Some Blows for Next Year

Political seismographs recorded last week the first advance tremors of 1964. New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller sallied into Kansas and Nebraska in what was unmistakably a forward-looking effort to win friends in what used to be Nixon country. From Washington, the National Republican Senatorial Committee mailed out invitations to a $1000-a-plate dinner to be held in May with Arizona's Senator Barry Goldwater as guest of honor. The dinner is billed as a "preview of the bright prospects of 1964." Kentucky's Thruston B. Morton, chairman of the committee, happily pointed out that in 1964 the G.O.P. will have extraordinarily favorable arithmetic going for it in Senate races. Only nine Republican seats will be at stake as against 25 Democratic seats, and only six of them Southern.

"Downright Spongy." At his press conference, John F. Kennedy showed unmistakably that he, too, is thinking ahead to 1964. He strode to the microphones with the springy belligerence of a middleweight boxer. A note of impatience ran through his answers to reporters' early questions, as if he could hardly wait for a subject really worth punching. Then a reporter asked him whether he cared to comment on a letter that Dwight Eisenhower recently sent to Indiana's House Minority Leader Charlie Halleck. Eisenhower's letter urged "major surgery" on Kennedy's spending plans. The Administration's space program, Ike charged, is "downright spongy'' and wastes "enormous sums."

Kennedy did indeed care to comment. He had examined the Ike record, he said, and found it riddled with budget deficits, gold outflows, recessions and high unemployment. "That's not a record that we plan to duplicate if we can help it."

As for spongy space programs, Kennedy blamed his heavy space expenditures on Ike: "We are second in space today because we started late. It requires a large sum of money. I don't think we should look with equanimity upon the prospect that we will be second all through the '60s and possibly the '70s." And as for excessive spending elsewhere in the budget, Kennedy virtually claimed to be an economizer compared with Ike. "The fact of the matter is, in nondefense, non-space expenditures, we've put in less of an increase in our three years than President Eisenhower did in his last three years."

"Beset by Stalemate." It was by far the hardest-punching attack that Kennedy has ever aimed at Ike. One reason for the surge of bellicosity was that Kennedy himself had been getting punched of late. The week's election news was worrisome. In Michigan, the voters adopted the new constitution that Republican Governor George Romney had been battling for, and the victory both brightened Romney's luster and dimmed the prospects that Kennedy will carry Michigan in 1964 as he did in 1960. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley, who helped Kennedy mightily in his close squeak in 1960, won re-election by only a mediocre margin against a weak opponent.

The return of New York's long-strikebound newspapers brought from columnists a renewed freshet of negative pronouncements upon the New Frontier. "Frustration and stalemate," wrote the Times's James Reston, "now seem to be the order of the day for the Administration.'' Echoed the Herald Tribune's Robert J. Donovan: "The President is beset by stalemate and sluggishness."

Frustration, stalemate and sluggishness are grave charges against any President, but especially against one who campaigned on the theme that he would get the nation "moving again." It is embarrassing to President Kennedy today to have his performance measured against that often reiterated campaign promise, and it might be highly embarrassing in 1964. That consideration helps explain the vigor of the President's attack on Ike. It would be safer to be measured in 1964 not against 1960 promises but against the performance of the Eisenhower Administration--that is. if Kennedy himself is doing the comparing.

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