Cancellation & Continuation

While the ruckus about the Dixon-Yates power contract roared on in Capitol Hill committee rooms last week, the President of the U.S. and the mayor of Memphis met at the White House for a sensible discussion of the question. Democratic Mayor Frank Tobey told President Eisenhower that Memphis is wholly sincere in its plan to build a steam plant that will replace the power drawn from the Tennessee Valley Authority by the Atomic Energy Commission. By building its own plant, Memphis will be assured of power without Dixon-Yates. Since this fitted the Eisenhower policy of local rather than federal solutions to such problems, the President announced that the Dixon-Yates contract will be canceled.

With that, bulldozers at the Dixon-Yates site at West Memphis. Ark. stopped running, but the political arguments on Capitol Hill rolled on. They are sure to continue at least until the 1956 election, focusing partly on the charges against Dixon-Yates made by congressional Democrats, partly on how much, if anything, the U.S. should pay the Dixon-Yates combine in closing out the contract.

The Senate committees investigating Dixon-Yates had found unusual circumstances. They had learned that Investment Banker Adolphe H. Wenzell played an ambiguous role as a consultant to the Budget Bureau in the early stages of Dixon-Yates, at a time when he was also a vice president of the First Boston Corp., which emerged as a Dixon-Yates financing agent. But First Boston had acted without fee, and there was no showing that Wenzell profited by his activities. Last week the probers made another discovery: White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams had personally obtained a brief delay in the Securities and Exchange Commission's Dixon-Yates hearing in June, when the House was about to vote on Dixon-Yates transmission lines. The Administration explanation was that Adams, no lawyer, had wanted advice from Attorney General Brownell and White House Special Counsel Gerald Morgan about legal problems relating to the SEC hearings. Since Brownell and Morgan were away from Washington at the time, Adams requested that the hearings be put off until he could confer with them.

Such matters were grist for the congressional mill, but they hardly stacked up as a solid campaign"But none of these mistakes adds up to scandal, or even superficially documents such wild charges as Kefauver's that the President had to cancel the Dixon-Yates contract because it was be coming more scandalous, more smelly, all the time . . . When Memphis, in June 1955, announced it had arranged to build its own power plant at the expense of local basic points he taxpayers, made the in 1952 President and won 1953" his

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