Organizations: Cosmos Commotion

As much as anything, membership in the club means membership in an infrangible fraternity of one's peers. The club offers the inestimable satisfaction of bestowing and receiving esteem. This, we venture to suggest, is not snobbery. It is the essence of fellowship.

—Cosmos Club brochure

The essence of fellowship is sometimes blended with whiffs of politics and publicity, and when the fragrance of bigotry is added, the resulting aroma, as Washington's Cosmos Club discovered last week, can be quite embarrassing.

The Cosmos Club has been a Washington institution for 84 years, now occupies a formal grey limestone building on Massachusetts Avenue's embassy row with 52 bedrooms, three big dining rooms, an auditorium seating 300, a billiard room —and, some braggarts say, the capital's worst food. The club's members have included Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, along with twelve Nobel and 20 Pulitzer prizewinners.

But last week the club's "infrangible fraternity" was fractured when its twelve-man admissions committee blackballed the first Negro ever brought up for membership: Carl T. Rowan, 36, the Kennedy Administration's Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.

Rowan was sponsored for membership by his State Department predecessor, Edwin Kretzmann, and Voice of America Commentator Raymond Swing. A Minneapolis Tribune reporter from 1948 to 1961, Rowan has written four books, including an analysis of the South's racial conflicts and a biography of Jackie Robinson. When he was rejected by the Cosmos, Rowan made no claim that race was the reason. Said he: "If it is the intellec tual judgment of the membership committee that I do not merit membership, I can do no more than note this judgment and wish the club well."

Hearing of Rowan's turndown, U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith, undergoing treatment for sinus at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Md., promptly phoned the White House, then sent a letter of resignation to the club; Galbraith thereby voided the application of President John Kennedy, whom he had sponsored. Also quitting were Swing, Civil War Historian Bruce Catton, Assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland, Author James P. Warburg and ABC News Analyst Howard K. Smith.

The Cosmos is not the first U.S. club to get into this kind of trouble. Two and a half years ago, the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, N.Y., made unhappy headlines by turning down the application of the 15-year-old son of Nobel Peace Prizewinner Ralph Bunche. Washington's Metropolitan Club (which serves somewhat better food than the Cosmos) last year reprimanded Massachusetts' George Cabot Lodge, son of former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge, for bringing a Negro to lunch; George Lodge resigned from the Metropolitan, was swiftly followed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.