Within hours after the White House realized that the President's first TV defense of his budget had won him nothing, Dwight Eisenhower and his staff set about recovering lost ground. Last week, when the President took to radio and television to fight the toughest action of all—in defense of the hard-pressed foreign-aid appropriation—he talked with ringing conviction of a program that is not only vital to U.S. defense but challenging to all that the U.S. stands for. Almost overnight Washington sensed a sudden and dramatic change in the political climate. The White House glowed in a new mood of confidence. Congress talked and acted with an apparent new sense of responsibility. Hostility toward the Administration's foreign-aid program all but vanished, and many a critic scurried to get right with Ike.
"I congratulate the President for some of the decisions he has made," said Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson, who only the week before was needling Eisenhower at every opportunity. Said the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Montana's Mike Mansfield: "For the first time in years the foreign-aid program has been presented in a form that looks manage able and salable." Minnesota's Fair-Dealing Hubert Humphrey was "delighted" with the message. House Speaker Sam Rayburn (who had brushed off Ike's State of the Union message last January as "one of those kind-of-usual things") called it "great," volunteered that he was going to back "a very generous appropriation" for foreign aid. Indiana Republican Homer Capehart, who has voted against foreign aid for ten years, called the speech "highly gratifying"—and promised to vote in favor of the President's program. New York Republican Jacob Javits, a staunch budget defender through the battle, reported that his mail was running 10 to 1 in Eisenhower's favor, and "I would call that a dramatic shift in public opinion."
Gloomy Prospect. The failure of Ike's first budget speech (TIME, May 27) dismayed White House staffers, who had expected the chief, once he really started fighting, to send his opponents reeling. To some, the prospect of changing many minds on foreign aid ("the global dole") looked equally gloomy. Only one day before last week's speech, New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, told a businessmen's cut-that-budget rally in Chicago that he was "fed up with global do-gooders who want to see us spend the hard-earned tax dollars of American citizens in the support of a worldwide welfare state." At his elbow Virginia's Harry Byrd, the Mr. Economy of the U.S. Senate, nodded approvingly.
Ike called in his onetime chief speechwriter, Emmet Hughes of FORTUNE. Working together, they ripped apart Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' preliminary draft and put together a speech with punch. Ike himself was still tooling away at it a few hours before the TV cameras were set up.