Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1525

Carbon of a letter from Heath at Saint Luke’s Hall, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

August 5, 1954

Sir:

    There is something vastly more important to the preservation of America’s free institutions than the morals or the merits or the methods, within his scope of office, of any public man or men. It is the degree of their observance or of their defiance, when high in office, of the Constitution of the United States. That great instrument imposes upon its three departments of government exclusive obligations and independent powers. Among these is the right and duty of the Legislature to investigate the conduct of the Executive officers, high and low, and if need be and in their judgment to impeach them and to put them on trial for alleged misconduct or default.

     Pursuant to this duty, now in the current scene as often in the past, the United States Senate has set up a committee of its members especially charged to obtain information concerning communist or other disloyal pene­tration into the Executive Department. Two great heads of this Department by executive order have forbidden their subordinates to give this committee of the Legis­lative Department access to information contained in the executive files concerning the manner and extent of the known communist penetration into places of honor and trust and responsibility within that Department.

     This defiance of the right of the Legislature to an express and essential duty prescribed for it by the Constitution far transcends in importance and is a vastly greater danger to our tripartite form of govern­ment with its safeguards against executive autocracy than the personal behavior or alleged misconduct of any public officer or body while acting within his or its constitutional duty as expressly prescribed. There is no surer path to complete executive autocracy than this, no danger to democratic institutions so great as this.

Respectfully,