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There is no doubt that the President has made a great, a unique and a necessary contribution to reducing the prob ability of a third world war. He has done this by maintaining our military power and our alliances, and, also and no less, by clarifying our fundamental policy m the Far East. If we pay attention not to what the Administration has said but to what it has been doing we can say that it has pulled back from positions of weakness where we were overextended, to positions which the United States and its allies are strong enough and willing enough to hold.
IKE, LIKE BASEBALL, A NATIONAL INSTITUTION
NEW YORK TIMES Washington Bureau Chief JAMES RESTON : THE popularity of President Eisenhower has got beyond the bounds of reasonable calculation and will have to be put down as a national phenomenon like baseball. The thing is no longer just a remarkable political fact but a kind of national love affair, which cannot be analyzed satisfactorily by the political scientists and will probably have to be turned over to the headshrinkers.
Very much against his will, the President is suddenly being presented as the answer and solution to everything: war, juvenile delinquency, the decline in farm prices, parental irresponsibility, the division of Europe and Germany, polio, death on the highways, the school shortage, and all the rest. When the Republican state chairmen met [last] week, they went over all these things and came to the same conclusion about every thing. Ike was the answer. To a man they agreed that if he should refuse to stand for re-election next year, the confusion in the party would be indescribable but even in their private sessions with one another they refused to consider an alternative.
Whatever the President does now is automatically wonderful. If he goes to Geneva and cries peace, even when there is no peace, he is proclaimed throughout the world. If he counters the optimism of Geneva six weeks later with stern warnings to the Communists, nobody asks why he didn't think of that before, but hails him as a scourge of the appeasers. When the farmers think about the decline in commodity prices, they don't blame the President but Secretary of Agriculture Benson. When people have complaints about foreign policy, they turn on Secretary of State Dulles.' When they worry about polio, they blame Mrs. Hobby; about taxes, Secretary Humphrey; and so on.
It is a remarkable psychological situation. Roosevelt at the height of his pop ularity never had it so good. Eisenhower today not only commands the overwhelming support of his party, but the affection as well.
Eisenhower is. indeed, a symbol of the atmosphere of the time: optimistic, prosperous, escapist, pragmatic, friendly, attentive in moments of crisis and comparatively inattentive the rest of the time. What America is, at this moment of her history, so is Eisenhower, and the Democrats don't know what to make of it.
LIBERALS CREATED DANGER OF BIG GOVERNMENT
An open letter to a liberal, in the Conservative FREEMAN :