The First Tiff

"The honeymoon is over," snapped the Republican Cleveland Plain Dealer. Said pro-Eisenhower Publisher John S. Knight in the Detroit Free Press: "President Eisenhower's popularity should not suggest that he is immune from criticism." Texas' San Angelo Standard-Times, which backed Ike in 1952 and 1956, complained: "The Administration has not only gone back on its promise of government economy, it is not entirely frank with the people." Across the U.S. last week, Ike-minded newspapers raised voices in the first general criticism since the Eisenhower Administration took office in 1953. The chief cause was the familiar cause of many a marriage's first tiff--money. The predominantly (62%) pro-Eisenhower press was upset over President Eisenhower's $71.8 billion budget, biggest in peacetime history.

The spectacle of newspapers expressing alarm at heavy government spending was not new. Still, the reaction against Ike's budget was so widespread that some Democratic partisans were quick to suggest a considerable disenchantment with the President. In Cervi's Rocky Mountain Journal, a Denver weekly, Democratic Publisher Eugene Cervi crowed: "Big business and its willing handmaiden, the fat metropolitan dailies . . . loved Ike as long as he was a 'weak President.' Now that the President's social conscience is beginning to bother him, the harlots of journalism are screaming." More realistically, the Atlanta Constitution's Editor Ralph McGill thought that "Mr. Eisenhower's usually sugar-sweet press support is here and there becoming shrewish," but only because the press "failed from the beginning by setting up an impossible climate of perfection," and because "some elements of the so-called G.O.P. press were never really for him."

"Fantastic Thinking." For example, the right-wing Chicago Tribune, which has never wholly concealed its distrust of many Eisenhower policies, in recent weeks has lunged directly at Ike for the first time, sneered that " 'modern Republicanism' is just a variant of New Deal recklessness." But ardently pro-Eisenhower papers also expressed concern that Ike's philosophy was shifting to the left. Many conservatives, said the pro-Ike Dallas Times-Herald last week, "fear that Eisenhower believes the only way the Republican Party can prosper is by outdoing the Democrats in so-called liberalism."

Just as economy-minded Treasury Secretary Humphrey was unable to say where he would trim a budget that ought to be trimmed, few newspaper editors were able to submit practical proposals for cutbacks. Criticism ranged uneasily from attacks on what the pro-Eisenhower Dallas Morning News termed "welfare state" programs to petulant forays into the broad area of foreign aid and defense policy. The Denver Post saw a source of the trouble in differences within the official family: "Right now, everybody's talking about the same thing in different terms or different things in the same terms. And the public is beginning to wonder who's running the government, anyhow . . . It's time to regroup, General." But the criticism was chiefly grounded in frustration, in an awareness that the upward trend of Government spending was probably irreversible. Reasoned the GOPartisan Buffalo Evening News: "The President's 1958 budget is not by any means an irresponsible fiscal document. Its increases are mainly for national security. It proposes no vast new spending programs, and in fact is no more than a projection into the future of programs long since enacted or long ago proposed."

Even newspapers that defended the budget, e.g., the New York Herald Tribune, were generally disturbed by the President's warning that wage and price controls might be invoked unless labor and management helped stem inflation. Said the pro-Ike Houston Chronicle: "It is typical of the fantastic thinking running governmental policies that President Eisenhower will say that price controls may be necessary to reduce inflation without even mentioning a reduction in the wild government spending which is the chief cause of inflation. It approaches hypocrisy."

Few Bad Signs. In the pro-Administration newspapers there have been scattered attacks on several policies or personalities in the Administration--Agriculture Secretary Benson and farm policy, Interior Secretary Seaton and the emergency oil-to-Europe program--as well as chiefly professional beefs against the President for the shrinkage of information out of the White House and against Secretary of State Dulles for his refusal to allow U.S. correspondents into Red China (TIME, Feb. 18). Also the Negro press, influential in last November's important shift of the Negro vote toward the Republicans, has begun to exude disappointment at what it considers to be Administration lethargy in backing up racial integration rulings.

Adding all together, however, an Administration pessimist charged with the job of looking for bad signs would find only a few things to report with real concern. The 19 Scripps-Howard papers were coupling criticism of Government spending with scathing attacks on foreign policy and crying "Dulles must go!", and in his five newspapers John Knight was complaining that "this high-spending, save-the-world concept is what we might have expected of Adlai Stevenson, but not from Eisenhower."

But when it came down to choosing sides, Editor Knight was sure that "my affection and respect for the President remain undiminished." And, despite the budget ruckus, that plainly is how the bulk of the U.S. press still feels.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.