Inside Story (Contd.)

The lure of a peep into the White House's own files made an overnight bestseller last week of New York Herald Tribune Reporter Robert J. Donovan's new book, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (TIME, July 2). Many a newspaper reader rushed to get it because most of the U.S. press, apparently confused over the release date, lagged in reporting Donovan's fresh material. Among the most avid: Democratic Congressmen, who promptly began to cry "foul."

From both Houses came the angry charge that the Administration had turned Donovan loose on hush-hush papers that it has steadfastly denied to Congress. Illinois' Democrat William Dawson, chairman of the House Government Operations Committee, gave examples in a letter to the President demanding the same privilege as Donovan. In the Senate, Arkansas' Democrat John McClellan, chairman of the Permanent Investigating Subcommittee, twice sent telegrams asking Cabinet Secretary Maxwell Rabb to testify on how the reporter's information was supplied. Twice Rabb pleaded ignorance and refused to appear. "Inexcusably arrogant,'' snapped G.O.P. Senator Joe McCarthy, who was also rankled by the "scurrilous statements" that Donovan attributes to Ike (sample: "I will not get in the gutter with that guy").

Columnists and pundits, even those syndicated by the Herald Tribune, began wrangling over the book. David Lawrence charged the White House with blundering ineptitude in letting Donovan in. The volume, he wrote, "contains much ammunition useful to the Democrats." But Columnist Roscoe Drummond thought that the White House's "calculated risk'' had produced "an honest, balanced, faithful, narrative record" of the Administration. Drummond also dismissed the Congressmen's objections. He wrote: "Presidents have always affirmed that it is the executive's responsibility to determine how, when, what, to whom and under what circumstances it will make available material from its private files."

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