National Affairs: Comings & Goings

Last week, with appropriate regret, Army Secretary Robert Stevens accepted the resignation of John G. Adams as the Army's counselor. A central figure in last year's Army-McCarthy hearings, Adams resigned less than a month after Michigan's Republican Senator Charles Potter announced that he was redoubling his efforts to get both Adams and Stevens out of the Pentagon. "I have not resigned," replied Adams at the time, "do not expect to resign, and have not been asked to resign."

Adams' departure left just two of the principal performers in last year's hearings still in Government service: Stevens and Joe McCarthy. "A few more resignations should be tendered and accepted," snorted McCarthy, when he heard the news of Adams' departure. Other comings and goings in Washington last week:

¶ The Senate approved the nomination of Kentucky's able ex-Senator John Sherman Cooper to be Ambassador to India and Nepal.

¶ The President nominated Philip W. Bonsai, 51, a veteran diplomat, to be Ambassador to Colombia, and Newell Brown, 37, New Hampshire publisher and onetime secretary to Sherman Adams, to be Wage-Hour Administrator.

¶ Trevor Gardner, 39, brilliant, onetime boy wizard of the West Coast engineering and electronics industry (e.g., rockets) was nominated Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for the second time in six months. The first nomination of Gardner, a close friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer. was blocked in the Senate by Senator Bourke Hickenlooper. After studying Gardner's case, Hickenlooper announced last week that he would not again oppose the nomination.