The Week

• Cyrus Eaton has been summoned—as of course he should be—to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee concerning his recent denunciation of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI as Gestapo-like; and New York’s Liberal newspapers just can’t stand it. “A brazen challenge to basic American liberties,” cries the New York Post; “an assault on freedom of speech”; the issue at stake is whether “public criticism of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is to be considered evidence of treason.” Cool down, say we to the Post; nobody has said anything about treason. The Committee, far from threatening Mr. Eaton’s freedom of speech, will merely give it wider scope and him a greater audience. And there is surely something to be said for the view that Congress, through one of its committees, should look into any widely-circulated charge that a federal agency is incompetent, overpowerful, and overzealous. Or isn’t there? It isn’t as though everyone automatically dismisses Eaton as a fool. Certainly not those whose information about the world we live in comes from such papers as the New York Post.

• Liberal Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson, senior Senate representative on the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, is mounting to new levels of reckless fury in the struggle to block reappointment of Admiral Lewis Strauss as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. During a recent TV interview, Senator Anderson accused Mr. Strauss and the Pentagon of deliberately making bombs “dirtier” (i.e., more dangerous in radioactive fallout) than necessary. When Mr. Strauss made the moderate suggestion that in the international agitation against nuclear tests “there is a kernel of very intelligent deliberate propaganda,” Senator Anderson foamed from the Senate floor: “Thus he seeks to become the modern apostle of McCarthyism.” If Moscow is given the appeasement offering of Admiral Strauss’ retirement on June 30, Senator Anderson—whose intervention blocked a senatorial inquiry into fellow-traveler Linus Pauling’s nuclear behavior—should receive a goodly share of the credit.

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• Cyrus Eaton has been summoned—as of course he should be—to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee concerning his recent denunciation of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI as Gestapo-like; and New York’s Liberal newspapers just can’t stand it. “A brazen challenge to basic American liberties,” cries the New York Post; “an assault on freedom of speech”; the issue at stake is whether “public criticism of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is to be considered evidence of treason.” Cool down, say we to the Post; nobody has said anything about treason. The Committee, far from threatening Mr. Eaton’s freedom of speech, will merely give it wider scope and him a greater audience. And there is surely something to be said for the view that Congress, through one of its committees, should look into any widely-circulated charge that a federal agency is incompetent, overpowerful, and overzealous. Or isn’t there? It isn’t as though everyone automatically dismisses Eaton as a fool. Certainly not those whose information about the world we live in comes from such papers as the New York Post.

• Liberal Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson, senior Senate representative on the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, is mounting to new levels of reckless fury in the struggle to block reappointment of Admiral Lewis Strauss as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. During a recent TV interview, Senator Anderson accused Mr. Strauss and the Pentagon of deliberately making bombs “dirtier” (i.e., more dangerous in radioactive fallout) than necessary. When Mr. Strauss made the moderate suggestion that in the international agitation against nuclear tests “there is a kernel of very intelligent deliberate propaganda,” Senator Anderson foamed from the Senate floor: “Thus he seeks to become the modern apostle of McCarthyism.” If Moscow is given the appeasement offering of Admiral Strauss’ retirement on June 30, Senator Anderson—whose intervention blocked a senatorial inquiry into fellow-traveler Linus Pauling’s nuclear behavior—should receive a goodly share of the credit.