Raising Up & Tearing Down

There were two things to be done: either tear down the White House and start anew, or save the shell and rebuild the foundations and interior. Tearing it down entirely would have saved perhaps 10% of the bill, but even the most tight-fisted Congressman found a little sentiment stirring in his breast at so crass a thought. Last week a congressional committee approved plans for the spending of $5,400,000 to restore 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a way destined to make the White House survive in all its classic glory for another 300 to 500 years.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the gigantic empty caverns where oratory and reason often mix in unequal proportions, workmen had ripped out the seats and equipment in the Senate and House chambers; ugly steel beams still upheld the ceilings. A visitor to Washington would find the President of the U.S. and Senators and Representatives all working in crabbed quarters.

Something of this same shoring up and pulling down was going on in the nation's foreign policy last week. In Europe the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff talked things over with their Atlantic pact allies and announced that there would be some kind of military organization by 1950 (see INTERNATIONAL). They were shoring up a Europe that had sagged in places, but fundamentally was built of sound material. In China last week the U.S. pulled out the final sagging props that had held up its policy, and a lot of decayed timbers were exposed in the process. The old structure, never sound, was disintegrating, all right, and it made a portentous heap of rubble when it fell. The tragedy was that the U.S. had nothing to put in its place.

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