Taft Go Bragh

Last week the White House announced these nominations and appointments:

P: To be Ambassador to Ireland: William Howard Taft III, scholarly eldest son of the Senator, grandson and namesake of the late President and Chief Justice. Taft, 37, avidly sought the appointment (left vacant by the death last October of Francis P. Matthews), and has much to recommend him: he is an official of the Central Intelligence Agency, an authority on Gaelic culture, and he lived for some time in Ireland as a member of the postwar ECA mission there (his fourth, Irish-born child is named Sean). A Yale graduate and Princeton Ph.D., Episcopalian Taft has taught English at Yale, Maryland and Haverford, has kept up his Celtic studies as a hobby. He will be the first Gaelic-speaking U.S. ambassador to Ireland.

P: To be Governor of Alaska: B. (for nothing) Frank Heintzleman, 64, long (16 years) the Department of Agriculture's regional forester in Alaska. Woodsman Heintzleman follows the prevailing Washington opinion that Alaska is still too green for statehood. Says he: "I am very much interested in getting statehood for Alaska when it can finance the services of state government . . . I hope [that stage] will come in the next few years."

P: To be alternate delegate to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights: Donald W. Eastvold, 33, lean, eager-looking attorney general of Washington state. Televiewers remember Eastvold's bold and brilliant leadership ("Beware a young man with a book") in the successful fight against the seating of the Taftist Georgia delegation at last summer's Republican convention.

P: To be a member (and eventually chairman) of the Civil Service Commission: Philip Young, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Business. A registered Republican, Young is the son of Industrialist Owen D. Young (onetime Democratic elder statesman who supported Eisenhower last year). Squarejawed, stubborn Dean Young has the reputation of selecting able associates. He is a sailing enthusiast, a maker (and smoker) of fine briar pipes, and he has been called the best square-dance caller in New York's Herkimer County. The President said that Young would be elevated to Civil Service chairmanship as soon as the Senate confirmed the nomination, added that he would be invited to attend Cabinet meetings.

P: To be High Commissioner of the Pacific Trust Territory (southwest Pacific islands administered by the U.S. as trustee for the United Nations): Frank Elbert Midkiff, 65. Born in Anna, Ill. Midkiff went to Hawaii at 25 to take a job as an English teacher and athletic coach at an insular college, stayed on to become a businessman, school principal. His new bailiwick, scattered over an expanse of ocean wider than the U.S., consists of 2,130 small, rainy, tropical islands with a total area of 687 sq. mi. and a total native population of 58,000. The territory's value to the U.S. is purely military: some islands serve as bases, others (Bikini, Eniwetok) have served as sites for testing atomic bombs. The new High Commissioner sees his task as "giving the islanders a chance to develop." His headquarters: Honolulu, at least until completion of proposed new headquarters at Truk, southwest Pacific base of the wartime Japanese fleet.

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