The most salient case is Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Clarence Palmby. Passed over by Nixon as a possible Secretary of Agriculture, Palmby decided in the spring of 1972 to leave his job in the Agriculture Department to work for Michel Fribourg as a vice president of Continental Grain. Using Fribourg as a financial reference, he bought a $108,000 cooperative apartment on Sutton Place South in March, 1972. One month later, Palmby flew to Moscow as a United States Government negotiator to handle the Nixon Administration's preliminary bargaining on the grain credits. Pahnby left the Agriculture Department in May and joined Continental Grain on June 8, a few weeks before the Russian delegation arrived to buy grain. In his new role as a Continental executive, he sat in during some of Fribourg's bargaining sessions with Belousov but maintains he contacted nothing. Meanwhile, his job at the Agriculture Department was filled by his old friend and protégé, Carroll Brunthaver, a one‐time employe of another grain exporting company, Cook Industries.

All of this has provoked suspicions that Palmby carried valuable inside information on Russian intentions from the private recesses of the Agriculture Department to the corporate boardroom. But whatever impressions Palmby may have brought to Fribourg, they were apparently not specific enough to make Continental Grain get ready for a big sale by buying up wheat futures contracts in advance. In fact, the Russians kept Palmby and everyone else in the Agriculture Department from learning about their real desires to buy wheat until after Palmby had joined Continental Grain.

The best explanation of the mishandling of the grain deal is more prosaic than nefarious. Carroll Brunthaver perceived his responsibility as simply to facilitate the sale of every ton of grain that the exporters could physically move through the elevators. When he saw indications that the Russians were buying much more wheat than the Government had anticipated, he chose to keep the information.. to himself. While it is conceivable that he was acting out of some residual loyalty to the grain trade, it seems much more likely that Brunthaver simply failed to grasp the economic consequences of what he was being told in confidence by the grain traders.

Secretary Butz maintains he did not learn of the huge proportions of the grain deal until mid‐September, 1972. If he didn't, clearly he should have done more to find out. But, like every Secretary of Agriculture, Butz had his sights set on pushing up farm prices during an election year. The trouble with Butz was that he had tunnel vision: He did not worry about the grain deal beyond its impact on the farm vote in November.

Someone in the White House should have worried. If, in mid‐July, John Ehrlichman, the President's chief domestic adviser, had pressed a few questions about the grain deal upon the Agriculture Department, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget, perhaps some limits would have been placed on Brunthaver's commitments‐ to the grain traders. Unhappily, the White House had a larger preoccupation in the summer of 1972—it was known as Watergate.

IN defense of the grain deal, Butz testified: “It is easy to say now that we might have done it differently. The Federal Government might have stepped in and said no, the Soviets cannot buy here in a free market. ... We might have said, as some are saying now, with benefit of hindsight, that the Russians were in such trouble that they would have to buy from the United States and we should, therefore, in the vernacular of the day, ‘sook it to 'em.’ We might have followed such a policy of ‘big stick’ economics, but what would it have accomplished? On the one hand, there might have been some saving in export subsidy funds, which likely would have been canceled out by farm program costs and the continuation of storage charges. It is well to consider that the Russians might not have had to buy from us, at least in such quantities; by revising certain domestic programs they could have survived 1972 and 1973 with a good deal less imported grain than they bought In the United States. And we may ask ourselves the question: What would this have done to the advancement of peace and cooperation in a time when the world desperately needs to get itself together?.

But it still is evident that some lessons had been learned. Wheat export subsidies have been abandoned. There now is a reportin system on crop exports. And the Agriculture Department has been induced by the Cost of Living Council to put all 60 million acres of setaside cropland back into production for the 1974 growing season.

Had the wheat deal experience left any deeper legacy? Had it taught the need for consultation, for perspective, for foresight, even in the face of awkward political facts? That, in a Government of human beings, was a far less certain prospect. ■