Morning-After Ordeal

The President of the U.S. went into his first post-election press conference the morning after Election Day with his chin high and a jaunty half-smile on his lips, but when he left half an hour later, he was drawn, grey, visibly weary. Veteran White House reporters had never seen him tire so fast. It was plain that the Democratic landslide had jolted Dwight Eisenhower badly--that he found it painful to talk about.

But talk about it he did, in snappish tones edged with determination. Asked about the reasons for his party's defeat, he pointed to two failures: the G.O.P.'s failure to get its campaign rolling soon enough (he referred to Republicans as "they"), and the voters' failure to understand the dangers of excessive federal spending. He had warned about the "spender-wing" of the Democratic Party in his campaign speeches, he said, but "apparently that didn't make any great impression" on the voters. "I don't know whether they did this thing deliberately," he went on. "I know this: that they obviously voted for people that I would class among the spenders."

"Complete Reversal." Could the G.O.P.'s defeat, a reporter asked, be blamed on "disenchantment with the Administration"? Ike's reply showed that the thumping his party took at the polls had baffled as well as hurt him. After he had preached his "middle-of-road" convictions for four years, he said, the voters had re-elected him, in 1956, by a "majority of, I think, well over 9,000,000 votes.* Now, here, only two years later, there is a complete reversal; and yet I do not see where there is anything that these people consciously want the Administration to do differently. And if I am wrong, I'd like to know what it is."

Even with overwhelming Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, Ike declared, he was going to go on pushing for Republican "fiscal soundness." Again and again he harped on the "spending" theme. "We have got to stop spending if we are going to keep further dilution of the dollar from taking place," he said. During the next two years, he vowed, "I am going to fight this as hard as I know how." It was vital, he said, to get the U.S. "awakened to this particular danger."

Rearguard Tone. Ike's voice rang with conviction, and it was understandable that, faced with a peacetime-record deficit of $10 billion to $12 billion, he saw real peril for the U.S. in any trend toward freer spending. But his all-out stress on economy had a rearguard, negative tone that was unfair to his Administration's positive achievements.

Once again, the President passed up a chance to point to specific areas where he thought welfare-state spending might be trimmed back. He did say that a lot of money might be saved in national defense by eliminating "duplications" and by seeing to it that missiles and other new weapons systems "displace" older systems, not just "supplement" them. But when asked to name other good places to save money, the President lamely replied that he saw "no reason why we should spare any place, because I think every place we are spending too much money."

When Associated Press's Marvin Arrowsmith finally ended the press conference ordeal by shouting the traditional "Thank you, Mr. President," Ike muttered, as he left the room, "I thought he had forgotten it."

* 9,548,055.

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