Vacation Spoiled

Smiling Bill Boyle, the Democratic national committee chairman, rolled into California last week in happy anticipation. The hooting about his using his influence to get RFC loans had all but quieted down, and here he was in the sunshine. There would be just enough politics mixed with vacation to add the spice a politician needs. Then the lid came off with the shaker, and Boyle got enough spice to make him gag.

On the day he arrived, the James Roosevelt left wing of the California Democratic Party rushed through the Democratic State Executive Committee a resolution endorsing Harry Truman for reelection. That sounded pretty good to Boyle, so he trotted off to a jamboree sponsored by the left wing. There he posed for pictures beating a tom-tom, beside Navy Secretary Dan A. Kimball, who was wearing a gay Indian headgear. Conspicuously absent from the happy throng were Oilman Ed Pauley and Rancher George Luckey, two of the wealthiest Democrats in California. Pauley and Luckey had been good & true friends of Harry Truman in 1948, when Jimmy Roosevelt was trying to dump Truman and stampede the Democrats to Eisenhower.

The Pauley-Luckey right wing, fighting the Roosevelt crowd, was planning its own big jamboree in October, at which it hoped to raise $200,000. If Boyle insisted on recognizing the Roosevelt wing, Pauley-Luckey men might keep their checkbooks closed. Luckey voiced a thinly veiled threat that sounded more like the call of a banker than a rancher. Said he: "It's going to be hard to raise funds if we have to use the left-wingers for collateral." Stephen L. Wells, Truman's 1948 campaign director in Southern California, was more explicit: "We will either set up our own machinery ... or take a walk."

Since Truman in 1948 had only a narrow (17,865) margin of victory in California, this threat took the sunshine out of Bill Boyle's heart. His golf game suffered as he stuck close to a telephone, trying to reach Rancher Luckey. Boyle kept getting the answer that Luckey was "busy."

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