Shoot the Moon!

President Eisenhower was just returned from West Point, the class of '15 reunion and the homecoming football game (Army 53, Colgate 7). Defense Secretary Neil McElroy had gone home to Cincinnati after watching football in Columbus (Ohio State 47, Northwestern 6). Then the news of Sputnik II rattled over the wires and official Washington, as though by previously stenciled orders, reacted as though it had been socked by nothing more than a soggy sponge; e.g., Pentagon sources were careful to say that McElroy had not even called his personal aides to ask about the air-conditioned moon. "It surely is not surprising to anyone in the government," McElroy told reporters in Cincinnati. "We are already in a pressure program. Our program is in very good shape right now."

Nevertheless, the effect of Sputnik II helped obscure the real work done during a grinding presidential week of National Security Council and Cabinet meetings, a news conference and innumerable lesser conferences that resulted in major decisions. Items:

P: President Eisenhower announced that he will definitely attend the December meeting in Paris of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Thus he hopes to dramatize the decision made in his recent Washington conference with Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to weld NATO into a new unity, not just of arms and armies, but of all Western moral and material resources. One reservation in Washington's planning: the fear that too much emphasis on a Washington-London axis might distract the sessions from their urgent, NATO-wide purpose.

P: The President set the first of his television speeches on national issues for next week in Oklahoma City, set a high-wattage writing team, headed by Arthur Larson, recently of the U.S. Information Agency, to turning out copy. Title of the first speech: "Science and Security."

P: The U.S. finally broke through its $38 billion budget barrier on defense spending, with a decision to put up at least an additional $400 million (see below).

At his news conference, the President was asked if "these great problems sap your strength mentally or physically in any way?" Replied he: "I find it a bit wearing, but I find it endurable if you have got the faith in America that I have." Rather pensively, Dwight Eisenhower noted: "This is one of those falls where I seem to have a lot of things on my plate, and it is hard to tell which to attack first." Four days later Sputnik II, too, dropped on Ike's plate. The Pittsburgh Press expressed a nation's mood: SHOOT THE MOON, IKE.

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