THE WEEK

It is the opinion of a number of experienced observers in Washington that the President’s ambiguity in answering, last week, the question relating to the political future of Mr. Nixon can only mean, in context of the Stassen venture, the beginning of a rapid campaign to kill Nixon off. The President’s insistence that it is improper for him to dictate a course of action to the Convention cannot any longer bail him out. For it would not affront the most sensitive delegate had he said, “Itisupto the Convention who will be nominated for Vice President, just asitisupto the Convention to decide who will be nominated for President. My own feelings—and it would be coy to suggest that they are irrelevant—is that he is the outstanding contender. Certainly if the choice were mine to make, I would pick him.” The President has not yet talked that way.

The rhetoric used by the House Government Information Subcommittee in its report on the Executive’s “paper curtain” suggests a healthy impatience with the bureaucratic notion that “we the officials, not you, the people, will determine how much you are to be told about your own government.” The committee branded such a notion as a “psychosis,” no less, and bared its teeth by promising appropriate legislation, through stressing that the people’s best defense against “arbitrarily, unreasonably denied information is through publicity and at the polls.” There are, unfortunately, grounds for cynicism even in spite of the sentiment and language: It is easy to recall that the same Republican congressmen who railed against the security news “Blackout Order” instituted in 1948, under Mr. Truman, have coexisted happily with it in the past four years under Mr. Eisenhower, particular ly when it came in useful in the operation against Senator McCarthy.

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It is the opinion of a number of experienced observers in Washington that the President’s ambiguity in answering, last week, the question relating to the political future of Mr. Nixon can only mean, in context of the Stassen venture, the beginning of a rapid campaign to kill Nixon off. The President’s insistence that it is improper for him to dictate a course of action to the Convention cannot any longer bail him out. For it would not affront the most sensitive delegate had he said, “Itisupto the Convention who will be nominated for Vice President, just asitisupto the Convention to decide who will be nominated for President. My own feelings—and it would be coy to suggest that they are irrelevant—is that he is the outstanding contender. Certainly if the choice were mine to make, I would pick him.” The President has not yet talked that way.

The rhetoric used by the House Government Information Subcommittee in its report on the Executive’s “paper curtain” suggests a healthy impatience with the bureaucratic notion that “we the officials, not you, the people, will determine how much you are to be told about your own government.” The committee branded such a notion as a “psychosis,” no less, and bared its teeth by promising appropriate legislation, through stressing that the people’s best defense against “arbitrarily, unreasonably denied information is through publicity and at the polls.” There are, unfortunately, grounds for cynicism even in spite of the sentiment and language: It is easy to recall that the same Republican congressmen who railed against the security news “Blackout Order” instituted in 1948, under Mr. Truman, have coexisted happily with it in the past four years under Mr. Eisenhower, particular ly when it came in useful in the operation against Senator McCarthy.