Between Security & Sterilty

Before it finally approved the bill establishing a National Science Foundation, the House had grafted on a few amendments calculated to keep the new agency as spy-proof as the Union League Club. It seemed a worthy ambition and one that only the Daily Worker could possibly object to. But last week the House found its version of the bill under heated attack by none other than the FBI.

In a letter to the committee chairmen who would have to smooth out the differences between the House and Senate bills, Assistant Attorney General Peyton Ford warned that the House amendments were “fraught with peril, not only to the bureau, but also to the country itself.” What particularly worried Ford Was the provision making the FBI responsible not only for investigating all employees and scholarship holders of the foundation, but for actually determining their loyalty as well.

That was a job, said Ford, which the FBI had neither the facilities nor the inclination to tackle. “The fine reputation which I believe the bureau enjoys today . . . results in large part,” he said, “because it has carefully restricted its activities to the making of investigations.” If it also had to pass judgment on its own findings, “its efficiency would be seriously impaired . . . and lay a foundation for criticism of the bureau as a state police organization.”

Ford also objected strongly to the automatic ban against anyone who had ever belonged to any subversive organization. Such a proposal, he pointed out, would needlessly cut off “many Americans of unquestionable loyalty . . . who innocently joined a so-called front organization with the highest motives and who withdrew upon their first suspicion of its subversive character.”

A little abashed and puzzled by all the furor, House members seemed to think that the amendments could probably be toned down a little. To that the New York Times sounded a fervent aye. Certainly everybody wanted Government agencies to pick people of sound character and good judgment. But taking a hard look at the whole problem of insuring security without bringing on sterility, the Times editorialized:

“If every federal appointee to any important office is tried like a suspected criminal before he takes up his work and is thereafter likely at any moment to be assailed and denounced like an escaped convict, what sort of persons may we expect to have in public employment? Certainly they will not be the courageous, plain-spoken and intelligent men & women whom the urgency of our times demands. They are more likely to be weak mediocrities whose concern, like that of the minor functionary in far-off Russia, is to keep out of trouble . . . whose loftiest ambition is to make no mistakes.”

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