THE PRESIDENCY: Care Everywhere

The bluefish just wouldn’t strike. Vacationer Dwight Eisenhower, ensconced in a deck chair on the low stern of the Navy crash boat Queen Six, trolled for eight hours one day last week southwest of Newport. R.I. A novice in the sedentary sport of deep-sea fishing, he obviously missed the dry-fly casting in the frowned-upon (because of his heart) altitudes of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain brooks. Restlessly, he watched sunlight sparkle on fish hauled into nearby boats, then cracked orders by radiotelephone for his escort craft, full of ever-hovering Secret Service, to find out what bait the others were using. A neighboring cruiser shared its successful white feather jigs, and another provided wire lines for deeper trolling, but nothing worked until, on a tip messaged from a third helpful sportsman, the President ran into a sliver of luck: off Sandy Point, using a nickel-plated spoon, he hooked a single 20-in., 4-lb. bonito, hardly worth a tug on his heavy tackle.

He fished the rest of the day without a single strike.

All week the little bothers weighed on a man who could not put aside one truly big one: the Quemoy crisis. Eisenhower, briefed regularly by calls from Washington, spent much time on the direct White House telephone at Fort Adams’ “Quarters No. i,” an eight-bedroom Victorian frame house under an old-fashioned mansard roof. He pondered one of the most serious decisions of his Administration when Secretary Dulles came to the vacation White House office to work out the draft note on the defense of Quemoy and Matsu. Even the company of such close bridge and golfing friends as U.S. Ambassador John Hay Whitney and Washington Lawyer-Industrialist George E. Allen, roly-poly White House jester through the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower regimes, failed to give the needed break from the world’s pressing worry.

The tension showed plainest in his golf game, which he generally plays in the 80s with a concentration that banishes all other concerns. Though the rubbernecking crowds that bothered him last year were banned from the Newport Country Club this year, Ike’s golf seemed to suffer from the stares of newsmen, who can watch the first six holes from the clubhouse. Press Secretary James Hagerty smilingly asked reporters not to follow the games too closely, but the ninth hole, a par four right by the clubhouse, continued to be a psychological sand trap worse than the course’s 130 real ones, a place for bogeys and double bogeys. Ike played six rounds in seven days, stayed in the gos most of the time, his strong long game suffered from a duffer’s tendency to fail to follow through on some drives, and his short game, never too good anyway, found him three-putting many a green. The President, explained Golf Pro Norman Palmer, was “having trouble concentrating because of world problems.”

In his first week of vacation since April, the 67-year-old President also:

¶ Signed into law 121 bills passed by Congress, among them the $887 million aid-to-education program, a $42 million excise tax cut, the debt limit hike to $288 billion, a 1½-year extension to the farm surplus program that has already disposed of $4 billion worth of crops.

¶ Vetoed 14 bills, including an outsized $437 million subsidy to local airport construction and a $279 million authorization bill providing aid to distressed areas (It “would greatly diminish local responsibility”). In other parts of his drive to hold deficits in check, he cut down on contracts for stockpiling strategic materials, called a virtual halt to a Democrat-inspired antirecession housing program.