THE NATION: Man In Charge

On the morning after his reelection, President Eisenhower was up a few minutes after 7, at his desk before 9, to head off the seemingly inexhaustible dangers of world crisis. To the White House came the top diplomats, the military and intelligence chiefs, all bringing bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of Soviet tanks churning westward through the bloody snows of satelliteland, of MIG-17s swooping southward past Mount Ararat to take up menacing new forward bases in Syria.

Above the bits and pieces of the puzzle hung a many-sided question: Were these movements of troops and aircraft designed to suppress the satellite rebels? Were they designed to keep the war brewing in Egypt? Was the Kremlin, its battle for men’s minds irretrievably lost in the bitter killings of Budapest, now preparing to stake all on a single throw? Or was it all a Communist bluff?

United as One. Now, as at all times since World War II, the U.S. did not believe that the Soviets wanted World War III, but Dwight Eisenhower took no chances. Out of the White House flowed a series of crisp and rippling decisions, a new urgency of diplomatic cables and phone calls. Through the lobby on the way to the President’s office hustled so many VIPs—Vice President Nixon, Acting Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr., CIA Director Allen Dulles, Defense Mobilizer Arthur Flemming, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Arthur Radford, et al. —that White House reporters lost count. Out from Atlantic ports steamed a carrier task force headed by the 60,000-ton Forrestal, while in San Diego seamen worked all night beneath glaring floodlights to get Wasp and Philippine Sea loaded up and out to sea.

Around the world, U.S. Navy and Air Force bases were on a tighter state of readiness (none more so than ever-ready Strategic Air Command). Back home in Washington, the President called in congressional leaders to brief them fully on the crisis, to show all who might have believed too much of Adlai Stevenson’s election oratory that the U.S. stood united as one.

Bristling Messages. In classic diplomatic fashion, Dwight Eisenhower moved surefootedly on these fundamentals of security to dampen the flash points of potential outbreak. Specifically, he set about 1) making plain to the world in the forum of the U.N. that Communism had again shown itself morally bankrupt after the barbarous suppression of satellite independence; 2) stopping the Egypt tinderbox fighting before the Russians had the chance and the time to pour in “volunteers.”

On Hungary, the darkest arm of the crisis, the President’s best advocate was the Red army, whose conduct provoked violent anti-Communist reaction from El Salvador to Saigon (see FOREIGN NEWS). In the U.N. General Assembly, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. pressed hard for withdrawal of Soviet troops and a U.N. investigation, won a 50-8 approval. Aware that he could not help the rebels militarily without increasing the threat of a bigger war, the President ordered, as a heartfelt gesture, that 5,000 Hungarian refugees be admitted to the U.S. without regard to the niceties of the immigration laws (“Get ’em in”).

On Election Day Eisenhower finally persuaded Britain and France to listen to the U.N. and order a cease-fire in Egypt (he made it clear in the process that the U.S. would not feel compelled to protect British-French forces in Egypt from Soviet attack). Next day he sent a bristling message to Israel’s electric-haired Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had accepted a cease-fire but stalled on withdrawing his troops from conquered Egyptian soil. Sternly the President reminded Ben-Gurion of “the various elements of our policy of support to Israel in so many ways,” and he hoped indeed that Israel would not choose to “impair” these fruitful relations. (Privately, he told Israel it could expect no U.S. help if Israeli delay resulted in Russian attack.) Writhin 24 hours Ben-Gurion, fearful of the Russian air buildup in Syria and concerned about the U.S., capitulated.

Moral Ramparts. To get the Middle East stabilized, the U.S. backed the Canadian plan for a 6,000-man U.N. police force. With careful forethought the President had held strongly that this police force should be recruited only from volunteer small powers so that 1) Arab-Asians would not be able to cry colonialism; 2) Russians would not be able to demand inclusion to balance any contingent from the U.S. Shortly after the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the police force (64-0), Eisenhower, with U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold’s approval, ordered U.S. military transports to pick up the vanguards from such small-power points as Jutland and Bogotá and to airlift them to a Naples staging area. Neutral Swiss planes would take them on to the Middle East.

In the broader sweep of diplomacy Ike concentrated on patching up and cleaning up the Western alliance. Throughout the despair of Hungary-Egypt, he had taken his stand on the ramparts of moral law and the U.N. (TIME, Nov. 12), and now these were the ramparts behind which the free world could most safely range itself to face down the new Soviet threat.

But when Britain’s Eden and France’s Mollet put out feelers for a face-saving Washington summit conference, the White House was pointedly not listening. And when Swiss President Markus Feldmann proposed at week’s end that the Big Four get together (with India’s Nehru) in Switzerland, the President politely replied that the U.S. was conducting its crisis diplomacy through the U.N., and “I believe that the interests of all will be best served by carrying these initiatives to a successful conclusion.”

Getting Some Air. At week’s end, with no Soviet attack materializing out of the intelligence jigsaw puzzle, the President ducked out of the White House for a breather. In his twin-engined Aero Commander he flew to his farm at Gettysburg, donned a brown-and-black-checked cap, a hip-length windbreaker and heavy leather boots, and puttered about in the crisp fall weather “to get some air.” Happily he inspected his 20 head of cattle and chatted with the neighbors who accompanied him. (“She’s a pip! . . . We ought to hold on to that one for a while until we see how he develops!”) Then, after precisely five hours on the farm, he flew back to Washington to get back to work.

All in all, the President, so it seemed to those who knew him best, was handling things Normandy-style, coolly, with a sure and knowing touch. “I am getting tired,” he confided to one of his associates one tense day early last week, “of being President, President-elect and Secretary of State!”

Last week the President also:

¶ Accepted the resignation of ex-Radioman (Mutual) Theodore Streibert as head of the U.S. Information Agency, appointed in his stead Under Secretary of Labor Arthur Larson, 46, up-and-coming theorist of New Republicanism and one of the President’s campaign speechwriters.

¶ Accepted the diplomatic credentials of incoming British Ambassador Sir Harold Caccia (see box).

¶ Called Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall to the White House to find out why the Republican Party failed to carry Congress (see below). Assignment for Len Hall: gather and analyze all available information, then report back with a program for strengthening the G.O.P. to suit the Eisenhower doctrines of “Modern Republicanism.”