South into Sunshine

For two nights and a day, the 17,000-ton missile cruiser Canberra cut through an uneasy sea in rain and fog that blotted out the destroyers Barton and Wood port and starboard. Finally, on the second day, after knifing through the Gulf Stream, Canberra moved into the Bahama Islands' 100-mile-long Exuma Sound to be welcomed by warm sun and blue sky. Behind, through the veil of rain, lay the ship's Norfolk pier and beyond that Ike's own pier, the White House. On the horizon: the ragged smudge of Cat Island. To the northeast lay Bermuda and a highest-level conference of the Anglo-American allies.

On Canberra's main deck, Dwight Eisenhower relaxed in a deck chair, turned his face to the Bahama sun in the health-seeking exercise that had brought this task force of three ships and some 2,000 men steaming south.

Extra Guests. Within 24 hours, the 80DEG weather worked its therapy. Queasy correspondents aboard the destroyers gathered in makeshift press rooms twice daily to hear Press Secretary Jim Hagerty relay by radio-telephone optimistic reports from Canberra. White House Physician Howard Snyder found the President coughing only occasionally. His head cold was easing, his inflamed left ear cleared. So much better was Ike feeling that he stripped off his jacket, lazily drove golf-balls from a coco mat into a canvas shield stretched down the starboard side of Canberra's open deck while the ship lolled nearly dead in tropic water. He ducked into bed at 9 o'clock, stayed abed nearly twelve hours, rose for a late breakfast (prunes, oatmeal, toast and jelly, Sanka) and a look at Washington reports radioed or relayed by courier seaplane. The President suggested extra guests for dinner, i.e., Canberra's officers picked two at a time by wardroom draw for never-to-be-forgotten bread-breaking at sea with their commander in chief.

Tolerated Timing. As Canberra, her presidential flag fluttering in a desultory breeze, rocked softly in a southern sea, few at home in the spring-blossoming U.S. seemed to begrudge the President his trip, however inauspicious the timing. The Middle East was kicking up again. On

Capitol Hill the year's sorest political question, Ike's budget, was being fought out on partisan lines. Moreover, up to week's end, the Vice President and Secretary of State both were far away, creating --until Dulles' return from Australia on Sunday--a top-echelon vacuum in the capital. But there was general agreement, even in Congress, that the President's trip was proper to rid himself of a cantankerous head cold.

By midweek Canberra (symbolically, the only U.S. Navy cruiser named for a foreign capital,* and for a British Commonwealth metropolis at that) was due in Hamilton, Bermuda, to be welcomed by Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Once ashore, Ike faced a four-day conference that might well range over the major problems of the globe.

*Launched April 19, 1943, the U.S. Navy's Canberra commemorated the Royal Australian navy's Canberra, sunk by torpedo and shellfire eight months earlier during the Battle of Savo Island in the company of U.S. cruisers Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria.

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