Answering the Mail

"Leave a crisis unanswered for a while," wrote Columnist George Dixon after President Eisenhower's news conference last week, "and it tends to lose its importance --just like your mail." From the U-2 to the summit collapse to the Tokyo riots to Cuba's deepening Red hue, headline had piled upon headline in the eight weeks since Ike's last press conference. But, relaxed and tanned, the President made his way through the backlog of questions as though they were last year's mail.

He parried the ones on Cuba, refused to be riled by Khrushchev's promise that the Red flag would soon fly over the whole world, dismissed Khrushchev's "very crude attempts to involve himself" in U.S. politics, praised New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller ("a dedicated, honest and hard-working man") even as he disagreed with Rocky's sharp criticism of U.S. defenses. Next day the President flew from steaming Washington to the breeze-cooled summer White House at Newport, on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, for a month-long working vacation.

Ike has no intention of treating the presidential campaign as a dead letter. Staff members are preparing a series of speeches, beginning with a July 26 address at the G.O.P. Convention, in which he will renew his fight for fiscal responsibility. Congress, reconvening after the conventions, can expect a sharply worded message warning against lavish spending. And the President intends to participate fully in the presidential campaign this fall.

At week's end Khrushchev's rocketrattling support of Castro's Cuba struck Eisenhower as a threat that demanded a fast reply. "I affirm in the most emphatic terms that the U.S. will not be deterred from [its] responsibility by the threats Mr. Khrushchev is making," said he. "Nor will the U.S., in conformity with its treaty obligations, permit the establishment of a regime dominated by international Communism in the Western Hemisphere."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.