DEMOCRATS: Boomerang

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In a debate at the American Bar Association's Chicago convention last week, G.O.P. National Chairman Leonard Hall challenged his opposite number to cite an example of corruption in the Eisenhower Administration. Democratic Chairman Stephen Mitchell opened his mouth, and what came out was astounding.

Said Mitchell: "All right. Let's look at the Dixon-Yates scandal." He was referring to the plan by which the Atomic Energy Commission will purchase electric power from two Southern utility companies to reimburse the Tennessee Valley Authority for increased amounts of TVA power to be used by the AEC. In approving the contract, Ike overruled the AEC majority (TIME, June 28). Mitchell's charge: "It so happens that a director of one of the two companies favored in the syndicate is one of the President's closest friends—with a cottage next to President Eisenhower's at the Augusta golf course."

This meant Atlanta's famed Golfer . Bobby Jones, who said: "I resent any implication that the President would be susceptible to such an influence, and I resent the implication that I would be foolish enough to try to bring such influence to bear." Jones, who, with his wife, owns $18,000 worth of stock in the Southern Co. (whose chairman is Eugene Yates of the Dixon-Yates plan), said that he had not discussed the $100 million Dixon-Yates plan with Ike and that "it would come as a surprise to me if he had ever known I was [a director of the Southern Co.]." The next day at his press conference, Dwight Eisenhower observed that he had expected political life to subject him to innuendo from many types of strange characters, but that he was astonished by Mitchell's attack on Bob Jones.

Mitchell's remarks denoted that he had no evidence to back his charge, and he offered none later. In Atlanta, where Bob Jones's reputation for personal integrity is even higher than his fame as a golfer, people watched Jones limp from car to office on a cane (he is crippled from a spinal injury), and wondered out loud why Stephen Mitchell was chairman of the party to which they and their grandfathers belonged.