Promising Performance

Out of Paris' Palais de Chaillot and around the world went the reassuring picture of an American leader at work. While there were wide differences in interpretation of what the NATO conference was doing and what it did, there was general agreement that Dwight Eisenhower had turned out to be, in both symbol and deed, the key man of the conference. To all appearances he had once more fought his way back to good health, was once more determined to push to the limit his great talents for leadership. He was, in short, the Ike that Europe remembered.

This week President Eisenhower was back at home, where the U.S. needed the Ike it remembered. The NATO conference itself had imposed new burdens and responsibilities on the U.S., and they ranged from convincing Congress of the Tightness of the new commitments to the all-out production of missiles that are not yet operational. The Soviet peace-propaganda offensive, much in the minds of all NATO statesmen and their constituents, demanded renewed efforts of U.S. diplomacy. The first limited test-firing of the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile was an important step toward regaining free-world confidence in U.S. technical strength, but further discoveries of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee strongly indicated that past mismanagement in the Pentagon might be one reason why the U.S. had lost technical leadership in the first place. Beyond all this was the fact that the free world's hopes in the cold war are based on a thriving, productive U.S. economy--and despite the fundamental strength of the economy (see BUSINESS) there is no hiding the fact that the polka-dot spots of distress, in the polka-dot recession, are spreading.

Only the President can supply the leadership needed to move forward on all these fronts, to translate policy and orders into action. In his Paris performance Dwight Eisenhower has shown that brand of leadership; in his future Washington performance nothing less will do.

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