Nationwide, support had been building for Republican Senator Warren Austin of Vermont.

It was expected that the President would appoint a Republican to replace Justice Owen Roberts who was one of only two original Republican nominees remaining on the Court, the other being Chief Justice Harlan Stone, appointed by President Coolidge and elevated to Chief by FDR in 1941. But Senator Austin was 67 years old and lacked judicial experience.

On the basis of experience, offers the piece, Judge Parker could give Senator Austin "cards and spades and jokers and right and left bowers".

The local endorsement was mindful of the fact that there were local favorites everywhere abroad the country, and also that the Judge had once been rejected for the position in a particularly humiliating and unjustified manner, accusing him of racism and being opposed to organized labor.

When Judge Parker was defeated for the nomination by a single vote, Justice Roberts was appointed to the vacancy.

As indicated, the appointment would go to Republican Senator Harold Burton of Ohio.

The editorial doubts that such a move would suddenly cause workers to leave more lucrative jobs to join the textile industry, at the bottom of the wage ladder.

"And with the industry, of course, is caught the South."

The Army was so large and complex that it was impossible to calculate fully its needs and its leadership always took this uncertainty into account in issuing orders or establishing procurement quotas of any sort.

The Army Air Forces had 2.3 million men on V-E Day and calculated the need for 2.13 million men for the Pacific war. But it also determined to place 80 percent of the combat veterans, air and ground crews, on duty assignments in the United States.

The Army, it opines, should be held more closely accountable to its actual needs, lest the men who had fought in the war be maintained in uniform for the ensuing five years.

Yet, in the United States, the Army could not release men into the coal mines to provide the necessary supplemental coal to send to Europe for the winter. Nor could the Army discharge transportation personnel to aid in redeployment of the soldiers. Nor had doctors been brought home from Europe. The Army was not bringing back men in the correct order of priorities for needs at home.

Senator Lucas of Illinois suggests that if Senator Ferguson had been running the War Department, then all of these matters would have neatly been taken care of. It was easy, he said, to tear down a house, but not so easy to build one.

A similar mood appeared to prevail in America.

In light of that concern, Mr. Pearson posits that President Truman may have made his first major mistake by appointing War Mobilizer Fred Vinson to the post of Secretary of Treasury and replacing him with John W. Snyder, St. Louis banker and friend of the President. Mr. Snyder, though an able banker, had no experience with the kind of complexity demanded by this job. He had not even become familiar with the terminology of reconversion.

A sudden end to the war in the Pacific could spell severe economic problems, the worst since the Great Depression.

He next turns to an Independence homecoming given to the President by the Mayor of the town when the President had returned for the first time as President, on his way back from the San Francisco Conference in late June. A hundred or so townspeople had gathered at the Mayor's home to greet the President. Among them was the seven-year old daughter of the assistant counselor for the Jackson County Court, to whom the President had said: "I'm particularly happy to meet you."

The next morning, Mrs. Truman, reading of this encounter, called up all the people in town who had children and told them that the President would be glad to meet with their children also.

He next addresses various and sundry items, including the embarrassing situation at the special training center for the Army medical corps in Illinois, at which a general had suddenly collapsed of a stroke. When the ambulance was summoned by the Surgeon General of the Army, it was found to have no stretcher aboard.

Mr. Pearson also advises new British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin to examine Arpad Plesch, a director of I. G. Farben who had conducted questionable transactions on behalf of Germany in Switzerland during the war. The Churchill Government had not wanted to remove him from the black list despite protestations from the State Department. Mr. Bevin might wish to consider it.

The Committee wanted the new War Mobilizer, John W. Snyder, to supervise all Government agencies concerned with reconversion. But to accomplish the job meant greatly expanding the office, and that was undesirable at this stage of the war.

The War Department had been resistant to reconversion efforts, complicating the job of the War Mobilizer, charged now primarily with the responsibility of reconversion. The War Department had also hoarded machine tools needed for reconversion.

The Navy Department had been more cooperative in the process, as Secretary Forrestal had arranged for a series of cutbacks in Navy personnel and ships to take into account a one-front war. Even the Naval strength in the Pacific was greatly in excess of that now needed.

The President would have to face this problem upon his return from Potsdam. The Mead Committee had pointed out that a sudden end to the Pacific war could mean disaster economically for the nation. And Europe was in need of coal for the winter, requiring an increase in American production.

Should Secretary of War Stimson resign, as had been rumored he soon would, then a new Secretary would need to work with Mr. Snyder to provide manpower for adequate transportation, to provide miners for the coal mines, and to assess the manpower needs of the Army, with an eye at dramatic reduction to supply these exiguous areas of civilian employment.

Congress had gone home for two months as these matters lay in abeyance. Mr. Grafton suggests that especially conservatives, with their concerns over the supposed leftward drift of the world, surely would have wanted to assure provision of the hungry to avoid the tendency toward revolt.

America was producing only 570 million tons of coal when it could produce 700 million tons, and Europe only needed 25 million tons to meet its basic winter needs. Congress could have considered this problem, along with the request of Harold Ickes that the military discharge 30,000 miners to meet these needs, but, instead, they had departed Washington until October.

The war with Japan could end in the interim and the Congress had not yet acted upon the President's request for $25 per week in unemployment insurance for displaced war workers.

As in a great Western drama, the villain had been killed in the dusty streets, and the story was considered done, the tombstone erected on Boothill, and the townspeople left to live happily ever after, free from the desperadoes.

But the Congress had refused to check to see that it was in fact the case. Instead, they had simply left the theater.

But, he says, these booming sounds were as nothing to that heard in 1883 from an island in the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra in the South Pacific. On August 26 of that year, a volcano erupted on Krakatoa, which became a massive explosion the next day at 4:00 a.m. It erupted with the loudest sound ever recorded in history, heard without amplification by the officers at the British naval base in the Indian Ocean 3,000 miles away, as well as by thousands of Australians and the passengers and crews of all the ships at sea at the time in the Pacific.

A ship approaching Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America reported a 50-foot wave moving eastward at a gallop, as well hearing a tremendous crash at the moment the volcano had erupted seven thousand miles distant.

The island of Krakatoa, before the eruption having been 3,000 feet above sea level, was submerged 1,000 feet below sea level.