JUSTICE: Back-Room Man Out Front

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Thus Herbert Brownell could and did raise Justice Department morale. He could and did prove himself a lawyer first and a politician second. He could and did streamline the department machinery. Without these achievements he could not have written his record. But the achievements in method were not enough. The job of Attorney General demands a special sort of courage. It requires a man willing to walk a lonely road in applying the laws in such vital fields as security, antitrust and civil rights, the laws that reach dramatically into the very blood and muscle of the nation.

The Security Storm. Herbert Brownell became acquainted with this loneliness in his first days as Attorney General. When Dwight Eisenhower took office, he found on his desk the plea for clemency of Atom Spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Brownell recommended against clemency. The Rosenberg execution was set for the Friday of June 19, 1953, at dusk because the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown. Worldwide pressure against the execution was tremendous, the Pope used his good offices for mercy, more than 5,000 pickets chanted party-line slogans in front of the White House. Brownell quietly advised the President to go ahead with the execution unless the Rosenbergs showed a willingness to talk. They did not talk. Finally, the phone call came from Deputy Bill Rogers at the Justice Department: "It's all over." Brownell hung up the phone. The Rosenberg case was, indeed, all over.

But the security problem was far from over. Senator Joe McCarthy was monopolizing the headlines, making it appear that he was the only person who cared about ridding the Government of Communists. Other Cabinet members urged President Eisenhower to meet McCarthy headon, but Brownell thought otherwise. "Let time elapse," said he. Apply the law, Brownell counseled, by refusing to let McCarthy take over the files of the executive branch, but stay out of emotional brawls. First and last, Brownell thought that McCarthy by his excesses would bring about his own ruin. And he did.

Brownell got into trouble when his efforts to achieve a realistic security program for Government employees were taken up by Republican politicians who lumped security risks (homosexuals, alcoholics, etc.) with loyalty risks in what became known as the Eisenhower "numbers game." He got into even worse trouble when, for one of the few times in his life, he moved so far out of the back room that he found himself on the end of a very long limb. At a Chicago luncheon, Brownell made a speech identifying the Treasury Department's onetime Director of Monetary Research Harry Dexter White as a Soviet agent, and strongly implying that Harry Truman was disloyal. Brownell now says: "I felt the matter was so serious that it had to be brought to public attention in fast and dramatic fashion." But he was forced to eat his unjust words about Truman, and a serious, legitimate case of security breakdown was clouded by unnecessary brawling of the kind Brownell had urged others to avoid.