Without Excuses

In the frenetic baseball season of 1957, any U.S. sports fan worth his fresh roasted peanuts could quickly size up the predicament Dwight Eisenhower faced last week. A good-hit, goodfield Administration team had slithered into a slump, had begun to lose the big ones--the school bill, civil rights, etc. In the grand tradition, criticism for the slump was being hung squarely around the shoulders of the manager. There were no suggestions that he be forthwith fired. But there were plenty of jeers and birdcalls from the stands and the boxes--"lame duck," "no brains," "lousy liar." When Ike met the press last week in the White House version of a clubhouse critique, newsmen quickly zeroed in on the defeats, the slurs, the possibility of change in line-up and tactics.

The President met questions with easy directness: "I would be the first to say that with the difficulty that many of the Administration proposals have run into, that somewhere along the line I have not done as well as might have been done." But, he continued, in a terse summation of his unchanging attitude towards Capitol Hill, "I never employ threats. I never try to hold up clubs of any kind. I just say, 'This is what I believe to be best for the United States,' and I try to convince people by the logic of my position. If that is wrong politically, well then I suppose you will just have to say I am wrong."

Degrees of Enthusiasm. Was he worried about the verbal pop bottles shattering around him? Replied Ike: "I refer you to the second term of President Washington, and you look to see what the papers said about him,* and when I compare the weak, inconsequential things they say about me compared to what they say about the man who I think is the greatest human the English-speaking race has produced, then I can be quite philosophical about it."

If the President's political philosophy excluded threats and clubs, it did not rule out "degrees of enthusiasm that I have for the re-election or election of certain people, even though they bear the name Republican ... so I have, I think, my own ways of expressing that degree of enthusiasm."

Separate Functions. What last week's critique added up to was clear: Dwight Eisenhower holds definite ideas on how he himself must play the great game of government and politics. Regardless of criticism and a lackluster record of congressional achievement this session, he would continue in his conviction that the ground rules specify separate functions for the branches, that the executive should not attempt to browbeat the legislative. And if his tactics, when the capital season ended, lost a pennant, he was unapologetically ready to shoulder the blame.

Last week the President also:

> Nominated, to succeed Charles Erwin Wilson as Secretary of Defense, Procter & Gamble President Neil Hosier McElroy of Cincinnati (see box).

> Selected five U.S. delegates, five alternates to the U.N. General Assembly, including Cinemactress Irene Dunne. Named as delegates: U.S. Representative to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, Indiana University President Herman B. Wells, and two Congressmen, Missouri Democrat A. S. J. Carnahan and Minnesota Republican Walter H. Judd. Alternates: Deputy Representative to the U.N. James J. Wadsworth, Mrs. Oswald B. Lord of New York, Philip M. Klutznick of Park Forest, 111., Chicago Negro Lawyer Genoa S. Washington, and Miss Dunne.

> Named to succeed John B. Hollister as head of the International Cooperation Administration with the job of handling the $3 billion-plus-a-year foreign-aid program: husky, balding James Hopkins Smith Jr., 47, Groton, Harvard ('31), Columbia Law School ('35), World War II Navy pilot, onetime (1946-49) vice president of Pan American World Airways and standout Administration junior as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air (1953-56).

> Awarded, in a surprise ceremony, a gold star in lieu of a fourth Distinguished Service Medal ("for exceptionally valorous service") to retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur William Radford, 61, one of the U.S.'s great naval officers and strategic theorists (TIME, Feb. 25). Chicago-born, Annapolis-trained Airman Raddy Radford racked up a World War II Pacific reputation as "the pilots' admiral," a postwar Pentagon reputation as a Navy zealot bent upon scuttling the Air Force's intercontinental B-36 bomber. Appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1953, Radford successfully drove through "the new look" regearing of U.S. defense for the long pull--"We can't hope to compete with the Communist manpower, but we can build up an organization that can apply superior power at the right time and place."

*The papers called Washington a traitor, a spoiled child, an anemic counterfeit of the English kings. Wrote onetime friend Tom Paine in a 1796 open letter: "As to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship . . . and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any."

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