The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE sweeping re-election of Dwight D. Eisenhower was predicated on a continuation of his first-term aims of tranquility at home and peace abroad. But the eruptions in Eastern Europe against the Soviets and the combined BritishFrench-lsraeli move against Egypt in late October brought a host of new problems for the American government. The decision of our two major allies to resort to war as an instrument of national policy shattered the Dulles formula of keeping the peace by giving ground to the rampant nationalism centered in Cairo.

The heart of the Eisenhower policy, coexistence with the Soviet Union in the nuclear age, remains intact. But that policy in itself played a part in the complex of events in late October and early November. The American election and Soviet entrapment in the satellites were certainly two key factors in the decisions taken in London, Paris, and Tel Aviv to strike against Egypt.

Thus Eisenhower’s second term will begin with two sets of problems: how to maintain the peace with the Soviet Union, which likewise acknowledges the limitations placed on both major powers by nuclear science, and how to come together once again with those allies on whom the United States must count to help contain Communism short of nuclear war. The Kremlin faces a reverse form of the same problems: how to contain the Western power, to prevent its advance in the face of revolt among the satellite peoples, and how to make some withdrawal of Soviet military force.

Before the Middle East outburst, the most telling foreign policy argument made against Eisenhower during the campaign had been the charge that he had not yet shaped a policy for America in the era of peaceful coexistence — the era which formally began at the Summit Conference some seventeen months ago.

Now the President not only must shape and execute such a policy, but he must find ways to draw together the old alliance. That alliance has been strained before, from the days of Woodrow Wilson before we entered World War I down to the days of Western Europe’s fears that we would plunge it into war over Asia. The basic ties across the Atlantic are probably too strong to be severed — after all, nothing has altered the mutual need to hold together in the face of Soviet power. But it may be that a new relationship will evolve out of the ashes of today, especially if the Europeans go forward with integration among themselves.

Both the Eastern European and Middle East events have demonstrated that the bipolar world centered on Moscow and Washington has cracked up. But to what extent and with what result will depend considerable on how the President handles American policy in his second term. It will be a period of both risk and opportunity.

The President’s — and Dulles’s — shock at the British-French action sprang from a conviction that any such move was a historical retrogression which could not in the long run prevail against the tide of nationalism. On the other hand, the Polish and Hungarian uprisings were taken in Washington as the inevitable result of de-Stalinization and thus part of that same tide of history.

Perhaps Eisenhower’s place in history will rest on the fact that in his first term he led America to a general realization that an era had ended— that the bitterness of the Cold War years, the internal mutual suspicions and frustrations over the unwon Korean War, must be replaced by a liveand-let-live relationship with the Communist orbit in the shadow of the Bomb. And in personally guiding the change of atmosphere to one which accepts, by and large, the idea of peaceful coexistence, the President has avoided a swing to the illusions of disarmament and reliance on peace pacts which marked the decades following World War I.

Time for policy

What the President so far has failed to do, and what he now must do, is to demonstrate that America is prepared to take a positive stance befitting these changed circumstances.

The United States is faced with a complex of problems, few of them entirely or even chiefly of Soviet making, but practically all of them accentuated or bedeviled by the new Russian tactics of Stalin’s successors. They include the unresolved complex of Sino-American problems (recognition, trade, United Nations admission, the status of Formosa); the pressing necessity to adjust American interests to the rambunctious nationalisms of Asia and the Middle East; the opening phases of what are likely to be similar problems, with added racial overtones, in Africa south of the Sahara; and the emergence of Latin-American nations from their long and more or less exclusive dependence on the United States.

It has been the President’s horror of a nuclear holocaust, his determination to prevent any war for fear it might grow into a nuclear world war, which has led American policy too close to a peaceat-any-price attitude. The British and the French, in the long months of argument over the Suez Canal issue, felt increasingly frustrated because the United States kept striking from their hand the threat of the use of force. In the end, they determined to go it alone — and not to let the United States have even the opportunity, through consultation, once again to argue them out of the use of force. In all these foreign policy issues the President will continue to rely on John Foster Dulles, assuming his health permits. But that there will have to be an eventual reorganization within the State Department is clear.

Sound money and trade

In the economic field President Eisenhower will once again run into the hard steel doors of the Treasury and Secretary Humphrey’s arguments, so convincing to Eisenhower, that a sound dollar at home and normal private trade relations abroad are the most fruitful contributions this nation can make to world stability.

There are powerful voices in the Administration arguing that this is far too limited a point of view, but their ability to move Humphrey remains open to doubt. One leading Republican who serves in an important ambassadorial post recently said that unless Humphrey is willing to permit adoption of a bold economic program there will be “blood on those rose-colored glasses.”

Even Eisenhower’s expanding trade ideas are in trouble because of the increasing protectionist cries at home, especially from the Southern Democrats who reflect the accelerated industrialization of the South. In this field the President will face a wholly new problem if the current talk of a Western European common market should come to fruition. A vast continental market, which would be as populous as the United States and which may even include the United Kingdom besides, could be a counterpart of America—and with similar protectionist demands by its interested producers.

The German enigma

The President and Secretary Dulles have long urged a United States of Europe but never at the price of creating a third force in the sense of political neutralism. The United States has been greatly dependent on its overseas bases, especially in Western Europe, and will remain so for much if not all of Eisenhower’s second term.

Germany will continue to confront the President throughout his second term. But he can hardly count on unbroken support in Bonn from the aged Konrad Adenauer. The German enigma calls for imaginative policy-making as part of the opportunity to exploit the weakening of the ties between Moscow and the East European satellites — ties clearly strained by Tito’s insistence on his own kind of national independence and by the Polish and Hungarian rebellions.

Dulles moved at once to assure Moscow, partly by his public words, partly by private messages through the Yugoslavs, that Washington like Moscow did not want to see governments in the satellite nations unfriendly to Russia, and that the United States did not seek to add them as military allies. Washington’s worst fears, however, were realized when the Hungarian rebels pushed far beyond Titoism to bring on the Red Army bloodbath.

In the disarmament, or more properly arms limitation, field the President can be counted on to explore whatever ideas come up to him despite the natural hesitation of many in the Pentagon and Atomic Energy Commission. He will undoubtedly continue his policy of altering the character of the armed forces to accentuate weapons over manpower, with perhaps some modification to create “fire brigades” to meet the small-war possibilities.

New ideas and their implementation are imperative in the face of the Kremlin’s efforts to consolidate the Communist position from East Berlin to the Sea of Japan and to find a viable relation with the satellites and with the increasing number of nonCommunist nations.

Who says recession?

In the domestic field, Eisenhower’s policies will be influenced above all by the changing state of the American economy and by the extent of resistance to the end of segregation.

There have been signs over the past year that a cyclical business recession was in the making, though the economists have had to keep shoving back the date of its expected arrival. Another “rolling readjustment” such as occurred in 1953—1954 would call into play large measures of federal support for the economy, so completely have the Eisenhower Republicans accepted the “full employment” concept even though there are rightwing holdouts among the GOP. But there is no reason to doubt that the American economy has a basic vitality or that the continuation in office of Eisenhower will encourage risk-taking by business.

The farm recession, subject to the vagaries of weather and foreign markets, will remain a headache, with the President forced more and more to trim the flexible price support principle while still honoring it in name. The soil bank is almost certain to be expanded, and some form of direct production payments to farmers, with concomitant acreage controls, especially for overabundant wheat and cotton, is not impossible.

There is no simple answer to the cyclical problems of meat production, but production payments for wool, approved by Eisenhower, now work well and could be applied to at least some of the perishable crops. In sum, the government’s hand on agriculture is hardly likely to decline despite the President’s and Secretary Benson’s hopes for flexibility and their personal beliefs that the farmers want less government control.

The pattern of resistance in the deep South to the Supreme Court’s ruling on public school segregation is now apparent. The President’s inclination will be to rely on what he has time and again said are the chief elements to bring change — education and persuasion. It may very well be that the hard-core resistance will be strong enough, despite continued court battles, to slow down desegregation, and that this in turn will win the President to the idea of some form of federal committee or council through which his enormous prestige can be used to keep desegregation from becoming static.

Fortunately, the campaign did nothing to harden the political aspects of the problem though there is no reason to think that the new Congress will pass the civil rights measures which the last one rejected.

The Eisenhower election triumph doubtless will confirm the President’s conviction of public agreement with his thesis of hiring the best men he can find — that is, the top executives from the business managerial class— to run the government. But a drifting away of some of the more conspicuous examples, such as Defense Secretary Wilson, is not unlikely. Replacements will come from men of less spectacular wealth and personal success but with just as firm convictions of the virtues of private industry and with more ability.

Mood of the Capital

The dominant emotion in Washington the day after the election was simply: Thank God it’s over! Democratic control of the new Congress, even with the narrow Senate margin, testifies to the continuing wide distrust of the Republicans as a party.

Washington only partially accepts Eisenhower’s view that the election demonstrated that “modern Republicanism has now proved itself.” GOP Senate changes, for example, are less than conclusive — Javits, Cooper, and Morton fit the new Republicanism, but Revercomb does not; Duff who did was beaten, yet so was Welker who did not. Langlic, Thornton, and McKay, all Eisenhower backers, failed to win their races; yet Dirksen, a sometime Eisenhower backer, rode Ike’s coattails successfully.

In domestic matters it is probable that the President will follow the more liberal course of his last two years rather than that of his first two, when his own party was in control of Congress.

There should be some form of school aid, for example, and perhaps other related public welfare measures. But basically the effect of split control of the government will be felt far less in the domestic field—where the old coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats will continue to rule Congress —than in the foreign field.

Here the President will be free of the hobbles of right-wing GOP congressional leadership as he has been since the mid-term election in 1954. A Democratic Congress will give Eisenhower more freedom of maneuver in the difficult task of coming to terms with Red China — something he can hardly escape during his second term, though the platforms of both parties will not make that any easier.

Country above party

There have been strong voices among the Democrats in Congress for more forceful policies. But there also has grown up a Democratic suspicion of Administration foreign aid policies, and it will take real bipartisan coöperation in the planning stage to produce a broadly supported program. Here, perhaps as much as anywhere, will be a test of statesmanship at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The President wants to get along with the Democrats. But he alone can pass down the necessary order that will put his Administration in the coöperative mood so necessary for bipartisan action. If he does, the Democrats on the Hill cannot refuse. If coöperation fails for one reason or another, it will be at the peril of the nation.