The late Roosevelt administration is credited with more snappy spice than any other in history. Out-of-school tales were told about most of his children. The President and his wife were not spared by gossipers. But President Truman’s personal life is treated as dull and austere.
His advisers are farmers or aging professors. They were pirates in the first Roosevelt decade. The sports, drinkers and rounders who held high cabinet and military rank then are either gone or too old. Now most official vice is grubby stuff, with call-girls supplied by a protected vice-ring, about which nothing is ever heard, and which no Congressman or Senator will admit he knows.
President Truman’s pal, General Harry Vaughan, is comparatively quiet now, held to mama’s apron-strings. There’s gambling for him and the President in the White House. There’s no liquor shortage, either. The President likes his bourbon. He never smokes. He will not countenance whoring in his official family, though he doesn’t put detectives on official tails.
Probably the only real sport in town is Senator Warren Magnuson. The others save their skylarking for New York. When they do it in Washington, they are as frightened as schoolboys at it, and often as unimaginative.
What a change from the Roosevelt days, when sex was the prerogative of all government officials, and usually paid for by the grateful tax-payers! Uncle Sam even had to help Harry Hopkins do it. A monkey-gland doctor grafted sex virility on Hopkins and two other aging administration stalwarts, one of whom recently resigned from a little-cabinet post.
The doctor billed the wealthiest of the three $3,000 for each treatment. He charged the other two $1,000. Hopkins had already stiffed the medico for three operations when he asked for the fourth, in view of his pending marriage to a young woman. The doctor’s verdict was no money, no honeymoon. But Hopkins had a way out. He suggested the doctor needed a vacation anyway, so he offered to get him an appointment to make an inspection trip to army medical bases in the West Indies, with all expenses paid for self and wife, plus $35 a day fee until the $3,000 was paid. The doctor took the trip and Hopkins took the honeymoon.
High military brass is quiet today compared to the lusty generals and admirals of the ’20s and ’30s. Washington is still talking about how General Pershing, then chief of staff, ordered young General Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines after MacArthur married Mrs. Louise Cromwell Brooks, of the Philadelphia Stotesbury clan. Mrs. Brooks, after her divorce from her first husband, met “Black Jack” Pershing abroad. When she returned to America, she became his official hostess in Washington. She was 25 to his 60. Two months after their wedding, in 1922, the MacArthurs were shipped to the Philippines. Washington cats said Pershing sent his successful young rival into exile to get even. He had also exiled the captain of the Army polo team, who was attentive to the rich, beautiful Louise. She is now Mrs. Alf Heiberg, the proud owner of Washington’s only private atom-bomb shelter, which she constructed under her Georgetown Mansion.
The late General of the Armies, a widower, was quite a man with the women. He kept a Roumanian babe and her mother at the Shoreham Hotel for 20 years.
“Thirty” was written to Washington Society when a local paper fired its social editor because she refused to print the names of Negro hostesses!