Beyond Defense

Presidential Candidate Stuart Symington, like Presidential Candidate Lyndon Johnson, has a problem of labels. Last week Symington took to the road to explain that he is concerned with more than the problem of U.S. military weaknesses, for years his specialty. At a Des Moines press conference, he said that he did not appreciate being called a "one-track-mind" candidate, protested: "I am equally concerned with economic, social, moral and spiritual might." During the past year, Symington said, he had made more speeches about agriculture and economics than about defense.

Before leaving Washington, Symington set forth some of the problems that worry him. In a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he ticked off a grim list of the "liabilities" of the U.S.: "Recurrent large-scale unemployment; one-fourth of a nation living in poverty in a land of plenty; inflation, which hurts those most who need help most; millions of our senior citizens living on pittances; millions of our young people denied full educational opportunity; millions of farm families forced ever downward toward relative and absolute poverty; millions of families living in urban and rural slums; millions of families denied the medical care and future benefits which current science and medical research can provide."

During his two-day tour of Iowa, Symington pounded hard on a handy theme: the farmer and his problems. His own twelve-point farm program, he told a Democratic luncheon in Waterloo, is better and less costly than Ezra Benson's "phantom farm program." In Davenport, Symington turned his attention to the need for water resources: "In the dictionary of Republicanism, as proven by their plans and their budgets, the fate of a river is to flow wastefully to the sea. Democrats, however, believe that every great river offers a challenge to invest in a better America."

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