Cleanup Man

(See Cover)

At Dwight Eisenhower's New York headquarters a few days before the election, a receptionist slipped down the hall to take a look at Herbert Brownell, the great campaign strategist. She peeked in his office door and saw a man who had passed her desk a score of times. Said she in tones of disappointment: "Oh, is that him? He looked so unimportant I didn't think he could possibly be Mr. Brownell."

The new Attorney General of the U.S., a highly capable lawyer, is recognized as the best political strategist of his party, but he is neither a happy-hander like Jim Farley nor a glowering bully like Mark Hanna. He is a slim (5 ft. 10 in., 150 lbs.), neatly tailored man with an easy smile, a low-pitched voice, a high-pitched forehead, and the unassuming air of a side-aisle usher in a big-city church.

One of his colleagues on Dwight Eisenhower's top strategy board said: "Often I'd look around and see that Brownell's chair was empty. That's the only way I'd know he had left the room. Then a little while later, when we were getting near a decision, I would hear a quiet voice speak up--straight to the point. Everyone in the room would stop talking and listen. That's the way I'd find out Brownell was back in the room."

Last week easy, unpretentious Herbert Brownell was getting straight to the point as head of the mighty U.S. Department of Justice. Sitting in his red leather swivel chair with his left knee drawn up, his foot planted on the seat, his long, thin hands dangling, he seemed as relaxed as a ballplayer in midwinter. With his customary calm, he was facing tremendously important decisions on Communism, corruption, crime and the gamut of vital issues affecting the people of the U.S. The success of the Eisenhower Administration depends in large part on how well Brownell does his job.

The Man to Send For. Ever since 1941, important Republicans have been sending for Herbert Brownell when they had a big job to do. That year, Tom Dewey got him to manage Edgar Nathan's successful campaign for president of the Borough of Manhattan. In 1942, he managed Dewey's winning campaign for governor, and then turned down a job in the state cabinet because he wanted to go on practicing law. Says he: "For me, politics was winning elections, not getting political jobs."

In 1944, Brownell was key man in Dewey's preconvention and post-convention campaigns to be President of the U.S. Although Bob Taft's forces pushed him out of the national chairman's job in 1946, he was able to engineer Dewey's nomination in 1948, and again was the G.O.P. campaign manager. He had gained national renown as a political expert by then, but the election fooled him as much as it did anyone. As late as 1 :45 a.m. on Nov. 3, 1948, he was still insisting that Dewey would win.

There & then Brownell vowed that he was through with politics. But when the Eisenhower-for-President campaign was having starter trouble, the volunteer drivers of the machine sent for Brownell. Last March, he went to Paris, had two full days of talk with Eisenhower, during which Brownell told Ike the nomination couldn't be had without a fight. Brownell, convinced that Ike would make all the fight necessary, flew back and quietly took charge.

Brownell advised Ike when to return to the U.S., fixed the time for his arrival at the convention, set up his conferences with delegates. In 5 1/2 weeks, Eisenhower met more delegates personally than Bob Taft had in 2 1/2 years of campaigning.

No Nights on the Train. While Massachusetts' Henry Cabot Lodge, Pennsylvania's Jim Duff, Kansas' Frank Carlson and others worked front & center, Brownell toiled behind a desk and behind the scenes, as usual. In running three campaigns for the Republican nomination and three for the election, he has never spent a night on a campaign train. Says he: "The manager . . . should be at the telephone at national headquarters, far enough away to get a bird's-eye view."

Herbert Brownell, once an aspirant to a career in journalism, knows how to organize good political reporting. Before the precinct caucuses in Texas last May, his information convinced him that the Eisenhower forces would have a majority, but the Taft forces would probably bolt and hold rump sessions. Before the Texas cloud was even sighted on the national political scene, Brownell had decided that Texas was the crucial G.O.P. state, and had flown there to map his strategy. He called the signals on the Texas battle, and it proved to be the beginning of the Eisenhower breakthrough.

Warren Burger, now Assistant Attorney General, Claims Division, was a Stassen member of the Minnesota delegation. He remembers that a month before the convention Brownell called him and asked him to be on the Credentials Committee. Brownell also phoned Harold Stassen and asked him to urge Burger to take the credentials assignment. "But Brownell never once asked me how I was going to vote on any contest," says Burger. "There was never any business of 'Can we count on you?' He never asked me to swing the Minnesota delegation for Eisenhower. I guess what Brownell did was to appraise the Minnesota delegation, and from that appraisal he knew the way they had to go." Minnesota switched to Ike at precisely the right psychological moment on the first ballot. Brownell had made no deal with the Minnesotans; he had simply made sure that they were exposed to facts which he knew would bring them around. Triple Telephoning. The best example of Brownell at work was his negotiating with John Fine and Arthur Summerfield. He parceled other states out to his aides, but kept crucial, uncommitted Pennsylvania and Michigan to handle himself. Brownell's information from his contacts in those states was so good that he could tell Fine and Summerfield things they didn't know about their own delegations. His reputation as a political operator was such that they believed him--and his tact kept them from resenting his superior information.

When John Fine was finally convinced that Ike was going to win the nomination, he telephoned Brownell at his office in Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel and said that he was almost ready to throw his votes to Ike. But he wanted assurance that Michigan's Summerfield would go along. Said Brownell: "The only way to do this is to get Summerfield on the phone." He picked up another phone called Summerfield off the convention floor. With a telephone in each hand Fine on one and Summerfield on the other, he held the phones so each could hear what the other was saying. So there would be no misunderstanding, he repeated their statements. In this strange, triple-phone talk, the timing of the Pennsylvania-Michigan swing to Ike was fixed.

Much later, when he was asked how the word was passed that those states would go for Eisenhower, Brownell grinned: "We cut our wrists and signed in blood."

Asked how he nursed Fine and Summerfield along, Brownell says: "We built up their confidence that we knew what we were talking about. We had to convince people that we had as good a chance as Taft. That's where confidence in your word and your judgment comes in."

John Fine, not a man to pay a political compliment lightly, says: "I always had supreme confidence in Brownell's word. He's the type of fellow who grows on you." Brownell never went on the convention floor. He sat in his hotel room listening, thinking, remembering. A close associate says that his greatest asset then was his memory of the two previous conventions. He knew who had stood up under stress, who was a mild opportunist, who was a waverer, who had given and broken his word, who had a grievance and what the grievance was.

It was all in Brownell's head. Eisenhower headquarters had an elaborate card index of all the delegates. Brownell never used it. He says: "Why write it down on cards? When you need the information, there isn't time to go look it up on a card."

Brownell's line on the delegates was so good that on two key roll calls his forecast was only two votes off. He had such confidence in his information that when one state delegation cast a vote he did not expect, Brownell, watching on television, told associates that the delegation must not have understood the question. In a few minutes, the delegation's chairman called Brownell's room to say that the question had been misunderstood and the vote would be corrected.

"Let's Ask Herb." After the nomination was won, Brownell helped lay out the general campaign plans, then packed his bags and headed for his Manhattan law office. He could have been campaign manager, but he knew that the big black "D" on his old sweaters would antagonize the Midwestern Taftites, even though he was no longer Dewey's man.

He was not in retirement for long. Dwight Eisenhower had been "tremendously impressed" by his judgment and his equanimity, and ended many a post-nomination strategy conference with: "Let's ask Herb." Soon Brownell was slipping in to see Candidate Eisenhower, before long had a chair to put his foot on and a phone to grasp. When the Nixon fund furor broke, it was Brownell who took charge. He talked to some of the wisest heads in the party, studied the legal implications of the fund, flew to Cincinnati to see Eisenhower. He boarded the campaign train one night unseen by the press, spent several hours with Eisenhower, advised him to stick with Dick Nixon (although some of Nixon's friends were mistakenly convinced at the time that Brownell had advised Ike to dump Nixon). Before dawn, he was flying back to New York, thinking through some advice to Nixon on his telecast. Brownell proposed the audit and legal study of the fund, which were highly effective in making Nixon's case.

On election night, when the landslide was rolling in, Herbert Brownell, who had slipped out to a chiropractor during the campaign to get the tensions worked out of his body, allowed himself to release his pent-up emotions. He jigged up & down the hall at campaign headquarters in Manhattan's Commodore Hotel, singing old college songs (off key) at the top of his lungs.

A Different League. On his third try, Strategist Brownell had won a national campaign. Few would question the fact that as a national political planner and organizer he is the top man in his party.

But in a way this is faint praise. The Republican Party, long out of power, with no efficient big-city machines to train its organizers, is short on Brownell's kind of talent. He is top man--but in a major league that through 20 lean years has fallen into many minor-league ways.

This became apparent soon after the election. Brownell (with Lucius Clay) became the chief Ike adviser on appointments. As would be expected from Brownell's character and wide knowledge, the appointments were good, but some of them were not handled with political astuteness. He let the appointments of Ohio's George Humphrey as Secretary of the Treasury and of Martin Durkin as Secretary of Labor be announced without a word of warning to Robert A. Taft, the senior Senator from Ohio and the ranking G.O.P. member of the Senate labor committee. These political sins of omission were graphically ascribed to petty resentment against Taft and to deep-dyed political strategy. In fact, they resulted from plain carelessness and lack of Washington experience.

More eyebrows were raised when the furor over Charles Erwin Wilson's General Motors stock holdings broke. Why had Brownell not foreseen the trouble and steered around it? Brownell says merely that he was not asked and did not advise Wilson on the stock question until after the storm broke. He dismisses the Wilson crisis lightly--perhaps too lightly. Says Brownell: "You have to distinguish between Washington dinner-party conversation--the most deadly thing in public life today--and the actual merits of the case. When a fellow makes a social error on the Hill, that's all they talk about here. You get a better perspective out in the Midwest."

But Attorney General Brownell, who learns fast, will learn that the Washington dinner parties can mightily affect the Administration's reputation--even in Brownell's native Midwest.

Politics in a Shoe Box. Brownell was born in Peru, Neb. (pop. 1,265) just 49 years ago this month. His father, a dignified, goateed man, performed the considerable feat of putting seven children through college on a professor's salary. When Herb Brownell was six, the family moved to Lincoln, where his father taught science education at the state university until his death in 1936. (Brownell's mother still lives in Lincoln.)

Young Herbert began to act like a politician when he was only six. He went to the polls with his parents, ruined one pair of knickerbockers after another shinnying up poles to take down campaign posters. At one time he had hundreds of political cards and posters stored at home in shoe boxes. Later, when he became a carrier boy for the Nebraska State Journal, there were a good many days when his papers were late. When there was a good political story on the front page, Carrier Brownell would sit down on the curb and read it carefully before he started out on his route.

From the day he started school, Herb gave signs that he had a quick-witted head on his slim shoulders. At the University of Nebraska, he had an A average, was editor of the Daily Nebraskan, graduated top man in his class ('24) and, like four of his six brothers & sisters, made Phi Beta Kappa.

It was at the University of Nebraska that Politician Brownell blossomed as the kind of politician he has been ever since: a skilled behind-the-scenes operator. In one election a barb-fraternity coalition ganged up on Brownell's frat faction, and put up a young barb named Wendell Berge (now a Washington, D.C. attorney) for president of the freshman class. Brownell startled the coalition by letting Berge win without opposition. The method in his mildness came to light later: Berge joined a fraternity and took his political following into Brownell's camp.

Lawyer by Chance. The Attorney General of the U.S. became a lawyer by accident. Not long before he graduated from Nebraska, he applied to the University of Missouri and to Columbia University for journalism scholarships. For good measure, he threw in an application to the Yale Law School. Neither of the journalism schools came through, but Yale offered a $200-a-year tuition scholarship. Off to Yale went Herbert.

A hard-working student, he made top marks, became editor of the Yale Law Journal, graduated in 1927 (cum laude) without having to worry about his first lawyer's job. The offer he decided to take was a $2,700-a-year junior post with Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine, one of Wall Street's great law factories, headed by Elihu Root Jr., the son of Republican Elder Statesman Elihu Root.

Herb Brownell's plan was to see how it was done in New York for a couple of years, then head back to Nebraska to set up practice in Lincoln. Two years later he changed his course, after the firm of Lord, Day & Lord made him an offer. Within three years he was a partner, had been with the firm 23 years until he resigned last month to become Attorney General. An expert in corporation law, he was general counsel for the New York World's Fair in 1939, later general counsel for the American Hotel Association. He is strictly an office lawyer, has never to this day tried a case before a jury.

Candidate by Default. Not long after he came to New York, Brownell joined the Republican club in the old Tenth Assembly District (now the First). In 1931, Brownell was the Republican candidate for the legislature, and his campaign manager was another young lawyer out of the Midwest, Thomas Edmund Dewey, sometime of Owosso, Mich. Brownell lost. Next year Brownell won, the only New York City Republican that year to succeed a Democrat.

During five years at Albany, Brownell became known as a liberal legislator, pushed through measures that Special Prosecutor Tom Dewey wanted for his crime-busting and those that Fiorello La Guardia wanted to reform New York City's government. His successes came only after he used a prenatal political advantage. Says he: "At first, I couldn't get anything through. And then I found out what the trouble was. Among those upstate Republicans, a Republican from the city was considered worse than a Democrat. After I told them my father came from Madison County and my mother from Chenango County, everything was fine."

Politics has brought Herbert Brownell many things, including his wife; they met at a church social in New York City in 1933, where Brownell made a political speech.

They have two sons and two daughters, the eldest 17, the youngest 9. Until last month, they lived quietly in a ten-room town house on Manhattan's gracious Gramercy Park. They love the theater, political confabs with friends, and long evenings at home with books and records. The most intensely pursued family interest is baseball. During the 1948 Dewey campaign, Brownell and Harold Talbott (now Secretary of the Air Force) rented a box at Yankee Stadium to entertain visiting politicos. They kept the box from then on. Mrs. Brownell, a convert to baseball, attended 60 games the first year, now knows the averages of all the leading players. In Washington, the Brownells plan to root for the Senators--when the Yankees are not in town.

At a Saturday morning family breakfast last month, Brownell announced his new job by imitating a radio commentator ("President-elect Eisenhower today announced . . . Attorney General Herbert Brownell"). The children were amused by his technique, until they realized that he meant it. Brownell later told friends: "I sat there feeling that they would be rather proud that their father was going to be Attorney General of the United States. I was never so deflated in all my life. The whole family broke into tears because they'd have to live in Washington."

An Upward Tug. In Washington, Herbert Brownell's first big job is to raise the Justice Department from the low estate it reached under Harry Truman's Tom C. Clark and J. Howard McGrath.* The new Attorney General's first upward tug came in the selection of his assistants. Every one he has picked so far has the highest possible rating in Martindale-Hubbell, the official directory of the American bar. This is in sharp contrast with some of the department's recent personnel, e.g., former Deputy Attorney General Gus Vanech, who thrice failed to pass the District of Columbia bar examination and had to try it in Tennessee, where the examination was easier.

Before he had been in office a fortnight, Brownell reached out to New York and booted Armand Chankalian out of his job as administrative assistant to U.S. Attorney Myles J. Lane. Chankalian, veteran of seven years in his job, had turned out to be buddy-buddy with New York's fashionable Gangster Thomas ("Three-Finger Brown") Luchese. Snapped Brownell: "There will be no dealings with gangsters or racketeers."

Dwight Eisenhower's State of the Union message made clear that Brownell had already begun a major policy job: the drafting of a new loyalty and security system to replace the Truman loyalty debris. No witch hunter, Brownell nonetheless will be firm on loyalty and security.

Inspection of Stowaways. On the turbulent tax-fraud front, Brownell promised a full review of all pending cases, including some that were "stowed away by the last Administration." He warned that there would be no fixes. Implementing that policy, Brownell's able deputy, William Rogers, startled an old friend who telephoned from Texas (on Rogers' first day in office) to ask for friendly treatment on a tax case. Rogers cut him off in mid-drawl, told him to pursue the case on its merits.

Politically, the most sensitive cases the new Attorney General will have to deal with are in the antitrust area. There, more than anywhere else, the Democrats will be watching Republican Brownell most sharply. Their quest: evidence to support charges that the new Administration is favoring big business and that the Attorney General is playing politics.

Since the day he was sworn in, Brownell has been working seven days and seven evenings a week and holding daily luncheon conferences with his staff. On a recent weekend, his homework was studying the case of Atom Spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to determine whether he should recommend, clemency or reject their plea. The new man at Justice takes his job very seriously. Said he: "I feel strongly that the Department of Justice is a keystone of the Republic. If it fails, all that our youth has fought to preserve crumbles."

Currently, Brownell wants to concentrate on the Department of Justice. He is backing out of the patronage picture, tells all who will listen that he is no longer Ike's job dispenser.

This is no pose. Brownell is a first-rate lawyer," and Justice can certainly use one. He is a first-rate organizer and Justice, after Clark and McGrath, desperately needs organization. The Republican Party in New York is a reform party, and there is plenty of cleaning up to be done in Washington. Brownell used his political brain to help win the election. Now his legal mind has a chance--a great chance --to show why the election was won.

* Among the 61 Attorneys General who preceded Brownell were a grandfather of Robert A. Taft (Alphonso Taft, 1876-77), a grandnephew of Napoleon (Charles Joseph Bonaparte, 1906-09), and a great-uncle of Herbert Brownell. The great-uncle (on his mother's side) was William Henry Harrison Miller, an eminent Indiana lawyer. Miller was named for President William Henry Harrison (although he was no kin), then was the law partner, political adviser and Attorney General (1889-93) of William Henry's grandson, President Benjamin Harrison One of Miller's Cabinet mates was Secretary of State John W. Foster, grandfather of John Foster Dulles.

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