ARGENTINA: The President’s Wife

Argentines, among the most socially conservative of all Latins, had never seen anything like it. For them, a lady’s place —and that went for a first lady—was in the home. Now Eva Duarte de Perón, handsome ex-screen star wife of President Juan Perón, was changing all that.

Since the inauguration two months ago Eva de Perón had set a pace for which only Eleanor Roosevelt had set modern precedent. At her office on the fourth floor of the Central Post Office Building she received trade union delegations before her neighbors along the swank Avenida Alvear were out of bed. Nurses and teachers, quick to spot a militant feminist, mayors and cabinet ministers eager for Evita’s views on public issues, jammed her waiting rooms.

Often there was barely time for lunch with General Perón before the Presidenta had to be off again to make a speech. Last week, with air and shipping tycoon Alberto Dodero & wife, she flew north to keynote the Government’s anti-inflation campaign in the great grain port of Rosario.

Atomic Diplomacy. Evita is never happier than when sitting in on conferences to decide her husband’s labor policy. There have been rumors that she might become Latin America’s first female Secretary of Labor.

But all politics absorb Evita. Recently a Russian trade commissioner came to argue the merits of expanded Russo-Argentine trade. The Russian pressed his case but Perón played wary poker. “First of all I am an Argentine,” he said, “but second I am an americano.” “And besides,” Evita broke in, “the Americans have the atomic bomb.”

Staid Argentines, whose daughters still may not date without chaperones, could hardly be expected to swallow all this without an occasional harrumph. One oppositionist deputy introduced a bill in Congress to forbid public activity by officials’ wives. Earlier this month, naval cadets coughed so pointedly during a newsreel of Evita that their Peronist C.O. saw fit to expel over 20 of them. But the Argentine-in-the-street likes it.

If Evita could hold her grueling pace, she might start a revolution deeper than any her husband might lead.

And what did His Excellency think about the sign hung on a lamp post near his house: “This post is waiting for President Perón”? The President had a scornful, possibly significant answer. “I am not worried about the future,” he said. “If anybody wants to stage a revolution, I will stage one myself a week before him. All it will amount to is providing a few yards of rope to my ‘descamisados’ (shirtless ones) and then we will see who strings up who. I have half a million descamisados, and as Napoleon said, with me at their head we total one million.”

Then he added: “Governing is not my job. My job is fighting. I am better equipped for that.”

Wishful anti-Perónistas seized on the last remark as proof that he was slipping. Their points: he was having trouble holding his Nationalists, Radicals and Communists together; one of his best-known labor leaders had quarreled with him; his old nationalist tub-thumper, La Tribuna, this week broke with him for getting ready to sign up with the U.S.

But despite negligible results for his anti-inflation campaign, Juan Perón had not lost the support of the underprivileged classes who elected him. With a closely disciplined Army and an obedient majority in Congress, it looked as though he could go right on running the country the way he wanted it to run.