Damage & Diplomacy

P:The Administration is now resigned to the fact that it will have to ask Congress to lift the present $275 billion limit on the national debt. Increased military expenditures, decreased revenues and difficulty in cutting back nonmilitary spending have made the request all but inevitable. Said a White House aide last week: "We're right at the brink--you'll pardon the expression--of going over the debt limit. We're within a very small margin now, and have a very small cash balance." Treasury Secretary Anderson has assured congressional finance committeemen that he can hold out until Congress reconvenes next month. Capitol Hill, in turn, believes that, after appropriate howls of anguish, Congress will approve the increase rather than cut domestic programs in an election year.

P:Briefing State Department correspondents last week on the Indonesian crisis, Press Officer Lincoln White took extraordinary pains to praise the work of U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia John M. Allison, 52. Behind-the-scenes reason: Old Far East Hand Allison had already written out his resignation in protest against a series of United Press stories from Washington saying that his reporting on the Indonesian crisis (see FOREIGN NEWS) was inadequate. Allison's Washington friends suspected that Allison's Washington rivals were planting the stories to undercut him. To buoy him up, Secretary of State Dulles cabled Allison a personal compliment on the excellence of his report, ordered that Spokesman White's press-conference remarks be included in his message.

P:Dopesters who five weeks ago hailed M.I.T.'s Dr. James R. Killian Jr. as the new U.S. missile czar are discovering that Killian is not--and never intended to be --any such thing. Killian sits in on Pentagon briefings and high-level policy discussions, has gathered a staff, settled down to do what Ike asked him to do, i.e., help whip the budget into shape, broaden basic research, improve scientific education. He shies away from issuing orders, saves his advice for the President's ear, has already used this influence to fan in the President a more informed interest in scientific projects. Said a White House aide last week: "Science has never before been given that kind of attention at that level." P:Ohio Republicans, who thought things would start going their way once they got popular Democrat Frank Lausche out of the statehouse and into the U.S. Senate, are wringing their hands over 1958 prospects. Bumbling G.O.P. Governor C. William O'Neill will probably be challenged in the Republican primary, and if he wins will be a lackluster running mate for U.S. Senator John Bricker. Last week ten-term Congressman John Martin Vorys, 61, added to party woes by turning down an eleventh nomination to return to his Columbus law practice, left the G.O.P. only five months to groom a nominee. P:Stevenson-for-President Democrats who sadly buried Adlai in 1956 are happily resurrecting him for 1960 and glancing nervously at hurdles in his path toward a third nomination. Most immediate hurdles: 1) prejudice against a two-time loser; 2) Massachusetts' John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who has been doing prodigious spadework of his own in preparation for a presidential run. Stevensonites are convinced that the money for the Kennedy boom is not Jack's but father Joe's. And they smile indulgently at the Catholic-can-win surveys, implying broadly that Roman Catholic Jack Kennedy still can't.

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