The Same Ike

The New York Times Sunday Magazine section carried a glowing analysis called "The 'New Look' of the President." In London, Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express took up the cry: "Call him a new Ike. For there's no doubt about it. Dwight D. Eisenhower is a changed man today." To the studious newspaper reader and radio listener, it seemed that everybody and everybody's brother, aunt, cousin and cook were prattling happily about the New Eisenhower. It was an odd business because, in point of obvious fact, the New Eisenhower had been around for quite a while--and his presence was apparent over months past to anyone willing to look.

Sudden Flood. What had brought the tide of praise for President Eisenhower to sudden flood was apparently enthusiasm for his bold effort to sweep aside the cold war's barriers by trading visits with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. The chatter about the New Eisenhower came during an Ike week that was dramatic in several other ways. The President was in his usual top form at his press conference, held in a converted Gettysburg gymnasium. On Capitol Hill, an attempt to override an Eisenhower veto of an inflated housing bill failed miserably and all but nailed down a victory for Ike in his long, steady fight to balance the U.S. budget. After the year's most dramatic legislative battle, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a stern anti-racketeering labor bill, it was the influence of President Eisenhower--thrown into the struggle at the right time in the right way--that was largely responsible.

In the light of such performance, most of it stemming from actions and positions of months ago, the seemingly spontaneous New Eisenhower line, especially in the U.S. press, was a journalistic baffler, though it did make for some bright writing and the appearance of punditic discovery. "One evidence of the change," wrote the Washington Evening Star's Garnett Horner from Gettysburg, "is the very fact that he held a news conference here at all yesterday." The New York Times's Washington Bureau Chief James Reston played a variation on the New Ike theme: "What appeared was not really 'a new Ike' at all, but a new reflection of that captivating figure, the 'old Ike' of London and Paris and the prepolitical days of long ago . . . He is now the man of action again, moving and planning and speaking out with a new serenity." Pundit Walter Lippman, who had been wringing his hands for years about Eisenhower shortcomings, agreed--more or less--with Reston: "We have seen no such display of energy and initiative since the early days of his first Administration. For years the present Eisenhower has been quiescent, as it were submerged. But what we see now is not a new Eisenhower. This is the old authentic Eisenhower with his liking for large gestures which sweep aside the concrete details that more worldly statesmen and professional diplomats worry about."

Full Holler. Characteristically, the British press, until a few weeks ago reviling Ike as a senescent, bewildered man ("a man who can hardly perform his day-to-day tasks," said Beaverbrook's Express last April), now turned full-holler the other way round. Under the headline,

THE STAGGERING CHANGE IN EISENHOWER, the staggered London Daily Mail reported: "The sick man leaning away from leadership has become the keen-eyed, confident head of state ready to cope with anything." The Manchester Guardian was almost mystic in its praise: "Something deeper and nobler than a passion for a political prize now guides the President's conduct."

By his performance, President Eisenhower unquestionably deserved the praise that was finally coming his way. It is a matter of medical history that in 1955, 1956 and 1957, Dwight Eisenhower suffered a series of serious illnesses--and it is a matter of medical fact that such illnesses take something out of the victim. But the Dwight Eisenhower everyone was praising last week did not just magically appear last week, or last month.

Rather, it was more than a year ago that Ike stood up under one of the hardest leadership tests ever imposed on a U.S. President. In the midst of the 1958 economic recession, Democrats were shouting for the Administration to start priming the fiscal pumps. Some of the President's closest advisers urged him to take spending measures against depression. Ike stood firm, refusing to panic under tremendous pressure (TIME, March 24, 1958 et seq.), and the economy dramatically righted itself as he had insisted it would.

Again this year, confronted by whopping Democratic majorities in Congress, President Eisenhower made the deliberate, determined decision to fight down the line for a balanced budget (TIME, Jan. 5 et seq.). Most pundits gave the President hardly a chance to make the decision stick--but he did. During the Berlin crisis, while Secretary of State John Foster Dulles lay dying, it was Dwight Eisenhower who laid down the strong, plain line in a television address to the nation: "We have no intention of forgetting our rights or of deserting a free people. Free men have, before this, died for so-called 'scraps of paper' which represented duty and honor and freedom."

It was precisely that sort of leadership that the discoverers of the New Eisenhower were just beginning to catch up with. He was not, in fact, the New Ike or even the New Old Ike, just the same-Ike. It was that same Ike who last week replied to a press conference question asking whether he had a "new concept of the presidency" or whether he was "just feeling better?" Replied the President: "Perfectly simple. When you have a situation that has gone on, as we have had this cold war, since 1945 . . . there must be no gun unfired and no individual effort spared." To do the job under such circumstances, said Ike, "takes, therefore, possibly more personal activity than I think would be normal in more normal circumstances."

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