Sorry, Mrs. Shipley

Although he was confined to a Reno hospital bed last week, Nevada's blustering Senator Pat McCarran still managed --somewhat like the Queen Elizabeth whistling in drydock--to issue a blast at the State Department. At first glance, it seemed fairly routine: the Senator noted with alarm that 18 leftist U.S. labor leaders got visas for England, France and Italy last spring and then went blithely on to Moscow, took part in the Reds' May Day ceremonies and issued anti-American propaganda.

But Pat McCarran did not stop there. Passports, he made clear, should have been denied all 18. "While our boys fight Communism in Korea," he roared, "our State Department lets the enemy's civilian agents move at will between here and Moscow." This was a direct slap at a respected State Department functionary named Mrs. Ruth B. Shipley. Washington politicos reacted with the same horrified fascination they might have felt if the Senator had kicked a baby--or criticized J. Edgar Hoover.

"Wonderful Ogre." Though the State Department is an enticing target to all Congressmen, Mrs. Shipley, head of its passport division, is the most invulnerable, most unfirable, most feared and most admired career woman in Government. Starting as a $1,200-a-year State Department clerk in 1914, she graduated to her present post in 1928. She brought with her a sharp insight into bureaucracy and the ways of bureaucrats. Her division grew amazingly (it now has 240 employees, six branch offices, has issued and renewed over 250,000 passports this year), and yearly worked wonders of economy and speedy service.

Both benign and autocratic, Ruth Shipley runs her big job--issuing or denying passports to all U.S. travelers, controlling the destinies of 430,000 U.S. citizens abroad--with almost terrifying efficiency and dispatch. Franklin Roosevelt once fondly called her the State Department's "wonderful ogre." For the thousands of troubled U.S. citizens she has helped--servicemen's wives, harried businessmen, hard-pressed students--she is nothing short of wonderful. Her most famous exploit: recovering 300 U.S. passports, first issued to members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and reported lost in battle in the Spanish Civil War. Mrs. Shipley correctly guessed that the passports would turn up in Communist hands, and eventually got most of them back for cancellation.

Preposterous Charge. Congress finds the Shipley operation an awesome example of administrative efficiency. She resists political pressure with a rocklike stubbornness--she once told an Administration big shot: "You can fire me, but you can't make me issue a passport to the wrong person." But at the same time, she invariably gives Congressmen rapid-fire service when they ask it for worthy constituents.

When she read Senator McCarran's blast last week, Mrs. Shipley knew just what to say: "Preposterous!" That was all that was needed. "I want to make it abundantly clear," an aghast Pat McCarran cried the next day, "that the laxity . . . is not chargeable against [Mrs. Shipley] the chief of the passport division. It is apparent that [she] has simply not had the cooperation of the topflight officials of the department."

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