When the White House Press Secretary gets newsmanaged into a promise to hike fifty miles, that’s news. But when he manages to un-manage the news by retracting his pledge, no doubt in return for onsite inspection of his unguided muscles, that’s not news, managed or otherwise. It’s just a broken pledge. That’s not news, any more.
Rep. Craig Hosmer of California started a one-man assault on President Kennedy’s nuclear test ban toward the end of January, and before long he had collected expert statements from Adm. Lewis Strauss, physicist Edward Teller, Disarmament Chief William C. Foster, and others, with a cumulative effect that drew the support of other congressional leaders (Arends, Ford, Goodell, Dirksen) and may have pressed hard enough on the President to make him retract his order to stop testing. Perhaps it was only coincidence that David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the AEC, spoke up last week for the first time since 1950 on the subject of nuclear weapons, saying a test ban actually would work against the prospects of peace. In any case, the episode (and Hosmer’s efforts will continue as he leads a Republican Conference Committee on Nuclear Testing) illustrates the potency of well-documented argument in the Congress, and gives heart to those who have been calling for a Loyal Opposition to the follies of the Administration.
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