Washington

on the World Today

DESPITE the bitterness between the Democratic and Republican Parties, bipartisan agreement on the basic principles of foreign policy thus far remains undisturbed, thanks to Governor Dewey and Senator Vandenberg. Roth have withstood temptation to criticize the Administration policy, although the Governor sang a dangerous solo on the subject of the Italian colonies. Some Republicans have complained, “The Administration seems to act as if it had a blank check from us.”But, except for this private muttering, they have been loyal to their bargain.

Governor Dewey made it plain that there were two pieces of legislation needing enactment at the special session: one was an improved bill admitting displaced persons; the other, the loan to the United Nations. Only the latter got through.

Senator Vandenberg and his Republican colleagues were censured because this measure failed of passage at the regular session. But the fact is that the Senator had pleaded in vain with the State Department to get at least a token contribution from the other member nations. For he has always to keep in mind the need of a case for the Senate. The State Department, however, ignored the plea: the loan, in consequence, got a cold shoulder, and it was put through the special session only by the joint effort of Governor Dewey and Senator Vandenberg.

Who decides our German policy?

The situation in Berlin arose out of the June decisions of the Six Powers. No Republican was included in this important negotiation. The Republican leadership knew in a vague way that the Western powers intended to take measures for the closer integration of their zones, but there was no mention of a German government, nor of the introduction of the West mark in Berlin. It was only after the fat was in the fire that the State Department invited John Foster Dulles to sit in on the departmental conferences.

In this instance perhaps the fault does not lie entirely with the State Department. It has sometimes seemed that where Germany is concerned the State Department has been on the outside looking in. Conlrol in Germany is exercised by the Army Department, and tin* Army Department’s proconsul is General Lucius D. Clay, a good administrator, who has been virtually independent in handling affairs of the Western zone.

Clay is a gifted but a somewhat curious man, with a penchant for tantrums, especially on the “telecom.”Because he has been a difficult man to handle he has been left pretty much alone. Those who cross him earn his enmity, as, for instance, the French, and he can think only in terms of “my Germans” instead of the whole European community. “Localitis” is the commonest affliction of administrators, and Secretary Marshall once said he, who had always warned his subordinates against it. contracted il when he was in China.

The one-man show in Berlin meant that there was no chance of developing a German policy in the Stale Department, though, in the final analysis, the State Department was responsible when affairs got so tangled that they had to go to the highest level.

When General Eisenhower came back from Berlin, he sought to relieve the Army of administrative responsibility in Germany. But Secretary Byrnes refused to take over. Eisenhower then obtained a promise from General Marshall that when he became Secretary of State, Germany would he brought under his jurisdiction. But the transfer was never made. Marshall, like Byrnes, pleaded that neither staff nor organization was available.

Prices and taxes

The President is waging a demagogic campaign to tag a high price label on the Republicans. He can show that the cost of living derives in part from the premature dropping of controls and the lowering of taxation. But the Republicans are not without an et tu, Brute! On controls, except for OPA, the Administration was as precipitate as the Republicans, and the very tax, the excess profits tax, that Mr. Truman sought to restore at the special session was the one that Fred Vinson, as Secretary of the Treasury, proposed to drop. Mr. Truman is pitching the rest of his appeal on the bounty and favors that would now be in the possession of the minorities but for the wicked Republicans.

Senator Taft thinks that the Republican campaign could be waged on the conflict between philosophies of government. He is counting a lot on voter sophistication! But the point he is trying to make is worth pondering. His is the plea of responsible government to keep the economy on an even keel without drying up incentives and enterprise.

He sees the antithesis in the new Truman penchant for profligacy and controls — controls which, moreover, would mushroom as the result of a spendthrift policy. The result would be a police stale or an explosion, for, as Senator Taft said, “You cannot tie down the safety valve while you go stoking the furnace.”

The Red hunt and the New Deal

Republican leadership, of course, will not be as high-minded as Senator Taft. In the Red scare the GOP already has its rod in pickle for the Democrats. The rod was brought out simultaneously with the special session in order to beat the Administration off the front page. It was a successful maneuver.

Undoubtedly the appeal on this score will be tremendous. The impression is being given that the government service is corroded with Reds. Figures fail to support the impression. Preliminary checks by the FBI on 1,955,814 Federal employees disclosed questionable information in 4137 cases, or a little more than two tenths of 1 per cent of the total number of persons checked.

Full-scale investigations are now being conducted in these 4137 cases, and 1391 have been completed. Some 231 persons resigned during the course of the probes, and in 13 other cases the workers are no longer with the government.

The remaining 1147 completed investigations have been turned over to the Civil Service Commission for evaluation, and it is a reasonable assumption that by no means all these persons will be denied Federal employment. The record will stand up, no doubt, with private service, and there need be no question that the screening is going on steadily. It has to be borne in mind, too, that the bureaucracy had to be hurriedly increased in wartime.

The relative paucity of security risks in the government has intensified rather than ameliorated the effort to identify New Dealism with Communism and espionage. Actually there are not many New Dealers left in government service. The way of torturing the survivors is not limited to the Thomas Committee. One indoor sport is to leave a message on t he desk of a New Dealer: “Miss Bentley wants to speak to you,” and the telephone number of the House of Representatives.

There have also been telephone calls to New Dealers suggesting that “now you’ll no doubt be leaving Washington. What about renting your house?” One officeholder, now an Assistant Secretary, one day found a moving van outside his house, ordered there by some cruel joker.

It is perhaps natural that this sort of thing should prevail after so long an administration. One remembers how Herbert Hoover was similarly crucified. In Washington in the thirties anybody who said a good word about Hoover was made to feel as if he had leprosy.

The watchword of the New Dealers was the eager equalitarianism which Tocqueville warned us against in his monumental book on America. Mr. Hoover’s was liberty, and it is this aspect of Mr. Hoover, together with his actual hunmnitarianism, that accounts for the resurrection of his reputation. The pendulum has swung back, and the Hooverites and Old Guard Republicans are enjoying a sweet though vindictive revenge out of the goings-on at the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

What is fair investigation?

Investigation is fundamental in the proper performance of the duty of the legislature to frame wise laws, and to keep an eye on the doings of the legislature. A prime example of the service done by the investigative process of Congress was the unraveling of the Teapot Dome scandal in the twenties.

But the fear of many impartial observers is that the process is being degraded. On the quiet, one hears that procedure will change if Governor Dewey comes in. A premonitory sign was his making available to Senator Ferguson one of the best investigators who served under Dewey — namely, William P. Rogers.

Senator Ferguson is chairman of the investigation subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Expenditures, which is going over the ground that is now being covered by the Thomas Committee, but the difference in procedure is most marked. Senator Ferguson, of course, is not above playing politics, but he is punctilious over procedure, and by no means shares the lust of the Thomas Committee for name-slinging.

It is clear that a code of fair practice for investigation committees will be offered to Congress after the clections, chiefly to make sure of adequate screening of witnesses by expert counsel, so that, contrary to present practice, no injustice will be done to innocent individuals when they are put on the stand.

Public secrets

Truman’s relations with Congress are worsened by his refusal to help the investigation committees on loyalty. The President will not allow them access to confidential records. Constitutionally, Congress is free to examine anything, but it is not always in the public interest for it to do so. It is a question how much access Congress should have to secret material, to secrets limited to three or four people, as, for instance, Joseph Grew’s diary. This is the type of exemption that Judge Wyzanski of Boston specifies in his recent article on Executive-Legislative relations.

Recognition of Executive power in this respect was shown during the war when the War Department used to keep secret documents in the White House basement. The Department was far more afraid of Congress than of the enemy.

The public interest clearly would not be served by allowing employment records to float around Congress containing FBI and other reports on employees. These contain all kinds of items, including just plain gossip, for the FBI insists that it is merely a collecting and not an evaluating agency. Aside from any unfairness to the employee in question, the practice would be bad for the national defense, for it would reveal sources of FBI information.

There is a good deal of grist for the Dewey mill in the inefficiency of government as well as in Mr. Truman’s stubborn attitude toward Congressional investigators. It is difficult to understand how Silvermaster could have obtained a job, let alone the succession of jobs which he held onto for more than a decade, anywhere in the United States government. In the case of Remington, it is fantastic to see how he could have been given such a sensitive job in the Commerce Department as chairman of a committee which allocates exports.

It may be, of course, that they were kept so that they could be watched, and that that fact cannot he brought out on the side of the Administration. The FBI can’t give away its secrets. Nor can it be interested in helping the investigators, since the hearings are a sort of no confidence vote in the FBI and the grand jury system. As for Senator Ferguson and Attorney General Clark, they have been at swords’ points since the exposure of the voting scandal in Missouri, when ballot boxes full of votes disappeared.

The Mood of the Capital

The mood of the Capital that the Republicans are as good as elected has not changed since the special session. It is felt that the Russians are taking advantage of the campaign to press for advantages that might embarrass the Administration. The wholesome thing is that the more they press, the closer is the interparty unity on Russia. Even old campaigners are amazed, especially in view of the “no holds barred" sort of political fight that Truman is waging.

Governor Dewey kept foreign policy out of his struggle with Roosevelt because of the war. The advocates of restraint are still in the saddle of the GOP, including both Senator Vandenberg and Senator Taft, the one on the foreign and the other on the domestic front. The latter’s philosophic summing up of the special session was a model of reasoning and objectivity compared with the President’s demagogic statement. It is felt in the Capital that Mr. Truman is playing from desperation.