Trouble in the Family

President Eisenhower's grim determination to get a balanced budget has resulted in the most serious split in his official family in the six years of his administration. Aligned with the President: Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson and Budget Director Maurice Stans, who believe that a balanced budget is simply an act of fiscal good faith; Commerce Secretary Lewis Strauss and Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, who accept the results as a symbol of good management and proper Republican conservatism. Aligned against the President: Labor Secretary James Mitchell, Attorney General William Rogers, and to a lesser degree, Interior Secretary Fred Seaton and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming. In tune with the rebels is Vice President Nixon, who has been unhappy with the President's attack on "big spenders" ever since Nixon himself pushed it in the November campaign.

Personal Attack. The rebels do not object to a balanced budget, but they believe that the President is doing permanent damage to the G.O.P. by putting too much stress on balance and too little on a dynamic program. Rankling them is the belief that just such inflexible conservatism swamped the Republicans in November, will certainly defeat the party in 1960 unless a new national G.O.P. image is forged.

Like liberal Democrats, they argue that the U.S. needs more and more money spent on schools, roads and houses than the President is willing to spend. They dislike his insistence that inflation is the nation's principal hazard--not because they like inflation but because they want to talk about other things, e.g., reclamation, broader civil rights legislation, urban renewal and power development.

As never before, the President himself is coming under personal attack within the family. Said one angry family critic last week: "He's not so much indolent as he is tired and immobile. He has lapsed into almost total unwillingness to shake into the kind of action this bunch wants."

Worrying too is what seems to them Ike's overattentiveness to big businessmen. "Look at the President's guest list and golfing partners," says one. "These people are afraid of change. They're afraid they will lose something."

Party Call. The Cabinet squabble has plenty of echoes in other branches of the party. In the Senate, Vermont's George Aiken and his band of 14-or-so liberals are still working behind the scenes--and against the President's wishes--to wrest control of the Republican minority away from the Old Guard (TIME, Dec. 29). The word has been leaked to the papers that Nixon is on the side of the Senate rebels.

Whether their revolt succeeds or fails, New York's Jake Javits is already issuing the call for a party meeting on domestic issues similar to the 1943 Mackinac Island Conference, at which Republicans set foreign-policy aims. The unrest reaches into the Republican National Committee, which as part of its rebuilding is trying to reach labor leaders disgruntled at the Democrats, has been hampered by recent antilabor broadsides of Postmaster General Summerfield and Commerce Secretary Strauss.

Ike's Cabinet, even though split down the middle, still retains a six-year sense of discipline. The bickering goes on behind closed doors. Outside, except for news leaks, the Cabinet presents a united appearance. But the roots of dissatisfaction are deep, the stakes in 1960 are high, tensions are building that might well snap before then.

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