ETHICS AND COST-PLUS

...Turning his attention to the "values" in American society, the professor found, among others, the following: • A preoccupation with private rather than public welfare...

...Truman, moreover, that he is loyal to weak and irresponsible aides or associates, was a favorite subject of columnists and editorial writers before the new mandate he won in 1948 and the invasion from business noted early in 1949...

...As for Douglas himself, he has taken on Taft, the President, Secretary Acheson, the bureaucrats, and the veterans on his own side of the aisle, but not McCarthy...

...On the same day on which Benton testified, Comptroller General Lindsay C. Warren, creature and friend of the Congress and watchdog of federal spending, said to the Douglas subcommittee: "I do not take any comfort from those who say the government is no worse than business...

...Democracy will survive so long as the country can be shocked by moral weaklings in the various branches of government...

...Douglas, looking even huger in formal clothes than in the daytime Senate, wore a somewhat skeptical air...

...The constant allegation made against Mr...

...Even those businessmen (the great majority) who had not been talked into hedging their bets by Democratic money-raiser Louis Johnson, remembered the old adage that if you can't lick 'em, join 'em...

...Prof...

...This is the era of the free ride, the free loader, the man who gets his tab picked up and the person who is happy to pick it up...

...Lowry taught English literature at the University of Illinois...

...James Cbx...

...What is everybody's property belongs to nobody...

...The first is that while Mr...

...Truman, the funds that poured into his campaign often came from the sources for whom the Fair Deal was either unimportant or detestable...

...II The Douglas subcommittee began where Fulbright left off...

...Greene might have recommended leaving well enough alone...

...He quoted an anonymous friend (could it have been Douglas...

...As Washington cor' respondent for The Progressive Lowry has done a series of portraits of major figures in Congress —Sens...

...It was this conviction that produced the well-heeled Jefferson-Jackson Day gathering of 1949 and increased what Comptroller General Warren called "the transfer of certain business practices to government...

...The assumption on which the investigation began" was that developed by the RFC probe, namely that there were a lot of people in business, around the Democratic National Committee, and in the government service who would do whatever was legal by the book, no matter what its moral propriety, particularly where the government dealt in millions, as in contracts, loans, or subsidies...

...Touch not pitch lest thou be defiled," retorts Congress...

...The Douglas and Monroney subcommittees both took testimony on McCarthyism, as it operates in Congress and as it figured in the 1950 elections...

...Cries of "You're another" fill the air, and the public is left with neither edification nor enlightenment...

...Greene, should study not only the executive and legislative branches of government, but newspapers, pressure groups, lobbies, and even the voters themselves...

...Ethics and Cost-Pius Never the Twain Shall Meet By W. McNeil Lowry TO the lessons in "ethics" coming from Capitol Hill, President Truman, responds with one of his favorite Biblical adages, "Thou shalt not bear false witness...

...It was so in Mark Twain's day, and the pictures that Missourian drew of Washington make the Missouri administration of today look faintly like the millenium...

...Another by-product of the 1948 triumph was that it gave a new sense of security to some men who had served Truman loyally when he was thrust into Roosevelt's seat but who had never been handpicked by their boss as White House staff...

...A "Know Nothing" revolt against all incumbents, regardless of party, is not impossible...

...On June 19, this year, at an inquiry into the government's ethics chaired by Douglas, Democratic Sen...

...The trouble with Washington's new subject of ethics is this tendency for the ox that is being gored to turn his horns on his adversary...

...Warren accounted for the "general moral breakdown" by some unspecified lapse in "moral training" and the "weakening of moral standards" accompanying World War II...

...William Benton of Connecticut harked back to the same night and the same sight...

...Greene, "is characteristically American...

...My own starting point is Feb...

...Thanks to the cost-plus contract and the excess profits tax, it is all, in one way or another, legal...

...The dreary failure of responsible members of both parties to do anything at all about McCarthyism has both lowered the reputation of Congress to new depths and served as a pretext for the Truman Administration in its tolerance of bad money and easy virtue...

...Sawyer hit upon the tu quoque favored by Truman when he raised some questions of his own about "ethical considerations" for members of Congress...

...A tendency to identify happiness with prosperity and to attach tremendous importance to both...

...A tendency to identify happiness with prosperity and to attach tremendous importance to both," says Prof...

...Hence a tendency to superficial optimism which often passes over into an equally unjustified cynicism and pessimism...

...David J. Crawford, who "did nothing anybody else wouldn't have done, only somebody else caught me at it...

...You can start wherever you wanti and still make a case...

...A preoccupation with material things rather than with spiritual values...

...This is just another way of saying' that ethics in government is a broad subject because the government is broad and the lines of responsibility only vaguely drawn...

...A strong drive to intense competition for personal gain...

...A Presidential aide, Donald Dawson, said he had done nothing wrong in accepting free hotel rooms at Miami Beach, an attitude later outclassed by the favor-taking Brig...

...Business and government have been driven by the very magnitude of their joint operations into a system of bookkeeping that has little room for honor...

...who had remarked to him that probably three-fourths of those present at that Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner would have been on hand if the Republican Party had been celebrating its own victory and the birthday of Abraham Lincoln...

...I do not think it is as bad as business, but it is true that the government has been affected by the general moral breakdown and by the transfer of certain business practices to government...

...But three by-products of the 1948 victory are worth recalling, and may account for the fact that government ethics is news in 1951 when it was not, at least for all but purely political purposes, in 1948...

...But neither the free loader nor his host is out of pocket...

...That Mr...

...Nothing is more relative in the capital than another man's virtue...

...If, as Comptroller General Warren told the Senate Subcommittee, there has not been "one case" of moral laxity on the part of a government employe that did not involve a "tempter from outside," it is inconceivable that the tempter could succeed without a susceptible victim...

...Was it proper for Congress to reveal secret information given in closed session by an agency official who has carefully withheld such information in his own capacity...

...He did almost that by suggesting an exhaustive public inquiry that, as things go in Washington, would still be sitting long after the youngest government employe now living had been laid to rest...

...Vaguer still are the speculative depths into which one can fall if he asks himself whether there has actually been a breakdown in morals in Washington, and if so what caused it...

...Truman, who was given his head by the voters in the election...

...An early witness was a philosopher...

...24.-1949, the day of the Jefferson-JacM son Day dinner celebrating Mr...

...A corresponding faith in quick, short-range, practical solutions of problems...

...Since even the Truman Administration did not reflect a society with these values...

...III It is no excuse for Harry Truman, but it is an explanation to say that a good part of his truculent defense of his executive aides is not fanatical and unreasoning stubbornness, but the origin and occupation of the accusers...

...The well-wishers were so numerous that the National Committee moved the celebration into Washington's National Guards Armory...

...What is often overlooked is the fact that Truman's handpicking, when he has an opportunity to exercise it, is as good as Franklin Roosevelt's, say, and often a great deal better...

...Like the Senator from Connecticut, I do not think the trail between the Douglas remark of 1949 and the Douglas inquiry of 1951 is merely figurative...

...In his two chief aides, Special Counsels Clark Clifford and Charles Murphy, President Truman has had both loyal and trustworthy servants...

...It would be both inaccurate and cheaply partisan to suggest that the Democratic Administration of Harry Truman suffered a breakdown in moral standards solely at the hands of American business, which is normally associated in popular thinking with the Republican Party...

...Was it proper for Congress to issue a report on a bureaucrat's activities which carefully pointed out all his mistakes and mentioned none of his accomplishments...

...Theodore Meyer Greene of Yale...

...And World War II added devices that are still with us, the cost-plus contract and the excess profits tax...

...Truman believed that he had been thoroughly maligned by Congressmen bearing false witness long before Sen...

...The pot calling the kettle black," say more and more voters...

...The railroad, whiskey, and sugar money that once formed the life-blood of the grafter in this capital was nothing to the billions that have been flowing since World War II began...

...Impartial observers, of which strictly speaking there are none, tend to conclude that the resultant bloodletting on both sides did the' victims no injustice and, possibly, no harm...

...Prof...

...Was it "proper or improper," Sawyer asked, for Congressional committees to investigate executive agencies "with complete abandon' when the agencies could not investigate Congress at all...

...It all goes on the expense account, and the expense account is impersonal...

...W. McNfilL LOWRY nas a front r6W seat at most of the major developments in Washington, Where he is chief of the Washington 6u reau for the four dailies in Florida, Georgia, and Ohio owned by former Gov...

...Truman repaid their loyalty in unstinting measure is known to the whole country...

...Before going to Washington Mr...

...Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer voiced it when he told Douglas: "Any man who must look up his code of ethics to find out what is proper or improper for him to do is too innocent to be around Washington . . . "The very man who would be most likely to do the unethical thing will be least influenced by the fact the code says he shouldn't...

...J. William Fulbright, ex-Arkansas college president, had, with Douglas' help, dragged out of the RFC investigation the pastel mink coat which put the moral breakdown in symbols the country could understand...

...Perhaps a philosopher would say it would then be too late...

...Both veteran politicians and students of government detect a popular loss of faith in democratic institutions that .bodes ill for their preservation...

...It is when the sense of shock has been lost that we can begin to worry...

...At this moment it is difficult to determine whether Congress, with its witness-bearing McCarthys, or the Executive, with its- influence peddlers, is in lower repute with the American people...

...Philosopher Greene, though he used birdshot rather than a bullet, probably hit the mark as well as anyone to date...

...A deep suspicion of abstract thinking save that by scientists, and particularly when such scientific thinking leads to technical advance...

...If the businessman does not charge it to the government as "cost," it will go to the government as excess profits...

...Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin started giving the Congressmen lessons...

...The committee, said Dr...

...Prof...

...Fulbright had also made the loftiest speech on the need for ethics in government, but the Arkansas Democrat himself twice carried headline-hunting in the RFC investigation beyond the limits of smoking-car humor to off-color data that could not get in the newspapers, let alone the headlines...

...Tru-man's astounding victory the preceding fall...

...But not even the almost invulnerable veterans of the Senate have ventured to arrest McCarthy, McCarran, Jen-ner, or the other smear artists in their midst...

...Richard Russell, Paul Douglas, Estes Kefauver, and Hubert Humphrey —which have attracted wide attention and been the subject of many reprint-ings...

...Greene took Fulbright at his word that the government and its activities were "a mirror of our national life...

...Truman owed his victory to no one but Mr...

...Wandering around the tables be--fore the speaking began, I found one at which the brand new Senator from Illinois, Paul Douglas, was sitting...

...And so on...

...Finally, the 1948 election, with its bitter frustration for Republican businessmen—who at long last had seemed to catch the vision of green pastures—loosed a good deal of talk about the possibility that the GOP might go the way of the old Whigs...

...But the gov-ernment of the United States is much too important to all the people to have its control decided by a contest in name-calling...

...I've seen men here tonight I never thought I'd see at a Democratic celebration," said the Senator from Illinois...

...The resolution pending before it was the Arkansan's proposal for a public commission of inquiry...

...An analysis of how the question of "ethics" becamej news in Washington may be moat important than the relative merits on the Administrations of Harry Tru-I man, Warren Harding, Ulysses Grant, Andrew Jackson, et al...

...It was no accident, either, that when the "moral breakdown of government" came to be generally diagnosed, it was Paul Douglas, the conscience-ridden Quaker, who headed a Senate subcommittee trying to write a code for the government's servants...

...For all but the most scrupulous, there is one huge charge account...

...Truman's cabinet is man for man better than any Roosevelt ever had...

...It can even be made into a magic carpet that will circle the globe in junkets for Senators, junkets for businessmen, junkets for publishers, junkets for government officials, junkets for reporters, junkets, if he knows how to get aboard, for everybody...

...Douglas and his colleagues soon found that the subject of government morals was vaster than the billions under the government's trust...

...His language, however, needs translation if it is to catch the Washington tone...

...The whole kit and caboodle belongs ultimately to the taxpayer, but it is being spent anyway, and everybody is a taxpayer these days...

...But the mine-run assistant who stayed on with the President after 1948 has too often believed it was he, and not Mr...

...The official response of the Truman Administration to the ethics inquiry was more pointed...