Last Twirl

Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer had twirled like a weathercock in a whirlwind over the problem of jug-eared Michael Lee, controversial chief of Commerce's Far Eastern Branch. Last spring, when a Senate subcommittee began gesturing at Lee's loyalty, Sawyer said: "He's one of our best men . . . We're ready to fight for him."

Then the Senators began wandering through Lee's intriguing past: he had been born Ephraim Zinovi Liberman in Harbin, Manchuria (in 1907), had gone to Moscow briefly in 1930 under a Chinese identity card and the name of Li Hoi-min. Twice he was refused U.S. citizenship because, said the court, he was "not attached to the principles of the U.S. Constitution" (presumably because his first wife had divorced him on grounds of physical cruelty). In 1941 he was naturalized at last. The Senators hinted that Lee, in Commerce, had held up aviation gasoline shipments to Nationalist China in 1948 and 1949. But about all they could find out was that he had a reputation for gossiping. Nonetheless, they demanded that Sawyer fire Lee on pain of a full-dress investigation. Sawyer asked Lee to go quietly, but he refused.

Last week, still twirling, Sawyer reversed a two-month-old Commerce loyalty board opinion that Lee was, indeed, disloyal. "Reasonable grounds do not exist for any belief that you are disloyal . . ." wrote Sawyer's personnel officer to Lee. Then, while Lee was drawing up his resignation anyway, Sawyer fired him forthwith "on the grounds of security and the best interests of the U.S."--which is the current imprecise Government way of saying we haven't found you disloyal, but we still don't quite trust you.

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