The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

DURING his five years as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss became one of the most powerful men in Washington. As chairman and official spokesman, he was the AEC. As special assistant to the President for atomic energy matters, Strauss, a highly successful New York financier, managed to become the sole representative of science to a President who likes his summaries in terse, easily digestible paragraphs. It was only with the arrival of Sputnik and Dr. Killian that Eisenhower was able to open his ear to other scientific wave lengths.

In regretfully declining the President’s invitation to stay on for another five-year term, Strauss referred to the “occupational hazards of political life.” He also wrote the President that “circumstances beyond the control of either of us make a change in the chairmanship of the Commission advisable.”

It was well known that Strauss’s wife thought it high time for a man of sixty-two to step out of the taxing arena of controversy. But it was also well known that the prime hazard of Strauss’s political life had become the Democratic majority on the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, particularly Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico. Anderson, who is scheduled to be rotated back into the chairmanship next year, planned to give Strauss a hard time both at his reconfirmation hearing and on the Senate floor — and Strauss knew it.

The Senator has never forgiven Strauss for embroiling a previously bipartisan AEC and Joint Committee in the political and economic skirmishes of the 1954 Dixon-Yates power contract. After that abortive proposal, all AEC-Joint Committee business became acrimonious. The Democratic majority and Strauss disagreed on peaceful atomic power assistance, radioactive fall-out dangers, the development of the so-called “clean bomb,” the exchange of the secrets of the submarine Nautilus with Britain (where Strauss’s unexpected international generosity managed to lose him even his Republican support), and, retroactively, the removal of Dr. Oppenheimer’s Q-clearance in early 1954. This year, Strauss even began having his differences with Secretary of State Dulles. Strauss wanted more stringent terms for a nuclear test ban than Dulles seemed prepared to exact.

In bowing out, Strauss did not necessarily abdicate. President Eisenhower had him continue as his special assistant for peaceful atomic energy matters and appointed him head of the American delegation to the second Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva next month.

Admiral Strauss’s successor

John A. McCone, as sole owner of Los Angeles’ Joshua Hendy shipping combine, commands a fleet of fifty cargo ships and tankers. An engineer by training and a financier by practice, McCone gained Strauss’s nod after several previous choices had shied away when approached. McCone, one of the President’s golfing companions and host to the Eisenhowers at Pebble Beach, California, following the 1956 Republican convention, was pleasing to the President as a personal friend.

As Southern California finance committee chairman for Senator Knowland’s gubernatorial campaign, he had the support of the Senate Minority Leader. As both a former deputy to Defense Secretary Forrestal and Undersecretary to Air Force Secretary Finletter during the Truman Administration, McCone already had Democratic clearance. And to avoid antagonizing Senator Anderson, the White House cleared McCone’s name with the Senator personally — a good while before public announcement. The change in the AEC chairmanship, by itself, can hardly bring about an AEC-Joint Committee love feast. But it might make atomic life more livable.

The Hound’s Tooth Club

The “respectable Republican cloth coat" phrase which Vice President Nixon had used during his 1952 campaign to differentiate wife Pat’s gear from Truman Administration mink has been given an unexpected twist. Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams it seems thought nothing of accepting a costly vicuña wool coat from his long-time friend Bernard Goldfine. Goldfine, a New England textile mill magnate, it seems thought nothing of using Adams’ good offices to place top-level inquiries to the government regulatory agencies which were giving Goldfine business trouble. As the gift list grew, first in charges before the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, then through Adams’ own admissions, criticism mounted.

As soon as Adams had stated his own side of the case, four Republican senators demanded his resignation. There is an election in November, they said, and the Republicans who won on a corruption-in-the-White-House platform in 1952 could hardly be repeating the theme this year.

“Imprudent" was Adams’ grudging admission in hindsight reappraisal. New Hampshire’s Senator Cotton, who along with New Hampshire’s Bridges and Maine’s Payne also shared Goldfine’s largess, joined Adams in defending their benefactor. He had gone into abandoned mills in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts and revitalized them and helped restore community prosperity, they said, and what politician wouldn’t be grateful? If Goldfine had to have a shortcoming, Cotton conceded, it might be said that “Bernard likes to collect his dividends socially.”

The Hound’s Tooth Club, New England chapter, really could not be censured for merely receiving gifts. After all, the President’s Gettysburg farm has been showered with everything from black Angus cattle, tractors, trees, and assorted livestock to furniture for the farmhouse. And was not Mrs. Eisenhower treated to beauty in the grand style at Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance Farm this past spring?

The censure had to come on those who misused their high position to grant special favors in exchange for these gifts. Perhaps the origin of this easy morality lay with the Congress which, mindful of the tributes paid legislators, particularly in campaign contributions, has not found it at all prudent to bite the hand that feeds. But in the absence of congressional example and initiative, what keeps the Administration from policing its own ranks? What forces a Chief Executive to accept less than impeccable conduct?

Three of the five Republican members of the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, Congressmen Heselton of Massachusetts, Wolverton of New Jersey, and O’Hara of Minnesota, decided not to seek re-election this year. Wolverton is well on in years and ready to retire anyway, but both Heselton and O’Hara had been among the leading opponents of the investigation of the regulatory agencies and publicly tried to cut it down to size earlier this year.

In the face of the Lebanon crisis, the President resolutely pushed the Adams trouble away from his desk. But this is a continuing question, which in the last analysis only Adams himself can answer.

Administration flip-flop

The attempt to liberalize the mutual security program by giving the President the authority to grant aid to all satellite countries except Russia, Red China, and North Korea backfired. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts made the original proposal and State Department officials quietly helped him draft the actual bill. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee print appeared, however, it contained an erroneous notation that the department officially approved the measure as an amendment to the Mutual Security Act. The State Department, secretly delighted, decided to sit tight quietly and hope for the best. Eisenhower Republicans joined Northern Democrats in support of the measure.

Then Senators Knowland and Bridges let the Administration know that they considered aid to satellite countries so poor an investment for American taxpayers that they were prepared to make drastic cuts in the overall mutual security appropriations. State then decided upon a “retreat with honor.” They would stick by their request for the authority to aid satellite countries. But they would leave it to the Senate as to how this should be granted: through an amendment to the Mutual Security Act or through an amendment to the trading-with-the-enemy Battle Act.

The President was briefed on this tactic and agreed to it. Then, when Republican congressional leaders joined him on the morning of the Mutual Security Act vote, the President, either in confusion or in a desire to placate further the Knowland-Bridges faction, gave the impression that he favored the amendment as part of the Battle Act and was opposed to it as part of the Mutual Security Act. Since the Battle Act is not up this year, proposed amendments to it are futile.

A State Department official stood up at the White House congressional leaders’ meeting and tactfully reminded the President of the policy the Administration had agreed to. The President curtly told the State Department official he had just stated the policy. Senator Knowland jubilantly ran up to Capitol Hill with a Presidential endorsement and managed to defeat the Mutual Security Act amendment by a 43 to 42 vote. The authority to aid satellite countries, which the President presumably wanted and which his supporters went down the line to grant him, now was out of the question for 1958._

A week or so later, when the Administration pulled a similar flipflop by having Secretary of Labor Mitchell denounce the KennedyIves labor reform bill, a bill with bipartisan sponsorship which the White House presumably favored, the Washington Post’s Herblock drew a cartoon showing obeisant Secretaries Dulles and Mitchell unrolling the red carpet ahead of a beaming and strutting Senator Knowland. The caption read: “He may not be doing so well in California, but —.”

Unpopular dictators

Another problem concerned the admittance to this country of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez and his secret-police chief, Pedro Estrada. The State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, charged with maintaining good relations with Latin American regimes and desirous of preserving the traditional south-of-the-border respect for political asylum, had granted Pérez Jiménez and Estrada entry visas from their temporary refuge in the Dominican Republic.

The Justice Department’s Immigration Service, charged with guarding our entry gates against those who might defile the resident population, merely paroled the two men into Miami pending further inspection to determine whether they were excludable. U.S. Immigration Commissioner Joseph M. Swing then asked the State Department to have its representatives in Venezuela furnish him with the necessary affidavits to give him the legal grounds to act. State decided to lend General Swing its visa file but nothing more.

Swing complained of having his hands tied. State did not retreat. Through past experience, it feels that yesterday’s political leader may be today’s exile and tomorrow’s hero again. State’s attitude was somewhat buttressed by reports from Venezuela that the present military junta has so many ties with the Pérez Jiménez regime that for four months the junta made no serious effort to obtain extradition. The effort began after the notoriety surrounding the Nixon visit.

While Immigration and State stood their ground on the problem, Estrada slipped off to Zurich. Immigration promptly warned all air and sea carriers that they would be subject to a $1000 fine — plus return passage — for bringing Estrada back to this country. General Swing, however, had to resign himself to watching Pérez Jiménez rusticate in his $400,000 Miami Beach estate.

Nobody in Washington seemed to question why State was obligated to grant political asylum to two controversial refugees when they already were enjoying political asylum in the Dominican Republic. After all, Argentina’s former dictator, Juan D. Perón, also fled to the Dominican Republic during the Venezuelan uprising at the beginning of the year, and State discouraged him from applying for a United States visa.