Into the Maelstrom

Dwight Eisenhower has been heard to refer to his oval, pastel-green White House office as "the maelstrom." Like other Presidents before him, he chafes at the number of visitors and routine chores (including some 200 signatures a day) that drain presidential time and energy away from the task of setting and steering the nation's course. He has succeeded in snipping away a little red tape (e.g., he shifted to the Chief of Naval Operations the chore of signing naval-officer assignment papers), but every now & then a presidential aide will hear him bark like a drill sergeant: "Why do I have to do this?"

Back in the maelstrom last week, the suntanned President looked healthy and rested after a nine-day vacation in Georgia. The office had a new look, too: a-huge, bright-colored Japanese silk screen, a present from Crown Prince Akihito, stood before the fireplace. But the endless torrent of people and papers still flowed, and the vacation-time backup made the flow even stronger than usual.

In the course of the week, the President: P:Asked Congress to help meet the free world's refugee problems by permitting "the special admission of 120,000 immigrants per year for the next two years." A few days later, the chairman of Congress' Joint Immigration Committee revealed that the President had asked for a re-examination of the McCarran Act "with a view to achieving legislation which would be fair and just to all." P:Wrote C.I.O. Boss Walter Reuther (who had asked him to call a conference on full employment) that he "firmly" subscribes to "the Employment Act of 1946, [which] reflects a determination on the part of the American people to see to it that the stupidity of mass unemployment never again visits this land."

P:Addressed the "spring conference" of Republican women, 1,290 strong. Greeted by a flurry of waving napkins when he strode into the Presidential Room of Washington's Hotel Statler, Ike got off to a lighthearted, cheer-rousing start: "It'has been proven, I think, that the average of intelligence among women ... is a trifle higher than among men. And I can understand it, because ... a greater percentage of women [than of men] voted Republican last fall." More seriously, he said that the U.S. seeks nothing from other nations "except the decency, the respect, the consideration that America herself is ready to accord to every other nation in full measure."

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