Rare Ferment

With the heat on, the spotlights glaring, and an investigation-bent Democratic Congress due back next month, behind-the-scenes Washington is in a rare state of ferment. Items:

P:| President Eisenhower got word that Georgia's Richard Brevard Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is aggressively dissatisfied with the answers the committee is getting from the Pentagon on U.S. defense policy. "Say, tell me about Dick Russell," said Ike to an aide. "I thought he was a friend of mine. What's the matter with him? Why is he sore at us?" Answered the astonished aide: "Why, Mr. President, you can't expect him to be very happy over the Little Rock situation and use of Federal troops." "Golly," said Ike of the man who last summer directed the Southern attack on civil rights legislation, "I didn't think he'd take that personally."

P: Deputy Defense Secretary Donald A. Quarles is becoming Washington's newest scapegoat for its defense troubles. Scientist-Engineer Quarles (Western Electric and Bell Labs) is being blamed for enforcing former Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson's stretch-out and cutback policies with too little protest and too much relish. On Capitol Hill, within a fortnight investigating committees of both House and Senate have been critical of Quarles. In the Pentagon, he is in disfavor with the Navy (for criticizing super carriers), with the Army (for refusing it medium-range missiles), and with the Air Force, although he was Air Force Secretary before becoming Wilson's assistant. Air Force corridor gossip accuses Quarles of accepting Air Force budget cuts too complaisantly, of refusing to be "tarred with the Air Force brush" because he wanted to maintain the neutrality necessary to succeed Wilson as Defense Secretary: Although Quarles's friends give him high marks for his service impartiality, he is in danger of reaping the whirlwind of Charlie Wilson's mistakes. New Defense Secretary Neil H. McElroy leans on him less and less.

P: Illinois' grey-maned, smooth-talking Everett McKinley ("The Wizard of Ooze") Dirksen, 61, is generally expected to become Senate Republican leader when William Fife Knowland goes off at session's end to run for governor of California. Even Dwight Eisenhower, who always before made it his practice to steer clear of Senate internal affairs, is reminding G.O.P. Senators that Dirksen would serve their purposes better in the long run than such liberal Republicans as New York's Jacob Javits or New Jersey's Clifford Case. Best guess on who persuaded Ike to plead Dirksen's cause: Everett Dirksen.

P: Onetime Treasury Secretary George Magoffin Humphrey, now board chairman of National Steel, has popped up both at the White House in Washington and at Augusta, Ga. to repeat the same kind of talk that launched the disastrous Humphrey budget flap of last spring. Humphrey is urging the President to increase military expenditures, cut taxes, balance the budget, accomplish all these by limiting such "junk" items as foreign aid, health and welfare, farm subsidies and veterans' benefits. Humphrey's frequent visits are beginning to wear on White House aides. Cracked one Ike assistant to Humphrey: "Who's going to ram your plan through the Democratic Congress, George? Houdini?"

P: The Senate's Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee has decided to dig deeply into the state of the U.S. Navy's antisubmarine defenses. Reason: secret CIA estimates of the Soviet Union's ability to attack U.S. cities with submarine-launched nuclear missiles, secret suspicions that the Navy has been spending too much money on spectacular aircraft-carrier plans, too little on undersea and antisubmarine warfare. High on the committee's list of possible recommendations: a change of the Pentagon's present Joint Chiefs of Staff system to something akin to a Defense Department planning staff recommended by Dr. Vannevar Bush, wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The committee's strong suspicion: the time has long passed when such major decisions on service spending as aircraft carriers v. antisubmarine warfare can be kept in the hands of the tradition-bound services themselves.

P: The Defense Department is getting ready to launch a new organization--Advanced Research Projects Agency--to be headed by a civilian with top-level executive capacity, a scientific background and a strong bridge to the scientific community. ARPA will take responsibility for the study and development of antimissile missiles, the weapons possibilities of satellites, all other novel weapons systems. ARPA's responsibility will extend only over development; once weapons reach operational stage, the services will take over.

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