Washington - U.S.A.
COFFIN, TRIS
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By Tris Coffin Changing Atmosphere Washington, D.C. A fear that oppressed Washington and diverted its energies for a decade is slowly drifting away. This is a fear that some...
...The "easy-payment plans," which the Senator believes trap consumers into buying higher-priced goods and services than they can afford...
...chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, has been publicly spanked by the stern Speaker, Sam Rayburn...
...There are signs now that the air is clearing...
...The censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy by the Senate in 1954 was reinforced, in effect, by the defeat of his lieutenant, Herman Welker, by the Idaho voters in 1956...
...The lack of a Treasury nest egg to meet a recession...
...The charming and ingenious mastermind of the radical Right, Senator Styles Bridges, has been in the hospital for weeks...
...Yet, despite the meteoric rise of rates, not since the latter part of the 19th century has the Government security market been in such bad shape as at present...
...To this attack, such loyal Republicans as Senator Homer Capehart reply that more people are employed than ever before, wages and personal income are the highest, and gross national product the greatest...
...One who might have disagreed, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, author of the courageous "Declaration of Conscience" back in 1950, was kicked off the Committee and also dropped from the Republican Policy Committee...
...What more do you want...
...Morse put into the Congressional Record a list of tax amortizations (410 totaling $1,021,813,000) to companies linked with Hanna interests...
...J. Robert Oppenheimer was tried for heresy, largely because he had blocked Admiral Strauss maddeningly when the latter was a minority Commissioner...
...In the last year inflation has exceeded that of any peacetime year in the past 25 years and averaged several times that of the nonwar years (exclusive of immediate postwar years) under the Democrats...
...The Wall Street Journal stated that Humphrey was leaving "a fiscal mess...
...In this changing atmosphere, the Democrats have regained their tongues and are sharply criticizing the Administration on a number of key issues...
...Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, whose rough questioning unnerved Humphrey several times, declared: "I say that the Secretary of the Treasury, in an agreement with—on a basis that amounts almost to a conspiracy—the Federal Reserve Board, has made a speculative security out of every Government bond now in existence or those which they contemplate issuing...
...Almost every day, Democrats have been rising in the Senate to develop the loss in value of Government bonds into a major issue...
...High interest rates, which, Byrd feels, tend to discriminate harshly against small business...
...It requires some genius to accomplish this, not when debt is rising as in World War II or in the 1930s, but when debt is falling...
...Senator William F. Know-land is leaving Washington, presumably to run for Governor of California...
...The Joint Congressional Atomic Committee has held open discussions of fall-out peril, despite the threat of the Un-American and Internal Security Committees to investigate scientists who oppose H-bomb tests...
...Francis E. Walter (D.-Pa...
...He is chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and he has succeeded in getting rid of his last effective critic within the AEC, Commissioner Tom Murray...
...Of this loosely knit alliance of security officers, practical politicians and zealots who figured so prominently in the early Fifties, only Admiral Lewis L. Strauss remains in authority...
...George M. Humphrey, Secretary of the Treasury, the strong man of the Eisenhower Administration, is being torn apart by such a variety of critics as conservative Senator Harry Byrd, Seymour E. Harris, chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard, the Wall Street Journal, and Senator Wayne Morse...
...The redistribution and lengthening of maturities were 'musts' for the Treasury...
...The Eisenhower "team" was confused and divided in the IndoChina crisis, and woefully unprepared for the East German and Hungarian revolts and the war over Suez...
...What was more critical, Washington was so absorbed in this game of security that it ignored fateful Communist moves in the world...
...His one-time administrative assistant, Scott Mc-Leod, has been removed as chief of tho Stato Department's Security Bureau and packed off to Ireland as Ambassador...
...Federal expenditures are way above any peacetime years...
...The discouraging slump in Government bonds...
...High-level Federal spending...
...The reason why this issue has been so joyfully taken up by Democrats is that holes do appear in the economy —farm income, small business, cost of living—and these economic issues may obscure civil rights and peace by the 1958 Congressional elections...
...To many of these criticisms, Secretary Humphrey has answered: "As long as we have the extreme prosperity we are now enjoying and the people have the confidence that they have, they will spend more than they have got...
...In no areas are the failures more evident than in the management of the national debt...
...Harris in a scholarly letter to the Washington Post accused Humphrey of "inflexibility and unwillingness to learn ignorance of the elements of modern economics...
...He added: "In five years, despite his persuasiveness and determination, the Secretary has failed to achieve any of his fundamental objectives...
...Also, by coincidence, one of the early acts of the Internal Revenue Service under the Humphrey regime was to sue Premium Iron Ores, a Canadian corporation, for some $5 million in back taxes and penalty...
...The fast rise of the cost of living in the last 12 months...
...Senator Byrd in his several hours of questioning chided the Secretary for misleading statements in his 50-page glowing report on Republican prosperity, and then showed his grave concern over these problems: • The increase in public and private debt to $800 billion, or a leap of 33 per cent in four years...
...Senator Morse has raised the point of conflict of interest...
...A vast network of untrained security officers spread to such caches of top secrets as the Small Business Administration and terrorized the Civil Service...
...This alliance came to power because of the betrayal of Alger Hiss, the way a bright young California Congressman, Dick Nixon, exploited it politically, and the panic of the Democrats...
...The case brought angry protests from the Canadian press and was finally thrown out by the U.S...
...The day before they lost nearly $800 million, on last Friday they lost $600 million, and on Thursday $500 million...
...An attempt is being made, too, to transform George Humphrey from the saint to the goat...
...Admiral Arthur W. Radford is retiring as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...And trade with China is being pushed behind the scenes by the textile industry (which prefers to have Japan sell its shirts to China rather than to the U.S...
...the West Coast shipping lines, and manufacturers of heavy goods...
...The rate of interest has gone sharply upward...
...This fear had sterilized Washington of all but the most cautious thinking ever since Harry Truman began to wince under the brutal accusation of "corruption and Communism...
...At the height of the "security" furor, in the early years of the Eisenhower Administration, the radical Right had a checkmate power over foreign policy, military strategy, and atomic programming...
...Perhaps the most significant—though unrelated to "security" —is the Senate Finance Committee's study of fiscal policy...
...Yesterday, investors in Government bonds lost nearly $200 million...
...This is a fear that some security office has a thick folder filled with gossip and half truths, and that it will turn up at a televised Congressional committee session or a security hearing...
...Now the Supreme Court, in a series of major decisions on civil liberties, has massively cleared the air and released the vast talents of the nation's capital...
...But it has not been the Supreme Court alone...
...Premium, with great holdings in Ontario and the Ungava Bay, is a sharp competitor of Iron Ore of Canada, a company created by George Humphrey when he was a private citizen...
...Humphrey did not sell his stock, valued at some $12 million, in the M. A. Hanna and affiliated companies, and Morse suggests that he may have used his vast public authority, consciously or unconsciously, to the advantage of his private interests...
...Tax Court this spring...
...Ironically, the strongest sentiment for disarmament comes from Congressional conservatives who fear the effect of rising military costs on the budget, national debt and tax structure...
...Disarmament, trade with Red China, cultural and scientific interchange with the USSR are being discussed without fear of subpoena...
...McCarthy ran the Government Operations Committee with no dissenting votes...
...The Communist attack in Korea and later the Chinese entry came as staggering shocks to the Truman Administration...
...He pointed out that the Secretary is a member of the Defense Mobilization Board, which controls the rapid write-offs...
Vol. 40 • July 1957 • No. 27
