Depressed by Drought

By the time President Eisenhower wound up his six-state, 4,500-mile tour of the drought-ravaged Southwestern and Great Plains states, his face was a windburned, cherry red; his eyes were worn from squinting through dust and sun; his once carefully polished brown shoes were flaked with windblown dust. From his brusque manner and his almost perpetual frown, aides and reporters sensed that he was thoroughly depressed by what he had seen.

Though his trip was brief (his plane, Columbine III, made only seven stops) and frequently monopolized by chart-bearing experts, Ike came face to face with the unmistakable signs of disaster: careworn and worried farm men and women; parched, dried water holes; abandoned farm homesteads, their doors swinging open in the wind; thin, underfed cattle munching on de-spined prickly-pear cactus. As he went from farm to farm, Ike touched the weak, thin dust, crackled the dry tumbleweed between his fingers, examined with a knowing farmer's hands the bony backs and dull coats of underfed steers.

National Problem. Wherever he went on his dawn-to-dusk schedule* --San Angelo, Texas, Woodward, Okla., Clovis, N. Mex.--Ike faced the same brown, dismal picture. He sympathetically questioned the farmers and ranchers ("How much water are you pumping? What did you get out of your dry fields?"), frequently found in the hard-pressed people a surprising resoluteness--a "chins-up" attitude, as he expressed it. And they sensed that, because the President was there, their problem was now recognized as a national problem.

There were some happy coincidental signs along the route: in Tucson Ike appeared after a drenching, three-day rain; at Garden City, Kans. his arrival was heralded by a welcome but blinding snowstorm, which nevertheless did not prevent some 6,000 shivering Kansans from greeting the President at the airport. So fierce was the blizzard that crash trucks lined the Garden City runway to spotlight a path for Presidential Pilot Bill Draper, who babied the Columbine into a soft snap of a landing under weather conditions that gave the shakes to a group of Air Force pilots waiting and watching on the ground.

Partner's Promise. Ike well knew that the current drought was generally beyond the repair of a single storm, or even a single rainy season, that the time was late for local, state and national agencies to get to work on programs that would make the most of dwindling water resources, to reseed the millions of remaining acres of Great Plains grazing land that are ready to blow. At trip's end, addressing a special drought conference at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Ike promised to ask Congress for $76 million for emergency drought relief (credit for farmers and ranchers, feed for cattle, funds to slow erosion), promised that the Federal Government would be a "willing partner" with local and state authorities "in solving this problem, which I assure you we will solve."

*A schedule so strenuous that it reminded Ike-dogging Columnist Roscoe Drummond that people used to worry about the President's health. "Mr. Eisenhower," wrote Drummond wearily, "is standing this hectic drought trip better than most of the correspondents."

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