THE WEEK

Why oh why is it so compulsively necessary for George Humphrey to say he is leaving his post as Secretary of the Treasury merely because he needs to get back to private business? In the first place, we doubt if it is true; and truth should, somewhere along the line, figure in these things. But even if it is true, why must he stress the steel industry’s need of him, or his need of the steel industry, a singular relationship of mutual affection, to be sure, but one which is of limited public concern—why not cite the fact that he has differences with Mr. Eisenhower and that, as a serious man with serious convictions, he believes those differences to be serious, not frivolous, and worth stressing, not burying, at the moment when he makes one of his final public statements as Secretary of the Treasury? The reason, in part, is because of the obsession of Modern Republicanism with an undifferentiated team Manship that makes the important thing not the adherence to principle, but the shrinking from principle; the personalization of all issues and differences and analyses, to the point where that which is im-portant when Humphrey announces his departure from Washington is the state of his relations with the steel industry, not the state of his mind about the state of the union.

The eloquent and courageous former Ambassador Spruille Braden—who had an inside seat on the foreign aid program as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in the Truman era—has opposed extension of the program in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. He said the program is, a) bleeding America white, without b) hurting Communism or c) winning us any real friends among the recipient nations. Mr. Braden summed up our efforts at international philanthropy in this succinct way: “Never have so many given away so much for so little.”

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Dwight D. Eisenhower

Department of the Treasury

Why oh why is it so compulsively necessary for George Humphrey to say he is leaving his post as Secretary of the Treasury merely because he needs to get back to private business? In the first place, we doubt if it is true; and truth should, somewhere along the line, figure in these things. But even if it is true, why must he stress the steel industry’s need of him, or his need of the steel industry, a singular relationship of mutual affection, to be sure, but one which is of limited public concern—why not cite the fact that he has differences with Mr. Eisenhower and that, as a serious man with serious convictions, he believes those differences to be serious, not frivolous, and worth stressing, not burying, at the moment when he makes one of his final public statements as Secretary of the Treasury? The reason, in part, is because of the obsession of Modern Republicanism with an undifferentiated team Manship that makes the important thing not the adherence to principle, but the shrinking from principle; the personalization of all issues and differences and analyses, to the point where that which is im-portant when Humphrey announces his departure from Washington is the state of his relations with the steel industry, not the state of his mind about the state of the union.

The eloquent and courageous former Ambassador Spruille Braden—who had an inside seat on the foreign aid program as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in the Truman era—has opposed extension of the program in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. He said the program is, a) bleeding America white, without b) hurting Communism or c) winning us any real friends among the recipient nations. Mr. Braden summed up our efforts at international philanthropy in this succinct way: “Never have so many given away so much for so little.”