The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER is trying to revive a partnership between the Presidency and the Congress. He is investing, rather than spending, his political strength. Almost the whole of his energy has been directed toward establishment of relations with Congress leading to government by common agreement between true “coequals,” not by rivalry, jealousy, and a continual game of showdown.

The President never would tell the public how he really felt about Charles E. Wilson’s stockholdings. That was Senatorial business. He passed up a row when Congress knocked out the appropriation to keep the three-man Council of Economic Advisers going through June, although he had prematurely recorded himself in their favor. He stood on his position that budget balancing must precede tax cutting, but applauded those Congressmen who he said were going in the direction of reduction.

He would not be drawn into a public quarrel with Senator McCarthy; investigations were Congressional business. He did not challenge the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s tinkering with his resolution denouncing Communist enslavement of free peoples.

Representative Thomos J. O’Brien, embodiment of red-necked Chicago Democratic politics, said after lunch at the While House: “s’ll tell you. If I had something on my mind I wanted to talk to him about, I feel I’m in a position now where I could call up, and I think he’s the kind of fellow who’d say, ‘Come on down.’ ” Others were beginning to feel that way.

His rate of progress was slowed in early days by ragged liaison which showed up most glaringly in the matter of the “liberation” resolution. Also, Congressional leaders had trouble getting through to the White House at crucial moments. They complained that phone calls were not even returned. But these conditions were being remedied as rapidly as possible.

Eisenhower’s plans are not limited to giving ground, nor to just holding it. He is pushing forward, digging in as he goes. Building a new Voice of America while letting McCarthy whittle on the old is standard operating procedure. Eisenhower plans to return the policing of the executive branch to the executive branch. He says so.

Coöperation in the Treasury

Government by menu is pervasive. Once a week. Secretary Humphrey gives luncheon at the Treasury to Chairman Martin of Federal Reserve. Once a week, W. Randolph Burgess, Humphrey’s deputy for debt management, lunches at Reserve with Martin. These amenities symbolize all sorts of substance: Treasury - Reserve coöperation, lacking under John Snyder except toward the very end; a recognition of Reserve as the best 360-degree economic eye; the natural community of interest among business minds.

The Humphrey - “Burgess team is rated a corker. Humphrey has color and sparkle and rounded surfaces in his personality. Burgess is craggy and finished in flat tones. They both like facts and are ready to experiment when that is the best way to corner facts.

Their refunding of one-year certificates (Burgess’s idea) sounded the market for one-year offerings at a higher rate, and for longer-term (five-plus years) bonds of even richer yield. What they found out was that money is tight. Only about 7 per cent of the $8,868 billion offering was taken up in the bonds. Tight money wasn’t much news, but the negative report was in itself an array of facts.

Treasury draws more judgments from savings bonds. Sales now surpass redemptions. Treasury thinks that means confidence in money, a conviction that inflation is stemmed. But officials still fear inflation more than deflation. Unless the budget be balanced the inflationary threat is classed as still strong. Serious deflation, it is felt, could occur only if a big plus-balance showed, and that is listed among impossibilities.

The slow movement of facts delayed Treasury decisions on basic fiscal policy. But in Congress you could literally get even money, from men who will largely control the outcome, that up to $10 billion can be chopped out of the budget for the fiscal year beginning this July and that both a balanced budget and tax reduction will be achieved by the next Congressional elections.

Civil service and the veterans

The Augean stables, it has now turned out, are full of sacred cows. “ Cleaning up the mess” has naturally run into stiff civil service protections and veterans’ preferences. Herbert Brownell found himself free to fill only the ten jobs nearest him at Justice. Oveta Culp Hobby inherited free sway over only about six out of 37,500 at Federal Security.

The other side of the story was that some holdovers were useful. George Humphrey was candidly surprised at the high quality of men he found in most branches at Treasury, and kept on most of them. But in every department the new administrators found others qualified by civil service and also protected by veterans’ preference. Of the two, the latter can be the more damaging to efficiency.

All administrators with personnel problems pin much hope on Philip Young, turning forty-three, new Civil Service Chairman. He made wartime Lend-Lease a model of scandal-free and efficient administration, without benefit of civil service or veterans’ preferences. Young’s last job was the refurbishing, under Eisenhower’s eyes, of Columbia’s Graduate School of Business. The President “s confidence in him is shown by the fact that he ran Eisenhower’s brightest civilian dream, the “American Assembly” experiment in adult civic education.

“Mr. Attorney”

Attorney General Brownell is another department head who asks questions first and shoots afterward. Broad curiosity focuses on his antitrust program. Brownell picked May 22, when he will address the American Law Institute, as the earliest date on which he would be ready to disclose it.

Brownell did not like to be called “General,” as most men holding his office are. For that awkward title, confusing to a civilian, he substituted “Mr. Attorney,” found somewhere in British usage. It bespeaks not Anglophilism but legalophilism. Brownell is conscious of the dignity of the law and of his office, and is deeply determined to maintain both.

His abilities permit Brownell to set himself high professional standards. He quite frankly feels that reliance on civil service for job security is incompatible with a true sense of law as a profession. He is also unsympathetic toward those who offer political instead of professional credentials.

Brownell will hire good successful men interested in public service, good men who need good pay, and good men just out of law school looking for valuable experience. Primarily for the middle group, he decided to ask Congress for higher departmental salary scales.

Tackling the loyalty program, Brownell saw that the essence of effective government is executive responsibility and power of decision in loyalty cases. He perceived that national security, not loyalty, is the true criterion. A loyal person may be a bad risk. A once disloyal person may assert loyalty but remain a bad risk. Security is broader than loyalty, and permits more dismissals with less shame to the individual.

“Psy-War”

It is not surprising that some early operations went wrong while the President concentrated on Congress and his cabinet officers fought to get roots down into the Pleistocene strata of their bureaucracies. In psychological strategy, the first part of the record was all errors. Part of the blame, too, lay in the fact that the “psy-war” enthusiasts failed to remember that their weapon is an adjunct of, not a substitute for, real power and real policy.

The Seventh Fleet “unleashed” Chiang Kai-shek, but neither peace in Korea nor perceptible progress toward it resulted. An “ultimatum” to Europeans to unite was explained down into brotherly exhortations. The clarion call for European liberation ended as a dusty whimper in a Congressional pigeonhole.

Wise and weary State Department veterans now treat each “psy-war” device as a time bomb, which, they say, they wrap in cotton batting and put to soak in the Potomac for two weeks before untying the ribbon with ten-foot tongs.

This is not to discredit the use of psychological strategy. Too much had been tried too soon, and one explosive matter, the Rosenberg case, was not processed through the cold war strategy operation, where its adverse propaganda effects might have been minimized, in advance of the President’s decision upholding the court verdict. Such errors of commission and omission would be avoided, it was hoped, as soon as there was better coördination of government acts and utterances. This will be achieved as the National Security Council is strengthened.

Robert Cutler of Boston, bicyclist and banker, is the man making NSC step faster and talk more clearly. Half a dozen people concluded independently that Cutler may emerge as one of the most important figures in policy-making.

A new brain for State

Secretary Dulles was having understandable difficulties in doctoring the quivering nervous system of the old State Department. Old-timers compared the interim situation to the time under Herbert Hoover when Henry L. Stimson look over State with a profound distrust of it acquired while he served in the Philippines. Mr. Slimson never entirely succeeded in overcoming his distrust.

The observation has been made that Dulles’s idea of an ideal department would be himself and ten or twelve bright people, with all the bureaucratic processes going on out of sight in some gigantic utility shed. Part of the Administration’s indifference to McCarthy’s attack on the “Voice” is attributable to Dulles’s profound disinterest in operating mechanisms.

According to Dulles’s own calculations the reorganization of State will take half a year at least. Republicans in Congress became restive under the delay. In the beginning, Dulles earmarked many top jobs in the department and foreign service for persons who had managed the RooseveltTruman foreign policy: Bedell Smith, Livingston Merchant, James Dunn, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Murphy, John Allison, and Karl Rankin, for example.

The party felt that these jobs could have gone to latter-day Republicans, brushing aside the fact that most of the above had begun their careers under Republican administrations and had always regarded themselves as Republicans. The back lash fell on Kennan and Bohlen because of their relative prominence. Long association of the word “containment” with Kennan’s name caused Dulles to back away from Kennan.

Bohlen, never tagged with any label worse than “Russian expert,” would have had the Moscow Embassy with only grumbles had he been able, à la King Henry IV, to concede a genuflection to the Republican dogma of original sin inherent in Yalta and Potsdam. But Bohlen, who was there, refused to compromise his convictions. When congratulated by a friend for his courage, Bohlen bristled. The implication that a man of honor could do anything else but state the truth as he saw it shocked him.

This posed an intolerable dilemma for Senators like McCarthy and Bridges who had built campaigns around the presumed iniquity of Yalta and Potsdam. Either Bohlen or their campaigns had been wrong. So they rebelled, in spite of the simple logic of sending one of America’s two top trained Russian experts to Moscow to report on the aftermath of Stalin’s death.

Lodge and the UN

At the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge struck a crisp, fresh note. In his set speeches he showed that he was inexperienced in cut-andthrust debate and that he has yet to learn the agility of a Gladwyn Jebb. Friendly UN delegations were surprised when Lodge made the rounds asking for new ideas on Korea and implying that the United States would stand on Truman—Acheson policies. Veteran diplomats at the UN had assumed that the “dynamic” new American foreign policy would include a measure or two for breaking up the UN’s many log jams, although it is unrealistic to expect this of a new Administration so soon.

Mr. Lodge was refreshingly alert to possible new tactical approaches, such as Walter Lippmann’s proposal for using points of order to break the momentum of a Vishinsky or Gromyko assault, but the substance of new policy as a backdrop against which Lodge could perform remained to be fabricated at State.

Chastened by discovery that new policy must be made, not merely asserted to exist, the American team listened hopefully to what Britain’s Eden-Butler delegation had to say. Things were helped by the novelty of a British approach beginning “Here is what we will do by ourselves” rather than “This is what you must do.”

The most serious transaction of the talks was omitted from the communiqué. It was agreement on a coördinated operation which would aim to establish an Egypt-Israel peace combined with a Middle East defense pact. Dulles spent almost the whole of the three days with Eden. This unexpected and unusual solicitude caused Eden to wish that Dulles might be treated more kindly in the British press.

Mood of the Capital

Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey was among the first to discover that businessmen have things to learn about government. He holds no doctrinaire conviction that business methods can be transferred directly to government. He would not even predict that business methods will work at all in government.

Humphrey notes the absence in government of a single decision point. Even when the executive branch makes up its collective mind, Congress usually must ratify, and in Congress decision takes place inside an amorphous area called a majority rather than at a single point.

Humphrey and other fast-learning businessmen in the new team are finding out about politics. Throughout the executive branch a triangular cross-fertilization of business, administrative, and political ideas is going on. A new school in the art of government may evolve which will be less theoretical than in Roosevelt days, less political than in Truman days, and less businesslike than a group folklore passed down from McKinley times had led the businessmen to anticipate.