Personal & Impersonal

From the President's bedside came homely details--so homely and so detailed as to be in bad taste in many another country, or in this country at any former time. The U.S. was told what his wife read to him, what music he heard and how it was with his eliminative processes. A British reporter was horrified at the intimacy. After listening to Dr. Paul Dudley White's candid exegesis of a medical bulletin, the Briton exclaimed: "Imagine the BBC reporting that about the Queen!" Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty overheard him, replied: "Every American family has had a heart attack in it. People are deeply interested in the President's recovery. This is very important."

The feeling of identification between the people and the President was part of a long trend. Statesmanship aside, people and President have been growing closer for a generation--unbuttoned Harding more than Wilson; buttoned, homespun Coolidge more than Harding; Hoover, the self-made great engineer in a day when almost every man dreamed he was an engineer, more than Coolidge; Roosevelt, at his fireside, more than Hoover; plain Harry Truman more than Roosevelt; and Eisenhower, America's idealistic, practical, slightly nasal voice, more than Truman. Was this trend, as John Adams would have suspected, the inevitable result of the leveling factor in democracy? Or had it a subtler and more contemporary meaning?

Last week a hard look at the U.S. in a time of shock gave evidence that not even Adams' historical learning had a clue to the reaction of the U.S. people to "a heart attack in the family," i.e., the President's. It could be easily shown that the presidency had become both more powerful and closer to the people than either the 18th or 19th centuries had dreamed it might. From this, it would seem to follow that the sudden illness of a figure as cherished as Dwight Eisenhower would shake the republic to its foundations.

It scarcely twitched. The stock market ducked for a day, then bobbed up. Elsewhere, the momentum of U.S. life carried on without a jar. The Ford Motor Co. created no surprise whatever by announcing a half-billion-dollar expansion program in 1956. Aside from their interest in the bulletins from Denver, the U.S. people concentrated on the World Series, the annual climax of the most highly organized and statistics-adorned game that men have ever played.

Somewhere in this polarization between the homely intimacy of the news from the President's bedside and the vast, impersonal complexity of U.S. life lay the key to a worldwide mystery, the mid-century U.S. The Government, as governments should, expressed the society. In the Administration, there is hardly a man with a political position independent of Eisenhower's. Yet neither the fact of his illness nor the prospect of his retirement jolted the Administration. The web of committees and the pressure of agenda hold it tight. Richard Nixon, who is no second Eisenhower, quite adequately performs the coordinating functions at the top.

But neither in the Government nor in the nation has automation replaced people. Despite the elaboration of government, business and play in the U.S., the machines still need men and these will probably be marked by two seemingly contrary characteristics, close touch with the people, and uncommon ability to work amid the whirring social machinery of the most complex of nations.

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