Ike Retreats

When President Eisenhower submitted his record $41 billion defense budget to the Congress last January, he set his military jaw and let it be known that he would authorize no more spending than that for defense. That resolution lasted until last week.

Events abroad helped change his mind: the capture of U-2 Pilot Gary Powers, the summit blowup and, since then, the increasing Soviet truculence. But so did election-year political pressures at home: if there was one thing all candidates and platforms agreed upon, it was the need to spend more on defense. Eisenhower gave in.

The new plans--first sketched out in Ike's message to Congress and detailed later on by Defense Secretary Thomas Gates--called for spending about $476 million more, $150 million of it in fiscal 1961 (ending next June 30). The money will be distributed among a variety of projects: developing the B70 super-bomber, modernizing Army equipment, building more Polaris submarines and missiles, increasing airlift capability, expanding the Strategic Air Command airborne alert, and speeding up development of the spy-satellite Samos. They are all expensive items, and the extra money will not go far among them.

Ike's running quarrel with the Democrats over defense spending first took off last June. Congress revised the defense budget, adding here, subtracting there, wound up authorizing $1.2 billion more for defense than the President had asked for. He announced that he had no intention of spending any of the extra money. But then the pressures began inside his own Administration. Defense Secretary Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Nathan Twining* returned from the aborted summit meeting in Paris to suggest that the U.S. ought to re-examine its defense setup and increase its "readiness." Just before the Republican Convention, Richard Nixon got together with Nelson Rockefeller in the meeting that produced the "Treaty of Fifth Avenue" (TIME cover, Aug. 1), with its call for "new efforts" in national defense.

The wording of the G.O.P. platform's defense plank--a compromise between the Treaty of Fifth Avenue and Ike's insistence that U.S. defenses are more than adequate--gave the President a dignified exit: the plank gently recognized a need for new looks at defense programs, citing "swift technological change" and new "warning signs of Soviet aggressiveness" as the reasons.

Even so. the retreat left Ike explosively touchy about the whole subject of defense spending. At his press conference last week, the touchiness suddenly flared into anger when a newsman asked about Lyndon Johnson's charge that the President was still "freezing" the remainder of the extra $1.2 billion that Congress had voted. Ike denied that he had ever frozen any of the money. At any rate, about $476 million of it is now coming out of cold storage, and Ike may yet have to unfreeze more of it.

* Now serving his second term as JCS chairman (he stayed on at Ike's behest), Air Force General Nate Twining, 62, will retire before his term expires next August, the White House announced last week. Twining underwent surgery for lung cancer last year and for a ruptured appendix in February. Likely successor: Army Chief of Staff Lyman L. Lemnitzer (TIME cover, May 11, 1959).

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