Who's in Charge Here?

On his 64th birthday last week, members of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee presented hard-working Chairman Arthur Vandenberg with his ninth unanimous vote: a 13-to-0 approval of the China-aid bill. But four days later, as the bill reached the Senate floor, the committee report accompanying it exploded the birthday present like a trick cigar.

Though the report approved $363 million in economic aid for China, and $100 million for military assistance, it simultaneously kicked China's government publicly in the teeth. Said the report: "Ineptitude in military leadership and corruption among army commanders has contributed largely to the lowered morale of the Chinese government troops. ... An important psychological factor is the lack of popular confidence in the Chinese government."

Senate reaction was prompt and vociferous. Georgia's Senator Walter George warned that such searing condemnation was fine fuel for Communist propagandists. Others thought the report might be enough to unseat the whole Chiang regime.

Next day, red-faced Arthur Vandenberg hastily withdrew the report, telephoned his personal apologies to Chinese Ambassador Wellington Koo and scribbled a statement of retraction.

The report had been drawn up in routine fashion by the committee staff, Vandenberg explained, and had not been reviewed by the committee itself. Said Vandenberg: "I think it is obvious that certain reforms in the Chinese government and the basic Chinese economy are necessary . . . [but] I deeply respect the tremendous patriotic labors and the integrity of the great and courageous Generalissimo. ... I have always supported and continue to support him against the armed Chinese Communists."

Who was responsible for the blunder, Vandenberg refused to say. He insisted that "there was nothing at all sinister about it." But there could be no question that it was Vandenberg's laxity which let it slip into print.

Writing in the Harvard Law School Record, Roscoe Pound, the distinguished onetime dean of the Harvard Law School now on loan to the Chinese Ministry of Justice in Nanking, also tried to clear up some misapprehensions about China. Wrote Dean Pound: "There is by no means the general condition of demoralization, corruption and inefficiency which is portrayed in American newspapers. . . . In the clippings from the American press, which my friends send me from time to time, I can't recognize the land in which I am living. There is no censorship of the press. . . . The papers . . . which I see every day are as critical of the government as they like and are allowed a liberty in time of civil war which I do not think for a moment we in America would tolerate under like circumstances. . . ."

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