Ready on the Firing Line

Outside the Cumberland Township polling place north of Gettysburg a damp snow fell; in the small frame building a potbelly stove glowed comfortably as a dozen early risers politely stepped back to allow their famed neighbor the first primary vote. Dwight Eisenhower grinned a good morning, accepted his ballot from Clerk Herbert Raab, ducked into the farthest of five bunting-draped booths and took 60 seconds to mark his choices for "President of the United States" and 14 other offices. He reappeared to slip the folded paper into a ballot box, then drove off through the snow to Harrisburg to board the Columbine. Two hours later, precinct politics attended to, Ike was at his White House desk prepared to tackle politics at the national level.

That he was prepared was demonstrated next day at a 31-minute press conference that centered on bombs, missiles and peripatetic Russians, but found time for a political question more personal than the one on Dick Nixon. When I.N.S. Columnist Ruth Montgomery asked with mock-solemn mien what he thought about Democratic election-year strategy to make him the prime campaign target, Ike shrugged and laughed. "Well, I think it is perfectly correct," he said. "I am the head of the Administration, and I have been shot at before."

With equal frankness but no laughter, the President reviewed and approved the Federal Reserve Board's action raising discount rates to member banks 1/4% in ten districts and 1/2% in two, despite opposition from his own economic advisers. "The Federal Reserve Board is set up as a separate agency of Government," he insisted. "It is not under the authority of the President, and I really personally believe it would be a mistake to make it definitely and directly responsible to the political head of the state." Four years ago, well aware that Harry Truman had let the Treasury run Federal Reserve policies, to the peril of the U.S. economy, Ike pledged he would preserve the board's new status of independence. On the eve of a fresh campaign, he was happy to reaffirm the pledge.

Last week the President also:

P:Watched his fourth grandchild, Mary Jean Eisenhower, four months, christened in the White House Blue Room in the first such ceremony at the executive mansion since Benjamin Harrison's granddaughter Mary Lodge McKee was baptized in the Red Room in 1889.

P:Signed a measure raising the monthly pay of volunteers in the six-month military reserve training program from $50 to $78 to match National Guard pay for the same training, draw more young men into the lagging reserve program.

P:Met with 33 members of his new Committee on Education Beyond the High School, headed by New York Life Insurance Co. Board Chairman Devereux Colt Josephs, and promised full support to their assignment: studying educational opportunities and problems after secondary school and determining the Federal Government's role in that area.

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