THE NATION: Hand on the Tiller

John Foster Dulles arrived at Fitzsimons Army Hospital, as he always does for White House conferences, with a neat agenda of items for discussion. On his typewritten list, ready to be checked off, were eight subjects, including the forthcoming Big Four foreign ministers’ conference at Geneva, the Communist shipment of arms to Egypt and a letter to Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin. The President’s physicians told the Secretary of State that 1) he could bring up any subject he wished to, and 2) he did not have to comply with their previously set 15-minute time limitation. Then they let him into the hospital room.

For 25 minutes the President and the Secretary of State talked. At times Ike’s cheerful voice and occasional laughter could be heard out in the corridor. When they came to the Bulganin letter, Dulles produced a proposed draft, which did little more than acknowledge that the President had received the Soviet Premier’s letter discussing U.S.-Soviet exchange of military information and aerial inspection. Editing and reworking the Dulles draft, the President pointed up the whole letter and brought in a new point: “I have not forgotten your proposal having to do with stationing inspection teams at key points in our countries, and if you feel this would help to create the better spirit I refer to, we could accept that too.”

After the conference was over, the physicians examined the patient, and came to a conclusion: the experience had helped rather than harmed him. With that, a whole series of conferences with members of the Cabinet and other top officials of the U.S. Government fell into line. Before the week was out Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey (see below) spent a quarter of an hour in the President’s room; early this week Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson and Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled; later in the week Attorney General Herbert Brownell will fly to Denver.

By week’s end the President, for the first time since his illness, was able to leave his bed and sit (for 15 minutes one day and half an hour the next) in a leather chair. As the President’s strength continued to grow, Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams gave the Cabinet word that was good news for the U.S. and the whole free world: the President is now ready to dispose of all problems that any department head might hesitate to settle on his own authority. Gradually but persistently, Dwight Eisenhower was getting a new grip on the tiller.