The Four-Day Egg

Sweating out a steaming Washington summer and the last hours of the 85th Congress, the U.S. Senate began to feel the heat. Last week, while dozens of important bills awaited Capitol Hill attention, the Senate managed to waste a full day in noisy debate over the year's silliest issue. Cause of the feckless fight: a report that the Defense Department was subsidizing studies about what sort of surrender terms the U.S. should request when and if it gets conquered by Russia.

The "surrender" egg, originally hatched out of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, was set down in the slow incubator of the Congressional Record (along with two routine editorials on farm legislation) by Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington. The report stayed quietly warm for four days, then popped from its shell. Somehow, perhaps even by finally getting around to reading the Record, it came to the attention of Republican Senators. When the G.O.P. congressional leaders went to the White House for a legislative meeting with the President, they asked the Army's Dwight Eisenhower what all the surrender talk was about.

"I Have Never . . ." The result was dramatic. Old Soldier Eisenhower exploded. "Ridiculous!" cried he. "I know nothing about this--but I'll find out!" Marveled Indiana's Senator Homer Capehart later: "I have never seen the President so angry."

President Eisenhower's quick anger swiftly communicated itself to the Pentagon, which found itself being turned inside out by buzzing brasshats trying to find out what all the shooting was about. They soon discovered that the original Post-Dispatch story had been vastly overblown, growing out of a highly theoretical study of the history and nature of national surrender, completely nonspecific as far as mention of the U.S. was concerned. It was inaugurated seven years before by the Rand Corp., a private research agency with Air Force contracts, and was finally published in book form last spring.

They'd Rather Die. Explanation quickly returned the White House pressure gauge to normal, but the Senate was already under full steam. Georgia's Richard Russell, whose prestige as chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee had suffered during the battle for a Pentagon reorganization bill (TIME, July 28), saw a chance to regain ground. Russell introduced a rider to an appropriations bill that would forbid the Administration the right to undertake any study of surrender. U.S. citizens, cried Dick Russell, "would prefer to die on their feet in the event of a nuclear holocaust than to be making plans for living on their knees as the slaves of the masters of the Kremlin." The Senate shoved aside all real legislation, argued about Russell's amendment for hours, finally yelled it through.

Silly as it was, the great surrender flap caused thoughtful comment from at least one quarter. Wrote Columnist David Lawrence: "The key words [of the Rand study] are 'surrender politically,' and that's what many journalists and spokesmen for appeasement are unwittingly advocating nearly every day. They have ridiculed 'massive retaliation' . . . They have insisted that America must take the 'first blow' in a nuclear war."

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