in Defense of Dulles

Dropping by the White House one morning last week in his official role of chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, New Hampshire's Styles Bridges casually asked President Eisenhower if he would like to lunch with the committee some day on Capitol Hill. "Sure--today," said Ike briskly, leaving Styles Bridges to rummage up sirloin steaks, peach-and-cottage-cheese salad, chocolate and vanilla ice cream, Jell-O and coffee for 40 guests, purring that a Republican President had not lunched informally with Republican Senators on the Hill like this for more than 25 years. Obviously the President had something important on his mind, thought the Senators, and the President had. Ike was sick and tired of home and overseas attacks against Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and was now ready to start putting the critics to rout.

Foster Dulles, said Ike when the luncheon conversation turned that way, is "competent . . . dedicated . . . loyal . . . efficient" and he is going to stay on the job. "He has my complete confidence."

Hard Sell. It was the same theme that Ike had stressed earlier in the day to the Republican House and Senate leadership at the regular weekly meeting at the White House. He was truly amazed, he told the leaders, that Dulles, so soon after his illness and during a time of crisis, was able to "bounce back on the job." This, he went on, was a generally unappreciated dedication of the highest order, and "believe me, I appreciated it."

Ike's all-out private war in defense of Dulles was no idle campaign. Like everyone else in Washington, he was well aware that Arkansas' J. (for James) William Fulbright, Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey and Oregon's Wayne Morse were heading up a group of Democratic liberals pledged to bring down Dulles (TIME, Feb. 4). What concerned Ike more was that he was now getting little help from such responsibles as Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Democratic Whip Mike Mansfield, who have been alienated by the extravagances of Dulles' hard-sell tactics as he pushed for speedy action on the Eisenhower doctrine. The mounting Democratic theme: Dulles is the price the Administration must pay if it wants an 85th Congress that will be fully cooperative in foreign relations.

Command Decisions. Ike was in no mood to bargain, and he took pains at his 101st press conference to make clear that Dulles would stay on the job. The critics, he noted, talked only generally about blunders and lack of leadership, but made "no constructive proposals for what even should have been done with the benefit of hindsight." As for Dulles, he had been training for his job ever since his grandfather was Secretary of State, and "during those years he studied and acquired a wisdom and experience and knowledge that I think is possessed by no man--no other man in the world."

Both Dulles and he had made mistakes, Ike conceded, but he had had no reason to change his high opinion of the Secretary of State. And in any event, said he, sending his definition of command responsibility ringing round Capitol Hill and the world: "Secretary Dulles . . . has never taken any action which I have not in advance approved. I insist again that these matters are not taken spasmodically, impulsively. They are not policies developed off of top-of-the-head thinking. They take weeks and weeks, and when they come out, and are applied, they have my approval from top to bottom."

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