Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, for the first time in U.S. history, a Senate Majority Leader resigned his post in protest of a presidential veto. Senator Alben Barkley, to thunderous applause in the Senate chamber, resigned in disgust over the President's veto of the tax bill on the basis that it was for the greedy and not the needy. Senator Barkley, future Vice-President under President Truman beginning in 1949, declared that he was singularly indignant about the veto and its stated rationale.

The veto would be overridden and Senator Barkley re-elected by his colleagues to his leadership post.

The veto, of course, is a constitutional tool of the president and requires a two-thirds majority of both houses to override it.

The President’s gripe in this instance was that the bill was quite insufficient to meet the needs of the war, as established by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, who had testified that 10.5 billion dollars was required in new revenue for the 1944-45 fiscal year to pay reasonably for the war as it progressed and not leave the debt burden to a future generation. The House and Senate, plainly playing politics in an election year, allowed only 2.1 to 2.3 billion in new revenue.

That the President sought huge new taxes in an election year was a courageous move; that he vetoed the inadequate legislation was even more courageous. Alben Barkley's stunt, which he knew would be recompensed by his colleagues with re-election to the position, was nothing more than that, a churlish and overplayed stunt. The President should have taken him out behind the woodshed and provided him a good flogging.

In any event, as we have made the point numerous times, if anyone tries to sell you on the notion that America was beaming with unity and harmony, the Senate, House, and Executive Branch singing songs together on the Mall every Monday while holding hands during World War II, tell them it was anything but the truth. Except for the first couple of months immediately following Pearl Harbor, it was one of the more politically divisive times, in fact, in the country's history, far more so than anything the nation has seen since, save probably the battle over Civil Rights during the 1950's and 1960's, especially during the latter decade.

Today's Congress, for all the carping over disunity, appears by comparison as a daily prayer meeting. Democracy is not and should not be pretty. It is made for debate. If debate is quashed or allowed to be chilled or winnows on the vine of apathy and complaisance, or lies for too many seasons fallow from strict party fealty, violence inevitably will erupt from the resulting repression and frustration. It is a part of the human psyche which, if denied, is simply attempting to play the same Superman game which plagued the Nazis to their bitter and final end. This human principle is the reason for the First Amendment and why it is sacrosanct, not as a government-given right by its largesse, not one subject to incessant carved exceptions depending on the sway of a spare, mercurial Supreme Court majority of the moment, but as a human right, the denial of which is specifically articulated as forbidden fruit to the Congress and the several states by their laws and agencies. We have the right to be uncivil with one another. We have the right to scream to the top of our lungs at one another. That is part of our heritage in the United States. Deny it, prepare to live in the functional equivalent of Nazi Germany--which is where we feel strongly we have been living for the past decade.

Nevertheless, Senator Barkley in 1944 needed a good whipping behind the woodshed by the President for his silly stunt on the floor of the Senate. We wouldn't shoot him, just flog him good.

Imagine if you will a majority leader in the Senate today of the president’s own party resigning his post and providing a denunciatory speech of a presidential veto of a tax bill. You cannot imagine it. That is the difference between now and then.

House Ways & Means Committee Chair, Bob Doughton of North Carolina, also again, for the second day in a row, lit into the President regarding the claimed impropriety of the veto.

The Luftwaffe, for the fourth time in five nights and the eleventh time during February, attacked London, again in two waves, killing ten people and leaving behind several fires from the incendiaries. There was no estimate on the number of planes in the raid; a similar two-wave raid the previous week had involved about 150 planes, though only about 40 to 50 penetrated the barrage balloons, anti-aircraft guns, and scrambled fighters which constituted the air defenses of the city.

American bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force out of Italy hit Steyr, Austria, 90 miles west of Vienna, striking an aircraft engine manufacturer and a major ball bearings plant, the largest left in Europe after the one at Schweinfurt had been destroyed in October.

In Italy, American troops repulsed two counter-offensive drives west of Cisterna, while German artillery and 130 planes struck at Anzio, but were also countered by numerous Allied sorties plus artillery barrages. The Nazis had suffered the heaviest losses of the Italian Campaign during the previous Wednesday through Saturday, in their two and a half mile thrust from Carroceto toward Anzio along the Anziate highway.

The Cassino front was again relatively quiet, limited to patrol activity, as snow in the mountains curtailed movement.

Premier Josef Stalin, on the 26th anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, celebrated the Third Ukrainian Army's victory at Krivoi Rog, announcing that the Nazis were fast retreating toward the Bug River. He indicated that during the previous year, the Army had liberated three-fourths of the territory which had originally been occupied by the Nazis during the 1941 invasion.

The U.S. Army took over power and water facilities in Los Angeles after a nine-day strike of municipal workers had shut down 160 war supply factories and caused the loss of power to 125,000 residents.

An angry judge in New York threatened to find in contempt the defense counsel for Wayne Lonergan, elephant toy deliverer and accused slayer of his wife back in late October, as his defense counsel failed to show up for the first day of trial, having an associate ask for a continuance until Monday on the basis that the defense attorney was tied up in Toronto with another case. Stay tuned for Monday's fireworks.

Don Whitehead, substituting for Hal Boyle in the "Reporter's Notebook" column, tells of the "Soldier's Guide to the United States", published for troops being re-assigned from abroad back to the States, containing valuable advice about how to get along with the civilian population so as not to besmirch the name of the armed forces.

The booklet recommended, for instance, that soldiers speak loudly of "when we landed in North Africa" or "when we landed in Sicily", etc., to silence all other conversation, and then to proceed to proclaim of having landed in the first wave of the particular invasion, as such things were hard to check.

Taking a leaf from the Fields Manual, it recommended generosity with cigarettes, kindness to children, and kicking small boys in the groin to discourage looting of the jeep glove compartment.

Well, it goes on from there and you may peruse it for yourself. It was a strange country to which these men were returning, and kicking small boys in the groin for being a nuisance was just a part of the new way of life to which the soldiers would need re-acclimate themselves.

On the editorial page, "The Report" reviews the optimistic but cautious assessment of the Allied position in the war, as provided by Prime Minister Churchill the day before. It finds the rhetoric matter-of-fact, dry by comparison to the determined strength he had once voiced when the war was being lost two and three years before. But, the piece concludes, that suggested only a return to the more normal British stoicism now that the war was being won, there being nothing any longer about which to become terribly agitated.

"A Flat" comments on the invaluable asset of the country in time of war, humor, but finds the ordinarily humorous pages of The New Yorker in its most recent issue to have come up empty in the department, the piece offering several droll examples of its weak attempts.

We agree. The samples published simply aren’t funny. Indeed, we can’t even make sense of them.

Kicking small boys in the groin: now that’s funny. That is what The New Yorker needed, with color illustrations.

"New Czar" comments, as had Drew Pearson the previous day, on the new director of industrial demobilization, Will Clayton, to reconvert war industries to their peacetime footing. His reputation was that of favoring big business and thus it was predictable that his orientation in effecting demobilization would be to that end.

The piece counsels the necessity of reducing the size of enormously grown industries profiting from the war, especially the aircraft industry, grown from a fledgling amoeba to a full-fledged giant. After the war, it had to return to a smaller size for the benefit of the country, though its captains would actively resist such diminution from its halcyon days.

Whether Mr. Clayton, heretofore Undersecretary of Commerce, was up to the task, it expresses some doubt.

Should he lean too much to accommodate the interests of big business and not enough to small business and the average individual worker in the country, then, plainly, a good swift kick in the groin might urge relations more simpatico with the interests of the country.

"Roy Palmer" praises the selection of Mr. Palmer as the new head of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, replacing outgoing department store magnate, George Ivey.

Samuel Grafton again adopts use of the term "obscurantism", having been relieved of its elimination by the request of several readers. He finds its practitioners among the Senators who had indicated that the soldiers were not so much interested in the vote as they were in girls. It was likewise seen in objections to the bureaucratic structure to administer such things as gasoline rationing or price control, while not daring to object to the rationing and price control, itself.

Hitler was the King of obscurantists, says Mr. Grafton, for his substituting the Jewish question for all other issues.

The Fascists in Italy had been obscurantists, ignoring the demands of the people for a raise of $5 per week, while promising them instead the re-establishment of the Roman Empire.

Thus, Mr. Grafton concludes, however awkward sounding the word, it was most apt to describe a whole ugly generation, both at home and abroad.

Some say they were the Best Generation; Sam Grafton thought they were obscurantists who needed a good, swift kick in the groin on occasion. The truth was probably, as with most things, somewhere in between.

Drew Pearson explains how Senator Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina had effectively managed to more than double his Senate salary by placing a son-in-law, two sons, and two daughters on the Government payroll. One of the sons was in the Coast Guard.

Cotton Ed needed a swift kick in the groin for pilfering from the jeep glove compartment.

Mr. Pearson next tells of new Democratic National Committee Chair Robert Hannegan having addressed his fellow Democrats in Washington in stern terms regarding the 1944 election, that they would be fortunate to win it and must be diligent in their work toward that end. He also indicated that he did not yet know whether the President would seek a fourth term, that he hoped he would, but would be prepared should some other candidate become the party nominee.

Discussing the meeting of the Maritime War Emergency Board, Mr. Pearson indicates that they were deliberating on whether merchant seamen should have their hazard duty pay reduced, given that the hazard on the high seas had subsided enormously from that which prevailed a year and two years earlier.

Numerous merchant seamen were now out of work in consequence of the previous high pressure recruiting at the inception of the war, resulting in a glut of seamen.

Going back to the lead story of the day, re Senator Barkley's denunciation of the President's veto of the tax bill, we note that the Senator, as quoted on the front page, made a vague reference anent the President selling Christmas trees at Christmas which generated income for him, and that it was an improper analogy to compare "these little pine bushes with a sturdy oak, poplar, or cypress". The Time piece explains, as further elucidated in the text of the speech, itself, that he was alluding to the fact that the President had reminded the Senators and Congressmen gathered in his bedroom at the White House that he had favored a timber tax despite being a timber grower himself, to which Senator Barkley made his rejoinder that the President's quick-growing Christmas trees were hardly timber of the type to which the application of the tax could be compared, given that ordinary timber requires a generation of care to produce, during which no income is derived from it, and during which the tracts on which it grows are often bought and sold, taxed thus at lower capital gains rates than ordinary income rates, in gross. The exemption to timber growers which the Congress allowed and to which the President objected was to provide the sale of timber the same basis of taxation, at capital gains rates, as that allowed for the sale of the land or the rights to cut timber upon it.

But, since we had to look that up, and since, when considered for even a moment, based on timber growing patterns and annual regeneration methods, as dramatically improved during the New Deal by the introduction via Henry Wallace of reforestation education within the Missisippi Valley to ward off recurrence of the worst effects of drought cycles as during the Dust Bowl, discontinuing the prior uneven economic migration to California, it is an entirely specious argument, and thus we give Senator Barkley, the arborist, a good kick in the groin for good measure, just for being so abstruse re the spruce--or perhaps to the reporter who failed to position the trees in the story, even leaving out the gum and substituting, in free way manner, "cypress" groves for spruce within the spruced-down, double-meant quote, such that they would not wind up buried, or not, within the forest on the inside. At least the Senator did not, in celebration of Brotherhood Week, talk of witch-elms.

He did, however, feel compelled to take further umbrage at the President's consternation with regard to the loopholes afforded special interests and large corporations within the new tax measure, as exampled by the President by the excess-profits tax exemption provided the owners and operators of natural gas pipelines.