Tearing Down to Build Up

Since U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took ill and Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan stepped forward toward the leadership of the free world, the British press has been bursting with local pride. And in the process of building Macmillan up, even such ordinarily responsible papers as the Daily Telegraph and the weekly Observer have joined the raucous "popular" press in pot-shooting at an old friend. The target: U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, depicted in the British press as a sick, doddering old man who cannot possibly match wits with Russia's Nikita Khrushchev at a summer summit conference.

Beginning in February, Daily Mirror Columnist Richard Crossman, a Labor M.P., urged Prime Minister Macmillan to step into the Western vacuum of leadership. Said Grossman: "Poor Mr. Eisenhower is far too old and ailing even to try negotiations with the Kremlin." Asked the Sunday Express: "Will Ike now turn to Macmillan?" Answer: yes. Reason: "Too long has Ike let himself be known as a leader only in title, who in fact, needs someone else to lead him." Said the Daily Telegraph: "President Eisenhower is, alas, no longer robust, and the West can provide no substitute for an active and authoritative American Secretary of State." Said the Daily Express: LEADERSHIP LIES LIKE A DISCARDED SCEPTER IN AMERICA TODAY.

"Dead Men." Last month in the New Statesman, onetime Punch Editor Malcolm Muggeridge fired even more wildly. Said Muggeridge, under the title "Dead Men Leading": "Probably no powerful country in history has had quite so dead a government as the U.S. has today. It is not just a matter of the infirmities of its two principal figures--President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Apart from the decrepitude of the one and the fatal illness of the other, the government itself is scarcely operative."

Last week the attack continued in full cry. The Observer spoke worriedly of the President's "apparent incapacity for work or decision." Asked the Sunday Express: "Has the time come for Ike to step down? . . . What chance has the free world when its leadership is in the hands of a man who can hardly perform his day-to-day tasks? How can we expect President Eisenhower to hold his own against Mr. Khrushchev, healthy, exuberant, indefatigable?"

"A Broken Man." Said the Daily Herald: "Sick men can't rule the world . . . It is the West's tragedy that the President is NOT fit for service. At 68, America's wartime hero is a broken man, incapable of the energy required to grasp important matters for any length of time."

Said the New Statesman: "It is his capacity that is in doubt, not his will . . . The result is hand-to-mouth government, without either a set purpose or the political know-how to carry out whatever vague aims the President may conceive."

Sneered the Daily Mirror's Columnist Cassandra: "Of all the wibbly-wobblers at the White House, President Eisenhower is doing his best to break the records for indecision . . . General Eisenhower just doesn't know his own mind--which maybe is just as well."

What the British press missed in its effort to push Macmillan's leadership at Ike's expense: in recent months, President Eisenhower has been looking better, working harder and more effectively than at any time since his 1955 heart attack. And that fact was plain to anyone with open eyes, ears and mind.

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