . It would take a new man a year even to get the feel of it. We have no years to spare—not even days.”