Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Office of Price Administration director Chester Bowles was rumored to be on the verge of ouster from the Administration. Rumors had been circulating since late the prior week that he would become the new Economic Stabilizer. Mr. Bowles commented that he doubted the rumor regarding his ouster.

Meanwhile, the wage-price formula for ending the steel strike, thought to be close to agreement, had hit a snag when a question arose as to whether the $5 per ton allowed price hike should apply to alloy steel, representing only a quarter of steel production, as well as carbon steel.

Tugboat operators in New York returned to work after an agreement had been reached to submit their grievances to arbitration. Life in Gotham returned largely to normal, with schools again open and all transit facilities operating.

The Senate Labor Committee approved a 65-cent per hour minimum wage for all businesses earning more than $500,000 annual gross income or having more than four units. The previous minimum wage had been 40 cents per hour.

President Truman was considering his options for a new appointee to replace Harold Ickes as Secretary of Interior. Future Supreme Court Justice and 1968 nominee to become Chief Justice, Abe Fortas, former Undersecretary of Interior, was slated to testify to the Senate as to his knowledge of the offer by Ed Pauley of a $300,000 campaign contribution in exchange for the Government withdrawing its claims to offshore oil reserves. Mr. Fortas, according to Mr. Ickes, had been present when Mr. Pauley made the offer. That President Truman had questioned whether Mr. Ickes was mistaken about the matter had been the primary impetus behind the resignation the day before by Mr. Ickes.

Drew Pearson offers a piece regarding the resignation and adds that another basis for it was that Mr. Ickes had favored the nomination of Dillon Myer to become his Assistant Secretary, considered an excellent choice, but then found it submitted to Robert Hannegan, Democratic National Committee chair, for his assessment. The fact had irritated Mr. Ickes who believed such appointments ought be above partisan politics.

Mr. Pearson adds that several remaining Roosevelt men inside the Government had become increasingly displeased with President Truman, his recent appointments, and his continuing indecision on the wage-price formula to resolve the strikes.

The U.N. was nearing the end of its first session, but the Security Council was slated to continue to meet after adjournment of the General Assembly meeting. The Security Council the previous night had resolved the issue of Indonesia and had agreed to consider the complaint against France and Great Britain brought by the Levant States, Syria and Lebanon.

In Buenos Aires, Col. Juan Peron stated in an interview that the United States State Department blue book released February 11 had been the product of Assistant Secretary of State and former Ambassador to Argentina Spruille Braden and his attempt to cast Argentina in an unfavorable light. Col. Peron contended that the U.S. had engaged in a spy operation in Latin America under the "Braden plan" which had rivaled the espionage of Nazi Germany.

Navy Secretary James Forrestal and chief of staff Admiral Chester Nimitz testified before the Senate Naval Committee that the Navy would be the best line of defense against nuclear attack, with carriers able to deploy planes in a variety of locations. Admiral Nimitz posited that submarines in the future would be the best means of delivery of atomic weapons.

Hal Boyle reports from Bombay of two types of Britons serving in India, those who only wanted to earn enough to retire to England, and those who came to love India and wished to make it their home. He had met two men, one of each type, with some 20 years experience each in India. The first said that he felt like howling when he returned to the "bloody country" after a six-month leave. He preferred "smoky, dirty, dear old London".

The other was a mechanical and electrical engineer who helped build locomotives and place them in service. Unlike his counterpart of the return-to-England school, he had learned Hindustani and several Indian dialects. He had also absorbed many Hindu beliefs, such as the notion that eating beef made one coarse and animal-like. He believed that Britain had sent too many selfish opportunists to India, some of whom had been in the country for 25 years and had never spoken to an Indian except their servants. They led sheltered lives and might as well have been living in Kensington. India needed men who could understand the culture and empathize with the people. He had lived for two things, a Labor Government, as now installed, and a free India, which he believed he would live to see. He intended to retire in three years and remain in the country.

On the editorial page, "The Parting Shot" finds the letter to President Truman from Harold Ickes announcing his resignation as Secretary of Interior to be one of the most remarkable and candid documents tendered to the White House. It revealed that Mr. Ickes had sought and been denied a conference with the President following the testimony he had given to the Senate regarding Ed Pauley's offer of the $300,000 campaign contribution. Mr. Ickes also ascribed to the Pauley nomination a pattern which had wound up wrecking the Harding Administration—referring to Teapot Dome.

"But Now What?" discusses the State Department blue paper on Argentina, which documented the fascism of the Peron regime and its collaboration with the Nazis during the war. It also indicated that Argentina remained a base from which Germany could rebuild its aggressive power while the homeland was occupied.

"It Won't Help" tells of having seen a preview of "The Lost Weekend", which would shortly, on March 7, win the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1945 and earn its star, Ray Milland, an award for Best Actor, Billy Wilder, the award for Best Director, and also win the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

It was not, the piece says, "Ten Nights in a Bar-room".

And, per our usual disclaimer, we did not read ahead.

A piece from the Charleston News & Courier, titled "The Mighty Aristocrats", posits that Russia was the greatest aristocracy on earth by the fact of being ruled by the Communist Party, representative of only five percent of the population. The voting members of the party were an elite and highly informed group. They were somebodies who were strong and powerful, "and probably right good fellows, as the world goes."

Drew Pearson reports that it had been Bernard Baruch who had secretly formulated the wage-price structure which appeared to have resolved the steel strike. It depended on a year moratorium on wage and price increases after the current wage and price hike. He had determined that the only way to avoid post-war inflation was by a year of peak production without further increases in wages and prices.

Or, call it Ten Nights in a Barroom, or Under the Volcano with Vulcan in the Tulgey Wood.

Mr. Pearson then tells of the scarcity of surplus war vehicles, trucks and jeeps, not enough to meet the demand of the G.I.'s, theoretically with priority on purchases over civilian dealers.

Dorothy Thompson discusses the U.N. site selection, expressing the belief that if it was to be located in the United States, then San Francisco, which wanted the U.N., was preferable to New York, which did not want it. New York, she suggests, was too European to be representative of America. It did not produce America's thinkers but was rather a center of commerce, publishing, radio and the print press.

Samuel Grafton finds few surprises in Josef Stalin's recent speech in which he professed doubts regarding capitalism, a belief which he had held throughout his life. But it did not matter that he did not like capitalism. The real issue would be how he would respond to the system in the practical world. Would he cooperate with a system which he believed was in its death throes?

Marquis Childs explains that there was no simple method for determining a wage-price formula to fit all of industry. Differences in personality within the Administration between Chester Bowles at OPA and John Snyder as Reconversion director had made the matter difficult. But moreover, the complexity of American industry rendered the job almost impossible. The price of steel affected nearly everything produced in the country.

Doris would also get her oats.

A letter writer, "The Wave", as we once called him, who checked in a few times with The News in summer, 1940 and summer, 1941, apparently favoring the summertime waves, but who had not made an appearance since, writes from Iron Station regarding the publication of one of his previous letters, in which he had opposed the war, contending that he was only a part of the 80 percent of the country who did so.

Shortly after the Wave's letter was published, he was visited, he says, by the FBI, an agent who did not know "real Americanism" and gazed at the ceiling, red-faced, as the Wave explained it to him.

He then proceeds to offer quotes which represented his view of Americanism.

He notes that the recent poll of soldiers in occupied Germany had demonstrated that many believed the Germans were justified in their actions. That opinion went further, he says, than his own in 1941. He simply opposed entry to the war.

Now, he claims, Americans were to be limited to eating hog feed, or what they used to call "shorts".

"And the thinkings and knowledge of people today is to by [sic] this mass thinking. (Old philosophers called it, 'Intersubjunctive,' and a blank to the kingdom-nothing on which for the moral judgment seat to pass judgment.)"

He then quotes, sort of, from Leviticus 25:10, "...It shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his position [sic]," and goes on to contend that the executive order limiting the people to hog feed "of our fathers" was a violation of the Moral Law, which the Wave did not make up.

The editors respond: "Admitting that this is a very limited jubilee we're having at the moment, we still wonder what sort of feed we would have found in the trough if we had permitted Hitler to carry out his plans for conquest. Or are we just being intersubjunctive?"

In any event, we are glad to see that the Wave survived the war and was doing well after nearly a five year absence from the prints. He obviously had a five year plan in lieu of the New Deal. We confess that we had nearly forgotten him, but remembered instantly on observing his unforgettable name.

Now, we can backtrack five years to June, 2008, and refer to him in 1941 as "The Wave of the Future", no doubt one of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's proteges and even inspirations. They both, in hindsight, made equal sense.