THE ADMINISTRATION: Resigned to Duty

"We went from Black Sunday to White Wednesday," crowed an Agriculture Department official in Washington last week. Suddenly whitened were Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson's prospects of hanging on until the end of the Eisenhower Administration despite huge crop surpluses and massive farm-program spending.

On Benson's Black Sunday he was in Washington's Walter Reed Army Hospital, convalescing from a gall bladder operation and brooding about the campaign by high-level Republicans to dump him as a political liability. The day before, Republican National Chairman Thruston Morton had dropped a blackjack hint that Benson ought to "step down" for " the good of...

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