Dead End?

Mink ranchers could relax--if the rest of the nation could not. Last week's blowup in the Justice Department let out what steam remained in the investigation of Government corruption.

The Government's special investigator, Newbold Morris, was fired by the Government's regular investigator, Attorney General Howard McGrath, who in turn was fired by the Government's chief, Harry Truman. The President's announcement that he would not run again removed from his shoulders the political (if not moral) responsibility for cleaning up the Government.

The graft exposures seem headed into a dead end. The nation is left with all the doubts raised by the scandals and no assurance that the house will be cleaned.

Pundit Walter Lippmann, in a penetrating analysis this week, explained the real meaning of the corruption issue:

"It would be unfair and very misleading to identify this condition with Mr. McGrath personally. He merely exemplifies it. What is this condition? It is the condition of coming apart at the seams, and of becoming generally unraveled and disheveled and at sixes & sevens, which always exists when a government is in the hands of a party that has outlived its mandate and has spent its power. The scandals themselves are disgraceful, but they appear to be--it sounds awful to say it--merely the normal scandals of a falling regime.

"The condition of coming apart is infinitely more serious, more expensive, and indeed more dangerous than all the graft and influence-peddling combined. The corruption is only one of its consequences: the much more serious consequences are the paralysis of decision and the sterilization of thought at the highest levels of our policy.

"This condition cannot be cured, as Mr. Truman wanted to think when he called in Mr. Morris, by catching some more crooks. It is not at bottom a problem of law enforcement. It is a problem in political responsibility, which cannot be solved by investigation, which could be solved only by an election that brought into office men who have--what the Truman Administration once had but has no longer--a mandate, and with it a real working majority which gives it the power to govern."

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