The Administration: Pandora's Cashbox

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"Hogwash!" The special Senate committee overseeing the agency heard testimony from CIA Director Richard Helms and learned that much of its funding to private organizations, particularly those involved in educational pursuits, would be canceled. The reason, as Committee Chairman Richard Russell of Georgia later told reporters, is that disclosures in the past week had made further aid so suspect that it was all but worthless. Snapped Russell: "All this clamor about impairing academic freedom or subverting youth is a lot of hogwash!"

Indeed, clamor on Capitol Hill seemed curiously belated as well as overheated, since CIA's modus operandi had been aired in Congress 2½ years ago. In August 1964, Texas Congressman Wright Patman, chairman of a House subcommittee investigating the maze of tax-exempt U.S. foundations (upwards of 50,000), had come across a suspicious shortage of tax information on the Kaplan Fund. A committee investigation, he reported then, had shown that the Kaplan Fund had been "channeling CIA funds" and that this was the reason for its apparently cozy relationship with the Internal Revenue Service. That revelation made a small flurry of headlines, then died unnoticed until the N.S.A. furor put the agency back on Page One.

"Shame! Shame!" Last week's fulminations were by no means limited to academe or to liberal Congressmen. Vice President Hubert Humphrey cast aspersions on CIA's methods. Appearing at Stanford University, he said that he was "not at all happy about what CIA has been doing," and that the current situation amounted to "one of the saddest times in reference to public policies our Government has had. Out of this, I hope will come an agreement to keep CIA out of student affairs." Though that view reflects student-liberal opinion, Humphrey was rewarded by a post-speech protest in which angry antiwar demonstrators crowded around and all but knocked him down as they shouted, "Shame! Shame!" Other high Administration officials, notably Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner, also expressed their doubts about the CIA-student arrangement.

It was as ironic as it was unfair for Administration men to be sounding off against the agency. As New York's Senator Robert Kennedy declared early in the controversy, CIA should not be made to take "the rap" alone, since the funding policy was a product of "all relevant Government agencies—and that includes the White House. If the policy was wrong, it was not the product of CIA but of each Administration."

The President tried at first to duck the controversy by naming an investigative committee consisting of Helms, Gardner and Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach. Last week the Johnson Administration finally placed CIA in perspective. In a letter to Johnson, Katzenbach said: "When the Central Intelligence Agency lent financial support to the work of certain American private organizations, it did not act on its own initiative but in accordance with national policies established by the National Security Council in 1952 through 1954." Thus, said Katzenbach, CIA acted only after it had the approval of the Secretaries of State and Defense, as well as Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson himself.