National Affairs: The Conference

Senators' political radarscopes blipped wildly in the Army-McCarthy hearings last week when Army Counselor John Adams told of a meeting Jan. 21 with top Administration officials to discuss the Mc-Carthy-Cohn-Schine problem. Present at the conference, said Adams, were Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, U.N.

Ambassador (and sometimes Presidential Adviser) Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and White House Aide Gerald Morgan. Said the Army's John Adams: "At this meeting Governor Adams asked me if I had a written record of all the incidents with reference to Private Schine . . . and when I replied in the negative, he stated he thought I should prepare one." The names of Sherman Adams and Cabot Lodge sent the hearings careering off in new directions. One path led toward the President, the other toward Cabot Lodge, a favorite quarry for both Democrats and anti-Eisenhower Republicans, who still resent Lodge's management of Eisenhower's pre-convention campaign against Taft.

Hungry for more information, Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington started to ask John Adams about the specifics of the conference. But the Army's Lawyer Joseph Welch said: "This witness has been instructed not to testify as to the interchange of views on people at the high level at that meeting."

"To Save the People." Committee members protested. Joe Welch finally got the weekend to seek clarification of the order.

This week the answer came in the form of a letter from President Eisenhower to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson. Its net: John Adams was forbidden to testify about the top-level meeting.

Attached was a ten-page legal opinion from Attorney General Brownell, documenting the constitutional principle of the separation of powers—a principle which gives to the executive branch the right to conduct its own business in its own domain without Congress forever peeping over the transom.

Wrote Brownell: "One of the chief merits of the American system of written constitutional law is that all of the powers entrusted to the Government are divided into three great departments, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. It is essential to the successful working of this system that the persons entrusted with power in any one of these branches shall not be permitted to encroach upon the powers confided to the others . . . The doctrine of separation of power was adopted to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power and to save the people from autocracy."

A Familiar Issue. This principle has long been a highly practical limitation on the activities of congressional committees. Many Presidents, from Washington to Truman, have vigorously asserted it, and Eisenhower's Administration continues to maintain that the Congress has no right to read all executive-branch papers, or learn about all executive-branch conversations.

Despite the sweeping language in which the inviolability of executive-branch autonomy is sometimes stated, all Presidents have recognized that Congress does, under many circumstances, have the right to look into certain actions of the executive.