Victory Through Air Mail

It is customary for the attorneys general of the 48 states to invite the Attorney General of the U.S. to speak at their yearly meeting. But Georgia's Attorney General Eugene Cook, this year's president of the National Association of Attorneys General, announced last June that he was not going to invite Herbert Brownell to the 1954 conference in Mississippi next December. According to Cook, Attorney General Brownell had offended a lot of state attorneys general, notably: P: The Southerners, by filing an anti-segregation brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, which would make him "objectionable" to the conference host, the attorney general of Mississippi.

P: The Taft Republicans, by too vigorously backing Eisenhower at the 1952 convention.

P: The Democrats, by harshly throwing the Harry Dexter White case in Harry Truman's face.

Washington State's Attorney General Don Eastvold, who was conspicuous on TV screens in July 1952 as the "young man with a book" among the Eisenhower speakers at the Republican National Convention, came to Brownell's defense. He wrote airmail letters to all the other state attorneys general urging a boycott of the meeting if Brownell was not invited. Twenty-four attorneys general replied to Eastvold, most of them backing his position.

Last week Eugene Cook conceded defeat. The association's ten-member executive committee voted to switch the December conference from Mississippi to Phoenix, Ariz. Cook said that he would "cheerfully submit" if the executive committee decided to invite Brownell.

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