HAROLD E. STASSEN

Lowry, W. McNeil

Harold E. Stassen Political Grasshopper By W. McNeil Lowry ON the 18th of October, as the first session of the 82nd Congress dragged to a close, two United States Senators, decent men both,...

...30, 1949, trip to confer with Acheson and Undersecretary of State Webb was concerned with Ache-son's and Webb's request that Jessup stay on as a special ambassador rather than return to his teaching position at Columbia...
...If the mob spirit gets out of hand, it is directed at the rapist rather than at his victim...
...And at the same time, he could still entertain the idea of trying to make an independent showing in Wisconsin if he considered that desirable with Coleman supporting Taft...
...With Minnesota's delegates and with his normal strength in Wisconsin, Stassen might have gone to the Chicago convention next June with some standing as a dark horse, hoping to capture the pro-Eisenhower forces if Ike bowed out or did not make the grade...
...I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I must oppose Dr...
...After making all allowances for McCarran's help in lending his committee to Stassen for a podium, one can only conclude that Stassen's success approached the incredible...
...While this situation might be "very unjust" to the ambassador, nevertheless it existed, and on that ground and that ground alone Jessup should not go to the United Nations...
...Harold E. Stassen Political Grasshopper By W. McNeil Lowry ON the 18th of October, as the first session of the 82nd Congress dragged to a close, two United States Senators, decent men both, plumbed the depths of their individual consciences and reached the nadir toward which American politics at the mid-century has steadily descended...
...Ill Stassen's success, reporters in Washington believe, is more than merely surprising, even in retrospect...
...Bedfellows change: Joe McCarthy had to attack Gen...
...But there it was...
...Stassen testifies before Sparkman Committee that this additional evidence turned up by his "investigator" in the New York UN offices confirms that Jessup was not in Washington on Feb...
...It has remained for the mid-century advent of McCarthyism to reverse our native morality, to stamp the victim with the stigma previously borne by the attackers...
...But it has cost Stassen also in sheer political realism...
...McCarthy did him yeoman service in Wisconsin in both 1944 and 1948, when Stassen won the state's delegates for the Presidential nomination...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower for the 1952 GOP nomination...
...And Stassen could, and did, insist before the Senate Committees: "I do not associate myself with any other person...
...In 1948, Stassen started earnestly to win many state primaries as a liberal Republican...
...V Following McCarthy into the Jessup affair carried risks for Stassen, but he had been in debt to McCarthy for a long time...
...The fight against Jessup provided two such issues—the favorite Taft attack on the Administration's Far Eastern policy and the "softness toward Communism" issue...
...I testify of what I know, and I will be personally responsible for what I say...
...They were not accessories to his crime before the fact...
...This was the situation confronting Stassen after Youngdahl stepped out as governor, and a trying situation for any politician...
...Prior to the state GOP convention he was for Gov...
...Youngdahl could deliver delegates in Minnesota that not even Stassen could deliver for himself, as witness an interesting "Minnesota Poll" of 1951...
...After the convention, he endorsed the late Frank Knox...
...The issue had been shifted around...
...President," he said, "I must take the position I have announced...
...But since last August, Youngdahl has been a federal district judge in the District of Columbia and unable to win Minnesota delegates for Eisenhower, Stassen, or anybody else...
...Philip C. Jessup labeled Harold Stassen's shifting from the large issue to the small "fact," from U. S. China policy to where-was-Jessup-on-the-night-of-Jan...
...One of the things he knows is that Acheson and Jessup were now, and in the October, 1949, State Department meeting had been, attempting "the turning of India to the domination of the Communist Party of India...
...With Smith and Gillette had voted Owen Brewster, Maine Republican...
...But in the main Smith, like Gillette, paid steady if unconscious tribute to the success of Joseph McCarthy and Harold Stassen in confusing an American's loyalty to his government's own interests with his devotion (or lack of it) to the interests of the government of Chiang Kai-shek...
...Since publicly he was for Eisenhower and was supporting the Administration's foreign policy in Europe, Stassen now needed a couple of Taft issues to protect his other flank...
...But with Youngdahl unable to help him, Anderson and Roy Dunne, the old guard Minnesota national committeeman, would be unlikely to exert themselves for a Stassen drive on the progressive flank of the GOP...
...It was against this background, though Smith and Gillette didn't know it, that Harold Stassen did the job which prompted the two key votes in the Sparkman Committee to turn against Jessup's confirmation...
...But it is doubtful, particularly in view of Stassen's ultimate triumph over Jessup, that the former Minnesota governor felt any pain in Jessup's description...
...Stassen refuses to say categorically whether he thought Jessup unfit to serve at the United Nations...
...Stassen refuses the opportunity to disavow McCarthy's "affinity toward Communism" charge against Jessup by telling the Committee's counsel "that's your statement" and "I have no comment on that...
...But McCarthy had an accessory after the fact, and he was respectable—the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Harold Stassen, former governor of Minnesota...
...This may seem at first blush unfair to the man who presented himself in the book, Where I Stand, in 1948 as a forthright liberal able and willing to lead the GOP into the paths of pro-gressivism...
...We must meet it objectively and courageously...
...He filed in the Wisconsin primary in absentia from his post in the Pacific and won the state's delegates with McCarthy's help...
...For what Smith and Gillette tried to do Oct...
...Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin while delivering the coup de grace of the McCarthy technique to Philip Jessup...
...Jessup...
...9. U. S. Ambassador Warren Austin says that UN records in New York show that Jessup was there on UN work on Feb...
...That was fact number one...
...A Taft-Stassen slate for the Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominations could undoubtedly win the primaries in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, if Stassen could get Taft's promise...
...Lest this look like a political feat no man with Stassen's gifts could seriously attempt, one has only to study the "grasshopper technique" in pre-Jessup days...
...The personal integrity of Philip Jessup is not the issue," said Jessup's long-time academic friend...
...In 1942, Stassen backed the arch-conservative, now Senate Minority Leader, Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska in his victorious fight against the late Sen...
...The two votes for Jessup had come from Chairman John Sparkman, Alabama, and J. William Fulbright, Arkansas, both Democrats...
...True, this might be mainly owing "to the concerted campaign of unfair and unprincipled attacks made on him...
...By compromising with temporary defeats as a liberal, rather than with the principles of liberalism, he could have stood today in the spot at which he only vainly gazes...
...And the governor who succeeded Youngdahl from the lieutenant-governor's chair is C. Elmer Anderson, whom the Stassen Republicans in Minnesota have always opposed When Stassen s man Ed Thye came to the U. S. Senate, it was Anderson he beat in the primary...
...1. Stassen tells the McCarran Committee that Vandenberg had told him Acheson and Jessup proposed at a White House conference late in 1949 or early in 1950 that aid to the Chinese Nationalists be cut off...
...The tortured logic by which politics has sunk to this depth has never been so graphically illustrated as in the rationalizations by Gillette and Smith of their votes against Jessup...
...Jessup testifies before Sparkman Committee that his Jan...
...This further reduced his standing among progressives in Minnesota...
...Douglas MacArthur in 1944 in order to help Stassen...
...The other, Guy Gillette, Iowa Democrat, was physically 1,500 miles from the Senate precincts...
...He could then deal with Dunne and Anderson for support in taking the Vice-Presidential spot with Taft...
...On Oct...
...Stassen showed his state of mind by crying out that the Youngdahl appointment was a "political trick...
...They could not conscientiously grasp the hands of the assassin, McCarthy...
...In 1944, Stassen promised the Willkie people he would not go into the Wisconsin primary held a few months before Willkie's death...
...otherwise it would seem that the results of my visit to the Far East and the position I took [then] would be negated by sending Dr...
...1. IV Harold Stassen, as the nominal president of the University of Pennsylvania, is publicly committed to the candidacy of Gen...
...For in succeeding where McCarthy and McCarran were on the point of failing, the former Minnesota governor not only rejected every opportunity to support Jessup's "loyalty...
...And in Wisconsin, Tom Coleman, McCarthy's friend who had previously, with McCarthy, worked for Stassen, was now a driver for the Taft bandwagon...
...15 both Smith and Chairman Sparkman agreed that Harold Stassen had succeeded in shifting the issue from Jessup's loyalty to "China policy...
...But by cutting his losses, Stassen could remedy his situation in part...
...Smith, speaking out on the floor of the Senate in person, had more difficulty in reaching the Gillette goal...
...But even if he had it privately, Stassen could not openly throw in with Taft without losing the chance to inherit the Eisenhower delegates for his own Presidential try at Chicago...
...Gillette's conclusion was that, still, there was a lack of public confidence in Dr...
...Harold Stassen was straddling a political turntable that went the whole semicircle between the Eisenhower Republicans on the one hand and the Taft Republicans on the other, between a Stassen candidacy for the Presidency and a Stassen candidacy for the Vice-Presidency —or even for the job of Secretary of State...
...The latest advent of Harold Stassen on the American political scene had raised the game of "who said what about whom and when" to a new level, and had made it a pastime in which respectable men like Smith and Gillette could participate...
...Dr...
...Vandenberg placed Acheson and Jessup at the White House conference, Stassen does not concede that he could have been mistaken and challenges Sparkman to ask President Truman to produce minutes of the meeting...
...I think we must let that picture develop pretty much in their own pattern...
...Like the Senator from Iowa, he began by stating that he had "absolute confidence in his [Jessup's] integrity, ability, and loyalty to his country...
...An overpowering desire to be President of the United States has cost many Americans dearly, both in worldly success and in principle, and Stassen's name is on that tragic roll...
...Therefore . . . but no...
...In June he went to Philadelphia as one of the floor managers for the late Wendell Willkie...
...George Norris...
...As Washington cor' respondent for The Progressive Lowry has done a series of portraits of major figures in Congress —Sens...
...The record shows that Stassen, not Jessup, said of In-, dia, "We must not try to have the Indians take sides between the Communists and ourselves...
...Stassen had only to keep the independence he proclaimed when he climbed into the Minnesota governor's seat, and he might be unbeatable today...
...He also went through six Senate hearings without ever getting his latest "facts" in line with those he had so confidently aired under previous questioning...
...One, Republican H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, had the moral courage to exhibit his tortured and circular process of rationalization on the Senate floor...
...his voice in Washington this day was a statement for release in the Senate press gallery...
...30-31, 1949, and "must have" talked with Acheson about cutting off aid to Chiang Kai-shek...
...Fact number three was that Harold Stassen (Gillette did not identify him by name) had presented only "the most meager" evidence that Jessup took an important part in formulating controversial China policy in the years immediately following World War II...
...Answering the question as to who was the ablest Minnesota governor in the past 20 years, 44% picked Youngdahl, 24% the late Floyd B. Olson, while Harold Stassen trailed in third place with 17 per cent...
...While conceding that he has only his own "recollection" that the dead Sen...
...Though insisting over and over upon Jessup's "loyalty," Smith at one point declared that the inquiry of Sen...
...Jessup's confirmation...
...So McCarthy and McCarran won...
...A few minutes before, at a meeting of a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, the live vote of Smith and the proxy vote of Gillette had swung that five-man group against recommending Ambassador Philip C. Jessup for confirmation as a delegate at the sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly in Paris...
...Up to August, 1951, he had also a claim on the loyalty of the progressive Republican governor of Minnesota, Luther Young-dahl...
...5, 1949...
...A year later he switched his Pennsylvania GOP affiliations to join the Jay Cooke group of Philadelphia...
...5, 1949 which does nor establish that either Acheson or Jessup had been present at a White House conference following joint chiefs of staff recommendation that supplies to Chiang Kai-shek be cut off because they were falling into Communists' hands...
...II Sen...
...Lowry taught English literature at the University of Illinois...
...For in view of the particular political circumstances facing Harold Stassen as 1952 approaches, there can be no question that Stassen knew exactly what he was doing when he made his original request for a hearing by the McCarran Committee Oct...
...Thomas E. Dewey and managed a big Dewey dinner in Minneapolis...
...Jessup has been identified with those forces in and outside the [Truman] Administration which were responsible for the Far Eastern policy which has led to the present crisis...
...At one point the Senator from New Jersey, bouncing back and forth between backing Jessup's loyalty and rejecting Senate confirmation, introduced a new species of argument, what might be called the argument of internal consistency: "Mr...
...Here is a man who got his political experience in Minnesota, and has forgotten the elemental fact that in Minnesota the Republicans are a minority party (some 32% compared to 43% Democratic-Farmer Laborite and the rest independent...
...Jessup [now] to the Assembly as our representative...
...When Dewey won the nomination at Philadelphia, Stassen vainly offered himself for the Vice-Presidential spot...
...The respectable and well-meaning characters of these two Senators add both poig nance and point to the illustration...
...He won Minnesota and Wisconsin, again with McCarthy's help, took nine delegates from Taft in Ohio, shifted his ground and lost Oregon to Dewey...
...James Cox...
...It was not his mission, he says, to "give advice or reach conclusions," but only to "give the facts...
...And four Presidential elections since Stassen's first prominence in politics have not served to show him that in the United States, as in Minnesota, the Republicans are in the minority...
...The record also shows that the "10-point program" to which Stassen had testified did not exist...
...Owen Latti-more prevailed in advocating the recognition of Red China and nine other pro-Chinese Communist moves in Asia...
...Committee, Gillette wrote, showed Jessup "a man of great mental ability, a man of honesty and integrity, a careful student of international affairs, a teacher of international law with a wide, though varied, experience in international affairs...
...Gillette's statement was the more direct—if the more incredible—in its tribute to the new morality, by which the victim rather than the attacker is punished...
...31, the "grasshopper technique...
...Dr...
...Jessup, in short, "has not got the confidence of our people...
...18 was to disassociate themselves from Sen...
...Pat McCarran's committee into "the thinking behind the policy which was adopted as to the Far East" was "all a part of the case, and the hearings before that subcommittee have been very helpful to me...
...Richard Russell, Paul Douglas, Estes Kefauver, and Hubert Humphrey —which have attracted wide attention...
...One man made it possible for them to delude themselves that way...
...Normally Stassen's friends in Minnesota would enter a candidate against the anti-Stassen Anderson when the latter tried to be reelected governor in 1952...
...Suppose Stassen promised to help Anderson, rather than block him, in 1952...
...5, 1949, when the White House conference was held, but that Jessup had been in Washington Jan...
...Because Jessup was a close associate and adviser to Acheson...
...Fact number two was that McCarthy's allegations against Jessup were "unjustified associations of quotations" giving a "warped and distorted picture...
...He is a controversial figure . . . This issue is not a personal one...
...There is space for only the briefest log: Oct...
...This would take an understanding with not only Anderson but Roy Dunne, who is for Taft for President...
...There is an elemental American code, well understood by the down-to-earth men usually elected to the United States Senate, that a woman forcibly ravished of her ultimate favors retains her virtue...
...The evidence before the Sparkman W. McNEIL LOWRY has a front row seat at most of the major developments in Washington, where he is chief of the Washington Bureau for the four dailies in Florida, Georgia, and Ohio owned by former Gov...
...Stassen declares also that at an October, 1949, public round-table at the State Department, a group headed by Prof...
...Oct, 8. Stassen tells Sparkman Committee he agrees that the diary entry supports that interpretation...
...But they could not have done the job alone...
...In 1940, Stassen was for three Republican Presidential aspirants within four months...
...Before going to Washington Mr...
...7. The New York Herald-Tribune publishes Vandenberg diary entry not of late 1949, or early, 1950, but o/ Feb...
...Secretary Acheson says that State Department records show the same thing...
...The key to political victory for the GOP lies in the independent vote...
...Publication of the minutes of the October, 1949, State Department roundtable showed that the majority of 25 outside experts, including U. S. business leaders, had favored or accepted recognition of Communist China, while the State Department official involved, R. Walton Butterworth, urged against such action, with the backing of Harold Stassen and two other outside experts...

Vol. 15 • December 1951 • No. 12


 
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