The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

SECRETARY MARSHALL settled down to his job with the minimum of fuss and feathers. Promptly on arrival he let it be known that he and he alone was going to administer the State Department. What he wants from the staff is their “brains and experience.” Reorganization is implicit in Marshall’s determination that the American people get a good administration in their Department of Peace.

The task which Marshall has set himself may be likened to the job of turning a box into a pyramid. The State Department organization will be modeled on the pyramid that Marshall constructed at the War Department. Under Secretary Dean Acheson, who always chafed under Mr. Byrnes’s inability to delegate power, suddenly finds himself Chief of Staff.

It was testimony to Marshall’s prescience and courage that his first public act as Secretary of State was to order the withdrawal of troops from China. And he followed it by other decisions which went counter to professional opinion. He ordered the removal of the State Department to the War Department building. On this matter Byrnes could not buck the career diplomats. Marshall proceeded to deprive the geographical desks of their intelligence officers and set up a separate intelligence service. He will thus be able to check the data coming to him from the divisions.

One or two appointments to key positions failed to go to foreign service officers. It had been decided behind the scenes to make Sam Reber the head of the division of United Nations Affairs. Secretary Marshall wisely decided otherwise. This division is the backstop for Mr. Austin at the United Nations; and it was feared that under Mr. Reber the division might become subordinate to the geographical desks. Dean Acheson’s assistant, Jack Peurifoy, became Assistant Secretary for Administration.

On policy the Secretary is being chary of comment till he has a chance to make his own “estimate of the situation.” One action he took at once; he sent Ambassador Messersmith back to Buenos Aires with instructions to stop undercutting the State Department. Our Department of Peace is really being reorganized.

Marshall and the career men

Secretary Marshall looks quizzically at the foreign service officers who hitherto have regarded the State Department as their private preserve. Perhaps he seems oversevere with these men, who, despite their anxiety to keep the Depart ment a close corporation, are in general remarkably knowledgeable.

At present the Secretary is inclined to question what might be called the foreign service point of view on policy as well as administration. The career men have had to tell Marshall the facts of life about diplomacy with Moscow, and they have an uncomfortable feeling that the Secretary feels that they are defeatist or prejudiced. They are glad that Benjamin V. Cohen, Counselor of the State Department, who was brought in by Mr. Byrnes, is with Marshall in Moscow. Cohen has served his apprenticeship in negotiations with Russia. Marshall could not accuse him of a professional attitude toward Russia.

Is Secretary Marshall naïve about Russia? He believes he can evoke Russian candor in response to his own. In this connection he likes to tell a war story of how he got a cabled apology from Stalin. He had warned the Russians that the German Sixth Armored Army was about to be sent to the Budapest front for an attack on the Russian position.

When the attack failed to come off, the Russians accused Marshall of sending misinformation. The fact was that the Germans had not been able to refit the Sixth for the counteroffensive as a result, of American bombing of communications in Hungary. Their plan had simply miscarried. Stalin found this to be true, and apologized to Marshall.

But wartime relations are different from peacetime relations. It is to be hoped that the Secretary will get the low-down in Moscow, and as quickly as he did in China.

Confusion in the Court

More attention than usual is given these days to the Supreme Court under the administration of Fred Vinson. Vinson took over the toughest assignment imaginable. War — and the word was actually used — had been declared publicly between Jackson and Black. It was, of course, over portal-to-portal pay, the case for which was presented to the Court by Black’s former law partner, Crampton Harris. Black sat on the cases and led the wing that upheld the claims. Jackson thought Black’s conduct an impropriety, and expressed his feelings while he was trying the Nazis at Nuremberg.

The President named Vinson to the Chief Justiceship mainly because of Vinson’s repute as a wise, experienced conciliator. But Vinson, for all his skill, has not healed the breach. It is as wide as ever, as is shown by the scolding which Jackson indulges in over Black’s decisions on opinion day.

The confusion within the Court is creating confusion in the public mind. Witness the diversity of views, even among the majority, in the contempt decision against John L. Lewis. In defense of their habit, of writing separate opinions, the dissenters go back to the early days of the Court, when the justices were required to write their own opinions. Granted that the laying down of the law in the majority opinion admits of the nuances of concurring opinions. Yet this is hardly warranted in the case of the dissent.

A good deal of notoriety awaits the church and state judgment. The Court upheld New Jersey in paying for the transport of students to Catholic schools, on the ground that such payments promote the public welfare. Little press attention was aroused, not because of the lack of importance of the decision — for there is a seething hubbub about it — but because of the fact that it is a hot potato. That is why most (including metropolitan) newspapers, clinging to the view that they are sovereigns of what they shall comment upon, skipped editorialization. It is worth recording that on the purely legal aspect only a narrow gap divided the justices.

More cases of the sort are likely to come before the bench. Those who side with the dissenters say t hat nothing now prevents us from going the whole hog in supporting parochial schools.

However, the legal purists adduce precedents — free lunches at parochial schools paid for at public expense, public purchase of schoolbooks in parochial schools in Louisiana. This latter is most Interesting, for a test case has been passed upon by the Supreme Court, The Court, unanimously sustained the constitutionality of Louisiana legislation which provided free textbooks at public expense to all school children. So the lawyers rage, and some people are beginning to quote Dickens’s Mr. Bumble.

What was behind the Lilienthal opposition?

It must he plain as a pikestaff that the American future was deeply implicated in the Senate row over the nomination of David E. Lilienthal as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. No single factor united the opposition. The 78-year-old McKellar of Tennessee was ventilating a spleen which derived from Lilienthal’s refusal to play pork-barrel politics with him. The feud between the two is notorious. McKellar is a vindictive and relentless antagonist. He pulled all the stops in his campaign to block Lilienthal: anti-Semitism, fraudulent letters, innuendoes, and the rest.

When the old-guard Republicans seized the issue, the implications became serious. Here was evidence of reaction to Hardingism, It is said that word went out that the Lilienthal issue should be used as a weapon against the New Deal. Lilienthal was a New Dealer; ergo, he was unacceptable to a Republican Congress. But on this matter the Republicans are by no means agreed. Clearly revealed are the beginnings of a split, between the progressive forces in the GOP and the reactionaries. Vandenberg seems marked out for leadership of the progressives; Taft has the oldguard following.

It would he curious if this incipient division were to become clearly marked. For both men are instinctively middle-of-the-roaders. Vandenberg hated the New Deal and all it stood for. But he has grown with the times. He feels that, government has a role to play in maintaining an expanding economy. He believes that there can be no expanding economy in the United States without a constant increase in our foreign trade. Hence he stands back of the reciprocal trade program, though he feels — and the State Department. agrees with him — that the Tariff Commission should have a place in the negotiation of trade agreements.

Vandenberg, who is both chairman of the Senate and chairman of its Foreign Relations Committee, is likewise the great hope of Secretary Marshall in overcoming what the latter calls our “indifference” to our world responsibility.

Taft knows the business of Congress better than most of his colleagues. On domestic affairs he has supported several items of social reform. But on foreign affairs he seems to be drifting back to a 1920 position. His stand on Lilienthal was inexplicable on any other ground.

Taft said that Lilienthal was “soft” with Russia and Communism. Yet no agency has a better record of administration free from Communism than the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Dies Committee, when investigating Communist activities in the South, reported that three persons employed in minor positions by TVA had engaged in Communist activities.

Perhaps Lilienthal’s “softness” stems from the report on atomic energy bearing the names of Lilienthal and Acheson. It was the draft for the Baruch plan for the international control of atomic energy. At the time of publication, the Lilienthal-Acheson report evoked widespread admiration from wholly nonpartisan sources. The question is raised whether the old guardists are beginning to regret any effort aimed at the international control of atomic energy.

Even the position of the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission has been misunderstood. From the debate on Lilienthal, one would imagine that the chairman is authorized to develop atomic energy, and to distribute it as a public service. Hence the power lobby that was arrayed against Lilienthal.

The fact is that the commission is only the custodian of this new source of power. Unlike the Congressional act establishing the TVA, the atomic energy act declared as its basic purpose the encouragement of “free competition in private enterprise,” and it leaves wholly in Congressional hands the determination of policy with respect to the industrial uses of atomic energy.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

There was general relief in the Capital over the Supreme Court’s decision sustaining the contempt conviction against John L. Lewis and his union.

Washington is working itself into an anti-Communist lather. This is unbecoming to a nation which, as Mr. Churchill put it, stands at the summit of its power. For the mood is a reflection of fear. The way to combat Communism, as those who are decrying the new complex insist, is by making a success out of our system of free enterprise and by keeping our powder dry. In both respects the prevailing opinion on the Hill is not as clear as it might be.

Stability in the economy will not come so long as the pork barrel and sectionalism are rampant. And they are. Moreover, the anxiety to trim the budget raises an uncertainty over our national defense, not to say our overseas responsibilities. It would seem that lynching bees and witch-hunts constitute a poor excuse for statesmanship in these critical days.