Seer Suckers

President Eisenhower has never been one to be content with the clarity of immediacy. When he wants to rub a peephole in the steamy window looking out on the nation's future, he concedes that he himself is no expert on the future, and appoints a committee to do the rubbing.

During his second term he has created a greenhouse-full of professional seer squads, some of which have been very remarkable indeed. Perhaps the best-known of all these prophetic ventures are the Draper Committee (an impartial group of private citizens whose job was to recommend foreign aid policy), the Gaither Committee (to review defense strategy), the Nixon Committee on Price Stability and Economic Growth, and the National Committee on Goals chaired by Henry Wriston.

Yet there comes a time when every committee must interrupt the harmless progress of its research with a report, and here the White House kettle once again obscures the windows with a heavy cloud of steam. The recommendations of the Draper report, many of which were very sound, were apparently never considered, for there is no reflection of them in the President's foreign aid programs. Everybody knows what happened to the Gaither Report; it was locked away for fear, in Herblock's words, that people who read it might "die of happiness." Vice-President Nixon's report, a frankly partisan statement of Republican economic aims, alone managed to survive.

Nixon himself, incidentally, is beginning to catch on to the practice. He would like to see an Advisory Council composed of the Americans best qualified to tell the President and the Congress how the government can assist artistic endeavor. Possibly the country will be treated to another four years in which the bizarre philosophy flourishes: 100 experts equal truth, but if the truth they equal is too true to be good, suppress it.