Mobilizing the Energies

By any reckoning of physical assets, the free world has always had a preponderant advantage in plant, power and equipment over the Communist world. What the free world lacked in the cold war was a genuine harnessing of its energies. Last week the Eisenhower Administration got the harnessing well under way.

President Eisenhower's State of the Union speech (TIME, Feb. 9) outlined the areas for action. Eisenhower's order removing the U.S. Seventh Fleet as a formal barrier to Chinese Nationalist attacks on the Communist mainland provoked some Democratic questions in Congress, but at the very minimum succeeded in getting both the U.S. and U.S. allies in Western Europe to think hard along the new lines of initiative.

Part of Western Europe's sober second thought was attributable to the on-the-spot explanations of U.S. policy by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who traveled 10,000 miles, through seven nations in ten days (see INTERNATIONAL). Dulles was also eminently successful in drawing signs of new unity out of Western Europe's bickering diversity. In capital after capital he managed to convey the urgent need for action, based not on U.S. threats but on an overriding identity of interests among all free nations.

At home, the Administration moved with swift precision to reverse the political and economic philosophies of 20 years. Budget Director Joseph Dodge put a lid on new hiring and set each major department to work on a downward revision of costs--with a deadline of March 2 for action. And Eisenhower himself began the job of cutting away controls from the U.S. economy, confident that in a free economy the U.S. would find the source of more vigor, strength and energy for the cold war.

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