OCR Text |
Show KXj lifj DREW PEARSON )ollar-an-Hour Man IXTHEN and if Harry Truman VV leaves the White House, he rill have saved up until 1948 just ibout $4,000 a year out of the total .73,000 annual salary which the peo-ile peo-ile of the United States pay their (residents. In the year 1948, thanks o a Republican tax cut, Mr. Tru-nan Tru-nan will save more. The President sat down with pater pa-ter and pencil the other day and Igured that his Job as president had laid him only $1 an hour up until he GOP tax cut He estimated that, letting up early in the morning as te always does, he had averaged 1, 200 hours a year on the Job. After axes and other heavy expenses of mtertaining and travel, he saved 4,000 the first year and $4,200 the lecond or about one dollar an hour. However, In 1948, thanks to the Republican tax cut, his net Income will be $12,000. "And I vetoed that bill." chuckled the President. Today Mr. Truman is out on the uistings trying to break through his isual wall of bodyguards, servants ind secretaries in order to show he people his human side. The xuth is, that despite the steady itream of callers Truman receives laily and the reams written about lim, only a few close friends know he real man inside the White House. Actually, be is a lonesome man. Not many people know, for in-itance, in-itance, that Truman keeps two large inthologies of poems on a desk by lis bedside and, before dropping oft a sleep at night, likes to prop him-lelf him-lelf up in bed and read from the :lassics. His favorites are Shelley and Keats, but he can also recite at length from "Alice in Wonderland." One passage the President likes to quote is the Red Queen's remark to Alice: "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to teep in the same place." Truman also likes to read history especially the biographies and autobiographies au-tobiographies of his predecessors because, he told a friend, "It is men who make history." Historian Truman Truman's secret ambition is to write the history of his own administration, admin-istration, but it will have to wait until his term is finished. "There are times when I make np my mind I am going to do It and I start assembling my thoughts," he confided to a friend. "Then the pressure of work forces me to drop It. There Just aren't enough hours In the day." He complained that the public never knows the true history of a period until long after it is past and sometimes forgotten. "The trouble," he grumbled, "is that people have to depend on Drew Pearson and the Alsop brothers for their Information." As a boy the President used to crawl out of bed at 3 a. m. to practice prac-tice on the piano for two hours, and he still gets up early. He has more important things to do now. Presidential Peeve President Truman's pet peeve is the way Senator Ferguson of Michigan Michi-gan bat bandied the former war investigating in-vestigating committee. "I built that committee Into on of the finest on the bill," the President Presi-dent complained bitterly to an associate. as-sociate. "Since Ferguson has taken over, be made it into garbage company." MerryGoRound George Allen, ex-White - House jester, is reported pulling backstage wires to block the sale of the gov ernment's Cleveland blast furnace to Henry Kaiser. George, a director of Republic Steel, performed one ol the greatest political favors for Truman. Tru-man. He persuaded Elsenhower not to run for president. . . . Joe Jacobs, a career man, wfU be new U. S. ambassador am-bassador to Czechoslovakia. . . , The Republican national committee has hired Fred McLaughlin, high-powered high-powered Boston public relations man, to make a political survey in the so-called border states. . , . CIO officials believe that Communist-controlled and left-wing CIO unions will split off from the national organization organiza-tion by the end of 1948 and form an all-left-wing third party labor move menl Under the Dome Down-to-earth Army Chief of Stafl Omar Bradley isn't the kind who wll pull his rank even on an enlisted man. Not long ago a sergeant wai assigned to help Bradley move nm belongings to his new quarters. In stead of turning the job over en tlrely to the sergeant, General Brod ley pitched in' and helped haul tin baggage himself. In fact, Bradlc mode eight trips, the sergeant on I) seven. . . . President Truman hni told Intimates that if he's re-elected Secretary of the Army Royail won be around much. |