Responsibility Regained

Within hours after the White House realized that the President's first TV defense of his budget had won him nothing, Dwight Eisenhower and his staff set about recovering lost ground. Last week, when the President took to radio and television to fight the toughest action of all--in defense of the hard-pressed foreign-aid appropriation--he talked with ringing conviction of a program that is not only vital to U.S. defense but challenging to all that the U.S. stands for. Almost overnight Washington sensed a sudden and dramatic change in the political climate. The White House glowed in a new mood of confidence. Congress talked and acted with an apparent new sense of responsibility. Hostility toward the Administration's foreign-aid program all but vanished, and many a critic scurried to get right with Ike.

"I congratulate the President for some of the decisions he has made," said Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson, who only the week before was needling Eisenhower at every opportunity. Said the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Montana's Mike Mansfield: "For the first time in years the foreign-aid program has been presented in a form that looks manage able and salable." Minnesota's Fair-Dealing Hubert Humphrey was "delighted" with the message. House Speaker Sam Rayburn (who had brushed off Ike's State of the Union message last January as "one of those kind-of-usual things") called it "great," volunteered that he was going to back "a very generous appropriation" for foreign aid. Indiana Republican Homer Capehart, who has voted against foreign aid for ten years, called the speech "highly gratifying"--and promised to vote in favor of the President's program. New York Republican Jacob Javits, a staunch budget defender through the battle, reported that his mail was running 10 to 1 in Eisenhower's favor, and "I would call that a dramatic shift in public opinion."

Gloomy Prospect. The failure of Ike's first budget speech (TIME, May 27) dismayed White House staffers, who had expected the chief, once he really started fighting, to send his opponents reeling. To some, the prospect of changing many minds on foreign aid ("the global dole") looked equally gloomy. Only one day before last week's speech, New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, told a businessmen's cut-that-budget rally in Chicago that he was "fed up with global do-gooders who want to see us spend the hard-earned tax dollars of American citizens in the support of a worldwide welfare state." At his elbow Virginia's Harry Byrd, the Mr. Economy of the U.S. Senate, nodded approvingly.

Ike called in his onetime chief speechwriter, Emmet Hughes of FORTUNE. Working together, they ripped apart Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' preliminary draft and put together a speech with punch. Ike himself was still tooling away at it a few hours before the TV cameras were set up.

Slow Strangulation. He put a wallop into his delivery, clenched his left hand into a veiny fist as he warned that without U.S. military aid, free countries bordering on the Communist world would, under Communist pressures, "suffer a slow strangulation quite as fateful as sudden aggression." Going it alone without the mutual-security program, he said, the U.S. would need to step up its draft calls and spend billions more for arms.

"The cost of peace is high. Yet the price of war is higher and is paid in different coin--with the lives of our youth and the devastation of our cities. The road to this disaster could easily be paved with the good intentions of those blindly striving to save the money that must be spent as the price of peace. I know that you would not wish your Government to take such a reckless gamble. I do not intend that your Government take that gamble."

Disciplined Troops. Having launched his counterattack in the great Battle of the Budget, the President kept it rolling. So did his disciplined troops. The high-level disunity that had enfeebled the Administration's budget defense suddenly vanished. Items:

P:At his press conference the President got off a warning to G.O.P. foot-draggers. In backing Republican candidates in 1958, he said, he would show a lot more "enthusiasm" for "people that stand with me" than for "those that stand against me." This was a big turnabout from the week before when he had said, in effect, that Old Guard Republicans could snipe at his programs and still be sure of the same kind of boost from him at election time as his loyal supporters.

P:At week's end, in a telephone address to a regional conference of Republican leaders in Trenton, N.J., Ike called for legislation giving the President the power to veto individual items in appropriations bills as "one simple way to save a lot of money"--a thrust at congressional budget-cutters who favor economy on everything except pork-barrel projects for the voters back home.

P:Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued the case for the Administration's foreign-aid program with so much persuasiveness that committeemen. already impressed with Ike's speech of the night before, gushed a remarkable torrent of praise. Even Arkansas' Democrat William Fulbright. who had often delighted in baiting Dulles, called the revised aid program "wise and imaginative." As Dulles flushed redder than his wine-colored tie, Vermont's Republican George Aiken topped it all off. "I want to compliment you." he said, "on the compliments you have received."

P:In a speech to the American Iron and Steel Institute in Manhattan. Vice President Richard Nixon plugged hard for the defense budget and foreign aid ("as essential a part of our national defense as the $38 billion we spend for our Army, Navy and Air Force").

P:Defense Secretary Wilson, after putting up his sturdiest fight yet for his defense budget, pointedly advised $100-a-plate guests at a Republican fund-raising dinner in Milwaukee to look over their shoulders and see if the voters were still there with them. "As a tip in this regard," he said, "I would like to remind you of the great popular vote that President Eisenhower received in 1952 and 1956."

P:Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams, who only two weeks before had blurted out that Ike's budget could stand a $2 billion cut without real damage, told the G.O.P. gathering in Trenton that he had not come there to "shovel smoke," urged them to bury factional differences and unite as "loyal Republicans." Said Adams: "It is inconceivable that loyal Republicanism can be twisted to mean persistent and carping opposition to our party's leader and our party platform. If this should be our course, our party is foredoomed at the polls."

Though the counterattack had regained a lot of lost ground, the Battle of the Budget was still undecided--as the House Appropriations Committee made plain by voting a $2.5 billion slash in defense funds. It was still likely that Congress would trim Ike's $3.8 billion foreign-aid program to $3.4 billion or so, and he would have to keep fighting if he wanted to save such embattled programs as federal aid for school construction. But on one point there was no doubt: the President had, at long last, won the initiative.

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