Washington-U.S.A.
COFFIN, TRIS
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By Tris Coffin The Reappraisals Are Agonizing A ship tossing in a storm while its officers argue angrily over a proper course might describe the Eisenhower Administration...
...the Administration's fiscal crisis...
...Senator Kefauver believes...
...2. Where is our foreign policy going...
...Senator Flanders, a former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, proposes that labor and management pile in and increase production by modern technology, and split the benefits in cost-savings three ways: increased wages, higher profits and lower prices...
...It is heading toward a strengthening of NATO, which seemed to fall apart in the Suez and Algerian crises and in the reluctance of our European allies to dig up manpower...
...The old, deep-seated cleavage within the Administration on balancing the budget and holding up interest rates is still going on, with the tight-money, hold - the- appropriation - line forces in charge...
...And two other recent statements indicate a feeling that all the avenues of negotiation with the Soviets have not been explored...
...Vice President Nixon has been listening carefully to these reports...
...A two-column lead editorial in the Washington Post and Times-Herald last week said in part: "However weary the Russians may be of negotiating with us and however weary we may be of negotiating with them, neither side has any alternative that mankind can accept...
...The Treasury today is like the housewife who spent all her grocery money on a new dress—with payday two days off...
...By Tris Coffin The Reappraisals Are Agonizing A ship tossing in a storm while its officers argue angrily over a proper course might describe the Eisenhower Administration today...
...The Government does not expect new funds to come in until mid-January or, possibly, mid-March...
...A number of key Republican Senators late this summer proposed to Sherman Adams that Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson be put out to pasture as a Presidential assistant in charge of disposing of farm surpluses abroad...
...Meanwhile, Congressmen returning from abroad are urging the Administration to hold another face-to-face talk with Khrushchev...
...The thing to do now with six or eight competitive projects going in the different services is to pick out the best features and combine them into the best missile...
...economy...
...Adams sat on the idea until very recently, when Nixon supported the move as necessary to save the farm belt for the GOP in 1958...
...This met resistance from the Pentagon, which insists that the U.S...
...The three great struggles in this arena are: 1. Shall we expand the debt ceiling or raise taxes, if necessary, to catch up with the Soviet Union in the missiles field...
...The great powers can yet succeed if they bring to the conference chamber the hope of securing only one kind of advantage—the advantage to all humanity...
...Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R.-Me...
...the best backstage operator on Capitol Hill, has played like a master violinist on the strings of jealousy among the Democrats on the Armed Services Committee...
...The storm is composed of many things: new Soviet military-scientific achievements...
...Take the missile program...
...But much more is going on behind the walls of the Administration...
...A major figure is Vice President Richard Nixon, desperately concerned by the waning fortunes of the Administration and its effect on him...
...the uneasy Middle East dilemma...
...Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams has heard many bitter complaints about Secretary of State John Foster Dulles from Republican Senators and Congressmen back from overseas junkets...
...and political returns from New Jersey and New York...
...President Eisenhower's reaction is unpredictable because of his deep personal attachment to Benson...
...The doors are locked and the keyholes plugged in the tightest secrecy since wartime...
...These billions have been getting in each other's way in the missile job...
...At the same time, State and Central Intelligence estimates which underrated Khrushchev have brought new support to Senator Mike Mansfield's demand for a joint Congressional watch-dog committee on our intelligence activities...
...If the debt ceiling can be held until then, the fiscal crisis may evaporate...
...A Dulles policy under attack is his belief- that the United States could confidently expect Marshal Zhukov to take control in the USSR and reach a "comrades in arms" agreement with President Eisenhower for peace, prosperity and capitalism...
...It is unlikely that the full story will come before the public soon...
...Bradley asked, and went on to say: "I am unable to understand why, if we are willing to trust in reason as a restraint on the use of a ready-made, ready-to-fire bomb, we do not make greater, more diligent and imaginative use of reason and human intelligence in seeking an accord and compromise which will make it possible for mankind to control the atom and banish it as an instrument of war...
...Two refreshing new ideas on shoring up the economy come from the Senate...
...told American diplomats in Iran, after a flight from Moscow, that Khrushchev believed in peace and was a pretty good fellow...
...When we have done rattling our H-bombs and they have finished flourishing their missiles, the conference table remains as the only battleground that can be countenanced by civilized mankind...
...The dilemma will presumably be decided at the NATO Council meeting in Paris next month...
...Perhaps that will mean cutting back expenditures rather than increasing them...
...a swelling chorus of demands for an all-out crash program for missiles...
...intelligence estimates on Russia...
...British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan proposed to the President that Britain and other NATO countries be supplied with intermediate-range rockets which they would operate...
...Russia and many members of the Afro-Asian bloc have chosen to interpret America's lurch back to NATO as abandoning the United Nations, fortifying the British and French positions in the Arabian peninsula and Algeria, and stoking up the cold war...
...He mirrors the thinking of the air-frame manufacturers, who would be stuck with millions of dollars in equipment for planes...
...the toll of inflation on the housewife, wage earner, farmer and small businessman...
...I am not sure that giving a couple more billions to this program would do any good...
...The solid discipline of the USSR and its satellites, the group action of the Afro-Asian bloc, and the growing neutralism of many countries caught in the East-West conflict mean that Henry Cabot Lodge's word is no longer scripture...
...a veteran and knowledgeable member of the Armed Services Committee, told me that Air Force bomber generals are bitterly resisting missile development...
...There does appear to be a tendency to discredit the United Nations in the State Department, because we no longer have such easy control over its decisions...
...Opposition to a crash program on missiles comes from within the Pentagon and industry, too...
...This issue is complicated by the Treasury's fear that any new spending spurt now may break through the debt ceiling and require a special session of Congress...
...Meanwhile, Senator Kefauver's Anti-Trust Committee is exploring a vast storehouse of revolutionary techniques for making steel, developed chiefly in Germany, Sweden and Russia...
...Another facet of the controversy is the so-called "businessman's philosophy" which took a well-advanced missile program away from the Army's Redstone Arsenal because it was a form of "socialism...
...Also, it is claimed, these techniques ran eventually reduce steel costs materially...
...The argument is a series of dramatic struggles within the Administration...
...At this exact moment, it is somewhat like a car out of control on a sloping hill, having bounced off the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East and an earlier reliance on the United Nations to maintain peace and security...
...And the revered old soldier, General Omar Bradley, speaking at a school dinner, said he was discouraged by "our colossal indifference'' to working out a peace...
...He has the unfortunate habit of believing that all his decisions are touched with divinity and therefore cannot be questioned...
...3. What, if anything, is the matter with the U.S...
...How long— I would ask you—can we put off our salvation...
...Administration thinking is indicated in an interview I had with Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, ranking Republican on the Joint Committee on the Economic Report, as well as a member of the Preparedness Subcommittee...
...However, with the departure of ex-Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey, there are signs, both from the Federal Reserve Board and the Defense Department, that the line is cracking...
...President Eisenhower and Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks both contend that nothing is wrong, that inflation is leveling off and employment is holding up...
...Both Vice President Nixon and the new Defense Secretary, Neil McElroy, are fighting the Budget Bureau and Treasury for a crash program with more money...
...These and similar processes in other industries can...
...President Eisenhower is cast in the role of interested spectator...
...Senator Styles Bridges (R.-N.H...
...The forces now opposed to each other, some place and some time, must sit down and work out a system of coexistence, not in an atmosphere of diplomatic contest, not in a spirit of advantage-seeking...
...If Bridges succeeds, he and Johnson will privately sift the evidence and write a report...
...They require less capital investment and can be adapted to small plants scattered over a wide area, thus opening this almost closed field to small companies located across the nation...
...faulty U.S...
...This is hinted at, too, by Senator Stuart Symington's protest against centering the defense focus on missiles...
...I asked him if he would be willing to lift the debt ceiling, and he answered: "I can imagine some circumstances under which I would vote to lift the ceiling, but I think those circumstances are unlikely to occur...
...be the sole custodian and firer of the missiles...
...What we need now is greater wisdom in using present expenditures...
...open new frontiers for the American economy...
...The former Air Force Secretary believes that jet plane production should be hastened, too, rather than cut in the rush to get an ICBM in the air...
...Chairman Dick Russell and Lyndon Johnson, chairman of the Preparedness Subcommittee, were told by Bridges it might be best to hold the hearings in private because of the unique ability of two Subcom-mitte members, Estes Kefauver and Symington, to create headlines...
...Wall Street, the labor press and a great section of rural America do not agree, and it is to dissipate their concern that the President will address the people in a series of speeches...
...One of them, a close friend of the Administration, is saying privately: "From my talks with diplomats all over the world, I am convinced that the Secretary has become a grave liability...
...Senator Allen Ellender (D.-La...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 46
