(2 of 3)
Slow Strangulation. He put a wallop into his delivery, clenched his left hand into a veiny fist as he warned that without U.S. military aid, free countries bordering on the Communist world would, under Communist pressures, "suffer a slow strangulation quite as fateful as sudden aggression." Going it alone without the mutual-security program, he said, the U.S. would need to step up its draft calls and spend billions more for arms.
"The cost of peace is high. Yet the price of war is higher and is paid in different coin—with the lives of our youth and the devastation of our cities. The road to this disaster could easily be paved with the good intentions of those blindly striving to save the money that must be spent as the price of peace. I know that you would not wish your Government to take such a reckless gamble. I do not intend that your Government take that gamble."
Disciplined Troops. Having launched his counterattack in the great Battle of the Budget, the President kept it rolling. So did his disciplined troops. The high-level disunity that had enfeebled the Administration's budget defense suddenly vanished. Items:
¶At his press conference the President got off a warning to G.O.P. foot-draggers. In backing Republican candidates in 1958, he said, he would show a lot more "enthusiasm" for "people that stand with me" than for "those that stand against me." This was a big turnabout from the week before when he had said, in effect, that Old Guard Republicans could snipe at his programs and still be sure of the same kind of boost from him at election time as his loyal supporters.
¶At week's end, in a telephone address to a regional conference of Republican leaders in Trenton, N.J., Ike called for legislation giving the President the power to veto individual items in appropriations bills as "one simple way to save a lot of money"—a thrust at congressional budget-cutters who favor economy on everything except pork-barrel projects for the voters back home.
¶Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued the case for the Administration's foreign-aid program with so much persuasiveness that committeemen. already impressed with Ike's speech of the night before, gushed a remarkable torrent of praise. Even Arkansas' Democrat William Fulbright. who had often delighted in baiting Dulles, called the revised aid program "wise and imaginative." As Dulles flushed redder than his wine-colored tie, Vermont's Republican George Aiken topped it all off. "I want to compliment you." he said, "on the compliments you have received."
¶In a speech to the American Iron and Steel Institute in Manhattan. Vice President Richard Nixon plugged hard for the defense budget and foreign aid ("as essential a part of our national defense as the $38 billion we spend for our Army, Navy and Air Force").