Top-Secret Optimism

It was a new--and absurd--low in Administration secrecy. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee planned to hold hearings last week on the state of the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns and Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Herbert Stein readily agreed to give their assessments. But Kenneth Rush, Nixon's new economic coordinator, refused on grounds of Executive privilege.

Having to testify, he said, would hinder his ability to give "candid and uninhibited" advice to Nixon in private. So the committee postponed the hearings, to the disappointment of members who had hoped to ask Rush what led the President to predict recently a late-1974 pickup in national production and a downturn in inflation.

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