THE ADMINISTRATION: A Slot for Harold

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For many .weeks a question has fascinated capital gossips and bothered Administration officials: What will happen to Harold Stassen when his Foreign Operations Administration expires June 30?

Besides its interest to Harold Stassen, the question was important because, pending its solution, no decision could be made on how to reorganize foreign-aid programs. Last week FOAdministrator Stassen returned from a 30,000-mile seven-country tour of Asia, to report on U.S. aid needs there, and the world learned about his next assignment: the President has appointed him a special White House Assistant for Disarmament.

Said President Eisenhower: "The recent session of the disarmament commission of the U. N. has again resulted in no progress and no clear crystallization of thinking on this subject. It has an inseparable relationship to our constant objective of peace." Stassen's new post carries Cabinet rank, probably the first such that any government has devoted exclusively to disarmament.

Few Washington observers doubted the President's sincere hope that somehow an enforceable plan for world disarmament might be found. But there is no evidence that Russia is likely to become more tractable on disarmament proposals than it has been in the past. Therefore, the practicality of Stassen's new assignment is in doubt, giving rise to Washington guessing that it is a make-work slot to keep Harold busy pending a vacancy in a top operating post.

With Stassen's personal future temporarily tended to, the Administration is expected to parcel out FOA's economic functions to the State Department, its military functions to the Pentagon.