National Affairs: The Fabric of Peace

Overshadowed by his triumphal tour of Iowa was Dwight Eisenhower’s first major political speech of the 1956 campaign, televised last week from a CBS studio in Washington. Honed to intellectual sharpness, it dwelt quietly upon a theme that has long dominated the President’s thinking: peace.

Through and around the major issues of the day, Ike wove that thread. His own inner peace had convinced him, he said, that he is strong enough “to meet all the responsibilities of the presidency, today and in the years just ahead.” In the U.S., his Administration has led the nation toward industrial peace and “equality of rights and opportunity” for all men. Overseas, the U.S. has helped bring honorable peace to such troubled spots as Korea, Iran, West Germany, Trieste, Austria and Guatemala.

But the struggle has only begun. The Communists have changed their methods but not their goals, and hundreds of millions of men still seek freedom. Overriding everything else, nuclear weapons have given humanity “the power to end its history,” made “world disarmament a necessity of world life.” Then, without mentioning Adlai Stevenson by name, he took issue with Stevenson’s recent essays into military strategy. The U.S. cannot “prove wise and strong with public speech that erroneously asserts our economic weakness [or] by any such simple device as suspending, unilaterally, our H-bomb tests [or] by hinting that the military draft might soon be suspended.”

“We cannot face the future,” said Ike, still talking pointedly about Stevenson, “by walking into the past backwards.”