Healthy Outlook

The President of the U.S. strode jauntily out of the Army's Walter Reed Hospital one morning at week's end, a walking testimonial to the report of his doctors. Having examined Ike for two days from head to toe, including barium studies of the gastrointestinal tract, Army Surgeon General Leonard Heaton reported: "The best results we ever had."* Beamed Ike: "It was so good that I would like to go back oftener."

The fine bill of health came at the right time, for piled at the door of the 69-year-old President were enough major problems to give a younger man the shakes. At the top of the heap was the steel strike, nearly four months old and blighting the general economy. Instead of reaching agreement under presidential and public pressure, as Ike had hoped, the industry and the United Steelworkers were digging in for a prolonged battle of principle (see The Economy). Digging in behind them were such major industries as copper, shipping, railroads and meat packing in what promised to be the greatest labor-management confrontation since the sit-down-strike days of the 1930s. At stake was not only the prosperous pace of business but the President's own strong stand against inflationary wage-price boosts.

On inflation's other front, the fight for a balanced U.S. budget for fiscal 1961, disputes were rumbling that only the President could settle. The Pentagon was crying that U.S. defensive strength will suffer if the Administration insists on holding spending to the $41 billion level of the current fiscal year. In fighting against the outflow of dollars to foreign countries, the Administration was studying a possible cut in foreign aid and a revision of trade policies, with an eye toward shaping a new foreign economic policy that would hold the free world together.

Of all the problems, the President was most impatient to get on with the missions of personal diplomacy that he felt might lead toward a hardheaded world peace. A polite Eisenhower nudge brought an agreement from France's President Charles de Gaulle to a pre-summit meeting of Western chiefs of state (Eisenhower, De Gaulle, Britain's Macmillan, West Germany's Adenauer) on Dec. 19 in Paris (see FOREIGN NEWS). Beyond that lay a summit conference with Khrushchev next spring. Between the Western meeting and the long-heralded summit, Ike planned to make his promised visit to Moscow.

Fortunately for Ike, and perhaps for the nation, was the fact that he could stay relatively relaxed about the one problem that was bedeviling most other elected officials: getting re-elected in 1960.

* Ike's health was so robust that doctors had to fudge a little to avoid contradicting his own self-diagnosed complaint of "chronic bronchitis." They tactfully reported that he had a "persistent mild tracheobronchitis."

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