THE PRESIDENCY: Less Than Brilliant Light

Since Nov. 5, the day alter the 1958 elections, President Eisenhower had stayed mostly out of public view, vacationing at Augusta, working on his State of the Union message and on the budget for the next fiscal year. Nearly 250 newsmen therefore looked sharply, listened closely to the President last week at his 145th White House news conference. They found him looking well, shedding even-toned but sometimes less than brilliant light on a dozen or so subjects before the nation. Among them:

GERMANY: The Western allies, said President Eisenhower, have “always stood for the principle of the peaceful reuniting of this people of 70 million, and whose division we think is detrimental to the peace of the world.” But East and West Germany must be welded by free elections, not by Soviet threats.

MISSILES: Asked about the report from Minnesota’s Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey that the Russians have developed an 8,700-mile missile (see Democrats), the President replied: “I would know no reason whatsoever why this could not be done. We have also tested successfully an ICBM of sufficient range.”

POLITICS : Democrat Harry Truman, appearing at the National Press Club last week, had explained his estranged relationship with Ike this way: “I gave him hell when he didn’t knock [Indiana’s now-retiring Republican Senator] Jenner off the platform after he called General Marshall a traitor.* He’s been mad at me ever since—and I don’t give a damn.” Said the President: “I think that most of you have found that I have had a little bit too much sense to waste my time getting mad at anybody . . . And to say that I have ever stood still while any man, in my presence, was reviling General Marshall is not true.”

CIVIL RIGHTS: Questioned about the defiance by Alabama officials of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission (see The South), President Eisenhower disappointingly declined “to get into the basic question.” He did describe the Alabama situation as “a rather sad sort of thing,” adding: “What I would like to get help in pleading for throughout the country is respect for law.”

Considerably more substantive than his press conference was the work on the budget and State of the Union continuing behind closed White House doors. Shaping up were legislative proposals for a labor bill tougher than the Kennedy-Ives measure, which was defeated in the House this year, and for a civil rights bill, probably aimed at enabling the Justice Department to intervene directly in civil rights cases (Democratic liberals helped knock a similar proposal out of the 1957 civil rights bill).

As for the fiscal 1960 budget, from the White House came hopeful reports that spending and revenue estimates were nearing a balance. A new postal rate increase, which the Administration hopes to get, would put revenue at about $77 billion, as against spending plans pared to about $78 billion (including a defense budget just about firmed at $41.5 billion). Still under consideration: requests for a 1½¢ increase in the federal gasoline tax and a hike in the aviation gas tax. If the budget could be brought into balance, President Eisenhower would achieve what seems to be his fondest domestic hope.

Last week the President also:

¶ Hosted a dinner honoring the Justices of the Supreme. Court. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who recently suffered a heart ailment, was absent, and Chief Justice Earl Warren, down with a virus, sent his regrets. Added upsets: at dinner, Mrs. Howard Tinney, a Newport, R.I. friend of the Eisenhowers, left the table with a toothache; Mrs. Howard Simpson, wife of the president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, became ill, was later described as having “rapid action of the heart”; Mrs. Earl Warren tripped on the White House front steps, quipped: “It’s obvious I need my husband.”

¶ Visited John Foster Dulles at Walter Reed Hospital, also dropped by to see his ileitis surgeon. Major General Leonard Heaton, who was abed with an ulcer, and Lieut. General Floyd Parks, retired commander of the Second Army, suffering a bone disease.

¶ Appointed T. Graydon Upton, vice president of the foreign department of the Philadelphia National Bank, to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, in charge of international finance affairs, and U.S. executive director of the World Bank.

¶ Appointed able Foreign Service Careerist John D. Jernegan, a Middle East expert and minister-counselor of mission in Rome since 1955, as ambassador to revolutionary Iraq, replacing Waldemar J. Gallman, who had resigned.

* In a 1950 Senate speech Jenner called World War II General George Catlett Marshall a “front man for traitors.” Two years later, during the 1952 presidential campaign, Ike, who had consistently expressed his high admiration of Marshall, appeared on the same platform with Jenner, included him in a blanket endorsement of Indiana G.O.P. candidates.