Neither Flight nor Fight

To hear some sections of the U.S. press tell it, Senator Joseph McCarthy took over the State Department last week from a shaken and cowed John Foster Dulles. Instead of defending the department against McCarthy's latest onslaughts as head of the Senate's Permanent Investigating Subcommittee, Dulles--so the stories ran--had given way to a mood of "panic" and "surrender," pulled a "Munich" and taken "cowardly flight." As a result, said the reports, the Voice of America was "dead," and departmental employees, their morale shattered, were trying to "fade into the wallpaper."

With editorial explosions popping all around, Secretary Dulles issued a press statement pointing out that his department was investigating its own closets "in an orderly and, I believe, effective way," but that Congress is, after all, "a coordinate branch of the Government [with] broad powers of investigation.

"I am prepared to defend what I know to be sound and defensible," said Dulles. "I am not prepared blindly to defend a situation which was created under my predecessors, and which I have taken office with a mandate to change. I welcome any disclosures resulting from congressional inquiries that will help to make the Department of State more competent, loyal and secure. [These] are months of difficulty, since it will necessarily take considerable time before the new Administration through its own orderly processes can correct the accumulated errors of the last 20 years. It is a time when exposure through congressional action is to be expected."

The Touch-Off. There were three specific instances of State Department changes-in-front which had touched off the editorial explosions. These were:

1) In the opening days of McCarthy's Voice of America investigation, a low-echelon State Department officer put out a memo advising employees to use their "discretion" about answering questions of committee investigators when no Senator was present. McCarthy heard about it and protested. After Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith got the facts in the case, he hustled up to Capitol Hill for a conference with McCarthy. The offending memo was discarded, and State employees were ordered to cooperate with investigators.

2) After telling the McCarthy committee that derogatory material on employees sometimes strangely disappeared from State Department personnel files, departmental Security Agent John Matson was switched from his desk job to a pavement-pounding assignment. It was a low-echelon switch which Dulles would probably never have heard of if McCarthy had not hit the headlines by protesting about reprisals against Matson. Within a few days Matson was restored to his desk job.

3) McCarthy read subversive meanings into a Voice of America memo which suggested that "material favorable to the U.S." in the writings of "Soviet-endorsed" authors might have a "special creditability among selected key audiences." The memo was promptly withdrawn. Dulles then banned the use of quotations from Communist or pro-Communist writers except where the excerpts had already been quoted by "reputable" U.S. sources. Last week a new squall of publicity broke when--as a result of verbal confusion--the State Department briefly suspended then reinstated Alfred H. Morton, chief of the Voice's broadcasting operations in New York, for "disagreeing" with the ban.

Actually, State's switches on the "discretion" directive and Matson's reassignment were cases of much ado about little--important only because the glare of publicity made them embarrassing. The V.O.A. directive was a more serious matter because the ban would hamper U.S. propaganda efforts (which can frequently catch Commies in contradictions). But the retreat was only temporary: departmental officers are already at work "clarifying" the ban--i.e., removing its sting.

Heritage of Doubt. The columnists and editorialists who damned the retreats as "surrender" and "flight" passed over the fact that Dulles had inherited from Dean Acheson--along with some 42,000 officers and employees and countless big & little problems--the thick fog of suspicion that hangs over the State Department in the public mind. One of Dulles' main tasks is to dispel the fog, restore public and congressional confidence in the department. He cannot do this by getting into public fights with congressional investigators who are--or are supposed to be--helping to clear up the fog. But by going ahead with his own cleanup, Dulles may eventually be able to make Investigator McCarthy obsolescent by destroying the heritage of doubt on which he feeds.

Dulles' cleanup campaign was well on the way last week. Robert Walter Scott McLeod, former FBI man and lately administrative assistant to Republican Senator Styles Bridges, was appointed to take charge of the department's newly overhauled security machinery. And as the new chief of State's International Information Administration (which includes V.O.A.), Dulles chose Robert Livingston Johnson, 58, president of Temple University for the past eleven years. A tireless, smooth-talking executive type, ex-Adman Johnson impresses friends as being a first-rate salesman--"just what we need to sell America to the rest of the world." Johnson will investigate the service himself for a month before he decides to take on the job permanently.

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