THE NATION: Adams v. Adams

• Share

If there was one element of his crusade for the presidency that General Dwight Eisenhower felt more deeply than all the others, it was his personal determination to do what he could to preserve and increase public respect for the integrity of the White House. If there was one Eisenhower accomplishment that Democrats and Republicans could agree on, it was that a stern White House code—far tougher than the code of congressional politics that Harry Truman brought down the hill from the Senate—had erased the petty stains of mink coats, freezers and influence peddling. This week Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams, a tough, rock-like symbol and chief enforcement officer of the code, stood before it for judgment.

In Congress, Adams' acceptance of small gifts and favors from an old Boston friend (see Investigations) would have caused scarcely a ripple, his dutiful referrals of his friend to the proper federal investigative agencies would have been the mark of a Congressman taking good care of a constituent. But nobody knew better than honest Sherman Adams that the White House code was the underpinning of far more than an election platform. It was the base of the President's tremendous moral authority in the nation and the world. The code—and the authority—could be no more lustrous than the record of the chief enforcement officer, and in violating it Sherman Adams had committed a grave impropriety.

The President left it squarely up to Adams to decide his future. If Adams applied his own rules, he could logically reach no other conclusion than that he should resign.