The people's voice., 1958-04-25
Continued From Page Three)


power and few responsibilities coul
claim all the credit for success an
blame failures on a president wit
less power and more responsibility.
In practice, half the party and mos
of its professional politicians stood, il
1852, against those very reforms tina
Eisenhower regarded as his mission
Nevertheless, a man ignorant O.
politics but burning with his mission
resolved to re-make the Republican
party in his own fine image. That tasl
might have been barely possible fol
a master of politics like Franklin
Roosevelt. 1t was impossible for Eisen.
hover, an executive and soldier.
IGNORED WARNINGS OF
HIS OWN GOOD SENSE"
He foresaw his difficulties quite
plainly when, at first, he refused to
run. At that time, as Truman recently
revealed Eisenhower wrote letter
arguing that no soldier would be
likely to make a good president. He
perceived but then decided to ignore
the warnings of his own good sense
and of history, as attested by Ulysses
S. Grant and others.
At all events, the re-making of the
Republican party required a party
manager, the third aspect of the presi-
Dental trinity, the others being the
executive and the commander-in-
chief.
Eisenhower could never make sue
cessful party manager. He disliked
politics. The whole business of man.
agement by threat, persuasion, pun
ishment and reward, was repellent to
a nature essentially simple in the best
meaning of that word.
Besides, he did not understand party
management. How could he? Eisen-
hover was hurled into the vortex of
politics without days training, his
mind already shaped by another art.
Still, he made good start by cap
turing the loyalty and affection of his
great conservative opponent, Taft.
Their alliance, though it covered a
deep gulf of principle rather thinly,
promised large achievements. Yet |
something vital had already gone
wrong. Unwilling to be a party man.
ager, the president attempted to be
kind of constitutional monarch
above the dust of the arena. This
could never work.
The first intimations of the coming
tragedy appeared with Taft's death
That left no Republican figure strong
enough, or sympathetic enough to
Eisenhower, to tame and gradually
reform the Republican right wing.
IKE MISREAD THE TIMES
1t was bad enough for Eisenhower
to find himself in split party with
no adequate lieutenant in the legisla-
ture; much worse was his own mis-
reading of the times. The soldier
looked at the power map of the world
and quite misconstrued it, as the great
majority of his people misconstrued
it, as we certainly misconstrued it ;
in Canada.
We can now see that Eisenhower,
who might have been a magnificent
success in other times, was elected for
the wrong purpose, at the wrong l
with the wrong policy. BY I
1852 the natural ebb and flow of |
presidential power had already been c
broken. Throughout American history
4 strong president and weak legis- h
ature have been replaced, at roughly h
,ight-year intervals, by the opposite. a
But the regimes of Roosevelt and Tru- S
nan had stretched the dominance of Il
he presidency to twenty years. Legis- o
ature and people were naturally hos
lie to it. C
Then, too, the depression, World I
War II, the Marshall Plan, the Korean p
Var, the Macarthur episode, the in a
lation and the mink-coat scandals had Il
ickened the people of adventure. h
they enthusiastically elected Eisen-
lower to get the country back on a CO
traight, smooth road. His friendly, p
oyish face looked like the contempo- as
ary image of the old American a
)ream.
All this seemed reasonable at the T.
me. As the power of the United bl
tate remained interchangeable, it's K
lies recovering miraculously with N
merican aid and the Russians occu- al
led with their own affairs tho ara le,