The Columbine swooped out of a fading afternoon sky, cleared the bare, brown Montana hills, and touched down on the airstrip at Missoula, where Dwight Eisenhower last week began a round of speech-making that became progressively more political as he moved on to Washington, Oregon and California.
Some 30,000 persons crowded Missoula (pop. 24,000) for the doggedly unpartisan presidential dedication of an aerial fire-fighting depot. Places on the platform with Ike were assigned to public officeholders; this excluded many of the state's Republican Party leaders, but would have given a seat to rabidly New Dealing Senator James Murraywho failed to...
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