Nation: Safe Target

The Subversive Activities Control Board could have been invented by Gilbert and Sullivan. Like the Queen’s Navee, Savoyard-style, it provides its members with impressive-sounding responsibilities, conveys a generous ($26,000) salary, and requires virtually no work at all. The board has heard not a single case in the past 19 months and is not likely to hear one any time soon. With an economy fever gripping Congress, SACB—together with its nearly $300,000 annual budget—would seem to be an ideal target, but the Senate voted overwhelmingly last week not to dissolve the board for at least another year.

Set up in 1950 to force the registration of Communists, the SACB never really controlled subversives, much less their activities. Its chief function vanished altogether when the Supreme Court ruled that compulsory registration of Communists was unconstitutional. The board might have been forgotten entirely if the press last summer had not looked into President Johnson’s appointment of a board member whose main qualification seemed to have been his recent marriage to a former White House secretary who was well liked by the President.

Still, few in the Senate wanted to vote against it—or, by extension, for subversives. Why, declaimed Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, abolition of the board might even undermine the morale of the men in Viet Nam. Besides that, one of the members happens to come from Pekin, Ill., which, as every schoolboy should know, is Dirksen’s home town.

A similar bill reported to the House of Representatives would give the board new powers to investigate subversives, but the Senate voted to keep it substantially as it is, with one proviso: if the Attorney General does not refer any cases to it, it will go out of existence in January 1969. Whatever version emerges, it appears certain that, barring an unexpected presidential veto, SACB will live on.