Ten Men for the Second Term
"Will there be any changes in your Cabinet?" a reporter asked President Eisenhower at his press conference last week. "Not now," said Ike, comfortably aware that he had prevailed on all ten of his tested Cabinet members to stick with him as he starts his second term. An inaugural appraisal of their duties, achievements and deficiencies:
Ezra Taft Benson, 57, Secretary of Agriculture, is still hard at the politically hazardous job of convincing the less prosperous but vote-conscious U.S. farmers that they and the economy will be better off in the long run without large agricultural subsidies. But if Benson has stuck to principle, he has also learned to bend with the political winds. He fought for passage of the 1954 farm law that substituted semiflexible price supports for the Democrats' rigid supports, but agreed to limit the range of flexibility so that actual supports did not drop much. He once considered the soil bank a Democratic gimcrack, now embraces it as a painless way to cut surpluses. And in the 1958 budget he asked for an unprecedented $4.9 billion for agriculture, the largest farm outlay in U.S. history. Benson's vigorous program to sell off surpluses at home and abroad has worked; the surplus cutback augurs well for future farm stability; farm prices are on the upswing.
Herbert Brownell Jr., 52. Attorney General, whose influence and initiative run subtly through most major aspects of the Eisenhower program, energizes the many arms of the Department of Justice that reach into vital areas of U.S. life. Charged with responsibility for cleaning up the celebrated Democratic "mess in Washington," Brownell, by a series of successful prosecutions (among the convicted: five highly placed Truman Administration officials), tightened security regulations, ran down income-tax violators, purged the Government of scores of undesirables. His Justice Department battled Communists (72 Smith Act convictions) and labor racketeers (an average of 30 labor prosecutions a year). And to the surprise of some G.O.P. businessmen, Justice has commenced 157 antitrust cases since January 1953, won 25 convictions and signed 99 consent decrees forcing breakups of business concentrations. Brownell has 1) pushed a program that reduced the backlog of Government cases in federal courts by 25%. and 2) coun seled the appointment of some 68 high-caliber federal judges. His department helped win the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, and it is his department that will have to work through the federal courts to make the desegregation decisions effective.