Is IKE ABDICATING?

...Or, perhaps a better figure: toward government by a kind of informal Council of Ministers of State, including the Congressional leaders and powerful Cabinet members, where the President functions merely as a benevolent impartial chairman and is definitely not, on most issues, the controlling force...

...The more revealing fact is that the President doesn't know whether he himself believes in fed' erally subsidized public housing or not: he told a news conference that he wanted this issue "studied" by a commission working over the whole question of proper division of responsibility and revenue sources among federal, state, and local governments...

...Yet he appointed as Assistant Secretary of the Interior one Orme Lewis, who is on record as testifying that our public lands—an immense national resource—should ultimately be turned over to "private citizens...

...Lang-lie campaigned in Idaho last year against the public-power project of the Reclamation Bureau for Hells Canyon...

...McCarthy obviously has nothing to fear—and neither does Sen...

...Talbot, in short, agrees with the most extreme high - protectionist people that the Tariff Commission should be an agency of Congress alone, that it should set tariffs to "safeguard" each fringe industry here regardless of the Eisenhower overall policy on "trade not aid" for Europe...

...William F. Knowland, Republican Senate Policy Committee chairman, in driving for an amendment to the "Yalta" resolution that the President and Secretary of State Dulles found unacceptable...

...Joseph Lead Co...

...The request for legislation to allow 240,000 European refugees to enter this country in two years was received so coldly that stories about it promptly retreated to Page 18 of the newspapers...

...It is necessary for Eisenhower to be a "success," because he is the President of all of us, the elected Chief Executive of our Republic and our democracy, and if he should "fail," the failure would bear heavily upon the whole nation...

...If the White House declines or neglects to assert leadership, powerful Congressmen and Cabinet officials will—and have...

...McCarthy batters ijhe Department of State...

...Eisenhower, politically, is not a driver...

...He appointed to the Federal Power Commission, now involved in the proposed Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake River, one Arthur Kuykendall, a protege of Gov...

...James Murray, Democrat of Montana, had to argue that Labor Secretary Martin Durkin offer an Administration viewpoint on amendment of the labor law...

...He is consistently conciliatory and soft-spoken...

...The President's basic idea that he needs a "commission" to work out the "ideal" division of responsibility and revenue between federal and state governments is inherently hostile to federal government activities in the welfare field...

...II American politics, like Nature, abhors a vacuum...

...There was a time, before the Civil War, when Presidents could be "weak" without seriously damaging the nation, when the tradition was for one-term Presidents managed by powerful Congressmen or Cabinet members...

...The President during his campaign referred with pride to the Republican conservation and public lands program begun by Theodore Roosevelt...

...The House Ways and Means Committee began its hearings on reciprocal trade with testimony from witnesses hostile to the avowed views of the President...

...The Old Guard intends to "quit claim" to the several states as many functions of the federal government as possible...

...One can give his loyalty and honest good wishes to the elected President and still cling in his mind to proved facts of politics...

...Secretary of State Dulles went before the House Ways and Means Committee to plead for extension of the reciprocal trade program for one year, and proceeded to make the astonishing promise that there would be no major reciprocal trade agreements to lower tariffs during the year...

...Let us cut down money appropriations for Europe, he urged, but remove restrictions on imports so that the Western nations can earn dollars by selling goods in our domestic market...

...President Eisenhower named to the Federal Trade Commission, and designated as chairman, a lawyer who has spent his professional career defending business firms charged with unfair trade practices...

...His recommendation for revision of the McCarran-Walter immigration law was ignored by both House and Senate Judiciary Committees—ignored so utterly that the proposal never made an impact on the public mind...

...He should no longer denigrate his great office...

...The dominating elements in the pattern are: One—Congress, and particularly the Old Guard, New-Deal-hating, hard core of both parties, is the strongest force in government, the White House a subordinate force...

...Another major rule is that, historically, a President cannot really get anything from Congress unless he drives for it...

...Knowland got his amendment accepted, and the President and Dulles retreated...

...The President had a good deal to say during the campaign about a "trade not aid" policy in regard to our Western allies...

...Eisenhower's "trade not aid" family, or why the President considered Wormser a non-extremist or middle-of-the-roader...

...Felix Wormser, appointed as another Assistant Secretary of the Interior, is on record as asking heavily increased tariffs on lead and zinc...

...But it is difficult to see how this background qualified him for an official place in Mr...

...Robert A. Taft, House Speaker Joseph W. Martin, and the President...

...Langlie of Washington...

...The "new team" in the Treasury is filled with sales tax advocates...

...According to his own statements in news conferences, Dwight Eisenhower does the final "screening" of suggested appointees to major federal jobs...

...Eisenhower's political inexperience...

...While Eisenhower is appointing commissions and conferring with governors, the Old Guard drive to undermine everything that was done by Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt is in full swing...

...Three—The major drive, planned with great skill and cunning, is to destroy or whittle down the federal government's built-up function as champion of the general good and social welfare, to abandon sentimen-talisms about the ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and about the teeming refugees of Europe and the underprivileged of Asia, and settle down to a good old-fashioned pro-business government of hard money, lower income taxes, and non-interference with bustling enterprisers...

...Government moved quickly and sharply toward what might be called a Triumvirate consisting of Sen...

...Eisenhower to make himself President in fact, and lead the country toward the enlightened policies many of us believed he held...

...Eisenhower thinks is the middle-of-the-road, but he managed speedily to get himself burdened with subordinates deeply committed to right-wing Republican doctrine, including doctrinaires who range far to the right of Taft...

...Eisenhower's advocacy of social security expansion was promptly buried in a deep freeze by the House Ways and Means Committee—postponed for "study...

...This decision is bound to have far-reaching consequences, not only in the critical power field, but in the general drive of powerful special interests to capture the public domain for themselves...

...Liaison between the White House and Congress, in the traditional sense, is at an unprecedented low...

...The need today is for Mr...

...Taft blandly commented, "I don't see what he could contribute to the gaiety of the nation...

...That time ended with the election of Lincoln, who had to be a "strong" President to preserve the Union against all foes, Northern political snipers' as well as Southern armies...

...He appointed as Assistant Secretary of Commerce a fountain-pen executive, Craig R. Shaeffer, who in the past has beaten the drums for Mer-win K. Hart, right-wing economic agitator, and for the "millionaires' tax Amendment"—the proposal that federal income taxes be limited to a maximum of 25 per cent, which would benefit a few thousand millionaires and saddle all the rest of government costs on lowt-income families...

...The power of Congress under the Constitution is so great—to tax, to appropriate, to investigate—that it overmatches any Chief Executive who does not assert genuine leadership through every possible medium...

...It hopes to shift the tax burden to those least able to bear it by putting through some kind of national sales tax that hits'low-income families harder than high income taxes hit wealthy families...

...Yet as chairman of the Housing Administration the President appointed a lame-duck Kansas Congressman, Albert Cole, who had fought public housing consistently and complained that the whole idea came "from the Kremlin...

...He repeatedly asserts his belief in Congress as a "coordinate" branch of government...

...By WHIard She/ton THE widely discussed contradictions, inconsistencies, and slow-motion progress marking the first four months of the Eisenhower Administration are, in my judgment, more fancied than real...

...Suppose we concede for purposes of argument, however, that the pro-Republican experts were right last year and right now...

...The President's polite, graceful letters to Congress, issued as a result of what one supposes is some urgent feeling on his part, are pig-eo.n-holed with the same contempt Old Guardsmen showed in 1951-52 for Harry S. Truman's requests...

...The present fact is that Old Guardsmen think they have nothing to fear from Mr...

...A pattern of events took shape quickly enough...

...This does not require that we blind ourselves to what is happening or dull our imaginations to what will happen in the future if the present government by Triumvirate or by Council of Ministers of State continues...

...He will not criticize its actions—even when House Republicans defeat his public housing program, even when Sen...

...These appointments are only part of the story...

...To put it plainly, Eisenhower should abandon his "commission" and run the country in cooperation with, not in subordination to, Congress...

...He calls in the prospective nominee, tries to get the prospect's "philosophy," and seeks to make sure he is not an "extremist" of any kind but rather in general agreement with what Eisenhower considers his own "middle of the road" approach to problems...

...They intend to "amend" the Taft-Hartley Act by weakening, so far as possible, federal government guarantees of collective bargaining...

...Yet the extremists have not been checked even in Republican victory...

...Yet he appointed to the Tariff Commission a former Connecticut Republican Congressman, Joseph Talbot, who voted against the reciprocal trade law in the past and who testified, in hearings on his nomination, that the President should be deprived of his existing power to override the Tariff Commission if it raised duties on some "damaged" American industry...

...Taft fought for years to put through the basic housing law of 1949, which bore his name as one of the sponsors and provided authorization for 135,000 units of subsidized public housing each fiscal year...

...In our pragmatic democracy, the federal government moves generally only into activities where it has been forced to move, such as the aid of the unemployed or defense of labor unions against conditions which state and local governments could not effectively attack...

...and wanted his American market "protected" against foreigners...

...If we are now going to "study" what has been done, and vaguely try to shift back to the states responsibility they previously proved incapable of meeting, the obvious effect will be simply to leave the people defenseless against "states' wrongs," and no longer defended by the national government...

...This is a hard fact of life which many Americans now find unpalatable, but it is time they had the truth...

...Wormser quite naturally favored such tariffs, since he was an official of the St...

...Two—The President apparently thinks he has plenty of time to study sundry domestic policies, but policies are actually being set by astute gentlemen who know exactly what they want and are exploiting Mr...

...that is the purpose of proposed changes cutting down the authority of the National Labor Relations Board over the building trades and over local utilities...

...He retreats and sacrifices his Mutual Security Administrator, Harold E. Stassen, rather than tangle with McCarthy...

...Some Congressmen and Eisenhower's appointees mean to check social legislation, limit or kill public power, grab public grazing and forest lands as well as offshore oil...

...I seem to recall that last year the same experts were endorsing Eisenhower for President because, they said, if the Republicans lose again, the GOP will inevitably fall victim to its own extremists...

...Committee hearings on major bills —revision of Taft-Hartley and extension of reciprocal trade, for example—no longer begin with testimony from responsible executive officials...

...In other words, he was pleading for the form while agreeing to sacrifice the substance to placate the dominant die-hards in the GOP...

...Since he has no opinion on federal public housing, perhaps he would naturally not consider Cole, conscientiously opposed, as anything other than a "middle-of-the-roader...

...A major rule in government is that policy cannot be separated from personnel, and that no one can execute policy through officials who want to block it...

...It was only a matter of weeks before the Administration formally announced its capitulation to the power trust by opposing the great public power project at Hells Canyon and inviting the private utilities to move in and take over...

...One is not sure what Mr...

...Some observers view McCarthy's continued operations with considerable alarm and urge that we must vigorously hope for "success" of what Eisenhower calls his "middle-way" program lest McCarthyism swallow us all...

...Eisenhower, insisting that he does not agree, appointed Talbot to the job, and was reputed to be considering him for chairman of the Commission., The results were not long in showing...

...Yet Mr...

...The President asked Congress, in his State of the Union message, to renew the reciprocal trade pact law and to eliminate certain Bureau of Customs procedures that reduced imports...