THE ADMINISTRATION: Help Wanted

Secretary of State Acheson went to California on the advice of his boss. It was high time, Harry Truman had said, that Acheson answered his critics and took his policy to the people.

Few Secretaries of State had been under attack from so many different quarters. Some of the criticism was the kind of heel-yapping to be expected from the Chicago Tribune and the Hearst press; but some of it came from responsible men.

Critics charged that Acheson’s policy was too often negative. Some who approved his current policy of firmness towards Russia believed that he was late in adopting it. Some Republicans berated Acheson for refusing military aid to Formosa, blamed him for the loss of China to the Communists. On these grounds last week Minnesota’s Representative Walter Judd, an old China hand, called aloud for Acheson’s resignation: If his judgment had been wrong before, asked Judd, how could he be trusted in the future? In the Senate, Nebraska’s Republican Floor Leader Kenneth Wherry sounded off with demands for Acheson’s head as regularly as a factory lunch whistle.

In this hue & cry no Democrat rose to battle in Dean Acheson’s defense—even though some of them might privately agree with the position of New York Times Pundit Arthur Krock, who this week described Acheson as “in many ways the best-equipped man for his job in years and intellectually the superior of-many [of his] predecessors.”

Political Liability. The reasons for Acheson’s troubles lay in part in politics, in part in his own personality. Unlike some of his predecessors, Dean Acheson has no political support in his own right; this might not be a fatal defect, but it did not help to rally Democratic Congressmen to his support. Nor had he come into office —like Hull, Byrnes or Marshall—with a public reputation outside the Department. He had no close friends in Congress and he has made none in his 14 months as Secretary. His learning, his wit and his lucidity are admired by the State Department press corps, but Congressmen do not warm to his cultivated manner, his balanced phrases, his seemingly studied elegance. The Congressmen could probably accept all of that if they were not put off by what they regard as his aloof manner. In his appearances before Congress, he is gracious, urbane and polite—perhaps over-polite. But his explanations of foreign programs often carry a trace of faint weariness that explanations should be needed. Worse, even staunch Democrats were dismayed by his espousal of Alger Hiss; and his explanation of what he regarded as the moral niceties of the question merely embarrassed them more. In their eyes, he had thus become a political liability.

“A Part of All.” Acheson himself was well aware of his plight. In his policy of “total diplomacy,” he would need support both in Congress and in the nation. Soon he will have to urge Congress to admit more imports from abroad, a program which may stir the wrath of many a special interest. A man who constantly talks about the people but feels himself remote from them, he recently confided to friends his fear that the average citizen was not willing to support the sacrifices he thought were required. “All affairs are a part of all people,” Acheson told the World Affairs Council of Northern California last week. “Make everyone you know realize that. . . this isn’t a job they have handed to me and that they can have a relaxed and amused attitude about.”

The response of his California audiences astonished him. At each appearance, he won standing ovations that surprised and flustered him pleasurably. Back in Washington, he planned to make more personal appearances, several speeches over the air. He would need help. This week at Key West, Harry Truman finally rose to the defense of his besieged Secretary of State. Presidential Secretary Charlie Ross announced that “the President has complete confidence in the Secretary of State and believes he is running the Department admirably.” Rumors that he might be replaced, added Ross, were “completely without foundation.”