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Also to Eisenhower, a sound U.S. economy ("I know what I am for. I am for a sound dollar") was the bedrock for construction of a free-world economic system. "Dollars and security," said Ike, "are not separable." Again: "I say that a balanced budget in the long run is a vital part of national security." And again: "We not only have to be strong today but for 50 years, and if we become reckless in the economic field, we will no longer find ourselves with the means to protect ourselves."
In that cause Dwight Eisenhower fought one of his hardest and most successful battles in 1959. In January, when he formally announced his determination to balance the budget at $77 billion, the lopsided Democratic congressional majority hooted and howled. Indeed, it seemed all but impossible at a time when recession and the challenge of the U.S.S.R.'s Sputniks had ballooned the deficit to some $12 billion.
But Ike rammed across his point. He scolded his Cabinet members (Defense Secretary Neil McElroy had airily announced that military spending would have to go up by about $2 billion; he soon got the word from the boss), wrote personal letters to political, business and civic leaders around the nation, urged his cause in press conferences and on radio and television, worked closely with Republican congressional leaders, and used his veto and the threat of his veto against lolly-gagging money bills. At year's end a balanced budget was in jeopardy, only because of the steel strike. Eisenhower had performed the political miracle of making economy popular. Grinned a White House staffer: "When those Congressmen come back in January, they're going to be so anxious to find something to cut that they'll cut their own wrists if necessary."
Above & Beyond. The victory for a sound U.S. economy meant not only a U.S. that could continue to meet its obligations of free-world leadership; it served as a springboard for vast creative forces. With postwar U.S. help the industrial nations of the West had built their economies to the point where they could begin to tear down the trade barriers that are always a sign of weakness. They could start to share with the U.S. in the immense and compelling job of aiding the world's underdeveloped lands. Those lands, with examples of successful free enterprise ranging from West Germany to Japan, were beginning to shuck off their socialist notions of economic order by government decree. Thus the tooling of U.S. fiscal responsibility to the facts of economic life set off by 1959 a revolution in dynamic ideas and plans that held out to the humblest of peoples the promise of a better life.
In recognition of that promise—vague, unstated but everywhere in the air—came the tumults that met the President of the U.S. as he traveled among the masses in 1959's last month. Into that promise the U.S., as represented by Eisenhower, breathed the hope that economic gain could be achieved in peace—and enjoyed outside political bondage.