Confidentially

The real-estate lobby's most energetic spokesman is a solemn-looking Midwesterner named Herbert U. Nelson. As the $25,000-a-year executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, he once undertook to set the populace straight on the postwar housing shortage: there was no shortage at all, he said, just an "overconsumption of space." He was also the first man alert enough to link that stalwart Ohio conservative, Bob Taft, with the Communists--because Taft sponsored a public housing bill.

Last week Nelson appeared as a witness in a House committee's inquiry into Washington lobbies. He had barely started to testify when Pennsylvania Democrat Frank Buchanan, the committee chairman, pulled out a letter and asked whether Nelson had written it. He had. It was addressed to the 1949 president of his organization, and it said:

"I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I believe in a republic operated by elected representatives who are permitted to do the job, as the Board of Directors should. I don't think anybody but direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don't believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever . . ."

The Real Estate Boards' counsel leaped to his feet in protest: Nelson's letter was a confidential communication which had nothing to do with the lobby investigation, and it had been pinched from the files when his outfit had been kind enough to let lobby investigators rummage through its records. But his protest was too late: one lobbyist's effectiveness had been cut down to size.

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