mi urn i .1 I l I Jill . I . nii iwrnmrnmAMfimtJ President Talks-Every one Wants to Get in on the Act By BAUKHAGE News Analyst and Commentator WASHINGTON. The colonel was talking to the general, It was obvious that the general was as bored as his secretary looked, her interrupted .dictation on her crossed knee, which she uncrossed as the general's eye wandered. The colonel was the array's No. 1 specialist on the super-gadget which was about to revolutionize warfare, as the colonel could (and would, if he got a chance) tell you. The colonel knew the history of the r- M i " 111- -.-w... " gadget's develop-' develop-' ment from its crude semi - gis- 4 mo stage . when, primitive as it I was, it caused J the entire re-or-.1 ganization of the 3 tactics of the .5 knights under i Otto the great, 5 first King of the Germans. He could trace its evolution down President Truman got a little peeved recently over the same line of columnar chatter and began be-gan to "let it be known" that he could write himself. Of eourse, all presidents get advice, counsel, assistance and inspiration from many men of many minds. Of course, there are humanitarians and grammarians, stylists and Carlyle-ists, lexicographers and geographers, economists and agronomists, Russians, Prussians and Persians upon whom be can call if the need arises. And somehow or other, each and all, if they but contribute one jot or tittle to the sacred paper, think they wrote the whole or at least the stenographer who had to take down all the stuff hopefully offered for possible presidential use thinks so, and tells her friends about it confidentially. The problem of presidential speeches is much to the fore these days for this reason: President Truman and his advisers, despite the rebel yells, the wails of the defeatists, the triumphant roar of the elephant and the ominous hoof-beats hoof-beats of the polls as they Gallup downhill, still believe he has a fighting chance to return in November Novem-ber to the White House, and he intends to fight for it. The President is going on a speaking tour of the West of course, it isn't a campaign, that would be undignified and immodest before the convention has asked. He will speak under no "political sponsorship." But he will speak and he is going to ad lib, as we say in the trade. Even if we hadn't had our ears conditioned for 12 long years by the golden voice that breathed over the firesides, the un- through the days of delicate interplay inter-play when it broke up the Empire of Charlemagne, and on down to the fall of Stalingrad. The colonel had brought the general gen-eral about up to the third Punic war and the secretary was wiggling. wig-gling. The general himself had begun to fumble with form 2A-3064-B29. The colonel realized that he was rapidly losing his audience. So he raised his voice so that file clerks in the next office stopped filing (their fingernails) and looked up. "By the way, General," he remarked confidentially, "Did ' you know that I'm writing the President's next speech? The one he delivers to the Inter-Planetary association?" The general's secretary perked up . . . the general raised an eyebrow eye-brow . . . the colonel smiled . . . At about the same hour, over in the Metropolitan club, a very dapper young man from the division divi-sion of the Far, Near and Middle East and expert in economic-ethic-pathology, was sipping a thin scotch-and-soda which his chief had just ordered. His chief was bored. "By the way, Chief," he said in a whisper so loud that even the waiters stopped looking respectful ; and listened: "I'm writing the President's next speech at the Inter-Planetary Inter-Planetary association's conference." confer-ence." In four other places, four other young experts were telling their bosses the same thing. All were perfectly honest, all were believed, and in 20 minutes or so, stenog-, stenog-, i raphers, clerks, messengers, wait ers and cab drivers were pointing out "the guy who writes the Presi dent's speeches." All this has been going on, I suppose, in world capitals since before somebody else thought he had codified the code of Hammurabi. Ham-murabi. What really happens is this: The President calls in one of his more literary secretaries all of them are literate, but not all literary liter-ary (some those whose duties are conversing with politicians, don't have to be too literate). The President Presi-dent says to the literary one: "Bill, in this speech I have to write for the Inter-Planetary conference, con-ference, I'm going to mention the super-gadget, and I want to touch on the current economic and social situation in Beluria, also there are some erosion statistics I need, and some data on the problems which i arose as a result of the Whiskey Rebellion." "Okeh, Chief," says the literary liter-ary secretary, and on his way oratorical oratory of Harry Truman when he reads a speech, be it ever so humble, never would be mistaken mis-taken for the vox humana or the angels' chorus. But when Harry Truman gets up and talks, he's very human, very sensible, and not altogether un-persuasive. un-persuasive. So from now on, he's going to speak extemporaneously, no matter how much preparation it takes. He showed what he could do without with-out notes or manuscript (and without with-out learning by rote) when he addressed the newspaper publishers publish-ers and the Gridiron club in April, and again in May when he talked off-the-cuff to the national conference confer-ence on family life in Washington. And since such speeches aren't written, nobody can say he wrots them for him. 'Will to Peace' Finds Expression Next month a "national conference confer-ence for the prevention of World War III" will be held on the campus cam-pus of Grinnell college in Iowa.' The purpose is to present a "definite, concrete working plan to prevent a third world war; methods which can be presented to the two national political conventions at Philadelphia." The roster of speakers will include in-clude representatives of many of the organizations now working for a single sovereign, world organization. back to his office, he begins j classifying, according to depart- I ments, the people he thinks may I have the facts or the people who will know who knows somebody who has the facts. He either I phones or dictates a brief memo j to these people, requesting not more than one page from each on the subjects indicated. Highly-pleased young and old men, on receipt of the memo or : phone call, begin leafing through their research libraries and die-i die-i ' tating to their secretaries. In two days, a number of large packages I are delivered to the White House j via special messengers. The liter- ' ary secretary curses and sets to work boiling down a 24-page thesis on the progression of tau-mute from the Sanskrit et elia to a sentence sen-tence and a half which he has his stenographer type into the rough draft of the speech which the President has dictated and sent to him for the purpose. Franklin Roosevelt became angered an-gered because columnists persisted In "revealing" which confidential adviser wrote the last speech he delivered, whatever it was, that he once showed us the actual draft of a speech he had dictated and writ-! writ-! ten, and re-written as was his custom. In fact, the last-minute revising of Roosevelt's Interlined ! manuscripts often went on while newshounds growled In the outer office and mimeographers stood by to handle the finally-okayed iheeU in "takes." Meanwhile Winston Churchill is hammering steadily at his purpose pur-pose of building a United States of Europe. Although the Attlee government gov-ernment has not approved the idea, the prime minister himself has spoken words of encouragement encourage-ment regarding the formation of a real federalization of the western west-ern union. Attlee even went so far as to say that Britain was willing to sacrifice her sovereignty in part to bring it about, although he qualified the promise by saying the time was not yet ripe for such a step. But Churchill wants to strike now. He received considerable support from the unofficial gathering gath-ering in the Hague a forum, they called it composed of representatives representa-tives of the Marshall plan countries, coun-tries, plus exiled leaders. Churchill's proposals and the Grinnell conference are both part of the tremendous "will to peace" that currently is finding expression. Perhaps eventually we will learn that great lesson of history to yield the sovereignty that causes wars to the kind of sovereignty that allows not only the other freedoms free-doms to the individual but which, also will give him freedom from the FEAR of war. Just as the federalization of the separate colonies col-onies made the citizen of the state of New York free from the fear of war with the state of Pennsylvania a situation possible because both recognize a higher sovereignty the United States government