Eighth Inning

Lots of baseball fans, loyal rooters for the home team though they are, leave the game after the eighth inning to avoid the crush after the ninth. Last week that kind of discretion may have motivated the resignation of one of Franklin Roosevelt's most faithful and useful sub-Cabinet henchmen: chunky, chipmunk-cheeked Joseph Berry ("Joe") Keenan, 51, who was called from his profitable Cleveland law practice to assist Attorney-General Homer Cummings with criminal prosecutions at the peak of the Kidnap Era (1933) and who stayed on to become chief White House overseer of the Senate, especially in Federal judgeship appointments. Should the New Deal game end in late 1940 and hordes of its legal alumni come pouring out of the government grandstands to become Washington lawyers, lobbyists and the like, able Lawyer Keenan will have a long headstart on them.

Stories that Joe Keenan resigned because Boss Roosevelt would not make him, too, a Federal judge, were false as a gangster's oath. Fact was, Joe Keenan was offered a $12,500 judgeship and he declined it simply because that is not enough on which to send four children through college. Back in private practice, Lawyer Keenan can easily make several times $12,500 a year. His standing with the Janizariat is ace high. Yet because his unswerving efforts in the Supreme Court fight and the Purge were known to be based more on loyalty than conviction, he stands almost as well with anti-Administrationists. Irish, homely, blunt, honest Joe Keenan has a few enemies, but they are mostly behind bars or under sod, like Machine-Gun Kelly.

Another sub-Cabinet resignation of last week: socialite Wayne Chatfield Taylor as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, vice president of the Export-Import Bank. One reason: discomfort over the Administration's foreign-fiscal policy (loan to China, airplane procurement for France--see col. 2). Another reason: difficulty in getting along with Mr. Henry Morgenthau.

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