The Lost Chord

The White House staff bristled warily when Harold Stassen telephoned to ask for an appointment with the President. The deep, dark, staff-level suspicion: Childe Harold might be looking for a chance to resign from his job as Disarmament Adviser and claim martyrdom in his lonely campaign to pit Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter against Dick Nixon for the Republican vice-presidential nomination (TIME, Aug. 6). Back went a call to Stassen: Just what did he have in mind? Replied Harold: he wanted the President's permission to take a month's leave to expand his pro-Herter activities. With a sigh of relief the appointment-makers fixed a time, and early last week Stassen was winging to Ike's Gettysburg farm for a friendly 20 minutes.

For Dwight Eisenhower, Stassen's challenge to Nixon was apparently less disturbing than to his Janizariat. At his press conference last week, when the first question shot at him raised the Stassen issue, Ike was unruffled and ready with his thinking about the affair. His central point: the second man on the ticket, like the presidential candidate himself, must be chosen by the delegates at open convention and not by Eisenhower fiat. Until then, everyone has the right to express his preferences as he chooses.

"A Wise Act." Accordingly, said the President, when Stassen first informed him of "what he expected to do ... I assured him that that was his right as far as I was concerned"--but, if he planned to express his own preference, he must do it as an individual and not as a member of the official family. Later, when "he came to me ... to ask for a leave, which I personally thought was a wise act on his part ... I promptly approved."

For Dick Nixon, Ike had warm words of praise and defense. The Vice President, he said, "has made a splendid record . . . these past four years." Does Nixon damage U.S. relations overseas, as Secretary of Peace Stassen had implied? Said Ike: "As you know, I have sent the Vice President on innumerable trips, and from every country ... I have received only the most glowing reports of his acceptability." In sum: "There should be no doubt about my satisfaction with him as a running mate."

That was as far as the President would go to dictate the choice of his possible successor. Pressed to commit himself to Nixon--or to comment on other well-qualified Republicans--Ike dug his heels in. Said he firmly: "I have said that I would not express a preference. I have . . . said [Nixon] is perfectly acceptable to me, as he was in 1952. But I am not going beyond that." Beyond that he hardly needed to go.

"For the Young." Yet there was remarkably warm praise for Stassen too, considering the circumstances. In a most difficult job, Ike said, he has worked "earnestly, rigorously ... to do things that very few people would have had the patience, the intelligence, and really the courage to do. One of the reasons that this whole episode sort of disturbed the even tenor of my ways was that I thought: 'Well, now. Here is a month that he won't be around.' "

To Childe Harold this music was as soothing as the Lost Chord. Armed with his 30-day leave, he was all confident smiles as he sauntered along Washington's K Street to open his new Eisenhower-Herter campaign headquarters. Said he, posing for photographers while his staff of young volunteers handed out canned biographies of the leaders (181 words for Herter; 545 words for Stassen): "I'm doing this for the young people of America. I believe I've been clearly sustained by the President. I predict this matter, will be very actively considered from now until the convention."

No doubt it would be. By speaking favorably of Nixon, not unfavorably of anyone else--and by committing himself to no one--Ike had put the selection of a Vice President precisely where he wanted it, in the hands of the Republican delegates. But by his warm praise of Nixon, and his refusal to appraise any other possible candidate for the vice presidency, he had also made it perfectly clear where his own choice lies.

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