National Affairs: Fadeout

Last month North Dakota’s young Gerald P. Nye, chairman of the Senate Munitions Investigation Committee, asserted with an air of discovery that President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 had “falsified” to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about his knowledge of Allied secret treaties. Senate oldsters led by Texas’ Connally and Virginia’s Glass forthwith passionately gave the lie back to Senator Nye, excoriated him as a monstrous despoiler of honored graves. Discovering that the Nye committee was almost out of funds, they promised to oppose granting it another dollar (TIME, Jan. 27). When the Senate sound & fury had died down, historians quietly pointed out that the Nye charge was: 1) old stuff, having been discussed in print since 1922; 2) quite probably true, in the judgment of competent scholars. Last week chastened Chairman Nye asked the Senate for $7,369 to let his committee hear out Banker J. P. Morgan & friends, pay off its employes, print its record. Not a single Senator opposed this graceful fadeout. Senator Connally temperately limited himself to declaiming: “The burglar who breaks into a house at night doesn’t believe in private rights or security. The jackal or the hyena that invades a cemetery to fatten its own body by digging up the dead does not believe in the sanctity of the tomb. . . . Let [the Nye committee] come out of the cemeteries and catacombs and get out in the daylight.”