Scandalous Spats

Room No. 2034 m Washington's Munitions Building is the office of Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring. A few paces down the hall is the office of Assistant Secretary of War Louis Arthur Johnson. Their lairs might as well be in separate buildings. For Messrs. Woodring and Johnson never visit each other. Only when absolutely necessary do they speak to each other. When official business requires them to communicate, they do so in writing or through harried subordinates. Mr. Johnson despises Mr. Woodring. Mr. Woodring distrusts and despises Mr. Johnson, who for 27 months has gunned for Mr. Woodring's job.

When the U. S. Army was a peacetime starveling, this Kilkenny cat-spat was just another bureaucratic brawl. With war abroad, rearmament aswing, and the Army in expensive expansion, the case of Woodring v. Johnson is now a stench in Washington. Last week Franklin Roosevelt took a look at the war in his War Department, let the public have a peek, and, after a year's scandalous delay seemed to be about to end it. Up to last week he actually did no more about it than he had since he first turned mild little Mr. Woodring and big, explosive Mr. Johnson loose on each other.

The only war concerning the President was Depression I when Harry Woodring came out of Kansas to be Assistant Secretary in 1933. When Secretary of War George H. Dern died in 1936, President Roosevelt was in the midst of a re-election campaign and the easy thing to do was up Harry Woodring. In 1937, having failed to work up much enthusiasm for mild Mr. Woodring, the President chose for Assistant Secretary a go-getting West Virginia lawyer and Legionnaire, Louis Johnson. Reports that Mr. Johnson had been promised his boss's job soon reached the newspapers and the boss. Secretary Woodring thereupon set himself to keeping his job and getting rid of Mr. Johnson, bringing to that effort a hitherto unsuspected vigor. Assistant Secretary Johnson set himself to running the War Department, acting very much like a No. 2 man who had been made No. i in all but title.

Used though they are to their private brand of internal politics, Army men are taught to expect at least a show of decent order at the top. The indecent disorder at the top of the War Department improved neither their morale nor their respect for civilian democracy. Two years between his upper and nether bosses brought Chief of Staff Malin Craig near to distraction and collapse before he got out last June and turned his cross over to brilliant, patient General George Catlett Marshall.*

As though dissension in the War Department were not enough, Washington recently was treated to one of the strangest episodes in New Deal Fantasia. The President's undercover men (Janizaries Corcoran & Cohen) began to shoot at Louis Johnson who all along had been trustfully waiting for the President to make peace by giving him Harry Woodring's place.

Mr. Roosevelt last week fired two barrels at unhappy Mr. Johnson, unhappily for the War Department did not fire either Mr. Johnson or Mr. Woodring. Somewhat musty ammunition for the first shot was supplied by Secretary Woodring himself. At a Cabinet meeting he brought to Mr. Roosevelt's attention a book which appeared last August with an approving foreword by Louis Johnson. Adjusting Your Business to War is a handbook for industrialists, based on a now outmoded plan for mobilizing their resources in wartime. Mr. Roosevelt publicly remarked that no book on Army, Naval or kindred subjects bears the administration imprimatur, that 90% of the writers on such subjects do not know what they are writing about.*

The second shot was fired over Louis Johnson at the War Resources Board which, with the approval of the President, Assistant Secretary Johnson had too hastily created last summer (TIME, August 21). Mr. Johnson had announced that this board after reviewing his 1939 plan for industrial mobilization would continue to serve, would become in wartime an all-powerful War Resources Administration. Last week the President announced that W. R. B. will make one report to him and then promptly disband. Chortled Harry

Woodring: "We are not setting up any war boards or war machinery and, as far as I am concerned, I hope we never will."

Discredited Mr. Johnson canceled an engagement to address the American Legion in Chicago (see p. 17) and dashed to Washington, where his colleagues were waiting to see whether he would resign. When he showed himself at the War Department, he did not act or look like a whipped pup in the doghouse. He apparently had a chance to subside into the War Department's No. 2 position, no discernible chance to replace Harry Woodring when & if the President finds a satisfactory successor. Attorney General Frank Murphy was offered the War portfolio, turned it down. An oft-mentioned possibility: New York City's LaGuardia.

Crisis in Crisis. All this crystallized an issue far more momentous than personal discord in the War Department. That issue was: Who is going to run U. S. War Economy--New Dealers or Businessmen, "Liberals" or "Conservatives?"

The President's appointments to the War Resources Board roused a whole closetful of undefined, murmured fears among the New Dealers now running Washington. Chairman of the Board was Edward R. Stettinius Jr.--also chairman of U. S. Steel. Serving with him were no Laborites, no Little Businessmen, no Janizaries. Instead, there were such Big Businessmen as A. T. & T.'s Walter Gifford, General Motors' John Lee Pratt, Sears, Roebuck's General Robert E. Wood, Manhattan Banker John Milton Hancock. Here, to the shaken Janizariat, was sinister evidence that Franklin Roosevelt, in advance of war, had turned elsewhere for counsel. When Louis Johnson announced that Mr. Stettinius as chairman of W. R. B. would wield vast administrative powers in wartime, the evidence seemed to be overwhelming: the New Deal would be shelved for the duration of any war.

By disbanding W. R. B. last fortnight, the President did not end this crisis within a crisis. But at a time when he needed a maximum of accord among those immediately around him, he did achieve at least an armistice, a lull in a war that will some time be fought to a finish.

To him and to the U. S., the question: who would run the U. S. in time of war? was vital. But that question alone did not move him to act last week. The President was in a peculiar and exasperating position. For on him, to his pained surprise, was hung the tag of J. P. Morgan & Co. Mr. Stettinius and at least three of his fellow boardmen, it was being said, were present or onetime minions of the House of Morgan. By itself this circumstance would have been a nine-day wonder to be pondered and forgotten, along with Mr. Roosevelt's sundry other and short-lived flirtations with Business. What made it a crumb under the President's collar last week was the great debate on Neutrality in Congress (see p. 15).

Isolationist Senators were whetting their knives for his "Morgan Board." By disbanding it, minimizing its report, and chiding its sponsor, Louis Johnson, the President in time's nick snatched a deadly weapon from his foes in the Senate. About all they had left to hit him with then was the reasonable supposition that Big Steel's Stettinius will be back on the pre-war scene in Washington at some more politic time.

*General Marshall's army last week passed its 150th birthday, despite its feuding civilians marched right on with Rearmament. *Asked whether he supplied this piece of ammunition to his friend Mr. Woodring, Columnist-Commentator Boake Carter said: "The safest answer is no."

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