GHOSTS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

...No great problems exist, only small ones...

...None of them cares to offend the reigning reactionary duumvirate...

...Indeed, at the San Francisco convention they achieved their apotheosis...

...Here in Washington, I have explored Capitol Hill, the White House, and the major departments of government...

...The observers from the White House were led by the ubiquitous Sherman Adams, who "visited for a short while...

...That formidable fossil, Governor Lee of Utah, is now available for any interested museum, but such Eisenhower stalwarts as Governor Craig of Indiana and Governor Hall of Kansas have suffered stunning reversals...

...Time and the march of events have made obsolete the bitter and purblind isolationism which once inspired much Republican enthusiasm, and its survival in the Bricker amendment has come to be more pedantic than passionate...

...He has frequently complained that the people do not seem to understand what is going on in Washington, but he has not until recently appeared to perceive that it is part of a President's duty to tell them...

...Arthur Flemming, president-on-leave of Ohio Wesleyan University and director of the Office of Defense Mobilization...

...In a Congress dominated by Senators Knowland and Bridges, the Eisenhower Republicans are a pathetic and voiceless minority...

...The New Republican ghosts may still haunt the White House for a while, and the President may continue to echo their mellifluous accents...

...But it is the Vice-President, if elected, who will speak the hard language of power—and it is about him, or his like, that the old Republicans of Congress and of the state machines will regroup in defeat...

...These are the sources of his continuing and great personal popularity—and they identify his Administration as more notable for what it hasn't done than for what it has done...

...Pressed for his view of Nixon's place in the New Republican pantheon, Larson has said: "His thinking has changed under the impact of his experience...

...Indeed, he had lost this power months earlier, at the very time the Eisenhower eggheads were building their paper bridge between the President's good intentions and the millions of people who would have welcomed their translation into acts...

...The purpose of the list is to show how many intellectuals are included in these deliberations...

...Even if there were a new Republicanism, one fears that the President would not— without assistance—be capable of describing it...

...It will point also to the humanitarian program the President has sponsored at home and the strides the Party has made in the acceptance of internationalism under his leadership...

...I have had articulate guides...

...The balance has to be restored a trifle here, a slight anomaly in social legislation corrected there...

...Few Americans still seriously believe that their security can be assured either by a preventive war or by rooting traitors out of the State Department...

...If Larson's emphasis is more on intentions than on actions, it faithfully reflects the President's own inclinations...

...Meanwhile, I wish the New Republicans well...

...More people worship the rising than the setting sun...

...A President who, before he entered politics, claimed that social security existed only in prison now considers its expansion one of the chief glories of his Administration...

...By diligent rummaging through the trivia of Congressional enactment, and by claiming credit for the $1 minimum wage (which the Democrats actually forced upon the White House) he has compiled a list of Administration achievements in the field of social legislation...

...Smith, remain predominantly internationalist, but even here—and in Sherman Adams' own state of New Hampshire—Senator Bridges has consolidated his power...

...Some time later M. Robert Rogers, the personable young president of WGMS, Washington's "good music" radio station, bore down upon Sherman Adams, cocktail in hand...

...The name of Richard M. Nixon appears only once in Larson's book, and that only in a list of the people who gather around the table at Cabinet meetings...

...Even if Eisenhower were in perfect health he would, if elected, be the first second-term President who could not hold over his Party the threat of running for another term...

...With deplorable exceptions (such as conservation policy) the President has not permitted the clock to be turned back twenty years at home, as the Old Guard passionately advocated...

...They have confessed, without blanching, that they have become better known as "Eggheads for Eisenhower...

...Ghosts in the White House by DAVID C. WILLIAMS "IS THERE a distinct and coherent political movement, of which President Eisenhower is the architect and embodiment, but which is capable of existence and growth independent of him—a political philosophy with a clear set of principles and objectives, which one might perhaps call the New Republicanism...

...It is stated again in the President's Economic Report and Budget Message...

...Although urged to do so by many of his advisers, he "refused to get into the gutter with that guy...

...We have been spared by his essentially decent and prudent instincts the worst disasters which might have been inflicted upon us by the return to power of the Republican Party after twenty years of arid and feckless opposition...

...Nothing, one gathers—although Larson does not explicitly claim this—beyond the power of the part-time President of a part-time federal government...

...Pier-haps his greatest mistake came when the President let slip the opportunity to demand that Nixon be jettisoned as his price for consenting to run again and by running, give his Party its only hope of victory...

...Some of them, indeed, appear to be the good intentions of Secretary of Labor James Mitchell rather than of his chief...

...In spite of his long military career, he is not disposed to enter any battles he can avoid...

...After four years of observing the serried ranks of Old Etonians and Old Harrovians on the Conservative benches in Parliament, I cannot regard them as being to the "left" of the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense...

...Business, as represented by a Cabinet of Millionaires, took alarm at the signs of incipient recession three years ago, and faced up to the possible need for government intervention...

...Bright young men wearing "CASE for Ike" pins have buttonholed me at cocktail parties, and identified themselves as members of the newly formed "Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower...

...Perhaps, if the President could speak his mind directly to the people, they might demand the new Republican Party and bring it into being...

...Larson is everlastingly right in maintaining that things have changed since 1936, even though he is reluctant to admit that Stevenson discovered this before he did...

...The impact seems to have been fully as great as that made upon Moliere's bourgeois gentleman when he discovered that, without knowing it, he had been talking prose all his life...

...Organized labor has won a permanent place in the community...

...The Party, he said, had a program for attracting the support of many groups of Americans—but it had, as yet, made no effort to recapture the eggheads from Stevenson...

...He made such good use of his opportunity that Sherman Adams, greatly impressed, put the book in the hands of the President during his convalescence from ileitis...

...And, while they would not refuse membership to such hard-boiled eggheads as Adolphe Menjou and Clarence Budington Kel-land, one gathers that their adherence is not actively being solicited...

...DAVID c. WILLIAMS, editor of the ADA World, official publication of Americans for Democratic Action, has written widely of public affairs for publications in the United States and abroad...

...They know that what they say in opposition they will have to live up to in office...

...No place here for numerology...

...Now, even before the "new conservatives" had put their talented pens to work calling for a genuinely conservative party in the United States, I had felt the need for one...

...Indeed, after three martinis they are capable of assuring me that Dwight David Eisenhower is more of an egghead than Adlai Ewing Stevenson...

...In other ways, also, the New Republicanism is cut to the President's own pattern of behavior...

...They know that a leader must mold events as well as be molded by them, and that he must raise his followers to his level of action, rather than be dragged down to theirs...

...Eugene Orman-dy, conductor of the Philadelphia orchestra, sent greetings...

...Unfortunately, he is distressingly inarticulate...

...After the usual preliminary travail, the "Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower" was launched, with Helen Hayes and Harry Carman, dean emeritus of Columbia University, as co-chairmen, and Rogers as executive director...

...Kevin McKann, president-on-leave of Defiance College and one of the President's principal speech-writers...

...A lot of what labor and others hold against him, his voting record in Congress, is a part of his past that doesn't really relate to his future...

...Whether the President devised these phrases, so unlike his usual self, or whether he overheard his old friend Sir Winston Churchill say them, there seems no doubt that he would like to give his Administration this added dimension in history...

...Eisenhower's first term...

...The idea was developed of getting the administrative assistants of the "Eisenhower Senators" together for regular luncheons and exchanges of views...

...I sincerely hope that their ideas and aspirations prove capable of "existence and growth independent" of their fading patron saint and President...

...His name is likewise not part of the title of "Eggheads for Eisenhower"—Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower...

...Whatever else may be said about Nixon's future, it is certainly bright...

...Since the publication of Dean Acheson's political testament, A Democrat Looks at His Party, Harper's had been casting about for a Republican of comparable prominence to do a similar volume...

...Felix de Wel-don, sculptor of the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial, attended...

...Yet considerable doubt was cast upon his optimism by his simultaneous revelation that the "new broom" which had swept the GOP ranks clean was none other than that darling of the Old Guard, National Chairman Leonard Hall...

...I have been looking, rather, for a party that had drawn appropriate lessons from the past and had come to terms with the present...

...In 1953 he was so disgusted with the behavior of the Republicans in Congress that he seriously discussed with intimates the possibility of launching a new party, more moderate and more responsible...

...A sense of continuity...

...By a happy coincidence, however, a fuller statement of the egghead view appeared almost simultaneously...

...The organizers hastily backed down...

...After reading and re-reading Larson, the President seems to have recognized it as precisely what he had always thought and tried, not too successfully, to say...

...But he does not communicate facts and ideas, let alone a philosophy of government...

...Even Senator Wiley, the President's loyal spear-bearer in foreign affairs, barely escaped annihilation at the hands of his own party...

...The basis for a true conservative party does exist in the United States...

...And there is considerable evidence that, during the past year, a number of his associates, in and out of the White House, have been seeking a way to state the Administration's case in terms persuasive to reasonable men, even to the once-despised eggheads...

...Richard Wilson, in the September 4 issue of Look, claimed there were, and cited the election of 41 new state chairmen as evidence...

...Put this way, it sounds as if Larson had paraphrased the well-known lyric from the Broadway smash hit, My Fair Lady—"It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you pronounce it correctly...

...It is stated in detail in each year's State of the Union Message...

...It begins by excluding foreign policy from the field of discussion, and, by disowning responsibility for the words of "Senator X" and "Assistant Secretary Y," absolves the President of any duty to see to it that Republicans in Congress, or even in the Administration, conform to the gospel...

...I was, I suppose, looking for the American equivalent of the British Conservative Party...

...But he did nothing about it—and did nothing even to check Senator McCarthy and restore his own authority...

...A sense of creatness...

...With a deep conviction that, in an atomic age, there is no longer any alternative to peace, he has twice (over Indo-China and over Quemoy and Matsu) pulled the nation back from the very brink of war...

...It will lay great stress, for example, on the waning influence of the extreme right wing of the party during Mr...

...An instance of this, little noted at the time, occurred as recently as the beginning of this year...

...The President himself has been well aware of this...

...It is stated in the President's special messages to Congress on such matters as Agriculture or Education...

...There is no need to be in any doubt about what the Administration position is on any major matter," Larson boldly asserts...

...All showed up, and the luncheons have continued on a purely social, "march-ing-and-chowder club" level...

...It is not claimed that Nixon is one of them...

...Actually, there still seems to be plenty of weeds at the grass-roots...

...He prefers to wait —as he did in the case of the Wisconsin Senator—until the smoke of combat has cleared, and then to give his benediction to the winning side...

...CASE officials seem somewhat embarrassed by the suggestion that they view with pleasure the waning of the right wing and say that they have taken no such position officially— although privately they agree that, unless it does wane, they see no future for the Party...

...What I did find, and what I have been looking for here, are: A sense of responsibility...

...and Arthur Larson...

...The extension of the coverage of the minimum wage law is a blue-ribbon item in Larson's list of Administration objectives, and Mitchell did indeed describe coverage of retail employees as its "serious recommendation," but when asked about it the President told his press conference: "I have not specifically recommended [extending coverage to] any class or group . . . retail groups or anything else...

...Not that I idealize it, as some Americans do...

...When Senator Bridges got word of them, he hit the ceiling...

...Some elements of a conservative party were there—in the good intentions of the President, in his new and welcome dignity of utterance...

...With CASE as their caucus and Larson as their prophet, the New Republicans have scored one paper victory after another...

...My demands have not been excessive...

...A sense of style...

...Present at the organizing dinner were such authentic eggheads as Isidore Rabi, the Nobel-prize physicist, and Detlev Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences...

...It is embodied and confirmed in the President's legislative program, and in official testimony at Congressional hearings...

...The others, who seem to have lingered longer, were Dr...

...The suburban millions who provide a growing proportion of the Republican vote are primarily interested in maintaining their status in the Twentieth Century, not in returning to the Nineteenth...

...His list of its good intentions is, inevitably, rather longer...

...Gabriel Hauge, economic adviser to the President...

...Farther west Governor Knight of California had some bruising experiences at San Francisco...

...It was thus by the merest chance that the book-reading public was spared a "bird dog" view of the Administration from Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson...

...The fact that he is Undersecretary of Labor and presently the most pervasive White House ghost is itself an answer to Democratic charges that this Administration will tolerate no intellectuals—defined as anyone who reads without moving his lips—in positions of influence...

...They know that history is irreversible, and that one government cannot and should not seek to undo everything that another has done...

...I carried my search to the foggy hills of San Francisco, and returned to speed the "new" Nixon on his toplofty way...

...For the assuagement of old bitternesses we can be truly grateful, and can give President Eisenhower his share of credit...

...Robert J. Donovan, who since the publication of his Eisenhower: the Inside Story must be assumed to have the best existing pipeline into the White House, hailed the launching of CASE in the following words: "The Committee will endeavor to convince intellectuals that the climate created by the Eisenhower Administration has made the Republican Party a congenial place for them...

...He communicates —superbly—a warm and sympathetic personality...

...We are told that the President has "more than once" said that "the great Presidents were not great because of their practical administrative efficiency, but because of that added dimension that involves philosophy, vision, and the nobility of language to express it...

...And, in recent months, I have been busy looking for the "New Republicanism...

...Are there stirrings in the state party organizations, as yet inadequately felt in the musty corridors of the Capitol...

...Why didn't somebody do something about this, he asked—and was promptly invited to do it...

...In the process, the New Republicans had several hairbreadth escapes, for the opportunity was offered to each of the ten members of the Cabinet in turn, and rejected by each of them...

...But between these millions and the well-meaning man in the White House there is a Republican Party, which must itself be renovated if a plethora of good intentions are ever to become hard realities...

...This quest of mine has been an earnest and hopeful one...

...The only stated reason CASE has given so far why intellectuals should support the President is "that science and culture can flourish best in a world at peace, and that Dwight D. Eisenhower, as President, represents an effective force for attaining and preserving world peace...

...In and out of office, most British Conservatives talk and act like men who have held power and are prepared to hold it again...

...Win or lose, the "party of the future" belongs to Nixon...

...The first sign of this new concern for the higher reaches of politics was a remark by Robert Humphreys, Director of Campaign Activities for the Republican National Committee, to a gathering of Republican women...

...That is why the amiable President seemed almost a stranger at his own Convention, an out-of-town guest rather than a participant...

...Invitations to the first such gathering were actually issued...

...Not only did an authentic egghead ghost materialize at the rostrum of the Cow Palace, in the shape of Emmett Hughes, but the President's acceptance speech seemed haunted by a gaggle of ghosts indulging themselves in a private debate with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...

...Thus, at the very moment of his renomina-tion, the President was in process of losing any power he might once have had to shape a New Republican Party—the moderate and responsible conservative party which he himself would have preferred, and which Larson has conjured into the fiction of existence...

...By adding an "N" for Nixon, CASEN, it is explained, would lack the point of CASE—and besides, it is hoped that the Committee will take permanent form after November as the "Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Education...

...He is certainly a new kind of Republican himself—a Rhodes Scholar, an amateur of the violin, a man who has read Proust from cover to cover...

...Little is heard from such Eisenhower-before-Chicago stalwarts as Senators Duff and Ives, and New Jersey's Senator Case has been only a pallid survival of the once articulate liberal Congressman and chairman of the Fund for the Republic...

...Millions of Americans are eager for a New Republican Party, and the President, if he is a Republican at all between campaigns, seems to have novel instincts toward continuity and responsibility...

...For us eggheads, there is this not inconsiderable consolation: once courted, we need never again feel as completely rejected as we were four short years ago...

...It is an engaging and highly civilized case that Larson has put together, if not always an entirely candid one...

...The need for a genuine conservative party in America will continue to exist—and will, I hope, continue to furrow the elephant's brow...

...I have not asked for a "Party of the Future" and was not disappointed that, in spite of the President with an assist from Larson and Ibsen, it did not take wing, phoenix-like, from the debris of hundreds of colored balloons which littered San Francisco's Cow Palace...

...Having posed this question in his best-selling book, A Republican Looks at His Party, Arthur Larson answers it in the affirmative, and buttresses his "Yes" with 204 pages of fact and argument...

...Fortunately the chore was left to Arthur Larson, who had already, it appears, contributed to the President's speeches...

...This would not be a completely fair judgment, however...

...New York, with the nomination of Jacob K. Javits, and New England, with such Senators as Saltonstall, Bush, and Mrs...

...They had intended, they explained, to invite the assistants of all the Republican Senators—and a fresh batch of invitations were rushed out...

...But the leadership which he had never really grasped or exercised was already slipping into other hands...

...They know that the dignity of deeds requires a dignity of words which the Republicans have not found either in the back streets of politics or on Madison Avenue...