THE NEGLECTED ISSUE
The Neglected Issue THE 1956 Presidential campaign shuffles into its final fortnight as singularly lacking in passion as it began. Perhaps the last hurrahs of the closing-days will fan the long...
...Stevenson has often come close to candid discussion in this field, but mostly he has seemed to draw back from the kind of lucid, far-sighted exposition of the basic issues that distinguished his writing and speaking after he returned from his journey around the world three years ago...
...Eisenhower and Mr...
...Stevenson was not a jeering reference to the shattering of rosy predictions, but a courageous call for more conferences and more negotiation in a new effort to resolve differences and liquidate the Cold War...
...What we hoped Mr...
...He has had little to say, for example, of the most decisive development in world affairs since the end of World War II—the basic shift in Kremlin strategy that has enabled the Soviets to penetrate, with programs of trade, aid, and propaganda, areas of the world historically closed to the Russians...
...But it takes two to make a debate...
...Stevenson has held his fire in the sphere of public affairs that has most needed not only old-fashioned discussion and debate, but new insights and new leadership at a time of unparalleled challenge and opportunity...
...But we don't for a moment agree that Mr...
...Actually, the Geneva meetings helped pave the way for the historic shift in Soviet strategy, for Mr...
...Stevenson...
...Eisenhower journeyed to Geneva to confer with the leaders of the Soviet government at the Summit Conference of the Big Four...
...Although President Eisenhower's electioneering has been enlarged considerably beyond the original prospectus, the Chief Executive has been less a campaigning candidate than a reigning sovereign who emerges briefly from the White House on occasion to reaffirm his devotion to the three P's —Peace, Prosperity, and Progress— and, more recently, to utter a lofty word of censure for his opponent— and then withdraws to the sanctity of the White House...
...Comment of this kind is unworthy of Mr...
...We respect Mr...
...It was these talks at Geneva that hastened the Red rulers on their present course of channeling so much of their energy in world competition to economic, political, and cultural outlets, with results that have greatly heightened Soviet influence in strategic areas of the world...
...Stevenson has repeatedly sought to draw fire by hammering away at the Eisenhower Administration's failures in the fields of housing, education, conservation, agriculture, and foreign relations, but the President, with only a few exceptions, has refused to fight it out on specific issues, preferring to stake his chances for reelection on his immense personal popularity and the cagey don't-rock-the-boat strategy that incumbent politicians find so useful in times of relative calm and prosperity...
...It is possible, too, that Mr...
...When he was asked to appraise the Supreme Court decision invalidating segregation in the public schools, Mr...
...What we expected from Mr...
...We have been disappointed, too, in Mr...
...He talked about peace as though all that mattered was the mere absence of shooting hostilities at the moment...
...Stevenson feels unable to condemn more forcefully the Republican Party's over-emphasis on military considerations at the expense of a broader program of economic aid and trade because many Democrats in Congress voted with Republicans to overload the foreign aid bill with military appropriations...
...This has been a wholly cheerless assignment, this criticism of Adlai Stevenson's campaign inadequacies in the field of foreign policy...
...The most disturbing example, for us, involved the subject of high-level conferences with the Soviets...
...Stevenson's motive, but we can't accept it as sound...
...Day after day, in the current campaign, the daily press has unconsciously underscored this significant absence of democratic debate...
...Stevenson has not felt free to strike out on his own in many areas of foreign policy because of the compromising record of Democratic members of Congress on some of these issues...
...No one in a position of responsibility suggested that "a new era had begun...
...It is possible, for example, that the Democratic candidate felt he could not indict the Eisenhower Administration's "brink-of-war" diplomacy in the Formosan Straits because that perilous course had the support of nearly all Democrats in both houses...
...But his utterances in the critical field of foreign policy have lacked the fire, the forcefulness, and the wide-ranging vision that we hoped for him...
...For we find him in most other respects an enormously appealing political figure who, as we've suggested before, will almost certainly make a better President than he does a candidate...
...Despite the lack of genuine debate, the campaign has revealed many contrasts between Mr...
...Stevenson's tendency to disparage, without actually indicting, the few praiseworthy actions of the Eisenhower Administration in the field of foreign policy...
...We think that Mr...
...Stevenson has been so bemused by moderation that he found himself stranded without issues...
...The essential difference between the two candidates for President shows up strikingly in their response to the most compelling domestic issue of our time—civil rights...
...Stevenson has been largely silent on the fundamental weakness of American response to this changing Soviet strategy—our continuing reliance on massive armament and military alliances in a world where books have become more powerful than bombs and aid more decisive than arms...
...Stevenson, unhappily, chose to suggest that the conference "encouraged the happy illusion that a new era had begun—but later events quickly shattered those rosy predictions...
...Bulganin and Mr...
...The crisis over the Suez Canal broke in late July, after Congress had adjourned...
...This, in our judgment, was one of the most affirmative steps taken by the Eisenhower Administration in four otherwise sterile years...
...In every respect, including the area of our scolding, he represents the country's best hope in the four years ahead...
...His insistence that universal disarmament "is the first order of business in the world today" makes a great deal of sense...
...What has been lacking, in our judgment, has been a bold, imaginative analysis of the recent failures of American foreign policy and an equally bold and imaginative program that would chart a course of American leadership bent on seeking an end to the Cold War and launching the nation on the peaceful struggle of competitive co-existence in which the instruments of competition are not military, but rather political, economic, moral, and ideological...
...Stevenson journeyed into the Deep South, into Arkansas and Louisiana, to say, "I believe that decision to be right," and then to go on with his appeal that "we accept that decision as law-abiding citizens...
...The Democratic candidate was motivated by the loftiest of reasons—his conviction that it would be unpatriotic to make political capital of a current crisis involving our relationship with other nations...
...Eisenhower, at a White House press conference, came up with the feeble response that it wasn't up to him to praise or blame...
...Precisely what this "much more" involves by way of foreign policy action we have not been told...
...Stevenson could have impaired the conduct of American foreign policy any more than did the attacks on Sir Anthony Eden's Suez policy in the House of Commons by members of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition...
...In contrast, Mr...
...Our criticism is part of a family argument, for he's our man and has been since he ran, reluctantly, four years ago...
...And Mr...
...The issues involved have never been debated in the country...
...It is possible that Mr...
...It was only recently, when his attention was called to the dangerous complacency his speeches were implanting in the populace that the President conceded that the armistice in Korea "marked, not the end, but the beginning of our struggle for peace...
...So do his proposals for the exercise of American leadership in seeking the end of H-bomb tests and the reexamination of military policy with a view to ending the draft at the earliest possible moment consistent with national security...
...Here, too, President Eisenhower's campaign methods have made meaningful debate all but impossible...
...on the other side of the same page were reports of the major campaign addresses of the Presidential candidates—without a word of comment on the big news of that day and many days that had gone before...
...Stevenson...
...In general, the Stevenson position on domestic issues, as it has come through in a series of major speeches, has been bolder and more progressive than we thought might be the case when the campaign began...
...For weeks his standard analysis of world affairs consisted exclusively of telling the country that we have never had it so peaceful as the result of policies pursued by his Administration...
...His silence has deprived the electorate of an opportunity to have the issues debated and to form judgments based on hearing both sides...
...In the summer of 1955 Mr...
...Perhaps the last hurrahs of the closing-days will fan the long banked fires of partisanship or give us the kind of head-on clash over fundamental issues that was still so conspicuously absent at mid-October, as this is written...
...The organized campaign to persuade the nation to believe that rosy predictions had been shattered was inspired, for the most part, by those who opposed the Summit Conference from the outset —the Knowland-Bridges-McCarthy-Jenner crowd among Republican Old Guard isolationists...
...It has been argued, by some of the thoughtful pundits in the Washington press corps, that a great debate on the issues was impossible so long as Dwight D. Eisenhower, a progressive conservative, and Adlai E. Stevenson, a conservative progressive, continued to cling to their positions in the middle of the road...
...For though the guns are stilled, yet true peace . . . means much more than this...
...Stevenson would find in the aftermath of Geneva was not a stale reference to the new era that didn't get born, but a ringing recognition of the new challenge that confronts the United States in a world in which both great antagonists agree that war is unthinkable but in which competition goes on in every other way...
...His speeches were barren of mature thinking on the urgent issues of foreign policy...
...On the contrary, the Democratic candidate has fought and fought hard on many problems of public policy...
...Khrushchev took back to Moscow a conviction that the United States was not at all committed, as they had mistakenly believed, to a trigger-happy course of aggressive action...
...Stevenson has erred, too, in failing to make the Eisenhower Administration's handling of the Suez crisis a major issue in the campaign...
...Stevenson has held back from proposing a creative American contribution to what he himself once aptly described as "the revolution of rising expectations"—the surging pressure for freedom and independence and a better life on the part of a third of the world's population living in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East...
...It seems inconceivable that a critical discussion of the problem by Mr...
...On one side of the top of Page One would be a report on the newest development in the most serious of foreign policy issues...
...There is doubtless some truth in this appraisal of the character, or lack of character, of the current campaign...
...Stevenson has fought the phantom issue of peace on many occasions during this campaign, but rarely with the sure, creative touch or the broad-gauged analysis that he has brought to other issues...
...Whatever the reason, it seems clear to us that Mr...
Vol. 20 • November 1956 • No. 11
