REPUBLICANS: Curtain for Mr. Roberts

The Kansas legislature’s special investigating committee was at last ready with its report on the case of Republican National Chairman Charles Wesley Roberts. The committee found that Roberts “deliberately and intentionally” violated the “spirit” of the Kansas lobbying law in 1951. Roberts had taken an $11,000 fee from an insurance company for selling a hospital building to the state. He had not lobbied in the traditional sense, i.e., he did not ask legislators to vote for the sale, but he had talked to state officials. He did not hold any state or party office at the time, but he was a past G.O.P. state chairman and was recognized as a man of influence. Said the committee: Roberts should have registered as a lobbyist.

Three hours after the committee reported in Topeka, Wes Roberts slipped into a side door of the White House with a letter in his pocket. He handed Dwight Eisenhower his resignation as the $32,500-a-year national chairman, and then issued a bitter statement: “I have resigned because a carefully contrived and thinly veiled plot growing out of a fierce factional fight in Kansas state politics has destroyed my usefulness as national chairman.” President Eisenhower issued a quiet statement of his own: “I believe his decision a wise one.”

The outcome of this borderline case was tough on Roberts, but it served notice that Eisenhower meant it when during the campaign he said: “No party can clean up the Government unless that party—from top to bottom—is clean itself.”