The conferees in the White House study of President Willmoore Wheeler had all put on longer faces than the President’s beard. The President’s removal of troops and economic aid from Europe still brought quivers from the carcass of the old and very dead foreign policy whose bureaucrats, like a mass of maggots, scrambled for their very lives in search of more durable hosts. But what he proposed now seemed calculated to bury the remaining fleshpots, and the faces of his counsellors were a gaunt anticipation of famine.
You will remember that President Wheeler was a compromise candidate of the Democratic Party; he did not seem to realize that this meant he should be prepared to compromise himself. He had been a professor, and was blessed with a cherubic countenance, though he had a weakness running to Staffordshire cats and chocolate malted milks. Congress was due to meet a fortnight hence, and in the weeks past various stalwarts of the Party had prepared for the President his State of the Union message, explaining to him, point-by point, what his demands would be for a constructive, social, enlightened and equitable legislative program. Mr. Walter Reuther had forwarded an outline for a revised labor law which was calculated to revise most everybody’s idea of law. The indestuctible widow of a former Demoratic President had contributed the suggestion that copies of the various eulogies recently churned out on her be sent to expectant mothers under the sponsorship of the Department of Health, Welfare and Faretheewealth. There were other suggestions of great merit.
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