The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE Washington newspapers recently reported the news that a Senator’s wife had been the victim of a theft of a $2500 diamond and platinum bracelet. It was added that the bracelet was the gift of a shipbuilding company in token of the lady’s service in christening one of its boats.

The news occurred at a time when Congress was busy with the consideration of ethics in government, yet no commentator saw the tie connecting the little with the big news. The silence could not illustrate better what is wrong with the contemporary scene in the Capital. The borderline between right and wrong has been gradually whittled away; and, increasingly, it is not what is right that counts, but, as the President puts it, what is legal.

The problem of accepting tokens of the above description comes up very frequently in a Capital society which is divided between givers and recipients of favors. A Supreme Court justice makes it a practice to return everything. Charles Evans Hughes, when Secretary of State, limited his acceptance to petty consumables, and later added handkerchiefs. Others will take only packages of the specialties of a country which has been a beneficiary of favors or is an expectant beneficiary. “You have a low opinion of yourself,” said one man dealing in foreign aid, “if you are so rigid as to be rude when some sort of anniversary comes around.”

But all this is beside the point of the obviously bad practices which are complained of. In regard to Congress, the issue of the “kickback,” or the pocketing of part of the salaries paid to legislators’ staffs, has led to some convictions. It is as illegal as payroll padding. If there is any cure here, it lies in insistence on publicizing Congressional staffs and their salaries. But you can never get such information except by grace of the official clerks.

Self-correction is not a habit of the houses of Congress. Nor is condemnation of errant colleagues. his is shown in the extraordinary sympathy for colleagues who get caught in misdemeanors. Even after Representative Andrew J. May was sent to jail for his liaison with war contractors, the majority leader, Representative John W. McCormack, told an applauding House that he had represented his constituents “with loyalty.” This lack of selfdiscipline is recounted with copious examples in a new book by H. H. Wilson called Congress: Corruption and Compromise. The book sums up the history of the last few decades, and it does not make pretty reading.

The ethics of Washington

Senator Paul H. Douglas and his subcommittee on ethics arc scrutinizing the behavior of officials in the Executive branch of our government. This investigation came as a result of the RFC inquiry. At that time the whisper was that dubious practices in the RFC amounted to chicken feed compared with what was going on elsewhere.

The Comptroller General whetted the investigators. He traced “the shockingly low moral standard” in the Capital to both big government and war government. In wartime the lid was off. High federal officials accepted cocktail parties, hotel accommodation, and transportation from contractors while drawing expenses and allowances from the government. Some found cushy jobs awaiting them from firms whose claims they had settled. “Sheer size,”said the Comptroller General, “leaves knavery obscured and undetected. The false card is lost in the shuffle.”

In this correspondent’s opinion the absence of standards is still the exception. But there are enough examples of lack of virtue to make the citizen worry. The trouble arises in the quest for a remedy. In the Executive branch, which is not elective, several cures are suggested. Senator Douglas has a bill for a code of fair practices in the regulatory commissions. He would have the commissioners bound by the same written and unwritten practices that are supposed to govern the judiciary. For instance, a judge will not take counsel for one of the parties into private consultation; the other counsel has to be present.

The Comptroller General would have Congress restore an act of 1872 which made government employees leaving the service ineligible for a period of two years to serve as counsel or agent in pressing any claim against the United States that may have been pending in their department before they left.

Senator Douglas has hardened this proposal by suggesting a two-year prohibition on private employment of anybody who has dealt with the claims of the employing concern while in government service.

Care, of course, has to be taken, in airing these matters, not to vilify the government service as such. Of late years more than one department has had its prestige undermined by indiscriminate blackening. The prime example is the State Department, now the butt of the same kind of jokes as the banking profession was in the twenties. Yet no finer or more patriotic men can be found in the Capital than some of the officials in the Stale Department.

Divided responsibility

Administration of foreign aid is now distributed among various government agencies. For instance, Point Four is in the State Department, but technical assistance is in ECA. Military aid seems to be divided between the State Department and ECA. A movement in which most of the private study groups have joined would set up an entirely new agency for the handling of the 8.5-billion-dollar foreign aid program for the current fiscal year. The object is not so much efficiency as to leave the State Department stranded.

However, this is almost like burning down the house to roast a pig. After all, the State Department is the instrument of our foreign affairs. If it is denied the administration of foreign aid, there will be two consequences. First, our foreign policy will be impeded, for the defense of the national interest and the achievement of national objectives are dependent upon bargaining. Foreign aid thus needs to be regarded in some cases as a weapon. However, if the aid is divorced from diplomacy, it will degenerate into a giveaway proposition, as some of it has degenerated already.

Secondly, what appears to be coordination will in fact turn out to be the opposite. There will be, as in wartime, two arms of government in foreign capitals, and those capitals, in consequence, will find themselves in a fog in dealing with Uncle Sam.

The lesson should have been learned from the experience of ECA and the State Department. When ECA was sel up, Secretary of State Marshall fought against a separate establishment, because he felt that in such a situation the country would have two Secretaries of State. But his plea was drowned by the general antipathy to the State Department, which was spearheaded in this instance by Senator Vandenberg.

The result was as Marshall had forecast. In Europe, Paul Hoffman was regarded as Secretary of State; and though he was far more active than Secretary Acheson and far more animated with a bold concept of leadership, the result, nonetheless, was rivalry and confusion. This confusion and this rivalry were duplicated at the operating level. Sometimes there was harmony between Ambassador and ECA mission chief, often not. The same rivalry exists in the present ECA administration under William C. Foster.

Running the propaganda war

At last the President has set up a Psychological Strategy Board, and Gordon Gray is back in Washington to head it. Mr. Gray had a welldeserved reputation as an administrator when he left the Army Department to become president of the Universiiy of North Carolina. The mandate he has been given is purposely vague. But the Gray Board may turn out to be the planning group at the elbow of the National Security Council which General Albert C. Wedomeyer advocated at the MacArthur hearings. The General’s idea was that only through such a unit could we regain the initiative and keep it.

At any rate, the Gray Board will have prestige, and that is vital. It will devote its brains and energies to the mapping out of cold war policies which, when passed by the Security Council, will be rigidly adhered to.

Nothing is more important. Diplomatic policy, or the strategy of the cold war, changes from week to week. Palestine was a good example. China is the current example. When Assistant Secretary of State Dean Busk came out with a brand-new policy, Secretary Acheson put on a dead-pan face in his conference with the newsmen and insisted that there had been no change in United States policy on China.

General Ridgway has said that our national destiny is dependent upon our driving a wedge between Peking and Moscow by all the means at our disposal. Suppose that this becomes policy as the result of studies pro and eon of ihe Gray Board. Then, presumably, the word would go down the line and to all our representatives abroad, and all actions would have to fall within the framework of this policy.

Hitherto the National Security Council has not been able to undertake this thinking task, for the good and sufficient reason that all the members of the Council are working heads of departments.

Truman in 1952

Mr. Truman has recovered enough stock out of the cease-fire to be spoken about here and there as a contender in 1952. Six months ago nobody in the Capital would have offered to wager on any such prospect. But bis latest speeches and actions certainly reflect a recapture both of self-confidence and standing. He is not as ready now to step aside for General Eisenhower as he was in 1948.

It was only by a fluke, It can now be revealed, that General Ike did not stand in Truman’s place three years ago. The movement to “draft Ike" had Truman’s initial backing, but it was George Allen who spiked it. Allen was court jester for F.D.R., then for Truman, and seems to be in the same role in the Eisenhower train. He advised Ike against running. However, it is still hard to believe that Truman would do any stepping aside for anybody in the EVent that his stock continucs to improve.

Politicians who make the crossing to Paris seem to be as thick as arms shipments. They report variously on their return, and one gets most of one’s impressions — so tight-lipped are they — at second hand. Some are certain that Eisenhower would not take a Democratic nomination. Others explain that while he is 100 per cent back of Truman’s foreign policy, he is a congenital Republican in domestic affairs. Be this as it may, the tight hold that Taft has on the party machine makes the admittance of Eisenhower difficult, despite the clear fact that he is the people’s choice. Tn that event — what? The time to declare himself cannot be far off.

Everything for everybody

It is proving to be a vain task to persuade both Congress and people that Korea is not a war itself, but only an episode in a continuing war. Something of a letdown seems to have arrived. It remains to be seen whether the military will share it. The demonstration of military letdown is still to come but the town is full of reports that the military will take advantage of the “breathing spell” by keeping some items, such as tanks and aircraft, a little longer on the drafting board, so as to get the advantage of yet another design.

If some degree of rescheduling does take place, then the disbursement of orders, and the output of defense money, will be a longer process. The result will be felt on the fisc, though not till after the year-end. In other words, though we are now spending half a billion dollars a week in military expenditures, there might not be a deficit next June after all, even assuming a 6-billion-dollar tax program instead of the 10 billion dollars the Administration wants. Don’t forget that the anticipated deficit this past June turned into a surplus — a reminder of the habit of bad estimating on the pessimistic side.

In this emergency the Administration has acted on the theory that it is possible to have guns and butter together. As some writer has put it, the Administration also is providing the cow, meaning full investment in civilian plant as well as full civilian production and military investment.

Ideally, investment in non-munitions capacity should be firmly curbed, and most of the military production should come out of existing facilities. Even if this involved a curb on civilian production, the compensation would be substantial. There would not have been the disgraceful postKorean scramble among the Allies for raw materials; America’s part in the scramble was due to the anxiety to fill both civilian and military demands. Nor would there be the danger of overdoing development of marginal mines here and abroad.

This brings in its train a problem in readjustment, as, indeed, does overexpansion in factory space at home. Finally, by way of example, you could get more radar development if the electronics industry produced less for civilian purposes.

The argument for guns and butter is that our fabulous economy can afford both. But there is a better argument. 1t is that if the civilian gives way to the military too much, you might bring on a garrison state, and that this would make hostilities inevitable. There was good sense in John L. Lewis’s warning against getting all dressed up; no slate in history has been able to avoid a shooting war in such a posture. But, if you can provide the butter as well as the guns, then readjustment from emergency is that much less difficult. As to the cow, the animal might be restrained by a wise use of the tax weapon. Tax concessions have been given to the producers of strategic materials; why shouldn’t tax handicaps be devised as a deterrent against plant investment which is unwarranted?

Mood of the Capital

The mood of the Capital is oscillating between preparedness and letdown. In some discerning minds the notion is arising that settlement over Korea might be taken to develop a policy of national objectives. Since Korea the country has been operating not upon a plan, but at the behest of constantly changing military requirements. Ad hoc preparedness has been the rule side by side with ad hoc diplomacy. The spur has been provided by Economic Mobilizer Wilson, He has used the carrot and the stick approach. The stick is the fear of inflation, and the carrot is a date when the emergency will be over.

As to inflation when the present price recession is over, opinions, of course, vary, though the confusion has never been more profound. The economists are st niggling to figure out spending ideas of businessmen and consumers. If military requirements are spread out, then inflation is not the bogey that is now conjured up. But there is no uncertainty in the Administration. The Administration still holds up the bogey of inflation for purposes of trying to perpetuate price controls as well as lax and credit and allocation controls. The great need is to get over our episodic ideas and get used to a crisis economy for an indefinite future.