Another who lobbies against anti-Communist bills, and is openly so registered, is former Democratic Congressman Jerry J. O’Connell, of Montana.
Utilizing his privileges of the floor, as an ex-Representative, O’Connell strides into the House and Senate while they are in session, and delivers advice, orders and inspiration to left-wing Congressmen, and threats to others.
When the Senate was debating the Communist control bill in an all night session last September, O’Connell took up a station at the Senate door with a reporter from the Daily Worker, and without any pretense of disguise, dictated the unsuccessful opposition’s floor strategy.
But listen to the hue and cry when a manufacturer’s lobbyist buys a Coca Cola for a Congressman.
Being a government lobbyist can produce desirable advantages, especially for a Marshall Plan press agent.
A survey reveals that the Economic Cooperation Administration information office has been giving several of its employes free visits to Europe and the Middle East. Robert Mullen, director of ECA information, toured Europe. He mapped a $7,500 ’round-the-world trip, but postponed a visit to the Orient when the bullets began to fly.
Mullen sent an heiress to the J. P. Morgan banking fortune to London for a convention of clubwomen—to get new propaganda material on the Marshall plan to influence American clubwomen. He sent an inexperienced youth, hired as a “picture expert,” to Paris and London, to see the sights and get new pictures for propaganda purposes here.
Though ECA has 73 American press employes in Paris alone, and 56 in 16 other Marshall Plan missions in Europe, plus 222 Europeans on these staffs, ECA sent a former woman reporter to Paris to get “human interest” stories for a clubwoman propaganda pamphlet.
The ECA press information office in Paris has a chief who gets about $20,000 a year in salary and expense money, has highly paid former reporters on his staff, but the ECA here sent a man from Washington to show a group of editors about Europe. Several others went to Europe on similar assignments.