Essay: A FEW RESIGNATIONS MIGHT HELP

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O mother What shall I cry? We demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN−T.S. Eliot, Difficulties of a Statesman

THERE are plenty of committees in Washington these days, but virtually no talk of resignations. Since any number of Cabinet members and lesser officials are unhappy with President Nixon's policies, one would assume that a few of them are ready to quit amid ringing pronouncements: "I am sorry that I have only one job to give for my country." But no such moves−at least not so far.

Whether to quit or not to quit, and when, in a disagreement over policy is a dilemma not confined to people in government. But it is particularly painful for the dissident officeholder: Would he have a better chance of making his case by staying on as a good team player and fighting for his ideas from within? Or would it be more effective to carry his battle to the world?

In nations with parliamentary systems, resignation from high office on a matter of principle is common. If a Cabinet member disagrees with his Prime Minister on a basic issue of policy, he normally quits and tells why. Thus, Britain's former Foreign Secretary George Brown resigned his portfolio in 1968, complaining about what he thought was Prime Minister Harold Wilson's high-handed one-man rule. Some years earlier, Wilson himself left Clement Attlee's regime in protest against an emphasis on arms over social welfare. Anthony Eden suffered similar Cabinet defections as a result of his Suez policy in 1956, even as, nearly 20 years earlier, he had repudiated Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Mussolini by his own resignation. The British have probably best refined the notion of principled resignation−there have been more than 70 such Cabinet departures in this century. But it is also widely practiced on the Continent.

In the U.S. the concept has never taken firm hold. Indeed, it is less common today than it was half a century ago, when William Jennings Bryan so strongly disagreed with Woodrow Wilson's hostile policy toward Imperial Germany that he resigned as Secretary of State. While there have been a few low-level resignations on political principle from the Nixon Administration, no one at the Cabinet or subCabinet level has left. The last Cabinet official to leave in protest and say why was onetime Labor Secretary Martin Durkin; in 1953, after less than nine months in office, he resigned because President Eisenhower refused to support his proposed amendments to the Taft-Hartley Act.

Discretion and Soft Exits

The difference between European and American practice on political resignations is largely constitutional. In Britain, for example, a Cabinet member is appointed by the Prime Minister, but he is basically responsible to his own constituency and Parliament itself. If he quits or is sacked by the Prime Minister, he still has a seat on the back benches from which he can work against government policies. The American Cabinet member, by contrast, owes his allegiance and loyalty primarily to the President; he has no political platform from which to oppose policies he disapproves. Moreover, unlike his European counterpart, he has no chance at all of bringing down the government.