Nye's Spies

Any one who dares republish the charges of Ruth Hanna McCormick, Republican senatorial nominee in Illinois, against the Senate Slush Fund Committee may be prosecuted for "wilful and malicious libel." Notice to that effect was served last week upon the Press by Senator Gerald Prentice Nye of North Dakota, the committee's chairman, and three of his colleagues (New York's Wagner, Washington's Dill, Vermont's Dale. Missouri's Patterson did not sign the edict).

Nominee McCormick's charges: That agents of the Committee, in the course of their investigation of her campaign expenditures, broke into her office, rifled her private correspondence, tapped her telephone wires, spied upon her political conferences.

Proved by photographs was the tapping of Mrs. McCormick's telephone line near her farm at Byron, Ill. Undisputed was the fact that her confidential records had been searched and pilfered. Last month the Senate Committee held hearings at Chicago at which Mrs. McCormick and her political counsel, Attorney General Oscar E. Carlstrom of Illinois, offered to submit what they claimed was proof that Committee agents had a hand in these melodramatic antics. Chairman Nye, after questioning his agents privately and convincing himself of their probity, categorically denied Mrs. McCormick's "slanderous insinuations," refused to hear her evidence, adjourned the hearings. Mrs. McCormick rushed into print with a fresh batch of accusations to the effect that Chairman Nye had run out just when sensational evidence was about to be given against his own men. Chairman Nye explained he had adjourned the Chicago session because "we were driven to the conclusion that we were being framed* and . . . the Committee declined to set itself up as a stage for a candidate to play on for the rest of the campaign." Thereupon the whole State of Illinois became Nominee McCormick's stage from which she reiterated her charges of Committee espionage. To the Committee's threat she retorted: ". . . Having throttled that evidence, four members of the committee now attempt to throttle the press of the U. S."

* To "frame" (up)=to fake; to prearrange surreptitiously. Senator Nye's insinuation apparently was that Nominee McCormick herself had her wires tapped, her office rifled, then blamed the Committee.

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