THE ADMINISTRATION: Paid in Full

As far back as Inauguration week, Harry Truman had privately told his new Secretary of Defense to start boning up on the job. But the columnists’ vicious attacks on incumbent Secretary James Forrestal held the President’s announcement up: he would not let Forrestal leave under fire. Last week, with the heat off, Harry Truman finally accepted Forrestal’s resignation with an appreciative “Dear Jim” note. Then the President formally picked as Forrestal’s successor big, beefy Louis Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt’s onetime Assistant Secretary of War and the Democrats’ deserving fund-raiser in the campaign of 1948.

The departure of Jim Forrestal closed the door on the last Cabinet member Harry Truman inherited from Roosevelt, and one of Washington’s ablest officials. Forthright Jim Forrestal had angered the Zionists, embarrassed Democratic strategists with his Wall Street background, and refused to politick for Harry Truman in the 1948 campaign.

The Strapped Democrats. On the last score, at least, no one could criticize the qualification of Secretary-to-be Louis Johnson, whose appointment had made the most powerful job in the Cabinet one of the spoils of politics. A lifelong Democrat, he had never wavered through years of being passed by. Balked of one promised gift when Franklin Roosevelt reached over his head to make Republican Henry Stimson Secretary of War, balked again when Henry Wallace got the White House blessing for Vice President in 1940, Johnson stayed in there, ready to pitch for the party when he was called from the bench.

Last fall, when he was called, he took on the apparently hopeless task of rebuilding the Democrats’ dwindling bank balance. He coaxed a whopping $1,500,000 out of contributors. Early this year, a grateful Harry Truman recalled: “There were times in this campaign when we were pretty well strapped. We couldn’t buy radio time; we couldn’t even pay for transportation. But we did get Louis Johnson interested . . . and from the time he began operations we were able to make the necessary tours and get some of the radio time necessary.”

The Big Joiner. Flamboyant Louis Johnson, 58, has been performing such useful chores ever since he first hung out his law shingle in Clarksburg, W. Va. 37 years ago. At 26 he was the Democratic majority floor leader of the West Virginia House of Delegates. He returned from World War I as an infantry captain, soon became a $40,000-a-year corporation lawyer. But he never strayed far from politics.

Glad-handing Louis Johnson was a big joiner; he became Exalted Ruler of the Elks, president of Rotary, national commander of the American Legion. In the Legion he first came to Franklin Roosevelt’s notice by silencing a Legion outcry when Roosevelt cut veterans’ pensions in 1933. After ex-Governor Harry Woodring of Kansas became Secretary of War in 1936, Roosevelt called fire-eating Louis Johnson in as his assistant, in charge of all procurement and industrial mobilization.

Good-natured, ineffectual Harry Woodring, an Oxford Grouper and an isolationist, seemed unable to grasp the imminence of war, proved to be an ineffective Secretary. Harry Woodring’s inaction and Louis Johnson’s burning desire for the job precipitated a three-year running feud between the two top men in the War Department.

But Johnson plugged hard and faithfully for all-out preparedness at a time when security was often confused with warmongering. He worked out an industrial mobilization plan (which was belatedly adopted in essence after Pearl Harbor), stumped the country cataloguing factories for war work and issuing pilot orders to get things started.

More Power. No military statesman, but a driving, competent administrator, Johnson never truckled to service brass, took a personal delight in weeding out the Army’s overgrown system of orderlies and “dog-robbers.” He proved to be a shrewd, if heavyhanded, diplomat on a wartime mission to India.

In his new job, Louis Johnson would probably look with a kinder eye than ex-Navy Secretary Forrestal on Air Force expansion plans. But he had promised to stick by Harry Truman’s 48-group limit, and could also be expected to crack down hard on interservice bickering.

He would have plenty of authority to do it, if Harry Truman had anything to say about it. In a message to Congress at week’s end, the President asked for power to make his new Secretary boss of the armed services in fact as well as name. The President also wanted a permanent chairman to settle the continual postwar wranglings of the joint chiefs of staff. Whether increased authority would give hulking Louis Johnson the stature to fill little Jim Forrestal’s shoes was another question.