Principle Over Party

The State Department gave heartening support to the ideal of bi-partisanship last week. Only a month ago, Secretary Dulles presented his fellow Republicans with an opportunity to scourge the entire Democratic Party when he obligingly released the Yalta documents. On Friday the Secretary went to the other extreme, however, and did his best to gratify a single Democratic congressman, Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania. Dulles' decision involved the incidental loss of his own special adviser on immigration problems, Edward J.Corsi, but the Secretary made the sacrifice without flinching, for the greater cause of good relations with a member of the opposition party. The action should lay the last lingering doubt to rest-Secretary Dulles is indeed a man of principle.

Almost from the time of his appointment, immigration expert Corsi began to exhibit alarming tendencies. He actually took to heart the task of expediting the flow of immigrants and even showed mild shock at the fact that only 15,000 of a scheduled 209,000 refugees had received their visas in two years. He went so far as to suggest that State Department security chief Scott McLeod relinquish control of the refugee program, despite McLeod's enthusiastic administration of the Refugee Relief Act's security provisions. Worst of all, Corsi attacked the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. As Secretary Dulles well knows, Representative Walter is a formidable figure in Washington. After a slow start he is fast replacing the late Senator McCarran as the foremost Democratic practitioner of professional anti-Communism. In this light, the Secretary's decision to abolish Corsi's job appears as a perfectly logical one. And his subsequent offer that Corsi accept deportation to Latin America to study immigration problems was a magnanimous act under the circumstances.

Nevertheless, the Corsi affair leaves several unanswered questions. In January, after all, Dulles called Corsi "the best qualified man in the United States" to lift the administration's refugee program out of the doldrums that have gripped it for its first two years. The American public can only hope that the Secretary's judgment has improved in those three months, for he may soon be called upon to make even more important decisions. The Corsi controversy recalls the Republican campaign in 1952, when President Eisenhower urged the revision of the McCarran-Walter Act. Surely the entire Republican Party has not suffered a collective attack of amnesia on the subject of immigration. And one wonders how far Secretary Dulles will carry the logic of his bipartisan position. Not only Corsi, but Dulles himself has been the object of considerable Congressional criticism recently. Will the Secretary now offer his own resignation to promote Congressional harmony?