DEFENSE: No Retreat

Defense Secretary Neil McElroy took his seat in the target chair before the House Armed Services Committee. Studying him with trained marksmen's eyes sat the 37-man committee, headed by Georgia's Democrat Carl Vinson. Congress' No. 1 anti-reorganization man. Purpose of the hearing: to fire a few range and windage rounds at McElroy and the Administration's defense reorganization plan.

For four days McElroy, accompanied by General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, answered charges and innuendoes—based on the contention of Carl Vinson, true boss of his committee—that the plan would eventually lead to 1) elimination of the three separate services, 2) development of a Prussian general staff system or maybe a czar, and 3) the dissolution of the powers of Congress itself. Congress, said McElroy quietly, need have no concern about losing its legitimate power over the Defense Department. "The present authority of the Secretary of Defense is very large," said he. "Yet it is subject to the checks and balances [i.e., Congress, the President, the Joint Chiefs] which I am sure the American people want."

By the close of the firing, one really constructive thing had been accomplished: McElroy agreed that he would be happy to make a few clarifying technical word changes in the plan, would, for example, not object if individual service chiefs and service secretaries continued to have the right to approach Congress with complaints. "Our feet," said he, "are not set in concrete on this."

Warped Record. McElroy had not backed down on any substantive point in the plan. Still, from the influential New York Times (see PRESS) came the kind of front-page headline and story that sends the Administration scurrying to set the record straight. M'ELROY ACCEPTS MAJOR

REVISIONS IN PENTAGON BILL, said the

Times. "The Administration's widely promised fight for President Eisenhower's Pentagon reorganization bill turned into a quiet, well-ordered retreat," wrote Washington Correspondent Russell Baker. Neil McElroy "congenially offered up major portions of the legislation for rewriting by the hostile House Armed Services Committee. Thus, before the rousing all-out battle pledged by the President was ever joined, Mr. McElroy had set the stage for a compromise settlement with the plan's bitterest critics."

In Augusta on a long golfing weekend, the President got the word on the Times story, checked the facts on the telephone with McElroy. Instantly he directed Press Secretary Jim Hagerty to issue a statement: While McElroy "has not insisted on rigid adherence to words and phraseology, he has confirmed to the President that no changes in the meaning of any feature of the modernization program have been implied by any testimony of his." Ike himself dictated the final sentence: "Both the President and the Secretary are agreed that there can be no compromise on—or retreat from—the essentials of this legislation."