Waiting for the Bell

Theoretically, it was time to get some work done around the White House. Congress was gone from Washington, the national political eye was on Chicago, and there were plenty of pending problems ranging all the way from Suez to the 1958 budget. But problems or no, President Eisenhower was acting like a championship fighter waiting impatiently in his dressing room for an end to the political preliminaries and the main event bell.

Early in the week he went before the cameras for his two-minute stint in a 27-minute Republican campaign movie (Peace, Progress and Prosperity--A Report to the People), which will be spotted on TV and at political rallies starting next month. Intermittently, he checked arrangements for the Republican National Convention; harking back to an impressive prayer he had heard in Harrisburg, Pa. during the 1952 campaign,* he personally selected the Rev. John B. Williams, mellifluous pastor of Harrisburg's big Negro Second Baptist Church, to deliver an invocation in San Francisco. Cheerfully he approved a tentative schedule that puts him (and Mamie) in San Francisco next Wednesday evening, calls for an acceptance speech on Thursday, and grants three or four days' vacation at posh Cypress Point on California's Monterey Peninsula.

At his midweek press conference he was the alert, sure-footed Eisenhower of old, as he sparred with the 207 correspondents on domestic questions. A reporter asked if he had become a Republican in 1951 with the same intentions as those of a woman who "marries a man to reform him." Ike grinned, said no. What he had "very definitely thought" was that, "after one party had been in Washington 20 years . . . that party was really incapable of straightening out" the abuses that were the products of its long tenure. In 1956, Ike predicted in a frankly partisan stance, the Republican platform will reflect "some reorientation" toward "those principles, policies and programs" that will help it in "rebuilding its strength and vigor."

Stepping nimbly through details of the bipartisan congressional defeat of the school construction bill (TIME, July 16), he left the impression that he primarily blamed "a lot of Democrats"--"they not only killed my bill but they helped to kill their own." He conceded that rising steel prices present an inflation "danger sign," promised that the Administration would watch the problem "closely every day." He snorted at a suggestion that his soil-bank program was a device to buy farm votes, blamed Congress for not passing it early enough to be of more use in 1956.

Asked if he thought the Republican platform should endorse the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, he said he didn't know, but pointed out that he himself was "sworn to uphold the Constitution." Then, in defending the slow progress of desegregation, he had a comforting word for the South: "Let's never forget this: from 1896 to 1954, the school pattern of the South was built up in what they thought was absolute accordance with the law, with the Constitution of the United States, because that's what the [separate-but-equal] decision was."

When the conference was almost over with no mention of his health,* Ike himself seized an opportunity to bring up the subject, volunteered that before the election he will have another physical examination. "If at any time I have any reason to believe that I am not fit, as I believe myself to be now, I will come before the American public and tell them." The same day, as though to prove that he was back in form, he played nine holes of golf at Burning Tree (walking through three, riding his electric cart through six), reported later that he felt "very well."

Last week the President also:

P: Brought to at least a temporary end the exchange of disarmament correspondence between himself and Soviet Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin. Replying to Bulganin's most recent letters, Ike rejected--by ignoring it--the Russian proposal that Russia and the U.S. reduce their forces in Germany, accused the Communists of bad faith in failing to live up to their Geneva "agreements" to reunite Germany. In a pointed reference to the Stalin-debunking campaign, Ike said the Soviet was to be praised for its efforts "to eradicate some of the evils of an earlier period," but until international projections of those evils were also eliminated, there was little hope for disarmament.

P: Completed action, 72 hours before the Aug. 13 deadline, on the 280 bills that the second session of the 84th Congress left behind it. To the surprise of most Congressmen, he vetoed a bill authorizing a $1.6 billion harbors and rivers program (the first veto of this congressional pork barrel since Franklin Roosevelt slapped down a similar bill in 1940) because 32 of the 113 proposed projects had not been cleared by Army engineers.

P: Visited at the White House with Amintore Fanfani, secretary of Italy's Christian Democratic Party.

P: Played host to SHAPE Boss Alfred Gruenther, home to report on the affairs of his NATO command in Europe.

* Excerpts: "We have been looking in the face of hypocrisy and corruption in high places . . . Grant us this day . . . the courage to place men in control of our Government who will adhere to the principles of our Constitution . . . Restore to this nation a sense of its heritage and destiny ... so that our children will . . . grow up and enjoy life . . . facing the realities of one world of nations working with God . . ."

* On the theme of Ike's health, Eleanor Roosevelt told New York Timesman Clayton Knowles last week that Franklin Roosevelt's concern about his own health had no part in his decision to drop Henry Wallace as his running mate in 1944. Aside from a heart weakened by fatigue, she said, F.D.R.'s chief complaints were a special susceptibility to germs and a nose and throat difficulty.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.