An attempt to dissuade President Eisenhower from accepting an award from the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, in connection with the 40th anniversary celebration of the ADL, was made here by Joseph P. Kamp, who is known for his anti-Jewish views.
Mr. Kamp, who is a leader of the right-wing “Constitutional Educational League,” addressed a letter for this purpose to President Eisenhower. He stated that damaging information against the ADL was available from Robert L. Kunzig, counsel of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He also asked Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who is scheduled to participate in the tribute to the ADL, to instruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation to undertake a probe of the organization.
The 40th anniversary convention of the Anti-Defamation League opens here on Friday and will last four days. President Eisenhower will attend the anniversary dinner of the organization on Monday evening and will participate in a telecast that will come from Mayflower Hotel here. He will be presented with the League’s award by Henry Edward Schultz, ADL national chairman. Philip M. Klutznick, president of the B’nai B’rith, will act as host for the dinner.
In addition to the more than 1,000 ADL and B’nai B’rith leaders from all parts of the country, the dinner will be attended by more than 100 distinguished American personalities, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Chief Justice Earl Warren and five Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney-General Herbert Brownell, Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford, and General Matthew Ridgeway.
Bernard Baruch, Henry Ford 2nd, General Walter Bedell Smith, Harold Stassen, Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Murphy, and a large group of governors, senators, congressmen, White House officials and religious, business and educational leaders will also participate. The President’s response to the ADL award will come at the conclusion of a one-hour TV spectacle dramatizing American progress in human relations during the past 40 years.
(In New York, Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the ADL, commenting on Mr. Kamp’s plea to the President, declared: “Joe Kamp’s plea to Mr. Eisenhower to withdraw from our dinner comes with ill grace in the light of Kamp’s lies about and bigoted attacks upon Ike when the President campaigned for office last year.”)
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