A Few Questions

Texas' shaggy-maned Tom Connally, minor statesman, had a painful afternoon. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, it was his job to get Senate confirmation for four Presidential appointments to the State Department: Under Secretary Joseph C. Grew, Assistant Secretaries Will Clayton, Nelson Rockefeller and Archibald MacLeish. It should have been a routine matter, but the pesky Senate suddenly balked, stubbornly insisted on mulling the whole thing over.

What grieved Tom Connally most was that almost all the talk came from Democrats. Pennsylvania's New Dealing Joe Guffey was suddenly not as enthusiastic about the nominations as he had been. Wyoming's Joseph O'Mahoney asked, incredulously, whether the Senate would "vote blindly about so important a matter. . . ." Connecticut's Francis Maloney took another tack: "There may not be any brighter or better men than these. On the other hand, there might be. . . ."

Wall Street and Lyrics. The Senate was not really belittling Tom Connally's committee. Most Senators are deeply conscious of their responsibility for keeping an eye on U.S. foreign affairs, and deeply jealous of their prerogative. They were genuinely interested in the men who will run the U.S. State Department for the next few years. And the four new appointees also brought up fascinating side issues. A few Senators thought they detected the busy, ubiquitous hand of Harry Hopkins--and the Senate is never too busy to bombinate about Harry. Few had any criticism of Joseph Grew, a trained and tried career diplomat. But the big-money backgrounds of Businessmen Clayton and Rockefeller offered demagogues (and the left-wing press) a rare opportunity to orate against Wall Street. Anti-New Dealers saw a free chance to twang Poet MacLeish over the head with his own lyre.

Then up rose Kentucky's cocky, talkative Happy Chandler, always ready to go a few rounds when the spotlight is on. Happy Chandler had appeared in the Senate ring, on occasion, as anti-British, anti-Russian, anti-New Deal. This time he was anti-rich folks. Cried he: "Mr. President, I sometimes wonder who won the election. . . . Instead of poor folks obtaining jobs, the Wall Street boys are obtaining jobs, and we are clearing everything with Harry Hopkins. ... I know very little about these nominees, [but] there are some questions I should like to ask. . . ."

Call in the Band? The Senate voted (37-to-27) to throw the nominations back into committee. Tom Connally, deciding that the hearings might as well be open, engaged the huge, chill Senate caucus room (capacity: 400). Secretaries went hastily to work in the Senate Library, poring over volumes of MacLeish verse, culling choice lines for Senators--who had been speaking bad prose all their lives, without knowing it--to chomp aloud at the hearings.*

At week's end, the President appointed two additional Assistant Secretaries of State: sandy-haired Brigadier General Julius Cecil Holmes, 55, an ex-State Department protocol expert recently assistant to General Eisenhower at SHAEF; and cool, correct James Clement Dunn, 53, veteran career diplomat since 1919. Appointment of Jimmy Dunn, longtime croquet partner of Cordell Hull, was sure to raise the blood pressures of New Dealing Senators who suspect his wealth (he married an Armour) and his conservative bent. Presumably, all these new officials would be given a public currying by the Senate. and all would eventually be confirmed. But Minor Statesman Connally, dreading what might happen at the noisy, free-for-all hearings, growled: "All we need now is to call in the Marine band."

* The League for Sanity in Poetry (headquarters: Corpus Christi, Tex.) has no objection to MacLeish as librarian or diplomat, but scorns him as a poet. Last week the League's Manhattan representative, Albert Ralph Korn, 66, stated the League's position: Pulitzer Prize Poet MacLeish's work is "freakish or eccentric at best."

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