For the Record

News Columnist Drew Pearson wrote last week that Atomic Energy Commission meetings, once enlivened by "fascinating philosophical discussions" on the future of atomic power, now are "ice cold, stiff and edgy." The reason, reported Pearson, is that AEChairman Lewis Strauss uses a recording machine at meetings, and his security officers have clamped taps on the telephone wires of other AEC members. The result, as Pearson saw it, produced fear-muffled commissioners, who are reluctant to voice opinions lest their words some day be turned against them.

In the Senate, Iowa's Bourke B. Hickenlooper, one of the original members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, rose to defend his friend Lewis Strauss, and in so doing disclosed a little news himself about what Strauss found when he took over the AEC chairmanship.

"The facts are," said Hickenlooper, "that when Admiral Strauss took office as chairman ... he had a search made of the chairman's office and of other places in the commission ... He found that the offices were wired for recording. Within a few days of that discovery, he had the recording equipment and system ripped out of the office. He announced that there would be no secret recordings as long as he was chairman ... I was in his office about four days after he assumed his duties. I saw the places where the secret recording devices had been installed ... I am [also] completely convinced and satisfied that there is no secret tapping of the telephones . . ." (Strauss found the device in a decorative fireplace after brushing his knee against its cut-in switch under his desk.) Hickenlooper could not resist adding a comment born of ten years' experience in Washington: "I think it is ominous . . . when those who decry methods of insinuation and the blasting of characters and reputations on the part of others, themselves use such innuendo and unfounded rumor as the truth in their attempts to attack those whom they do not personally like and whom they would like personally to destroy."

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