WASHINGTON REPORT

...Eisenhower's new FPC "team" formally endorsed the "objective" of the Hinshaw bill...

...Three days a week, at the White House, Labor Secretary Martin Durkin and his aides met with Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks and aides, under Shanley's chairmanship...

...Staff members of the FPC, who think that consumers ought to be protected, argued that nothing in the bill would prevent the pipelines from setting up partially-owned or wholly-owned "subsidiaries" in each state...

...Democrats who consider Stevenson their party's greatest asset since F.D.R...

...Estes Kefauver, Tennessee Democrat, but the dissent got little attention...

...Readers of The Progressive will recall the editorial in the August issue showing how the House of Representatives voted to destroy the program, which is widely regarded as the heart of the TVA idea, a few hours after President Eisenhower branded the TVA as "creeping socialism...

...The net result is a considerable reduction in the scope of the program, but a heartening gain over the dismal decision of the House to wipe it out altogther...

...He still continues to use the technique with which he became familiar during his many Army years, preferring the "chain of command" and the "staff" routines to any more forceful policy-making concept of the Office of the Presidency...

...He quit because he suspected that Communists were running it and he refused to become a national trustee...

...This may do very well for Winston By Willard Shelton Churchill in a. beleaguered Britain during World War II, but Churchill had cogent and clear-cut political ideas of his own, which he kept forcing on the "staff" as a frame of reference...

...But the FPC would have no control of the resale prices by the "wholesaler" to local utilities...

...The Eisenhower staff meets each day—but under Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams...

...Hinshaw, California Republican, to butcher control of natural gas rates by the Federal Power Commission...

...Sale" of the gas by the pipelines to these wholesalers would be subject to FPC regulation...

...John Gwynne of Iowa, who was repudiated by his own Congressional district in 1948 and thrown out of office...

...argue, "This time he ought to show in advance that he really wants the job...

...And attending the regular conferences was Gerald D. Morgan, a White House aide who in 1947 helped draft the Hartley version of the eventual law...

...Eisenhower attended one conference...

...The Bishop sweetly suggested the tough question: Does this make Ike subversive by retroactivity...

...Sen...

...Truman the lowliest junior member was free to suggest ideas, but the Chief Executive was obviously conscious of his own preeminent policy-making responsibility and authority...

...The FTC, it now develops, sent a memorandum to the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsing a bill by Sen...

...Perhaps Mr...

...How do you handle a problem...

...The President's special counsel, Bernard M. Shanley, a New Jersey lawyer with practically no labor-law experience but an able brain, set up inter-departmental and inter-governmental branch conferences...

...Most Congressmen shuddered at the thought of raising first-class rates from 3 cents to 4 cents...

...On the list are social security revision, tax revision, another fight on reciprocal trade pacts, Taft-Hartley amendments, a new fight on foreign aid spending, and the whole issue of federal-state relationships...

...Eisenhower seemed mighty weary of it all...

...You tell the appropriate "staff" people to work on it and report back in a single-sheet recommendation...

...Ike consults with the staff only once a week...

...Eisenhower may face a real Republican revolt on trade pacts and foreign aid—and he no longer has Sen...

...I reported last month that the Eisenhower - appointed Chairman Howrey had made a little-noticed speech in Ann Arbor, Mich., suggesting that there be a new policy of seeking "voluntary compliance" to the anti-trust laws rather than prosecuting businessmen for violations...

...Eisenhower, too, will change his mind, as have other occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who found the power and perquisites of the Presidency irresistible...

...Five or six years later the Attorney General listed the Soviet-American Friendship Council as a "subversive" group—and Committee Counsel Robert L. Kunzig, Jr...

...Once he was sworn, the Committee threw into the record 43 new "Oxnam Exhibits" from what was called the "investigative file," and forced him to talk about these "exhibits" much more than about the items he tried to clarify...

...Reprieve for the TVA The world-famed resource development program of the Tennessee Valley Authority won a stay of execution in the final days of the recent session of Congress...

...Special Counsel Shanley was irritated when newspapers reported, about July 1, that his "conference group" had "bogged down...

...The death of Sen...

...Charles Tobey, New Hampshire Republican, chairman of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, cleared the way for Ike to put through a Louisiana "producers' " spokesman, S. E. Lee, for a vacancy on the Power Commission...

...Under Mr...

...Retreat for Small Business The ground is being cut out from under Federal Trade Commission both by substantive law and by appointment...

...President Eisenhower was furious when he was forced to recognize that such "original Ike-men" as Henry Luce of Time and Walter Fuller of the Saturday Evening Post were fighting him on postal-rate increases...

...The official theory advanced was that this would "restore the original intent of Congress" to let the FPC regulate gas prices charged by interstate pipelines, but leave the intrastate regulation of prices up to state commissions...

...Robert A. Taft, whose pride of authorship in Taft-Hartley was not to be ignored...

...The Committee agreed he was not a Communist, but no one had ever said he was...

...He insisted that the conferences hadn't done any such thing, but were simply awaiting some new "language" to be submitted for discussion...

...He couldn't understand why businessmen for him last year would object this year when his Postmaster General proposed increases on second-class mail rates — increases which, incidentally, would cost wealthy publishers millions of dollars now paid by taxpapers . . . Luce and Fuller, however, were not principally responsible for the death of the postal-rate increase bill...

...State commissions are notoriously more subject to personal and industry pressure than the FPC has ever been...

...He said it twice in public session and he later repeated it in trying to explain the novel notion to panting reporters...

...Bishop Oxnam, a distinguished Methodist clergyman who has been smeared for years, testified that he had served only a few months in 1943 as a "trustee" of a Massachusetts Council for Soviet-American Friendship...

...So, at least, he told a White House visitor with a vast national reputation who does not, at the moment, hold other than a diplomatic post...

...Donald Jackson's allegation—made from the immunity of the House floor— that he "served God on Sundays and Communist fronts the rest of the week...

...This reporter was less happy than most of his colleagues at the Oxnam performance...

...But a month later there was still no progress to report...

...The Bishop went in to talk about the falsehoods and unreliable "entries" in the Committee's "public files" on him...

...Homer Capehart, Indiana Republican, to weaken the Robinson-Patman act protecting small business...

...Most newspapers generally missed the significance of the new and dangerous concept, with only the Chicago Sun-Times and a few others reporting and interpreting its meaning...

...The significant part about all this is that Shanley's conference group could have got approval from the President for practically anything it could reach agreement on...

...Lacking such an agreement from the interdepartmental, inter-agency unit, the Eisenhower Administration still had no program for Taft-Hartley revision, nor did it seem to know what its general goals were...

...Eisenhower praised the "objectives" of the Council and asserted that American-Soviet friendship was a necessary "cornerstone for building the peace...

...A militant fight in the Senate brought a restoration of part of the funds The final settlement, reached in conference between the two houses, provided that TVA may spend $1,350,000 for resource development, of which $175,000 was a new appropriation, $500,000 must be found in the regular appropriation, and $675,000 must come from TVA corporate revenues...

...H. Alexander Smith, New Jersey Republican, chairman of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee...

...There was no indication of this, however, as the first session of the 83rd Congress ended...

...A minority report by Commissioners Mead and Spingarn endorsed a substitute bill submitted by Sen...

...The Washington-Wire Adlai E. Stevenson's wisdom in getting out of the country, for a round-the-world tour, was evidenced in the fact that no organized anti-Stevenson campaign had developed in Congress by the end of the session...

...Samuel K. McConnell, Pennsylvania Republican, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and Sen...

...How It Works A striking example of the Administration in action came during its consideration of the problem involved in the promised revision of the Taft-Hartley Act...

...An American is guilty of subversion, he meant, for having once belonged to an organization even though he resigned when he suspected it was controlled by Communists...

...A less able and experienced man—almost anyone who was not a bishop or a pugnacious debater •—• would have been hopelessly trapped by the nets the Committee laid for Oxnam...

...Eisenhower will soon replace him with one of the most reactionary Republicans of the ill-famed 80th Congress, former Rep...

...After more than six months of a burden that continued to baffle him, Mr...

...Mike Monroney summed up the feeling of most Democratic opinion-makers when he said, in effect, "I'm for Stevenson again— but not by default...

...The visitor left with the conviction that the President feels that he must make decisions every day on vital policy matters about which he knows little, that he can only hope he is getting good advice, and that he definitely does not plan to run for a second term...

...Also sitting in were Rep...

...One staff member was asked whether, under such conditions and with the "conference group" technique of making policy, the underlings rather than the President did not really make most decisions...

...Nevertheless, Mr...

...One fact has gradually become clear: The President does not meet the whole White House staff each day, as his predecessors did...

...told Oxnam, "That's retroactive...

...So did the late Sen...

...The suggestion was sharply repudiated, but it is hard to see how it can be otherwise...

...The Bishop received no real "clearance...

...All "consumers' " spokesmen have now been eliminated...

...The 1952 Presidential nominee still was the odds-on choice for nomination again in 1956 and no conspiracies against him have gained ground...

...Harry S. Truman, one must remember, spent his first year in the White House complaining that he had "never asked for the job" but ended by demanding—and getting —a full term in his own right...

...Robert A. Taft to help him hold down the GOP primitives in Congress...

...He didn't get the committee to clean up its public files or to abandon Rep...

...Spingarn is on his way out of the Commission...

...The trend was moving, distinctly, from the maximum-regulation doctrine on the old FPC to the minimum-regulation theory desired by gas-producing states...

...On its surface, the bill merely provided that state regulatory commissions would take control of gas prices once a pipeline had "sold" its gas at the state line or within it to a completely intrastate buyer...

...The men who see him every day are Adams and Shanley — and ideas, therefore, must be moved through these transmission belts...

...Every time my constituents licked a 4-cent stamp, they would hate me," said one influential Republican . . . Adjournment of Congress left a truly frightening backlog of work for next year, when the instincts of most legislators will be to get back home and start campaigning...

...Mead and Spingarn charged, in their dissent, that FTC Commissioner Carretta, a Democrat, had completely reversed his position from a recommendation he concurred in as recently as March 16, 1953...

...The Bishop outsmarted and outtalked the Committee and its counsel at many points, but too often he seemed more interested in clearing his own name than in making the fight on principle...

...Consumers Take Another Beating Quietly sneaked through the House of Representatives, at the last moment of Congress, was another anti-consumer bill sponsored by Rep...

...Bishop Oxnam handled this special problem by extracting from his voluminous files a copy of a message sent to the Soviet-American Friendship Council in 1945 by Dwight Eisenhower—two years after Oxnam had resigned...

...Guilt by Retroactivity' A terrifying new theory of disloyalty was advanced by counsel for the House Un-American Activities Committee during examination of Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam—the doctrine of "guilt by retroactivity...