FIRST REFLECTIONS ON THE CAMPAIGN
First Reflections on the Campaign "DARELY in American history has the character of a Presidential campaign been fixed so early as in the current contest. Never has the central issue seemed so...
...Eisenhower is in a position to judge objectively if and when the time arrives that he can no longer carry the burden of his office...
...Taken as a whole, I doubt that the Democratic Party either is ready, willing or able to rouse us...
...But assume for a moment that Mr...
...For it seems clear at this stage of the proceedings that however much the candidates and their casts of campaigners indulge in the traditional round of pointing-with-pride and viewing-with-alarm on the issues of domestic and foreign policy, their principal preoccupation will be with the state of Mr...
...But their promises carry less conviction because of the performance of their Democratic colleagues in Washington...
...His brooding insistence on seeing both sides of an issue has made him seem on occasion incapable of righteous indignation...
...What issues?," and with considerable justification...
...All but three of the fourteen standing committees of the Senate are...
...Given a healthy heart, Mr...
...Cowles warned us...
...Far from sharing his Secretary of State's complacent belief that nothing much needs doing, the President was sure that our program of combating the Soviet offensive needs strengthening and improving...
...Unless the United States adopts a much more imaginative and understanding psychological approach toward Asia and enlarges the scope of its economic aid, the probability is that much if not most of Asia will gradually slip into the Communist orbit...
...A cynic might rise to inquire at this point, "What debate...
...Hoffman pleaded with us "not to assume for a moment that those nations which are unwilling to join a military alliance with us are necessarily against us...
...Senator Estes Ke-fauver has been presenting a progressive position more dramatically and decisively than has Adlai Stevenson, partly perhaps because he is the underdog and must attract attention and build a militant following and partly because he is a scrapper by nature...
...His style and syntax remain a joy to those who appreciate a measure of art in politics...
...Paul Dudley White notwithstanding...
...The President himself keynoted the tone and content of the campaign by devoting just about every one of the twenty minutes of his announcement to the nation to a recital of his recovery and a prognosis of his prospects...
...No President in all our history as a nation has lived to be 70 in office, with or without a preceding heart attack...
...France's Foreign Minister Christian Pineau expressed "profound disagreement" with Western policy...
...And in the two instances in which it did paint itself apart, this leadership only managed two vivid stains: on the race issue and on the gas bill...
...It took 33 days for him to reply to the last letter of Soviet Premier Bulganin proposing a 20-year treaty of friendship...
...Dulles went on with his chronicle of Soviet retreats...
...American business men who venture abroad are returning with the same urgent warning for an America bemused by Mr...
...It is conceivable that he might not know if and when he had reached that point, just as he now rejects the notion that he has been something less than a full-time President in recent months...
...Even if Mr...
...chaired by Southerners, including such vital committees as Agriculture, Appropriations, Armed Services, Banking and Currency, Finance, Foreign Relations, Government Operations, Judiciary, Labor and Public Welfare, Post Office and Civil Service, and Public Works...
...And yet the Democrats, with the concurrence of the Republicans, handed the chairmanship of this Committee to a Senator who has preached open defiance of the law, who has vilified and obstructed the drive to achieve civil rights, who has publicly pilloried the Supreme Court as a bench that had been "indoctrinated and brainwashed" by the Communists, and who opposes every move to liberalize immigation restrictions...
...It is equally apparent that on issues of domestic policy this session of the Democratic-controlled Congress has produced little by way of basic division between the two parties...
...There has been talk, but only talk, of a revolt of that group of Democratic Senators generally identified as liberals...
...In a dozen of the leading ones lies the talent to do the kind of rousing that is needed...
...The President may have convinced himself, or been convinced by the headlines of a friendly press, that he has been functioning on a full-time basis, but the facts do not bear him out...
...For all his nostalgic longing for the simpler life of his boyhood, he has accepted the essential ingredients of the welfare state...
...The rest, prisoners of a deadening seniority system, were silent or absent...
...Dulles, of course, has been Secretary of State "for the past few years...
...The Knight and the Dragon FOR ALL his travels the world around, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles continues to dwell in splendid isolation...
...History and the actuarial tables throw a cloud over his next five years, Dr...
...buckles on his shining armor and goes forth to slay the red dragon, whose name is Communism...
...One of many recent examples is John Cowles, publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and of Look magazine...
...And what of the Democrats...
...At this stage of the political game, the party's aspirants for the Presidency must speak more for themselves than for the group...
...Consider the recent elevation of Senator James Eastland, Mississippi Democrat, to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee after the death of Senator Har-ley Kilgore...
...This he can best do now, in our judgment, by appointing Paul Hoffman, or a man like Paul Hoffman with immense experience in the field, give him the best staff American ingenuity can assemble, and charge him with building and executing a Marshall Plan type of program whose magnitude and social vision would at last give the free way of life a chance to show its stuff in the decisive struggle of competitive co-existence...
...So did Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer...
...III The Soviets have made no bones about what they are doing...
...Whether we come to appreciate quickly enough what is now happening in the underdeveloped areas of the world, or whether we will wait passively until the backward countries begin to accept Moscow's political and economic philosophies as their model, is the overriding political question in the period immediately ahead...
...Mr...
...James P. Warburg discusses the bipartisan conspiracy of silence on issues of foreign policy on Page 20 of this issue of The Progressive...
...Dulles, who thinks every-ing is just dandy...
...Dulles' elaborate network of military alliances through the skillful use of political, economic, and psychological tactics in the struggle of competitive coexistence...
...And they are making enormous inroads in areas long thought secure for the West...
...And the Democrats accepted the issue with a fervor born of desperation...
...A liberal bloc in the Democratic Party that roused itself from its torpid submission to the ruling clique of conservatives and went on to make a great fight for the things that need doing in the fields of housing, education, health, conservation, race relations, agriculture, and foreign relations—even if it went down to defeat on every bill—would provide a rallying ground for countless Americans who believe they are entitled to a choice on election day...
...What then...
...This is the kind of program The Progressive has been urging for several years—not the timorous, piecemeal approach of a Dulles based on a fanciful reading of current history, but a bold, imaginative program, developed in cooperation with the United Nations, which would help the underdeveloped and still uncommitted areas of the world to build the firm foundations for healthy economies and free political systems most indigenous to their own cultures and most responsive to their own aspirations...
...He was compelled to admit at a press conference that "that is one I missed...
...This is a decent gesture on his part, but it doesn't really allay our forebodings...
...The Judiciary Committee is one of the Senate's most powerful bodies...
...Eisenhower's heart is not healthy...
...Stevenson is still an immensely appealing figure—witty, urbane, incorruptible, and wholly dedicated to serving the public interest...
...But Mr...
...To paraphrase another first-rate Washington commentator, Thomas L. Stokes, unless the Democrats act soon to repair the health of their own party, instead of concerning themselves so exclusively with the health of the President, they may find themselves fatally weakened for this year's Presidential campaign...
...Adlai Stevenson spoke sharply, for him, of his amazement that the President would say "on his return from another long absence that he has fully performed the duties of the President for the past few weeks...
...Twice in two days our government, presumably for lack of a decisive voice at the top, reversed itself on the shipment of tanks to Saudi Arabia...
...The Russians, he exulted, have been obliged to abandon their "bankrupt" program, to "revamp their whole creed from A to Z," to "throw out their bible of 30 years," and "to bring their system closer to ours, rather than the other way around...
...The Secretary of State felt so good about everything that he was certain we need no change in any of our policies...
...Senator John Sparkman, in presenting the Democratic Party's official reply to the Eisenhower announcement, dwelt exclusively on the President's heart condition and the extent to which it has deprived the country of leadership and direction in critical areas of national policy...
...Our chance to counteract Soviet successes will not last indefinitely, Mr...
...All this has come to pass, the Secretary of State assured them, because of the "unity and firmness of resolution of the free nations during the past few years...
...We have made "the enormous error," he said, of thinking of military security only and failing, in the process, to develop economic alternatives to present policies and to emphasize the possibilities of peace and disarmament...
...IV Certainly some of the Southern chairmen are far better men and abler public servants than the rest, but the grim fact is that as a result of the intolerable seniority system, the situation is degenerating rather than improving...
...Unhappily, there is little on which to base such hope, as Edward P. Morgan, one of the ablest of the Washington news commentators, made clear in a recent broadcast...
...Having told his tale, Mr...
...We are not suggesting a lack of courage, rather a lack of deeply held conviction which seems to us to result again from his searching quest for the facts on both sides of issues...
...He lives, it seems, in a fairyland, where, not once upon a time, but almost every day, a white knight whose initials are J.F.D...
...Affirmatively, Mr...
...It has jurisdiction over all proposed legislation relating to Constitutional amendments, the criminal code, monopoly, espionage, civil rights and liberties, and immigration...
...It handles and disposes of half the legislation submitted to the Senate...
...Eisenhower, as a candidate for reelection, would provide the great mass of politically independent Americans with the kind of insurance policy they covet in politics: the knowledge that, however much they may prefer one candidate to the other, the country will be in safe hands whoever wins the election...
...Who, indeed...
...For in a news conference shortly after the Dulles outburst, the President expressed his troubled conviction that the conflict between the Communist and free worlds was now undergoing a "very great broadening" into economic and political fields...
...It is dominated in Congress by a conservative Southern leadership whose emphasis on compromise, however sincere and understanding, has seemed to dissolve the party's identity, blurring it in, like a running water color, with the Administration's stand, until they appear as the same hue...
...He praises Nixon fulsomely, seems to resent any report that Nixon is to be "dumped," but succeeds in planting and spreading the impression that Nixon is still but a "comer" who ought to consider stepping aside for the Vice Presidency this year...
...Eisenhower found it "very serious, very serious...
...Members of the Foreign Relations Committee, mindful of the many reports from overseas emphasizing that the Soviets were never in a stronger position, were stunned as Mr...
...It handles all legislation dealing with the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, and, most significantly, all measures designed to implement the Bill of Rights of the Constitution...
...II But Mr...
...More significant, perhaps, were the warnings that came pouring in from friends and allies around the world...
...We say this despite our conviction that he would make a better President—if he were a younger man or his health were more robust— than any other Republican who might have a realistic crack at the nomination...
...But quite apart from the nasty problem of Nixon in particular and the succession in general, we believe the President's decision to seek a second term was unfortunate because the country cannot afford a part-time President in this moment of global crisis, because the fact of a President with an ailing heart is bound to be an unsettling influence in domestic and world affairs, because there are no clear-cut constitutional procedures to guide us when a President becomes incapacitated but remains in office, and because his decision makes his health the central issue of the campaign and deprives the nation of meaningful debate on the grave problems of domestic and foreign affairs...
...Democratic leaders pushed the natural gas bill through Congress...
...Nixon...
...Eisenhower succeeds in triumphing over history and the actuarial tables, the chances are overwhelming that he can be no more than a part-time President in a period in which the nation will urgently require full-time leadership...
...Dulles saw, and presumably still sees, the unparalleled crisis that confronts the western world—the crisis brought on, not by Soviet retreats and defeats, but rather by a brilliant shift in Kremlin strategy which has enabled the Communists to imperil Mr...
...Eisenhower's health...
...He did seem to recall that the Kremlin has embarked on a program of winning friends and influencing nations through a program of greatly increased trade and aid...
...I haven't heard that one yet" when asked regarding the significant news that the Soviet leaders had proposed a new high level conference three weeks before...
...It is an irony of this era of overriding complexity, this age of the hydrogen bomb and atomic power, of big business, big labor, and big government that things as commonplace as a man's heart and arteries should loom largest in the political thinking of a people faced with great decisions...
...He had not read, a week afterward, Secretary of State Dulles' "brink of war" interview in Life although the article had dominated news of foreign affairs in every capital on earth for several days...
...Emphasizing the imperative need for the United States to disassociate itself from any taint of colonialism, Mr...
...Such a program, to be genuinely effective, must be wholly divorced from military alliances and completely free of strings...
...Here the President is guilty of a form of duplicity which seems quite unlike him...
...If President Eisenhower believes the situation is "very serious, very serious," as he said, we fail to see how he can retain Mr...
...Our guess is that he, like Lincoln, would become a man of action if elected to the Presidency...
...President Eisenhower, for all his insistence that Mr...
...in any event, we are convinced he would make a far better President than he is a candidate...
...This could be dealt with, he thought, by a modest increase in our own appropriations...
...There is no one presently in sight...
...His emphasis on moderation has alienated > those who demand militancy...
...Both candidates for the Democratic nomination are making sense, as we see it, on many of the major issues...
...Much of the same urgency was expressed by another Republican business executive, Paul G. Hoffman, head of the Studebaker Corporation...
...It is true, of course, that in the two men who are vying for their party's nomination for Presidency the Democrats have candidates who are substantially superior to the party's leadership in Congress...
...Only two Democratic Senators, Herbert Lehman of New York and Wayne Morse of Oregon, dared take the floor to oppose Eastland's elevation to the chairmanship, and only one other, Richard L. Neuberger of Oregon, spoke up to announce that he sided with them, in the voice vote, to deny the chairmanship to the Mississippi racist...
...It was a mistake, we think, for the President to have reached the decision he did...
...Dulles' wondrously simple impression of what our world is like was revealed most graphically during his recent four-hour appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...The fact is," he contended, "that we might witness a process of Communist political conquest, through the conquest of the mind and heart of people, without the need of a single gun being fired...
...He has been overly cautious, sometimes timid, when confronted with the need to speak up on deeply contentious issues like race relations, federal regulations of natural gas, and foreign affairs...
...Democratic leaders stand in the way of an expanded foreign aid program...
...Both have been hammering hard at basic issues which the Democratic bosses in Congress prefer to ignore...
...Democratic leaden join with their Republican colleagues to produce the shameful farce of the recent lobby investigation...
...He is a considerable person in his own right...
...Compared to it, most of our other problems shrink into insignificance...
...Canada's Foreign Minister Lester Pearson urged us to awaken to the success of the new Soviet strategy...
...III Many a progressive measure is bottled up in committee—and will remain there through adjournment— because the powerful committee chairmen, all of them Democrats, are op posed to the liberal philosophy which the Democratic candidates for the President are presenting to the electorate...
...But it need not prove fatal...
...compared with the Know-land-Bridges crowd of respectable reaction, or the McCarthy-Jenner clique of disreputable demagoguery, or the Richard Nixon school of shameless huckstering, the President takes on stature of striking eminence in Republican ranks...
...Dulles is the "best Secretary of State I have ever known," must be getting his briefing these days from someone other than his number one foreign policy adviser...
...President Eisenhower's decision to run again has cut deeply into Democratic hopes for victory this year...
...Dulles boarded a plane for Pakistan, where he informed the representatives of his Southeast Asia Treaty Organization that what they needed in that area was more military personnel and weapons to help him slay the red dragon again...
...how much, we find it impossible to judge...
...The Democrats are in control of the 84th Congress, but the Southern Tories who dominate the leadership and committees of the House and Senate have succeeded in preventing action on anything resembling a liberal program...
...Stevenson has lost ' ground since 1952...
...It is conceivable, too, that he might be so totally incapacitated that he would be unable to discharge any of his duties, including the act of resignation...
...Never has the central issue seemed so obvious to candidates, parties, and the electorate alike...
...At the moment that our best friends everywhere were warning us of the giant strides the Soviets were making in their non-violent offensive for the minds of men, our Secretary of State fairly bubbled with the news that everything was going just swimmingly well...
...We are not told...
...Discussing the need to rouse the nation to the hard challenge posed by Soviet strategy, Mr...
...Despite the insistent pleas of our firmest allies, the Administration is still without an overall plan of action to counter the new Soviet strategy in the struggle of competitive coexistence, and without any policy at all for the explosive Middle East and the potentially perilous situation in the Far East...
...They are using trade and aid and propaganda and appealing slogans of peaceful coexistence...
...But, laments the lonely liberal, who is going to rouse them...
...We are informed that the President believes no decision should be reached until he is nominated at the Republican National Convention in late August...
...II This was the way Mr...
...Cowles pleaded with his countrymen to understand, not that the Communists have retreated, but rather that they "are clearly gaining throughout much of Asia...
...Hoffman summoned us to develop a bold, resolute program of aid and encouragement that would do for Asia what the Marshall Plan did for the shattered countries of Western Europe after World War II...
...Far from feeling elation over the turn events have taken, Mr...
...This, at any rate, is the tale he spins whenever he must make a speech, grants an interview to Life, or appears before a Congressional committee...
...We can think of no significant issue on which the great majority of Democrats differ in principle with their Republican colleagues...
...Dulles' fiction...
...Almost precisely the same situation prevails in the House...
...But if he persists in keeping his Secretary of State/he ought at least to give the highest possible priority to a creative program of action designed to meet the Soviet challenge...
...Morgan found the Republicans too complacent to do the job...
...Home from a swing through the Far East, Mr...
...For all his long service as a professional soldier, he has emerged in the Presidency as a man of peace, respected as such by adversary, ally, and neutralist alike...
...And what of the group...
...The President has told us, since the first announcement of his decision to seek a second term, that he would resign instantly if his health failed to the point where he felt he could not carry the full constitutional burden of his office...
...Italy's President Giovanni Gronchi felt so strongly on the subject that he dared tell a joint session of our Congress that the West must cease its reliance on military alliances and move to meet the Soviet challenge with political and economic weapons...
...They are out to win the world to their side— without military invasion...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
