THE PRESIDENCY: Pink Frosting & Champagne

Secret Servicemen clustered about a big mansion on Washington’s ornate Embassy Row one night last week like drones attending the queen bee. Inside, in the rococo, tapestry-hung ballroom of Anderson House, the President of the United States sat beaming before a heap of ten-cent-store toys and a big pink and gold cake topped by three candles. He puffed once and blew them out. The 70-odd guests—the Cabinet, some of the Supreme Court, the White House guard and their wives—applauded happily. House Speaker Sam Rayburn proposed a toast (in domestic champagne) to the future.

For four years Attorney General Tom Clark had given the party on Harry Truman’s birthday. This was the biggest one of all. Court Jester George Allen, deep in the Truman doghouse last summer for his pro-Eisenhower antics, was out again and sniffing the friendly presidential air for the first time in months. He sat pleased and smiling at Harry Truman’s own table. New York’s Mayor William O’Dwyer, another doghouse tenant in pre-convention days, also had slipped back into the family. Ailing Les Biffle, Senate Secretary and a pal of many birthdays’ standing, left his bed at the Bethesda Naval Hospital just to be there.

While the guests sipped & supped at ten round tables, Concert Pianist Jose Iturbi and Barriee Breeskin, one of Washington society’s favorite orchestra leaders, took turns at the piano. After the last toast, the President strolled to the piano himself, rendered a competent Paderewski Minuet in G and a work of Chopin whose title escaped him. General George Marshall and Presidential Adviser John Steelman joined the three piano players for a friendly argument about music. “I’m nuts about Chopin,” said the President.

At his 65th birthday party Harry Truman looked and acted like a man who had few qualms about the future. Congress was acting up again (see The Congress) and he still had four tough years ahead in the White House. But at 65, the President seemed to be in better shape than when he took office four years ago. “The President,” proclaimed the White House physician, Brigadier General Wallace Graham, “is as close to being an iron man as anyone I know at his age.”

The next day, Harry Truman gave his pastor at the First Baptist Church his own explanation for his robust health: “I’ve had to work so hard all my life I’ve never had time to get into mischief, and that accounts for it.”

Last week the President also:

¶ Presented the annual $10,000 Collier’s magazine awards for “distinguished congressional service” to Democratic Speaker Sam Rayburn and Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg. (Rayburn gave his prize money to his home town of Bonham, Tex. for a library; Vandenberg gave his to the Park Congregational Church of Grand Rapids, Mich, as a memorial to his mother.)

¶ Nominated Princeton’s Professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, author of the famed Smyth Report on atomic energy, and the University of Southern California’s Professor Gordon Evans Dean, onetime law partner of Connecticut’s Senator Brien McMahon, to fill the existing vacancies on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.