HERTER STANDS BY

...In the vital area of civil liberties, Herter's record as governor has been weak and ambiguous...

...In any event, Herter, who throughout his career has been a serviceable, cooperative party man, will labor wherever the Republican leadership assigns him...

...He is hostile to the efforts of liberals who wish to restrict wire tapping by re quiring that police officers obtain prior judicial approval for each wire tap...

...Likewise, he has acquired few personal enemies and aroused little controversy because he does nothing to provoke antagonism...

...Eisenhower will not run and they don't want Nixon, he is the best they have in sight...

...This group made detailed recommendations on the operations of the Marshall Plan...

...He comes from a good family of middle class means, but one far removed from the rarified aristocracy of the Cabots and Lowells and Adamses...

...In short, Herter would continue the three main lines of the Eisenhower performance: the weak executive, the symbol of internationalism in foreign affairs, and the spokesman for quiet conservatism at home...

...In the past two months, in widely spaced parts of the country, he has launched out in a series of six major speeches designed to establish him as a national figure...

...He served for a couple of years as an attache in the diplomatic service, spent 1921 to 1924 as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in the Commerce Department, edited a now defunct sports magazine in Boston, and lectured on government for a term at his alma mater...

...In 1930 he was elected to the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature from Newton, one of the more prosperous Boston suburbs...

...This he most certainly was not...

...His only progressive gesture during these years was his support of the state unemployment compensation law...

...This surface manner is not calculated to endear him immediately to Iowa farmers or Pennsylvania miners...

...The last time this legal conundrum arose was in connection with the candidacy of Herbert Hoover in 1928, who had lived abroad so long that there was some question of whether he had had fourteen years of continuous residence in the United States, another Constitutional requirement...

...As a member of the House Rules Committee he followed faithfully the dictates of Leo Allen of Illinois and Clarence Brown of Ohio, the two reactionary Republican head men...

...Herter's "internationalism" begins with the matter of his birth, and this circumstance is an obstacle, though not a serious one, to his candidacy...

...He was born in Paris, where his father was then living as a painter...

...Herter described "high, rigid supports" as not the answer and the "soil fertility bank" and the two-price plan for low price exporting of surpluses as "only partial solutions...

...Herter speaks with the accent and intonation of the Back Bay, and he looks every inch what he is—a dignified Boston Gentleman...

...Should Herter decide to enter the New Hampshire primary this would afford him an early opportunity by means of a prearranged test case to obtain a court ruling on this point...

...A faithful proponent of the NAM's viewpoint on national questions, Weeks played a key role as chairman of the Republican National Financial Committee in organizing Eisenhower's nomination in 1952, and was duly rewarded with his present post as Secretary of Commerce...

...The odds are good that Herter will land on the national ticket, though perhaps not in the top spot...

...IV Herter, like Saltonstall, has not repealed any social legislation and has contented himself with tidying up the administration and completing the projects begun under his Democratic predecessor...

...This is a mixed district including four working-class and middle-class wards in Boston and two wealthy suburbs...

...Dever, his Democratic predecessor, was considerably more hospitable to the advice of intellectuals...

...Yet he is not without prowess as a campaigner...

...faculties...

...Herter's election in 1952 repeated...

...Herter is not an ideal Presidential candidate for the Eastern Republicans...

...It was in the area of foreign affairs that Herter achieved his greatest prominence in Washington...

...Except for his lack of the other's personal dynamism, Herter would be an almost identical replica of Eisenhower as a candidate and a President: he is very much a routine organization man who goes along with the advice of his business backers and political managers...

...In 1952 Sinclair Weeks, the Boston button manufacturer who has long been the grand sachem of Republican politics in the Bay State, tapped Herter to make the run against Democratic Governor Paul Dever...

...In the view of Dean Erwin Griswold of the Harvard Law School and other legal experts who have been consulted recently, this places him safely within the Constitutional requirement as a natural born citizen of the United States (any citizen not native born is debarred by the Constitution from becoming President...

...On no important economic issue did he ever differ from the Republican leaders in the House...

...III During the next decade in the House of Representatives, Herter repeated his earlier performance...

...His record in the legislature is a bleak chronicle of negative votes cast on almost every progressive measure...

...However, he has put aside all thought of retirement now that the prospect of going to the White House has suddenly opened up...

...Professor William Yandell Elliot of Harvard was Herter's chief brain truster and ghost writer in the preparation of his 1948 report on the Marshall Plan, but curiously enough Herter as governor has made little use of the expert services of the Harvard and M.I.T...

...However, by his marriage to Mary Pratt, heiress to a substantial Standard Oil fortune, Herter is solidly established as a member of the Massachusetts upper class...

...Last summer, before the President's heart attack, it was widely understood in Massachusetts that Herter would not run for reelection because of the precarious state of his own health...

...His birth was promptly registered at the American Embassy...

...This was a signal service to the Dixie-crat bloc in the House for which Herter has received surprisingly little criticism...

...Herter squeezed through to victory by a narrow margin and his Washington career was launched...

...He has arthritis of the back which stiffens his stride slightly and causes him some difficulty but is apparently not seriously disabling...

...This is the major question mark overhanging Herter's candidacy, for he is not a man likely to give any new direction or new impetus...

...The pattern con-sists of alternating Democratic administrations, which push through social legislation and grandiose public works projects, with subsequent Re publican administrations dedicated to cutting costs and consolidating gains...

...He cooperated with the Allen-Brown-Joe Martin triumvirate in sabotaging the modest rules reform of 1949 which enabled committee chairmen to bring civil rights and other controversial items of legislation to the floor when the House Rules Committee blocked action...

...Herter offered no solutions himself except to call for a "case by case, step by step, intrinsically American approach . . . the middle road...

...He consistently voted against public housing and public power...

...Dever and the Democrats from time to time let out cries of anguish at the spectacle of Herter opening new roads and dedicating new prisons and hospitals and implicitly taking credit for them, although these enterprises were initiated and financed under the Demo-crats...

...Most observers regarded 'this group's report as notably timid and restrained, but Herter nonetheless played a useful role in dragging along backward Republican members who might otherwise have been openly hostile to foreign aid...

...As governor a few weeks later, however, he reversed himself and stated that the same principle did not apply to state civil service employees...

...Will the American people choose this "middle road" once again if Eisenhower is not heading the ballot...

...He also lacks the magnetic charm of an Eisenhower or a Willkie...

...Herter's views on national issues do not depart in any particular from the orthodox line of the national Administration...

...The results so far of this trial run are encouraging to his backers but not overwhelmingly conclusive...

...WILLIAM V. SHANNON, Washington correspondent for the New York Post, is co-author with Robert S. Allen of "The Truman Merry-Go-Round...

...This was a period when the state was putting on its statute books a wide variety of "Little New Deal" legislation...

...but if Mr...

...As a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers he subscribed to the University's policy of not dismissing professors who had taken the Fifth Amendment be fore Congressional committees...

...He has the Eisenhower gift for saying nothing and making it sound important, for sponsoring an eminently conservative program and making it seem fairly liberal (or conservatively "progressive" or moderately "dynamic") and for championing internationalism in foreign affairs without offending anyone by cutting tariffs or spending money...

...Unlike his contemporary, Henry Cabot Lodge, who took the chairmanship of the legislature's labor committee, seized the liberal mantle for himself, and thereby leaped into the United States Senate in 1936 at the age of 34, Herter conformed to the straight routine of the back benchers...

...Since the elections that fall seriously depleted the supply of G.O.P...

...Unless every Boston Protestant whose father was not a known horse thief is to be incorporated within this definition, Herter cannot qualify...

...On the farm problem, for example, the United Press reported last December that Herter, in a speech in Omaha, described proper farm goals as "parity of farm income, stability of farm prices, preservation of the family farm, maximum response of farm production to market demand, avoidance of market development of greater export markets without resort to dumping...

...When the state's Congressional seats were redistricted in 1942, Republican Party bosses rewarded him for his stalwart service in the ranks by helping him obtain the nomination in the newly-formed Tenth District...

...Thus, Leverett Saltonstall was elected in 1938 following the administrations of James Curley and Charles Hurley, and served six quiet years before giving way to Democrat Maurice Tobin...

...He would do nothing daring or imaginative and would shun controversy and "personalities...

...He is an adequate speaker, conveys an impression of strength and purpose on television, and exhibited unsuspected talents for handshaking and folksi-ness during his first statewide campaign in 1952...

...In this regard Herter's performance on a state level remarkably parallels Eisenhower's in Washington...

...He supported the entire gamut of reactionary legislation of the postwar years, including the Taft-Hartley Act, the Tidelands Oil bill, the Ken-natural gas bill, the McCarran Internal Security Art, and the various onslaughts on price controls in 1946 and 1951...

...After his graduation from Harvard, Herter drifted in and out of various occupations for fifteen years before discovering politics...

...A Campaign Portrait Herter Stands By By WILLIAM V. SHANNON /CHRISTIAN HERTER was born ^* in Paris, is six feet, five inches tall, sixty years old, has a wealthy and attractive wife, was once an assistant to Herbert Hoover, served ten years in Congress, is now in his second term as Governor of Massachusetts, is a safe conservative and a moderate internationalist, and may just possibly be the next President of the United States...

...It is important to underline these facts, for it is certain that a significant component of the propaganda in behalf of Herter's Presidential bid will be an effort to picture him as a liberal Republican in the mode of Jacob Javits and Clifford Case...

...He voted in 1932, for example, against state funds for public works for the unemployed, against a ban on the importation of strikebreakers in 1934, against a ban on ex parte injunctions in labor disputes, against the 48-hour week for state employees in 1935, and against increased appropriations for mental hospitals and state aid to the blind in 1936...

...governors, the description is all the more accurate...

...If the same Eastern group of politicos and businessmen who set up the Eisenhower "draft" four years ago comes to a firm decision that Herter is their man this year, Weeks may be expected to occupy a similarly pivotal Tole in the governor's candidacy...

...a pattern long familiar in Massachusetts politics...

...In 1947, as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he led a delegation of Congressmen on a European tour...

...He would be agreeable to running on a ticket headed by Vice President Nixon, with whom he enjoyed friendly relations during their years together in the House and for whom his son worked briefly as an administrative assistant (although it is reliably reported that young Herter departed more disillusioned than enchanted by his service with the Vice President...

...II One myth certain to gain currency if Herter's candidacy becomes a substantial enterprise is the notion that he is a Boston Brahmin...

...Former Governor Thomas E. Dewey described Herter in 1954 as "the cream in the bottle" of Republican governors...

...Last fall Elmer Nelson, who as Republican state committee chairman is the governor's official political spokesman, presided at a mass meeting in Boston at which McCarthy was the featured speaker...

...Herter has also been discreetly silent on the issue of McCarthyism...

...Herter would be a useful make-weight on a Nixon ticket, for his dignified, cautious blend of internationalism and conservatism would disarm those Atlantic Seaboard Republicans and independents who are uneasy about Nixon...

...Although he rose to the rank of speaker, his record in twelve years in the legislature can at best be called undistinguished...