Browning Chief

Vandenberg Missed

FOR MORE THAN a month there has been a vacant desk in the senate chamber. It is the third seat from the center aisle in the second row in the Republican side. And the absence of its regular occupant, Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, due to his extended illness, has thrown the country's bi-partisan foreign policy into a tailspin.

The absence of Senator Vandenberg during this critical time has permitted the isolationists on the Republican side of the aisle and, too, some on the Democratic side, to run wild in partisan attempts to break down the united front in the senate of the United States on foreign policy.

There is little doubt in one's mind here that Senator Vandenberg was at once the spark plug and the balance wheel of our foreign policy and the various programs enacted to implement it; there is little doubt but that the all-out attack by Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin against Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the entire state department, would have ever come to pass had Senator Vandenberg been in his senate seat.

For it is this attack, these wild irresponsible charges of "Communist infiltration" by the "10-cent-store Robespierre from Wisconsin" that has done more to break down faith and respect in the nation's foreign policy and foreign commitments than if there were a dozen Commies in the state department.

Often Saved Day

More than once in the past, Senator Vandenberg has stepped into the breach and halted "politics at the water's edge" when some members of his party kicked over the traces and placed partisanship above the country's interests.

What many cannot understand here is how the senate has let this probe of communism in the state department get out of hand and develop into a full-scale Hollywood show daubed by the smear and "guilt by association" technique which is making of our state department a laughing stock for the rest of the world.

How much better it would have been, observers here point out, to have used FBI methods, namely to quickly and efficiently and quietly gather the evidence and if it constituted grounds sufficient to fire, or to indict, to have placed it in the hands of the department of justice without all the fanfare of movies, television, kleig lights and character assassination of many innocent and loyal Americans.

Russia Had Friends

Certainly anyone knows that during the war when Russia was our friendly ally, there were friends of Russia in the state department and in every other department of government. The Alger Hiss case is proof of that fact. We also know that when the American and Russian armies met on German soil after beating down the German armies, the American GI's and the Russian GI's threw their arms about one another in wild demonstrations of good fellowship and friendship in the full flush of victory.

But since then, times have changed and no doubt the sympathies of the people, friendly to Russia then, are just as unfriendly to Russia today.

But to lump all these people who expressed friendship for Russia and admiration for the stand of the Russian armies against German aggression back there during the war, as disloyal and pro-Communist today is a little bit ridiculous and an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

McCarthy Rapped

If, as Senator McCarthy declares, there is a "Hiss spy ring" in the state department, it was there when Gen George Marshall was secretary of state. But General Marshall's reputation with the American people was and is such that it would have been politically dangerous for Senator McCarthy to attack him through the process he is now using to smear and innuendo against Secretary Acheson. The conservative Washington Star has criticized McCarthy in similar vein.

"If Senator McCarthy believes that Mr. Acheson should be fired, he has a right to say so. But if Senator McCarthy wants to be thought of as a responsible citizen and officer of this government, then he most emphatically does not have a right to snipe at Mr. Acheson from behind a cover of reckless and unsupported charges against the state department.

For when he resorts to that technique he is not making a case against Mr. Acheson. Instead he is blackening the reputation of this government."