Close to a Flop

The White House did not even need to count its mail to know that the President's save-the-budget TV message was the closest thing to a political flop that Ike has ever had. Most perceptive editorial writers agreed with what he said ("earnest and impressive," said the often-critical Washington Post and Times Herald). But most also thought that he was far too late in saying it. "He should have moved when Secretary Humphrey made his incredible [curl your hair] criticism," said the pro-budget Atlanta Constitution. "Meanwhile, the enemies took possession of the field and established themselves on all the strategic positions in the political terrain."

Ike had refused for weeks to get excited about the budget uproar. Then one day last week, while he was in the midst of writing a perfunctory we're-doing-the-best-we-can speech, he got an urgent call from House Minority Leader Joe Martin. That evening Joe Martin was ushered upstairs to the President's study and bluntly told Ike that the House Appropriations Committee was about to make heavy Defense bill slashes. Really shocked at the prospect of a crippling cut--perhaps as much as $2.5 billion--Ike determined to toughen his speech.

Total Threat. "I earnestly be" lieve that this defense budget represents . . . the proper dividing line between national danger on the one hand and excessive expenditure on the other," he said the next night on TV. "If it is materially cut, I believe the country would be taking a needless gamble ... To this kind of problem I have devoted most of my life. I repeat my earnest belief that the estimate in the budget for our military forces, atomic energy and stockpiling . . . represents a defense program which is as nearly accurate, in present circumstances, as it is humanly possible to make it."

The new Eisenhower defense line was strong and important, but it was sandbagged by his routine explanation of the rest of his program--ranging all the way from the need for domestic expenditures ("essential national interest and no more") to the necessity for such parts of his overseas program as foreign aid and the U.S. Information Agency ("We must wage peace aggressively . . ."). Next day at his press conference he even pulled his punch on defense by conceding that greater efforts toward unification of the services might produce savings.

To the peril of the entire Administration program, Ike's polite, reasoned arguments did not even hit home among his old friends, the voters. Only one TV network (NBC) carried his speech live, and a Trendex rating showed that only 11.3% were watching (with another 48% not watching anything). TIME correspondents across the U.S. reported that most nonprofessionals just weren't listening. Staunch Ikemen were disappointed. "Believe me," said a Los Angeles insurance executive, "the President didn't change one opinion or one vote." The crusading anti-budgeteers were more belligerent than ever. "As for taking the President's word for it--well, he has lost stature with the people," said a Boston flour mill executive. "They feel he isn't quite the fellow they voted for."

Tradition Defied. Sensing this reaction, Congress promptly gave the Administration its worst drubbing in 4 1/2 years. One by one the House and Senate whacked away at appropriation bills for the various Government departments--State, Justice, Commerce, etc. The House score at week's end: cuts of nearly $1.5 billion and an ambition to cut $1.5 billion more. In one outlandish saber dance the House cut off all 1958 funds for the Administration's soil bank program, designed to ease farm gluts by paying farmers to take land out of production. Chances were good that the Senate, or even the House itself, would reverse this drastic action, but the 192-187 vote was a sign that in the ecstasy of economy--and the chance to take a poke at Ike with impunity--even the sacred farm vote was not sacred.

The Senate, adroitly led by Chief Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson (see below), defied tradition by not only refusing to restore House cuts but cutting even deeper. (One surprising victim: J. Edgar Hoover's almost sacrosanct Federal Bureau of Investigation, clipped some $150,000.) And with the Republican leadership sitting back in amused tolerance, Johnson & Co. turned with special glee on the President's pet program for fighting the propaganda war against Communism, the U.S. Information Agency. The Senate not only accepted the House's $38 million cut in USIA's $144 million request (which Ike publicly called "the worst kind of economy"), but whacked $16 million more.

Leadership Decried. The Eisenhower Republicans were hurting badly from the budget flap, and they made no secret of the fact that they thought Ike's lack of leadership was to blame. Not only had Democrats and Old Guard Republicans gained strength from the general confusion (headlined the New Rochelle.N.Y. Standard-Star: GOP TELLS IKE TO GO JUMP IN BUDGET LAKE), but Ikemen had nothing of their own to cling to. Reasons: 1) in order to make speeches defending the budget, an Eisenhower Republican had to accept the President's word that it was sound; 2) every time an Ikeman staked his political future by defending the budget he was likely to have the ground cut out from under him by members of the President's official family; e.g., just before Ike's TV speech, Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams proclaimed that the budget could stand a $2 billion cut.

Thus it was not surprising that when the time came for the key vote on Ike's USIA, only 14 holdout Republicans* and one lone Democrat (Oregon's Richard Neuberger) stood up against this symbolic--and genuinely harmful--slashing of the information program.

Ike himself added a kind of insult to the Ikemen's political injuries. Asked at his news conference whether he would go over the heads of the budget-cutting Senate Republican leadership--California's Bill Knowland and New Hampshire's Styles Bridges--to work with the Eisenhower Republicans who are fighting for his program, Ike left his hard-pressed Capitol Hill defenders sadly disappointed: "I don't see how it is possible for any President to work with . . . the whole Republican group except through their elected leadership. This doesn't mean that in special cases and for special purposes you don't." Did he intend to "punish" the leaders who are attacking his program and "reward" those who support it? Snapped Ike: "I don't think it is the function of the President of the U.S. to punish anybody for voting what he believes."

Praise & Blame. Some Ikemen were heartened at week's end by the show of fight in his telephoned address to a seven-state gathering of Midwestern Republican leaders in Cincinnati. For the first time he blamed Democratic control of Congress, for lagging performance on such measures as federal school construction and civil rights. Republicans must win control of Congress, said he, "for it is clear that political responsibility can be definitely fixed only when one party controls both the legislative and executive branches of our Government."

Even this mild show of fight had a perceptible effect: the odds in Congress suddenly rose that Ike's defense budget would suffer little more than half a billion token cut because few Congressmen were hardy enough to challenge the Eisenhower last word on national security. Also many a Democrat was suddenly made aware that he might have to answer to constituents in 1958 for cutting the kind of domestic programs that had long been the principal Democratic stock in trade.

But Ike's real make-or-break challenge lay just ahead. Old Guard Republicans and Southern Democrats alike were waiting with sharpened knives for the $3.8 billion foreign aid program. Whether the President's foreign aid speech this week would dull these knives and blunt the attack was the next big question. On the answer hung nothing less than the political prestige--and world stature--of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

*South Dakota's Karl Mundt, Minnesota's Edward Thye and New Hampshire's Norris Cotton, plus a dozen Ikemen: Vermont's George Aiken, Colorado's Gordon Allott, Connecticut's Prescott Bush, Kansas' Frank Carlson, New Jersey's Clifford Case and Alexander Smith, Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper, New York's Irving Ives and Jacob Javits, Utah's Arthur Watkins and Wisconsin's Alexander Wiley.

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