THE ADMINISTRATION: Heart & Head

In pajamas and a hospital blanket, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles got into a wheelchair at Washington’s Walter Reed Army Hospital just before 10:30 one morning last week, was wheeled down to a concrete-walled basement room 20 ft. square. A 1½-ton, lead-shielded door closed behind him as orderlies helped him onto a table. From the ceiling, doctors and orderlies pulled down the snout of a huge, telescope-like General Electric X-ray machine and pointed it at the patient’s lower abdomen.

The doctors and orderlies left, took shelter behind the concrete walls, watched through twin-paned windows resistant to radiation as the machine churned up its million-volt charge, sent a stream of X rays into the cancerous portion of Dulles’ abdomen for a full minute. Because Dulles was not nauseated, the doctors rated the treatment “well tolerated,” agreed that if he could stand it, he would get up to five minutes’ radiation every day except Sunday for the next three to four weeks.

Outpouring. All week Foster Dulles, coming back fast from his hernia surgery (TIME, Feb. 23), had been crowded by hospital routine. “You never have a minute,” he grumbled to his State Department aide, Joseph Greene Jr. Dulles made no attempt to call Acting Secretary Christian Herter or to mix in State business. He took pleasure in afternoon and evening visits from wife Janet, in a unanimous Senate resolution praying for recovery of “beloved John Foster Dulles,” in a phenomenal outpouring of 8,000 letters, telegrams and get-well cards.

Newspaper accounts of his illness and the speculation about a successor depressed him. But his spirits lifted with a second visit from President Eisenhower, after which the President headed off the speculation at the presidential news conference.

By way of allegory, the President recalled that he had once, as Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, asked Washington to send him “a certain corps commander.” Back came word that the officer was so crippled that the doctors “won’t assure you that he can move around.” Said Ike, by his own account: “You send the man and I will send him to battle in a litter because he can do better that way than most people I know.” Officer identified subsequently by the White House: Lieut. General Troy H. Middleton, who led Eisenhower’s VIII Corps in the Battle of the Bulge, is now president of Louisiana State University.

No Comment. “Now I feel this way about Secretary Dulles,” the President continued. “The doctors have assured me there is nothing in his disease that is going to touch his heart and his head, and that is what we want.”