The High-School Debate

In a briefing session just before the presidential press conference last week, Press Secretary Jim Hagerty warned his boss that questions on partisan politics had been building up for days. Hagerty passed along samples that had come into his office, and Eisenhower roughly laid out his line of reply. A few moments later, relaxed and ready, the President took his place before 204 reporters in the old State Department treaty room.

The United Press's Merriman Smith cracked the first question. "Mr. President," said he, "the Democrats on Capitol Hill say that bipartisan support of certain portions of your program have been endangered by certain statements which have been made by members of the Administration--statements ranging from the fact that the Democrats were soft to ward subversives in the Government to labels of political sadism. The Democrats have asked or suggested that you stop the statements."

Program for Americans. Ike grinned slightly, stuck his hand in his pocket and answered. It was quite apparent, he thought, that he was not very much of a partisan. The times are too serious to indulge in partisanship to the extreme. He quite cheerfully admitted that there must be Democratic support for the enactment of certain parts of his program. But without meaning to be pontifical or stuffed shirt, he had tried desperately to draw up a program that seemed to him to be good for all Americans, which included Democrats, and it was on that basis that he appealed for Democratic help.

The New York Times's Anthony Le-viero asked if it was not "a kind of class warfare for Republican leaders to suggest that all Democrats ... are tinged with treason or that they are all security risks."* Replied Ike: He has seen no such statements, but if any such statements were made, he would consider it not only completely untrue but very unwise--even from a political partisan standpoint. Later, in answer to another question, he added that he believed that the ordinary American was capable of deciding what was temperate and just.

Would the President "counsel officials of the executive branch . . . not to en gage in extreme partisanship?" That is correct, said Ike. Would that include the chairman (New York's Len Hall) of the Republican National Committee? Yes, said the President, it would.

Be Kind to Democrats. Back at the White House, Ike issued no further reprimands or "cease and desist" orders to his White House staff, and there were signs that the loudest G.O.P. talkers would keep on talking. Attorney General Herbert Brownell got a big laugh in Boston by flipping: "If this weren't be-kind-to-Democrats week, I might talk about Harry Dexter White." In San Mateo, Calif., Joe McCarthy said he had "no plans for a major change in my line of speeches." (The line: the nation has just survived "20 years of treason.") And in Jeffersonville, Indiana's Bill Jenner went even further beyond the limit. He said that "the Fair Dealers" did not intend U.S. troops to win a victory in Korea. "Then," said Jenner in a prepared speech, "[they] stooped to the ultimate depths--they gave away the victory our men had won with their blood." This the New York Times aptly characterized as "slander straight from the gutter."

The Democrats professed to be mollified by Ike's plea for temperance, but quickly readjusted their tactics to fit. Michigan's Representative Louis C. Rabaut called on Ike to fire Len Hall. Texas' Sam Rayburn, House minority leader, told the Women's National Democratic Club: "In my opinion, there are more fascists in the United States than there are Communists." He defined fascists as "those people who got richest under our [the Democratic] Administration."

Super-Responsibility. Some Democrats were getting as sick of the fight as some Republicans. This week Missouri Democrat Tom Hennings told the Senate: "I am amazed that we should even consider running to the President for help. And I am a little ashamed that we should whine and beg him to call off his 'boys' . . . None of us ... is really so foolish as to believe that the President's program will stand or fall on the basis of whether the Democrats are treated with kid-glove diplomacy ... I for one repudiate any notion that my votes are going to be affected by what some Lincoln-day orator may say about me or my party."

Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson confided another kind of worry to his friends: "I for one am not about to let the Republicans assign us to the affirmative in a sort of high-school debate on the question 'Resolved: that Communism is good for the U.S.' " Johnson's thinking: the Democrats should oppose the Republicans where it counts--they should fight Eisenhower's farm program and his attempt to revise taxes; they should needle the Administration on its failure to develop a foreign-trade program. Then, Johnson believes, if Ike fails to put his program through, the U.S. will turn to the Democrats in Congress--but only to the "super-responsible," conservative Democrats--such as Lyndon Johnson.

Partisan language which prompted recollections of Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 acceptance speech in Philadelphia, where Roosevelt pictured the G.O.P. as ruled by "economic royalists" and "privileged princes of ... new economic dynasties [who] created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction [and] sought to regiment the people, their labor and their property."

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