Back to the Source

For U.S. politicians, prolonged residence in Washington, D.C. often has the same consequences which lack of contact with the ground had for Antaeus the wrestler.* Last week, like Antaeus returning to the source of his strength, Dwight Eisenhower headed out into the U.S. countryside.

First stop for the presidential Constellation, the Columbine, was Minneapolis, where Ike was provided with a foolproof, all-American test of his popularity. Ten minutes before he was due to begin his speech to the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce convention, officials ushered on to the stage beauteous Neva Jane Langley, Miss America of 1953. The screams and cheers which greeted Miss Langley lasted 35 seconds. When Ike appeared, the Jaycees, who represented some 2,500 U.S. communities, tore the house down for a minute and a half.

Magic Numbers. Applause broke out again repeatedly as Ike took the offensive against critics of the Administration's proposed defense budget. The new defense program, he said, "allocates funds as justly and as wisely as possible among the three armed services." Then the President turned to the "fortress" theory of U.S. foreign policy, the up-to-date version of isolationism dear to many a Midwestern heart. Said he: "All of us have learned--first from the onslaught of Nazi aggression, then from Communist aggression--that all free nations must stand together or they shall fall separately." Rejecting the "partial unity" advocated by Ohio's Bob Taft in his explosive Cincinnati speech (TIME, June 8), Ike continued:

"We cannot select those areas of the globe in which our policies or wishes may differ from our allies . . . and then say to our allies: 'We shall do what we want here --and where you do what we want, there and only there shall we favor unity.' That is not unity. It is an attempt at dictation. And it is not the way free men associate."

Only at the end of his speech did Ike mention Bob Taft by name. With obvious sadness the President gave his audience the news of Taft's illness (see below), and announced that he had just sent the Senator a telegram, "saying that we well knew that we could not spare such patriotic and devoted service as his ..."

Great Days. That afternoon the Columbine pushed on to Minot, N. Dak., and next morning Ike drove 70 miles out from Minot to the giant Garrison Dam. It was a ride reminiscent of the great days of the 1952 campaign. At intersections and in the small, dusty towns along Route 83, farmers and their families gathered to wave at the President. Here and there a well-worn "I Like Ike" banner appeared, and in Bismarck, one shapely young woman in a black bathing suit had plastered the word "Ike" across her waist in white tape.

At Garrison, Ike was taken on a tour of the dam site and shown a scale model of the project. One of his Army Engineers guides, General William Potter, remarked that perhaps such models should be sent around the country so the people could see what they were getting for their money. Half grinning, the President snorted: "Did you ever stop to think that if they find out, they may stop you some day?"

Good Beginning. At South Dakota's Mount Rushmore National Memorial several thousand Young Republicans and guests gathered to see him. Standing beneath the looming, 60-ft. tall faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, which the late Gutzon Borglum carved out of the granite mountainside, Ike delivered the most frankly political report he had made since Election Day. Proudly, he emphasized the "good beginning" which his Administration had made in its five months in power. Its greatest achievement: "We have instituted what amounts almost to a revolution in Federal Government, as we have seen it operating in our generation. We have set about making it smaller rather than bigger--we have been finding things it can stop doing rather than new things for it to do." The Administration's great advantage: "The men directing the work . . . are uncompromised by years of political promises and campaign oratory. They are not prisoners of their own past mistakes, or their own stale habits of handling public affairs."

That night Ike settled into the South Dakota State Game Lodge where, in 1927, Calvin Coolidge outraged the nation's anglers by admitting that he was fishing for trout with worms. Redeeming his predecessor's conduct (which was denounced on the Senate floor by the late James A. Reed of Missouri), Ike offered the French Creek trout dry flies and a Colorado spinner. In a full day's fishing he caught a dozen trout. The biggest: a 15-incher weighing more than 2 1/2 Ibs.

Reasons for Pleasure. Next day, six hours in the Columbine took Ike from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. There, at Dartmouth College's commencement exercises, the President marched up to receive an honorary doctorate, stumbling once over the unwieldy academic robes. But his oratorical touch was sure. With the graceful spire of the Dartmouth library as an appropriate backdrop, the President talked easily about the need for a future which values fun, courage, and the basic greatness of U.S. life. This brought him to a paragraph which was headlined as his answer to Joe McCarthy's campaign to purge State Department libraries of books by Communists or "controversial" authors (see FOREIGN NEWS). Said Ike: "Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed . . . How will we defeat Communism un less we know what it is and why it has such an appeal for men . . .? We have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America, and even if their thinking and ideas are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them in places where they are accessible to others, is unquestioned or it is not America."

Teddy's Volunteers. The last stop was at Oyster Bay, N.Y., where Ike dedicated the old Theodore Roosevelt home and proclaimed Theodore Roosevelt Week. Reminiscently, he harked back to the early days of World War I when ex-President Roosevelt volunteered to serve in Europe as a division commander. Said Ike: "I remember so well in the regiment in which I was then serving in Texas, at least a half-dozen young officers went up to the adjutant to put down our names to say could we go to the division commanded by Theodore Roosevelt." (Roosevelt's offer, however, was firmly rejected by President Woodrow Wilson, his bitter political enemy.)

Roughrider Roosevelt also provided the President with an opening for a sly answer to critics who like to say that Ike lets Congress lead him around by the nose. In the popular image, he said, Teddy Roosevelt "galloped down Pennsylvania Avenue on a spirited charger with his saber drawn, rushed into the Senate or the House, demanded what he wanted and rode out with everybody cowed. But the fact is he was a wise leader. He used every form of polite advance including," said Breakfast Host Eisenhower, "many breakfasts."

With that, the President was off to Washington to wrestle with a century's worth of fast-changing foreign-relations problems. All in all, the U.S. would be the better for his trip, for Eisenhower could now act with the confidence that the sources of his strength were not only still there, but multiplied.

* Antaeus, giant son of Poseidon the sea god, was invincible so long as he kept in contact with his mother, the Earth. Hercules killed Antaeus by lifting him off the ground and strangling him in mid-air.

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