THE PRESIDENT'S COATTAILS

...He will not get another...

...They believe—they desperately want to believe—that the President has the kind of mass appeal which can be used to reinvigorate the Republican Party and to retrieve its ancient primacy...

...Not only were they afraid of losing jobs and favors...

...But not all the talents of Madison Avenue can give concrete meaning to, or fashion a renewed party from, semantic effusions like "dynamic conservatism," "middle of the road," "New Republicanism," etc...

...The Twenty-Second Amendment, handiwork of the GOP, forbids him to seek a third term...

...Of course there will be renewed and strenuous exertions for the Bricker Amendment which, with overwhelming Republican support despite Presidential opposition, came within one vote of passing the Senate in 1953...

...His attitude toward major problems is often casual, even nonchalant...

...Partly because, as the Journal says, "people seem to view Eisenhower as 'above politics...

...in 1956, almost 49 per cent...

...What patterns, what colors, what gorgeous robes...

...Though the Senator managed to save his political skin in the primaries, the anti-Eisenhower forces in the Wisconsin GOP actually cast more ballots for his rivals...

...Eisenhower, lacking coattails, will be ill prepared...

...They polled the highest percentage since 1934 of popular votes in an off-year Congressional race...

...He has no enemies to be known by or loved for...

...The greater perils to the nation lie in the further impairment of Presidential authority and in reckless assaults on foreign policy...

...This year they have conquered one district, seriously threatened in another (where the issue is still in doubt), and strongly invaded the third...

...They will be goaded too by the President's weakness either to help or to restrain them...

...Eisenhower piled up an enormous majority for himself, GOP candidates for Congress trailed the Democrats by a quarter of a million votes...

...There will be attempts to go beyond the Twenty-Second Amendment in sapping Presidential power by constitutional fiat...

...Hpw could he...

...It is a view which misinterprets the nature of the Presidency" and which is "sometimes shared by Mr...

...Members of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate warn of trouble ahead...

...The President, despite his monarchical airs, cannot follow suit...

...In 1954 the Democrats completed the rout...

...Eisenhower as "that man...

...Sometimes, indeed, he treats the office as though it were some kind of distinguished service award for a great and retiring general—another decoration or medallion to enhance his personal lustre rather than an obligation and a challenge to serve his country further...

...The President's manner and bearing are commonly those of a constitutional monarch, reigning but not ruling, eschewing responsibility for the acts of his ministers, professing ignorance of major developments MgjBJ events inside his own Administration Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, he has forged no new alignment or combina-tion of interests...

...His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Antioch Review, The Reporter, and the New Leader...

...No wonder the President's coattails are so flimsy...

...Wisconsin's member of the class of '46 is boning up for the tests to come...

...The spectacle of President Eisenhower calling on the voters to support Republican Congressmen who consistently oppose his policies on Capitol Hill is," the New York Times remarks, "logically absurd...

...In short, the outlook if Eisenhower wins is for internecine war which, given the party's critical weakness, may turn the GOP into a shambles...

...The Administration has been seeking "some sort of tricky way," Pyle assures us, to "put over" its belief in the individual's "ability to take care of himself...

...Eisenhower's reaction...

...And Mr...

...Publicly he did nothing...

...Eisenhower meets his rendezvous with destiny is typified by his response to the Supreme Court's decision on segregation in the schools: "I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it...

...Since 1952, increasingly since 1954, the men who run the GOP have yielded to a similar hallucination...

...I don't know what we'd do...

...The very nature of his popularity is a symptom of the General's ineffectiveness...

...The "new Republicanism," the Tribune blares, is all a scheme of "political wirepullers," "eastern men who wield financial clout and who control the instruments of propaganda...

...In Maine, too, the Democrats have been trampling down the political habits of long tradition, displaying a power more formidable than that in the heyday of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...This would, actually, be good for the Republican Party...

...Eisenhower himself...

...Thus it strips away the power of his availability and leaves him, for all the world to see, utterly bare of coat-tails...

...It was the thinnest majority a "victorious" party had won since the Civil War...

...So, right from the start of the next Presidential term, if not before, they will be hell-bent for re-election...

...They will be spurred by desperation because GOP hopes for 1958 may be dim: 20 of the 32 Senate seats at issue will be Republican and so will most of those in jeopardy...

...Last March, "precisely at the moment of the greatest confusion over the integration issue, the farm issue, the foreign aid issue, the school construction issue, and the foreign policy crisis" in the Middle East, the New York Times' James Reston reported, "he goes off on another golfing vacation in Georgia...

...Right wingers already have made clear that these dangers are real...

...in 1954, 45 per cent...

...The king in the fable beheaded his weavers and put his old-fashioned silks and satins back on again...

...Eisenhower may not be able to cope with them...

...Stevenson, Estes Kefauver, and others are wrong in assuming that power will gravitate to the heir apparent, Richard Nixon...

...and in Hawaii they have scored an upset, winning the island territory for the first time...

...It needs a controlling hand, a centripetal force, an organizing center...

...There is no better way to hit the front pages...

...But nobody refers to Mr...

...Not even the sorcery of Leonard Hall, Jim Hagerty, Sherman Adams, Henry Luce, and Paul Dudley White can cover his embarrassment...

...Especially do right-wing Republicans itch for another crack at the White House, the State Department, and all the rest of what Senator Jenner calls "that bureaucratic elite which wants to rule the United States in the protecting shadow of a loved and trusted symbol"—President Eisenhower...

...Worse yet, the rest of us may suffer too...

...They see what isn't there...

...Drained of the power inherent in his availability, he will be even weaker than he was in his first term...

...If, contrary to present signs, the President this year carries his party to a Congressional majority, the Old Guard will again command the most powerful salients on Capitol Hill, the committee chairmanships...

...And Republicans may discover, as their disenchantment grows, how moth-eaten and shabby is their own political garb...

...Senator Mundt serves notice that "once Ike is no longer a candidate, America is going to face a showdown...

...In state and local politics, Republican debacles have been even more impressive during the Eisenhower years...

...Eisenhower is the only President during the life of the Republican Party to campaign strenuously in the mid-term elections and then, within two years of his own popular triumph, MAURICE KLAIN is an associate professor of political science at Western Reserve University and regional director of the Citizenship Clearing House for Northern Ohio...

...How splendid His Majesty looks...

...Two years ago they swept their leader into the governorship with 54.5 per cent of the votes...

...If re-elected, he will lose his coattails, tattered and insubstantial as they have been, almost immediately and completely...

...The President's popularity is enormous...

...His name does not call to mind, as did F.D.R.'s, any specific acts or poli-cies...

...All this bespeaks Eisenhower's failure as the head of his Party...

...In Maine, as in other states, an "Eisenhower Bandwagon" rumbled over the streets and highways bedecked with curvacious "Ike Girls...

...In 1954 the voters of Oregon elected to the United States Senate the first Democrat in 40 years...

...Naively he toyed with the idea of a third party and despaired of Republicans who denied the Twentieth Century...

...They have taken the city halls in every Pennsylvania community of more than 100,000...

...A sharp feeling prevails in Congress, slashing across party lines, that the Administration has been too furtive with matters the public has a right to know about...

...Their will to believe was overpowering...

...The Chicago Tribune and other trumpets of the Old Guard have sounded the same note...

...In 1952 they took 33 per cent of the Congressional vote...

...Voters increasingly are developing the notion that, in Walter Lippmann's phrase, "the Democrats are manifestly the more modern party...

...In 1952, when Mr...

...As Adlai Stevenson says, "What influence the President has with his Party in Congress has depended on his running again...

...These are the groups which galvanize executive energies...

...And Mr...

...There is resentment that cabinet secrets inaccessible to the legislators were opened to a newsman, Robert Donovan...

...A continent apart, Oregon and Maine—bastions of Republican power for a century—have been crumbling under Democratic assaults, exposing dramatically the basic trend in party politics during the Eisenhower era...

...One only has to be partially familiar with the subtleties of Presidential influence, information and inspiration in . . . Congressional committee operation to know how serious this problem may become...

...He didn't know his condition—not for sure, anyway...

...The right-wingers will cut loose again with all the savagery they have been storing up since the party's defeat in the Congressional elections of 1954...

...Thus the President, weakened already by the loss of his availability, will have strengthened the very men who oppose the "reformation" he talks about...

...Democrats have seized from the GOP, despite the General's intervention, nine gubernatorial mansions, surrendering none themselves, and toppling Republicans in strongholds like Maine, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey...

...Freed from their toils, the President could relax into safe, ceremonial innocuousness...

...Eisenhower as "the leader of the leftwing of the GOP" and charges that the Administration "is becoming more and more arrogant and highhanded toward legitimate Congressional requests for information . .. My staff is now preparing a detailed study of . . . what I call government by secrecy...

...Most significantly, they have broken into the Congressional districts, forcing the GOP onto the defensive...

...Coming from military life, inexperienced in the arts of civil government, Mr...

...Don't even raise that question," a Republican governor snapped at a newsman...

...Elsewhere, even in the teeth of Presidential resistance, they enlarged and consolidated their local supremacy, as in recent conquests like Philadelphia and the New York borough of Queens...

...His magnetism is that of a friendly, inoffensive man with a warming, infectious smile...

...Besides, President-baiting is their talent and their fame...

...The Democrats have captured 495 additional seats in state legislative contests, ousting the GOP from control of seven state houses and two state senates...

...A democratic society naturally produces substitutes for parties which disintegrate, just as the Republicans supplanted the Whigs...

...The so-called middle-road philosophy," Fortune comments, ". . . provides a logical cover for the absence of political opinion...

...Because of gerrymandered districts, the Republicans managed to snatch a thread-bare majority of Congressional seats...

...Only once in more than a quarter of a century—in 1946—have the Republicans attracted more popular votes than the Democrats in the contest every two years for control of Congress...

...If it were some kind of soap, we could come up with an answer," his assistant, Howard Pyle, has said, defining the Eisenhower approach to national problems...

...There is a deeper cleavage than is generally known inside the Republican party," a right-wing publicist, David Lawrence, observed early in October...

...Most notably, Senator Wiley, whom the Times has described as "a loyal and courageous supporter of the President's foreign policy," was "virtually abandoned by the Eisenhower Administration...

...There will be other onslaughts aimed at the President's conduct of foreign affairs...

...Instead, they pooh-poohed the king's doubts and flattered his pride...

...The party stands now, in its centennial year, at the brink of its greatest crisis...

...Neither did the folks around him...

...They have brought it abreast of the times...

...The Donovan revelations, labeled "scurrilous" by McCarthy, have infuriated the Old Guard...

...What would the Party do if the President refused to run again...

...Within the Republican party," as Sam Lubell remarks, "foreign policy might be said to play almost the same part that the civil rights issue does inside the Democratic Party...

...is . . . extensive...

...The Old Guard, he promises, will strive more militantly than ever to subjugate the President through an electoral-college amendment which would enhance the position of "southern Democrats and rural Republicans" and drive "a death nail into the domineering controls of the city machines and some of their associated pressure groups . . . the CIO-PAC, . . . the organized colored voters, the ethnic voting blocs, . . . the ADA...

...The Republican Party is sicker than Ike, Roy Roberts, the Republican publisher, suggested...

...The Twenty-Second Amendment will act as a temptation and an incitement...

...He boiled in silent and impotent rage...

...Vice President Nixon acknowledged that "the Republican Party is not strong enough to elect a President...

...Until the mid-term elections in 1954, the Old Guard, sovereign over Congressional committees because of senior status in a tissue-thin Republican majority, rioted with animal unrestraint, defying the President's authority, usurping his prerogatives, and subjecting him to indignities unequalled since the time of President Andrew Johnson...

...These people spoke the truth as they saw it—indeed the truth they wanted to see...

...He stirs no passion deeply...

...The illusion that President Eisenhower has what it takes to reform and popularize his party will surely explode if he wins and serves another term...

...Not all the king's horses and all the king's men can tack the illusion on again...

...They increased over 1952 their popular support in 45 of the 48 states...

...They impute failures to a conspiracy within the Administration...

...The President himself implored the voters to mark a straight Republican ticket...

...But he has proved himself incapable of transferring these political assets to the GOP in any measurable degree...

...At least they wouldn't admit it—not even to themselves...

...No wonder the public's image of Republicanism is not that of Eisenhower but that of Knowland, Bridges, Bricker, and McCarthy...

...No garment from the tailor's needle will fit his predicament...

...Never before Eisenhower has a Presidential candidate achieved so much for himself and so little for his Party...

...But Mr...

...Eisenhower's obviously limited usefulness to his party—yes, in spite of his heart attack, his abdominal ailment, his advanced years—the GOP has pressed him into service again...

...These are precisely what the party has lacked under Eisenhower...

...Eisenhower's plight, however, will prove a major embarrassment to his party, his office, and his country...

...The nation has survived the passing of the Federalists and the Whigs, and it can live without the Republicans, too...

...Now, overthrowing custom, Ore-gonians have registered in greater numbers as Democrats than as Republicans...

...Indeed, he continued the practice, begun with his embrace of Jenner and McCarthy in 1952, of endorsing indiscriminately all Republicans Against Democrats...

...It creates a power vacuum in a second-term administration...

...In other states too—Kansas and Indiana, for example—the Old Guard has recently demonstrated its undiminished sway over the party...

...Never before in the annals of American politics has a major party fallen to such utter dearth of leadership, and betrayed such a complete lack of self-confidence...

...The President has had his chance...

...There will be raids on the executive branch like those McCarthy led during the President's first two years in office...

...Some of these men—stalwarts of the Old Guard in the Senate—will be whooping it up far more than usual...

...He would then cease to be, Senator Jenner hopes, "the star of the whole show, with the Congressional candidates all too often playing a secondary role...

...The king was a handsome figure, adorned with a radiant personality and loads of natural charm...

...This was his third vacation of the winter...

...The Republicans would be in a hell of a mess...

...How Mr...

...In the fable of the king's new clothes, the spell is finally broken when a child blurts out m mnocence: "The king has nothing on...

...His charm is irresistible...

...Citizens for Eisenhower" pushed an intensive drive by telephone...

...He refers to Mr...

...No other President has yet been exposed so rudely...

...It makes an opening to be filled, a position to be taken, an opportunity to be seized, an influence to be won...

...The President's disability, Senator Hubert Humphrey expects, will "hobble" him "all across the board, especially in the vital field of foreign relations...

...It will be much more difficult," Senator John Sparkman predicts, "for a 'lame duck' President to be able to lead a strong and imaginative program of foreign policy through a reluctant Congress when it is known that his term of office is bound to expire at the end of his second term...

...They belong to the redoubtable class of '46—Bricker, Jenner, Knowland, Malone, Martin, McCarthy et al— and their seats are at stake in the Senate races of 1958...

...He has substituted slogans for programs...

...No wonder the party still suffers from division and disrepute...

...There is, the Wall Street Journal has lamented, "a rather unusual discrepancy between the prestige of the President and his Party...

...It is a measure of the Republican crisis that in spite of Mr...

...Rather, with the General in the White House, "the unresolved conflict within the party," as Jacobs Javits dubs it, will flare anew and rage with increased fury...

...For the coming struggle over American diplomacy Mr...

...Senator Bridges, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, as well as other stalwarts of the Old Guard want to limit future Presidents to one term and thus completely annihilate the power of their availability...

...to lose simultaneously control of both houses of Congress...

...A President who works and fights for specific policies is bound to make some-body dislike him...

...Nor has the President fostered unity and discipline within the Party which fought a civil war in Chicago four years ago...

...When they run amuck the Administration—any Administration—is one of their principal targets...

...Curiously, the General sometimes has refused encouragement to faithful henchmen under attack within his own party...

...The Presidency, Theodore Roosevelt found, is "a bully pulpit...

...All of our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified...

...To the same question Chairman Leonard Hall responded: "When I come to that bridge, I'll jump off it...

...Eisenhower brought to the White House a conception of the Presidency reminiscent of Buchanan...

...The naked truth is that the Republicans as a party are weaker, the Democrats stronger after four years of Eisenhower's Presidency...

...Why...

...He would not, he insisted, stoop to "personalities...

...He is politically smarter than he used to be, apple-polishing Southern Senators nowadays by smearing the Supreme Court...

...Such are the prospects for a President without coattails...

...They have widened their beachhead in the Maine legislature...

...Mind you, in every contest since 1952, whether it involved a governor or a Senator or a dog-catcher, Republican candidates have groped frantically for the President's coattails...

...They drove the Republicans from command of the House, and the Senate...

...In the original fable, nothing was hurt but the king's dignity...

...The bitterness of the regular Republicans against the so-called 'liberal' Republicans...

...He can never again be a Presidential candidate...

...Rather, the GOP is in decline...

...We have to have a Presidential candidate strong enough to get the Republican Party elected...

...In Alaska the Democrats have re-established themselves in power...

...Members of the Old Guard have made a specialty—some a career—of exploiting the anxieties, fears, sorrows, hatreds, resentments and frustrations identified with foreign policy...

...Such events, reflecting others in every part of the country, belie emphatically the expression put into the President's mouth by his speech-writers that the GOP is "the party of the future...

...It is," the second Roosevelt agreed, "preeminently a place of moral leadership...

...this year they held the office with 59 per cent...

...In Indiana, for example, in 1954 they raised the number of Democratic mayors from 30 to 73...

...exclaimed his courtiers and jesters, his ministers and chamberlains...

...Eisenhower, who has yet to deny his blessing to a single Republican against a Democrat, has strained himself to help...

...But Mr...

...Nixon will be unable to exert such power unless he succeeds to the Presidency...

...In 1953 the Republicans lost to the foe seven of eight Congressional bye-elections, including areas in New Jersey and Wisconsin theretofore "safe" for the GOP...

...Under the General's leadership the GOP has lost more elections than at any other time in its history...

...They imagine, appearances notwithstanding, that Dwight Eisenhower has strong and ample coattails...

...Since the General's day of glory, his Party's basic strength—its standing with the mass of voters—has sunk lower and lower...

...In Maine and elsewhere the Democrats "have done with their party what the President dreams of doing with the Republican Party...

...All across the land the Democrats have surged into thousands of county and municipal offices they could not breach before...