National Affairs: IKE GIVES SOME ANSWERS

“The press conference,” wrote Columnist Walter Lippmann this week, “has become an institution . . . for overcoming that growing threat to honest journalism, the ghost-written speech and the public-relations facade. . . In its fullest modern development [it] is an ordeal which searches a man’s personality far more deeply than it does his principles and his policies.” The words were especially true in the case of Ike Eisenhower, and it was Ike’s character that won the week with newsmen. But Ike’s press conferences also produced answers on policies & principles. Samples:

¶ J Foreign Policy: He would “go any place in this world” to talk to Stalin if he thought it would do any good, but nothing is negotiable as long as the Soviet Union uses “subversion, bribery, corruption [and] threat of force . . . to try to destroy our form of government.” He believes the loss of Western Europe would put the U.S. “in mortal danger,” and favors a more dynamic U.S. foreign policy.

¶ Korea: “I do not have any prescription for bringing the thing to a decisive end . . . I believe we have got to stand firm and take every possible step we can to reduce our losses, and try to get a decent armistice out of it . . . There has been built up behind the Yalu River a very definite air strength that would make very dangerous any attempt to end the war at this moment, until we have a bigger buildup of our own.” But he implies that he would favor counterattacks on China “if I am attacked in a broad way by anything that you can call a nationalistic attack.”

¶ China: “I do not know who is to blame for the loss of China. I do know that the diplomatic triumphs of that period, if any, were claimed by the party in power. The party in power, therefore, has to take some responsibility for any losses we have suffered . . . When we see 400 million people falling under the domination of this Communistic dictatorship . . . it is a diplomatic, or let us say, an international disaster of the first magnitude.”*

¶ FEPC: He would not endorse the current FEPC program because he objects to its “federal, compulsory” nature. But he gives small comfort to the advocates of segregation, promises “my unalterable support of fairness and equality among all types of American citizens. I believe that insofar as the Federal Government has any influence or any constitutional authority in this field, all of its means, all of its expenditures, all of its policies should adhere firmly and without any kind of equivocation to that principle . . .”

¶ Federal Aid to Education: He opposes a law which puts “Washington bureaucracy” into education, because “education is one of those local functions that we should guard jealously . . . [But] I think that there is a certain level of education that is absolutely necessary . . . When we can show when any particular section does not have the proper, adequate means to educate its children to that level, I would certainly be in favor of help to that specific area.”

¶ Socialized Medicine: “I do believe that every American has a right to decent medical care, [but] I am against socialization . . . and submitting our lives toward a control that would lead inevitably to socialism.”

¶ The President’s Powers: As he sees it, Congress is the agency which should first decide when the nation is in a national emergency. It should also empower the President in advance to act in an emergency. Thus empowered, the Chief Executive should have the right “to act decisively when single action and quick action is demanded.” This does not mean that Ike agrees with Harry Truman’s seizure of steel, because there is a “vast difference” between a real emergency “and what we were discussing in the steel difficulty.”