"All Sorts of Ideas"

The President could hardly have been surprised that another big question at his news conference dealt with the state of U.S. defenses; his morning Washington Post headlined the plea of Air Force General Thomas Power, chief of the Strategic Air Command, for a round-the-clock SAC airborne alert to cover the years (1961-63) when the U.S. will lag in missile production.

"Mr. President," asked U.P.I.'s Merriman Smith, "do you feel any sense of urgency in catching up with the Russians?" Ike was obviously irritated. "I'm always a bit amazed about this business of catching up," he snapped. "What you want is enough, a thing that is adequate. A deterrent has no added power, once it has become completely adequate, for compelling the respect of any potential opponent." The fiscal 1960 budget, said he, appropriates $6,690,000,000 for missiles, "and this, it seems to me, is getting close to the point where money itself will not bring you any quicker development."

Attack & Retreat. Questioned specifically on General Power's testimony to the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, Ike had uncommonly harsh words for generals who dispute him. "There are too many of these generals who have all sorts of ideas," said he testily. "I have been long enough in the military service that I cannot be particularly disturbed because everybody with a parochial*viewpoint all over the place comes along and says the bosses know nothing about it."

The generals snapped quickly into line, toned down their talk of gaps and lags --at least in public. General Thomas White, the Air Force chief, called Tommy Power's zeal "unfortunate," then muted his own appeals for more funds. While he also favored an air-alert program and greater speed in building the B70 supersonic bomber, White said that his own responsibilities were "relatively narrow" and that his requests had been refused by "my superiors" (i.e., Defense Secretary Thomas Gates and President Eisenhower), and he accepts the decisions and respects the men who made them. General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Army Chief of Staff, said he did not plan to contest a recent Budget Bureau decision to withhold $137 million in Army funds for the Nike-Zeus anti-missile missile.

Counterattack. The fact that top generals were no longer willing to scrap publicly with Ike took some of the political wind out of Democrats who had helped to balloon the defense debate into a big issue. It left the field principally to handsome General Maxwell Taylor, recently retired Army Chief of Staff, who made the most of it.* Testifying to a joint session of the Senate Space Committee and Preparedness Subcommittee, Taylor urged less reliance on long-range missiles, greater reliance on a balanced arsenal of weapons that could wage any kind of war. "The trend of military strength is against us," said Max Taylor. "Our manned-bomber force is a dwindling military asset. Our long-range missile force is limited in size, uncertain in reliability and immobile upon exposed bases. We have no anti-missile defense in being or in sight. There is no effective fallout protection for our civil population." He prescribed strong medicine: a boost in defense spending from $41 billion to $50 or even $55 billion a year. "To change the trend," said Taylor, "will require more men, money and sacrifice."

The Administration has yet to make a strong case to the contrary, and Ike's testy snapping was a poor substitute. At week's end even-tempered Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke labored over a detailed declaration--due this week --that the U.S. is not now and never will be a second-rate power.

*Webster's definition: "Limited in range or scope; narrow." To Ike, an officer who cannot see beyond his own narrow military base or service is "parochial." And who two days later was hit by a Washington taxi, landed in Walter Reed hospital with a broken left arm and badly cut nose.

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