Exit with Remarks

Salty old (71) Seth Richardson was good & mad. He was, by his own lights, as dyed-in-the-wool a conservative as a man could be--a wealthy Washington corporation lawyer, a Republican, an avowed isolationist. His Republicanism went way back --to the Hoover administration, when he was Assistant Attorney General, and beyond that, back to his days in North Dakota. Now his critics in Congress were questioning his loyalty to the U.S.

It all started when Harry Truman picked Richardson to head the Subversive Activities Control Board. That aroused the Senate's one-man roadblock, Nevada's testy Pat McCarran, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. McCarran would not even permit a hearing on whether Congress should confirm Richardson and the four other board appointees, because McCarran wanted to handle loyalty himself. Last week Richardson quit, giving as his reason a critical surgical operation ordered by his doctors. Then he let fly:

Republicans in Diapers. "I've been subjected to the damndest bunch of intellectual balderdash that I've seen come out of politics in a hell of a long time. I've been represented as being responsible for the 'Pearl Harbor whitewash' [he was counsel for the Pearl Harbor Committee], although I battled the committee for a whole month. I've been accused of being responsible for everything the Loyalty Review Board did, although I sat in just two cases . . . I've been charged by Republicans . . . with being only a nominal Republican, and these Republicans were in diapers when I was making Republican speeches all over the country . . . I just wish that someone who has supported the Administration foreign policy, reciprocal trade, and all that other off-color stuff, would challenge my Republicanism to me. We'd have a merry time for the next few minutes."

Most of the criticism stemmed from the fact that the Loyalty Review Board, with Richardson as chairman, had cleared William Remington, Department of Commerce economist, of charges that he was then a Communist. Later Remington was convicted of perjury for saying he had never been one.

"The standards said we were to determine whether the man is disloyal [right now]," argued Richardson. "In the Remington case we said that for the last six years, uninterrupted, he had been a Government employee, and every one of his superiors testified that he was straight as a string. The FBI couldn't find anything wrong with him for that period. When he got out of college he was as radical as a short-tailed pup. If the case had come up then, we would have fired him in five minutes . . . If we had found one thing wrong in all those six years--one attendance at a meeting, one subscription to the Daily Worker--it would have been different. I said to one of the Senators, 'Are Bentley and Budenz the only people that can reform?' "

Exit. "The natural thing for [McCarran's] committee to do if it doubted the board [SACB] was to hold a meeting to find out if we were s.o.b.s. But no. There was no hearing. The damned representative of Franco could get a hearing and sit in the committee councils, but decent Americans couldn't . . . It makes me damned mad to have the papers announce that damned scaly representative of a scaly country can have a conference with the Judiciary Committee when five men who are just as good can't have a hearing . . .*

"People meet me on the street and ask, 'Have you been confirmed yet?' It's just like saying 'Have you had your daily bath?' I say, 'No, I still stink.' One of my friends asked me, 'Is your sickness just a convenient exit?' I told him, 'It's an exit, but it isn't convenient.'

* Senator McCarran, friend of Dictator Franco, called a conference (not a Judiciary Committee meeting) in his office May 29 at which a $52 million loan to Spain was discussed. When State Department. ECA and Export-Import Bank officials got there, they had to talk it out in the presence of Spanish Ambassador Jose Felix de Lequierica, who had been invited by McCarran.

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