"Working for Our Future"

THE PRESIDENCY "Working for Our Future"

In the conference room of the White House, President Eisenhower faced 80 business-and trade-magazine editors who had taken time off from their Washington convention to visit him--and for the next 20 minutes, held them intent. Speaking without notes, the President spoke on a subject to which he has dedicated himself: the absolute U.S. necessity for an "expanding, healthy and vigorous economy" based on a "sound dollar." In so doing, he drew on the lessons of his boyhood and early Army career, and as rarely before, he demonstrated the highly personal basis for many of his presidential policies.

"When I was a boy," said Dwight Eisenhower, "it was thought we could live our lives on a little piece of ground in the West, and the older folks--grandfather and grandmother--could live in the same home after their days of hard work were ended. That's the way we took care of ourselves and our older people. Today, through the changes in our industrial system, we as a people have become dependent for old-age security more and more upon pensions, insurance policies, savings bonds and savings accounts. These are the people that are particularly hurt by depreciation of the dollar."

Some Startling Lessons. "People who get a dollar one year and spend it that or the next year are not as much hurt, even if there develops a sort of creeping inflation, or cheapening of the dollar. But the man who makes a living today and puts away his savings to be used 40 years from now can receive some startling lessons over that 40-year period.

"My wife and I decided in 1916 to get married. Since I, like all other second lieutenants, was always overdrawn at the bank, I decided that I ought to show a little more sense of responsibility. So I began to buy a small insurance policy. Well, I gave up smoking ready-made cigarettes and went to Bull Durham and the papers. I had to make a great many sacrifices to buy that small insurance policy. Then, 30 years later, the company came around to pay it off. It was so small that I would have been ashamed to ask my wife to exist on it for six months.

"Yet I still think of the fun we had in working for our own future. Indeed, it was easy to make little sacrifices, because I was young and, of course, very much in love."

Some Earnest Views. "But today, think of the man at the lathe, the drill press, who is earning money which he is putting away in his pension with his company or into an insurance policy. If we today cannot assure him that 40 years from now he is going to have a good living left, then I say that sooner or later he will quit buying insurance policies, he will not have any confidence in the Government bond, and he will not think much of his pension."

Finishing, Ike thanked the fascinated editors for their "patience" in "listening to a very homey exposition of some of my own views and convictions on this subject." Concluded the President: "They may not be very erudite, but they are earnest and firm." Last week, in a period of broad-ranging activity, the President also:

P:Told his weekly press conference that he does not intend to be pressured into a summit conference unless the Soviet Union shows evidence of good faith at the four-week-old Big Four foreign ministers' talks at Geneva. Said the President: "There has not been any detectable progress that to my mind would justify the holding of a summit meeting." He added that he would expect the foreign ministers to produce an agreed statement so that "we could see where we are apart on issues, whether we could narrow these gaps, and whether we could define the areas where it would be worthwhile for us to confer ... a decent working paper."

P:Asked congressional leaders of both parties to the White House to discuss refinancing the national debt, afterwards prepared recommendations for new legislation to 1) increase the regular debt limit from $283 billion to $288 billion, and the temporary limit from $288 billion to $295 billion; 2) raise interest rates on savings bonds and long-term Treasury obligations to make them more attractive in the bond market (see BUSINESS).

P:Announced, in a move to tighten U.S. relations with Africa's new states, that the Republic of Guinea's President Sekou Toure (TIME cover, Feb. 16) had accepted an invitation to make an official U.S. visit next October.

P: Helicoptered to Gettysburg for a weekend stay. There he was host at a lawn buffet for 200 White House employees and their families--first party of its kind since the President suffered his 1955 heart attack.

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