Knees High, Elbows Out

With plenty of good humor, but with knees high and elbows out, Senator Robert Taft waded into the labor-law fight. The unions had made repeal of his Taft-Hartley Act a personal and political fight. Harry Truman had promised to kill it. In a Senate committee hearing room (the arena where he is most effective) Taft fought back.

On the right side of the crowded hearing room last week sat representatives of U.S. industry; on the left, representatives of the nation's unions. Directly behind the 13-man labor committee, chairmanned by Utah's bald and scholarly Elbert Duncan Thomas, sat Mrs. Taft placidly knitting on a sweater for a grandson. The expression on her face was a gauge of the battle's progress. Most of the time Martha Taft looked as if she thought it was going all right.

"Did It or Didn't It?" Taft's first target was Secretary of Labor Tobin, lean, broad-shouldered Boston politician and onetime Massachusetts governor, whose frame and fitness gives him the look of a retired first-baseman. Tobin had been sent up to Capitol Hill to defend the Administration's slightly blurred substitute for the Taft-Hartley Act (TIME, Feb. 7). One of its foggiest points was whether the President would have the right to an injunction to stop strikes which imperiled the national welfare--a right clearly stated in the Taft-Hartley Act. Attorney General Tom Clark sent along his opinion that such a right was "inherent in the presidency."

What, Taft demanded, did Tobin think? Did Tobin think when he helped draft the bill that he was or was not giving the President injunctive power in emergency strikes?

"I am not a lawyer," said Tobin.

"But you participated in drafting the bill," Taft pointed out. "What did you intend your lawyers to draw?" Tobin, who had actually directed the drawing of the bill, still tried to duck. Taft kept after him until, cornered, Tobin said: "We did not draft a bill that had to do with emergency disputes ... I am not an attorney and did not know what the answer would be."

It Didn't. The answer was clear enough to Lawyer Taft. He snapped: "I disagree with the Attorney General. I don't know of any inherent right of the President to get injunctions in a national emergency. If you want to do that you ought to say so in so many words ... in clear law." Oregon's waspish Lawyer Wayne Morse, a Republican friend of labor, agreed with Taft.

Secretary Tobin ventured: "Congress cannot circumscribe the constitutional powers of the President. Does that answer your question?" Said Morse: "I don't think it even comes near it."

Either Secretary Tobin had not done his homework on the law in the case or he did not understand what he had studied, but he tried again. No President, he said, would ever permit the economy of the U.S. "to be brought to its knees in a great national emergency." That didn't have to mean an injunction, he said. "He [the President] might handle it differently." But Tobin could not think what a "different" method might be.

When Missouri's earnest, plodding Forrest Donnell switched the attack and began prodding Tobin on the fact that the Administration bill did not require labor leaders to sign the non-Communist affidavit, Tobin replied: "I believe the requirement should be eliminated," and added, in a crashing contradiction: "Congress should pass a law prohibiting Communists from holding any office in labor unions."

"Do you mean," Taft asked incredulously, "that you want to make it a crime for a Communist to be an officer of a labor union?" Said the Secretary of Labor: "That's correct."

The Boys in Ohio. At week's end, well pleased with the week's work, Taft called a press conference. Through the very witnesses who opposed the Taft-Hartley Act he had scored a number of points. He was ready to predict, he said, that Congress would end up writing about two-thirds of the Taft-Hartley Act into the new labor bill. Among the measures retained, he thought, would be the non-Communist affidavit, free speech for employers on labor matters, the requirement that unions file financial reports, and injunctive powers for the President. He pointed out that Harry Truman, at a White House press conference, had said that he thought he already had injunctive power--but wouldn't object to having it spelled out in a bill.

Both labor and Administration forces were a little discomfited. L. M. Herrmann of A.F.L.'s International Labor Press hotly challenged Taft's claims. "You are a little premature," Herrmann told the Ohio Senator. "We have not warmed up yet. The boys in Ohio tell me that they will take care of things--including you--pretty well in the next election."

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