A Fine Hand

After reading Nelson Rockefeller's blast at Vice President Nixon last week. President Eisenhower remarked with a trace of bitterness in his voice: "I see the fine hand of Emmet in this." By Emmet he meant Emmet John Hughes, his own speechwriter during the 1952 and 1956 campaigns.

The President's recognition of a familiar style and tone was accurate. Emmet Hughes, 39, wrote most of Governor Rock efeller's manifesto--and has written many of Rocky's other major speeches and statements since last autumn. And if it is remarkable that a man who wrote Eisenhower campaign speeches should write a Rockefeller statement sharply criticizing the Eisenhower Administration's record, it is even more remarkable that he is a Democrat (a "dissident" or "wandering" Democrat, he specifies), who, under the President's auspices, delivered a major address to the 1956 Republican Convention.

Three-Hatted Tasks. Handsome Emmet Hughes, son of a New Jersey judge, always had a way with words. Raised a Roman Catholic, he published his first book, The Church and the Liberal Society, a few years after his graduation, summa cum laude, from Princeton in 1941. He spent the war years at the U.S. embassy in Spain, doing three-hatted tasks for the State Department, the Office of War Information, and U.S. Army Intelligence. From his Spanish years came his second book, the anti-Franco Report From Spain (1947).

Hughes went to work for Time Inc. as head of its Rome bureau in 1946. served as head of the Berlin bureau during the airlift, later became text editor of LIFE. During the 1952 campaign, feeling that Dwight Eisenhower could provide the foreign-policy leadership that Hughes believed the nation needed, he got a leave of absence from Time Inc. to write speeches for Ike. Hughes is generally credited with suggesting to Candidate Eisenhower a line that made eminent good sense to a lifelong military man and became the campaign's most famous and most politically effective promise: "I shall go to Korea." After serving as an Eisenhower assistant during the first year of the new Administration. Hughes returned to Time Inc. In 1957 he became chief of correspondents of Time Inc.'s Foreign News Service. Last November he published his third book, America the Vincible, a sharp attack on Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy as a tangle of contradictions, myths and catch phrases. Hughes himself strongly urged continuous negotiations with the Russians. Some critics called it brilliant and eloquent, and one New York Times reviewer called it "the whither-are-we-drifting volume to end whither-are-we-drifting volumes."

Slashing Pencil. Two prominent Republicans showed opposite reactions to the book. Dwight Eisenhower, slashing away with a red pencil, read it with mounting anger. Nelson Rockefeller read it and offered Hughes a job. Last March Hughes resigned from Time Inc. to become the Rockefeller brothers' "senior adviser on public policy and public relations."-- In that position. Democrat Hughes, who is bitterly anti-Nixon, has worked just as diligently as he did for Eisenhower to aid the presidential ambitions of Nelson Rockefeller.

*Time Inc.'s chief of domestic correspondents, James R. Shepley, is on leave for the 1960 campaign as a staff aide to Vice President Richard Nixon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.