WILSON HIRSCHFELD

Nixon Blamed for Viet Position

Will Richard M. Nixon, the GOP presidential nominee, get a chance to end the war in Vietnam? The answer will be known, presumably, the night of Nov. 5 or the next day.

In a most fascinating book published last week The Case Against Congress," Simon & Schuster), Washington reporters Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson tag Nixon with much of the blame for getting the U.S. involved in Vietnam.

WILSON

Pearson and Anderson write that early in 1954 Nixon, then vice president, urged the administration to intervene militarily to help the French HIRSCHFELD forces. The proposal was overruled by President Eisenhower. Later that year, after the Geneva agreements, with Nixon still appealing for aid to South Vietnam, the President dispatched some 1,000 American military advisers, the authors note.

NIXON, HOWEVER, is only a passing figure in this devastating book about shenanigans on Capitol Hill over a period of years. The book, with all its shameful episodes, is a damning indictment of so many of the nation's lawmakers, the mighty and the not-so-mighty.

Several chapters of the book are given over to Connecticut's Sen. Thomas J. Dodd. After reading these pages, one can have littde doubt that Dodd was a lucky man not to be bounced ou of Congress on his ear, to say the least. Portrayed in fine detail not known before, Dodd, however, emerges as a pathetic rather than a contemptible creature.

What really can turn one's stomach, for example, are the operations the authors charge to Illinois Sen. Everett McK. Dirksen, GOP minority leader. After reading all that Pearson and Anderson have to say about him, it would be a pleasure to move to Illinois just to vote against him. How he and Abraham Lincoln could come from

the same state, albeit a century apart, is something to ponder.

In Fairing conflicts of interest involving scores of congressmen, Pearson and Anderson point out that some of the nation's major corporations. go all the way to Peoria, III., to be represented by the law firm with which Dirksen is associated. The authors relate how Dirksen has conducted himself in and around he Senate in legislation involving those clients.

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In a long chapter dealing with domestic lobbying, the authors have some interesting chitchat about Clark Clifford, now Secretary of Defense, whom they label as the "St. Louis Smoothy." Abe Fortas, now an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, also comes in for some mention in this chapter. Pearson and Allen observe it was Clifford and Fortas who were called in to hush up the story about a White House aide who was found to be a homosexual.

THE BOOK DEALS with the power in Congress of the munitions lobby, and refers to President Eisenhower's valedictory warning, on leaving office, against the *might of the military-industrial complex. US. development of radar before World There is an intriguing account of the first War II and how that new discovery got into the hands of the Radio Corporation of Amèrica. Although the Signal Corps wanted to keep the developments secret in the middle '30s, RCA filed for patents in Germany, Japan and other countries. Washington hanky-panky over that case lasted about 15 years until it was dropped in the Truman administration.

The case was dropped after the National Broadcasting Co., an RCA subsidiary, gave Margaret Truman a singing contract and after RCA hired Clifford, a former adviser to President Truman, the authors note.

There are some 400 pages or so of disclosures such as these. This is not a book to make a reader happy. It ends with 10 proposals by the authors for congressional reform. Pray God they be heeded.