SEC Seat Warming

Iowa's ex-Congressman Edward Clayton Eicher got a new job last week. Its imposing title: chairman of SEC. Its actual duties: to keep the chair just vacated by Jerome Frank warm for Brain-truster Ben Cohen, who is now in England assisting with Lend-Lease Act administration.

Chairman Eicher, a mild man with a Santa Claus smile, wants to be a U.S.

circuit judge in Iowa. The New Deal wants to give him the judgeship, now vacant. Indeed, Eicher would have been a judge two years ago except for the wrath of Iowa's Senator Guy Gillette--who still resents Eicher's part in the New Deal's unsuccessful attempt to purge him in 1938.

As the New Deal timetable shaped up last week, ex-Chairman Jerome Frank will hold his seat on the Commission a few more weeks until Cohen gets back from England. Thereupon Cohen will be named a commissioner and Eicher will be nominated for his judgeship. The New Dealers hope that Gillette's isolationism has him in so much trouble already that he will let the appointment go through. If & when Eicher gets up from the SEC chair, Ben Cohen will sit right down. Cohen will be too busy braintrusting and planning the defense program to run the SEC routine, so a plan is afoot to create a new post of vice chairman and give it to Republican Commissioner Sumner T. Pike.

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