The Nature of the Job

At a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Detroit's Masonic Temple, Adlai Stevenson struck fire to the new issue: the na ture of the presidency and its relationship to Dwight Eisenhower's health.

"The office of the presidency," said Stevenson, "is indeed the most awesome and powerful temporal office on earth. Its potential for good or evil is virtually without limit. And it is precisely because this is so that the election of 1956 is a unique one in our country's history. The President has announced that he is going to run for re-election under certain conditions --conditions relating to the limitations of time and energy which he can give to this greatest responsibility on earth, and as to how this responsibility can be distributed among his associates.

"But such conditions, as the President stated them, sound more like the rules of governing a kingdom or a corporation. They are not the rules for governing a democracy ... I couldn't help thinking of the little rhyme, 'This wouldn't be sinister, if we had a Prime Minister.' "

The issues of 1956, said Stevenson, are "the great problems of our time, war and peace, what to do with the uncontrolled atom, how to meet the Communist challenge, how to provide better schools, health, highways, how to restore the farmer's wellbeing, how to conserve and develop our natural resources, the relation of Government to its citizens, and the gathering crisis in the relations of Americans to each other.

"These are only some of the issues. And to these must now be added a new issue-whether we are to permit a fundamental revision of the role of the President in the U.S. and in our scheme of things. This is not the question of President Eisenhower's health, but of the nature and stature of the presidency in our system."

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