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The program committee had a real treat in store for the Federal Bar Association’s annual convention in Washington last week. There wasn’t a lawyer in the place without decided opinions on the Supreme Court’s efforts to regulate congressional committees; what could be better, under the circumstances, than a debate between the attorney who won the Watkins case, and the chief counsel for the congressional committee which stands to suffer most from the Watkins case? The principals actually deserved an even gaudier billing: the co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action and now chief spokesman and strategist for the Establishment’s Civil Liberties Division versus the nation’s most famous anti-Communist investigator, one of three or four men in public life today who act and talk as though the internal conspiracy were a present menace.

Nothing, as things worked out, could have been better. The debate was neither a rehash of the arguments heard by the Court in Watkins nor a lawyers’ quarrel over how the decision should be interpreted. What needed explaining, both men seemed to feel, was where we are after twenty years of tumultuous national controversy over Communist investigations. From their very different points of view, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., and Robert Morris came up with much the same answers.

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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The program committee had a real treat in store for the Federal Bar Association’s annual convention in Washington last week. There wasn’t a lawyer in the place without decided opinions on the Supreme Court’s efforts to regulate congressional committees; what could be better, under the circumstances, than a debate between the attorney who won the Watkins case, and the chief counsel for the congressional committee which stands to suffer most from the Watkins case? The principals actually deserved an even gaudier billing: the co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action and now chief spokesman and strategist for the Establishment’s Civil Liberties Division versus the nation’s most famous anti-Communist investigator, one of three or four men in public life today who act and talk as though the internal conspiracy were a present menace.

Nothing, as things worked out, could have been better. The debate was neither a rehash of the arguments heard by the Court in Watkins nor a lawyers’ quarrel over how the decision should be interpreted. What needed explaining, both men seemed to feel, was where we are after twenty years of tumultuous national controversy over Communist investigations. From their very different points of view, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., and Robert Morris came up with much the same answers.