In late May of this year the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, commonly known as the Hoover Commission, submitted its concluding report to the Congress. This was the nineteenth in a series of reports released at intervals beginning early in February. The relatively brief individual printed reports of the Commission were accompanied by appendixes containing the most important substantiating evidence garnered from an estimated total of two and a half million words contained in studies made for the use of the Commission.

This documentary output contains the results of the most extensive study ever made of the problem of executive reorganization in the federal government. The Commission on Organization, created by act of Congress in the summer of 1947, started under the most auspicious circumstances, was liberally supplied with appropriations for its work, and has enjoyed widespread public interest in its recommendations. With a distinguished membership drawn from public and private life, from the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, and from both major political parties, the Commission was given an extremely broad assignment by die Congress.

The arrest, trial and sentence for life of Joseph Cardnial Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, has profoundly shaken the conscience of the Western world and provoked a wave of protests on a scale unheard of before. The incident occurred at the climax of the tension between West and East. The figure of the Cardinal became the personification of a world-wide struggle between two fundamentally different conceptions of life. His broken resistance—both physical and psychological—symbolizes the fate of the millions oppressed and silenced by a ruthless Communist minority in East Europe. The recntations and self-contradictory confessions in the course of the trial had all the characteristics of the usual travesties of justice in Communistdominated countries. Pope Pius XII rightly stated in his allocution of February 14, 1949, that the behavior of Cardinal Mindszenty “appeared an accusation not against himself but against his very accusers and condemners.”

The term “satellite” clearly indicates a relationship of inequality and dependence between master and “follower” states. It stands to reason, therefore, that dealings with the present satellite states in Eastern Europe cannot be viewed in the same light as relations with completely independent nations, but must be considered special problems within the general field of American-Soviet relations.

It is one of the ironies of history that of all the belligerent nations of World War II the civilian-minded United States alone fought the war in almost exclusively military terms, concentrating her efforts on victory in the field of batde and giving scant attention to the post-war constellations. In line with this short-range attitude, the United States supported two principal political concepts with regard to Eastern and South Eastern Europe. She clearly recognized that the Soviet Union had a right to have friendly governments along her frontier, that is, governments which would not permit their countries to become avenues of aggression against the Soviet Union.