The Dupes

Massachusetts' stolid, solid Senator Leverett Saltonstall smelled something fishy last week, and it was not Boston cod.

The Senator sat down and wrote to the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship: "The Council ... has been taking positions on matters of policy affecting our Government's relation with the Government of Russia. ... I became a sponsor of the American-Soviet Friendship during the war. ... As you know, I have never been consulted by your officers or executive committee on any position that your organization has taken. . . . Please withdraw my name."

Chairman of American-Soviet Friendship is Rev. William Howard Melish, 36-year-old associate rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity of Brooklyn. The Rev. Mr. Melish makes no bones about admiring the not-so-holy trinity of Marx, Lenin & Stalin. He wrote in the Communist New Masses that he was "impressed by the substantial truth of Marxist methods of social and economic analysis." He is a supporter of Manhattan's Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist incubator. In the latest Reporter, the Council's four-page bimonthly which Rev. Mr. Melish edits, he took a 100% pro-Russian stand on virtually every question now agitating U.S.Russian diplomatic relations.

It was some of these little stink bombs which Senator Saltonstall smelled. Some other equally respectable "sponsors" of the Council caught the whiff and withdrew: Harold Ickes, executive chairman of the Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences and professions; Judge Learned Hand of the Circuit Court of Appeals; Congressman Joseph Clark Baldwin of Manhattan; William L. Batt, wartime vice chairman of WPB; Kansas Republican Senator Arthur Capper.

But at week's end the Council still had a respectable list. It included: Christian Gauss, dean emeritus of Princeton; Mrs. Thomas W. Lament, wife of the board chairman of J. P. Morgan & Co., Inc.; Gerard Swope, honorary president of General Electric; the Most Rev. Henry St. George Tucker, presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

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