THE CAMPAIGN: Cove Cones

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Even before Aesop, wise men were illustrating points about human nature with parables about dogs, foxes, geese, snakes, rats, oysters, cocks and bulls. All literature, from the Bible to the comic books, is full of zoomorphic comment on human behavior. Seldom have these comparisons given serious offense, one exception being the case of Aesop himself, who was killed, partly because of his fables, by a Delphian mob. Last week Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson knew just how Aesop felt.

The Narrator. Wilson, an uninhibited teller of down-to-earth stories, was not tabbed for a single campaign speech by the Republican National Committee. But he was going home to Detroit last week for his yearly physical checkup, and he was booked to speak at a fund-raising dinner there. Then a speech in Chicago, 48 hours later, was set up.

After a morning session at Harper Hospital, he went to the Statler. Hotel's Michigan Room for a news conference with nine or ten Detroit reporters. At the doorway Wilson told a story about the western sheriff whose friends smeared Limburger cheese in his beard while he slept. Wakening, he sniffed (Wilson sniffed to demonstrate) and rushed outdoors, but could not get away from the smell. Baffled, he went back in and announced: "Boy, the whole world stinks." That's like the Democratic Party, said Wilson, still accusing the Republicans of the kind of mess in Washington made under the former Administrations.

When the conference began, he talked freely and answered all questions. Many of the questions were about the possibility of more defense contracts for Detroit. Wilson predicted that Detroit would have full employment by Christmas, and said that defense was too serious a matter to be used to make work. "When a whole community gets to leaning too much on military business and gets a vested interest in war, that's not good," said Wilson. He deplored governmental policies that seemed to promise to bring a job to every man in every area; he would like to see more self-reliance. Typically, he made his point by a story about two dogs.

What Makes History. This turned out to be a historic blooper—but the blooper was not immediately apparent. The Associated Press did not put it on the wire for some eight hours, and the New York Times buried it at the bottom of a story. It took the C.I.O.'s Walter Reuther to discover that Charlie Wilson had delivered an insult without parallel to the American workingman.

Demanding Wilson's resignation or apology, Reuther wired President Eisenhower: WORKERS ARE NOW DOGS TO YOUR

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE. Light dawned on a press that had, up to this point, failed to find much of interest in the congressional campaign. When a London paper next day said that Wilson had "referred to the country's unemployed as dogs," it did not need the excuse of distance.

Many U.S. papers and radio commentators went just as far in distorting his remarks.

Wilson had taken a theme from Ae—sop ("The Two Dogs").* According to the transcript, this is what he said: