Easy to Talk About

Not for weeks had Dwight Eisenhower looked so well: his color was good, his step quick. Nevertheless, health-conscious Washington buzzed with rumor. Under congressional consideration, but likely to advance nowhere, were proposals for firmly certifying presidential disability and transferring presidential functions to the Vice President (including an Administration recommendation advanced by Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., delegating responsibility for the decision to the Cabinet). The hubbub prompted a blunt question at the President's press conference: Was Ike planning to resign? Replied the President coldly: "The worst rot that I have heard since I have been in this office." There was another subject that was arousing some Eisenhower ire: the budget furor. "It is an easy thing to make speeches about," he said, "but it is a very hard thing to do much about ... If we are going to wage peace abroad and try to provide the leadership and the services at home that our people demand, then we have got to pay for it." He had ordered federal agencies to study economy suggestions rolling out of Congress, to carry out "a tightening up exercise all the way through." Nevertheless, he was frank about the expected outcome: "I don't anticipate any changes in terms of amounts big enough to be ... startling. I am not thinking in terms of $2 billion."

Another Thought. But someone else on the team seemed to be thinking in those terms. Almost at the moment Ike made his statement, Treasury Under Secretary W. Randolph Burgess was telling the Senate Finance Committee that a $2 billion to $3 billion budget cut would be "a sound thing." Next day Burgess hurried back to the witness table, cryptically called his variance with the President's views "a false alarm." Like his hair-curling boss, George M. Humphrey, the Under Secretary succeeded only in adding to the impression --valid or not--that the Administration is sharply divided on the budget.

Behind the President's own stand was a subtle change in his philosophy. Four years ago Eisenhower took office determined to decentralize Government functions. Now he believes that decentralization has gone about as far as it can. Rather than slough off remaining responsibilities, he told a Washington conference of the Advertising Council, the Administration should provide the "massive single leadership that is necessary and then keep the Federal Government out of operations so far as it is possible . . ."

For Emergencies Only. It was on that basic principle that the President last week spoke up for his aid-to-education program. At the National Education Association's centennial celebration banquet in Washington, he made his most eloquent plea: "Our schools are more important than our Nike batteries, more necessary than our radar warning nets, and more powerful even than the energy of the atom." To foster that power he asked "federal help to correct an emergency situation." And he meant emergency. "After these new schools are built," he said, "after the bricks are laid and the mortar is dry, the federal mission will be completed."

Before the week was out, a House Education subcommittee approved a school construction bill that went beyond what the President was asking (he had proposed a four-year, $1.3 billion program): the subcommittee approved a fiveyear, $2 billion plan. Despite such preliminary approval, the school bill faces a rough road through Congress, where it will be opposed on grounds of both economy and principle.

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