The Week

It is significant that the suggestion that he might commit so much as a single American battalion to combat without consulting with Congress so horrified President Eisenhower that he lost his equanimity. The contrast with Mr. Roosevelt, who deployed American armed forces in utter disregard of congressional sentiment, and with Mr. Truman, who cockily committed us to a major war by the device of calling it a “police action,” is refreshing. There is quite clearly in the President an instinctive respect for constitutional balance of power, which, when undeflected by the Palace Guard, hits the people with a considerable punch.

Everybody is amused by a certain kind of impiety— by cartoons that show children throwing snowballs at top hats and spattering stuffed shirts. So it’s hard not to chuckle at the sight of Senator Kefauver, the overgrown child, poking his barrel-stave lance at the balloons of the solemn and mighty. At the same time, let’s not overlook the fact that Estes Kefauver is the worst of the Presidential candidates. His style is less flamboyant than Huey Long’s, but at the rate he is going he may set some new demagogic records before he is finished. He promises anyone anything, but beneath the mishmash of his folksy speeches there runs a dark leftward-heading current of statism at home and capitulation abroad.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

It is significant that the suggestion that he might commit so much as a single American battalion to combat without consulting with Congress so horrified President Eisenhower that he lost his equanimity. The contrast with Mr. Roosevelt, who deployed American armed forces in utter disregard of congressional sentiment, and with Mr. Truman, who cockily committed us to a major war by the device of calling it a “police action,” is refreshing. There is quite clearly in the President an instinctive respect for constitutional balance of power, which, when undeflected by the Palace Guard, hits the people with a considerable punch.

Everybody is amused by a certain kind of impiety— by cartoons that show children throwing snowballs at top hats and spattering stuffed shirts. So it’s hard not to chuckle at the sight of Senator Kefauver, the overgrown child, poking his barrel-stave lance at the balloons of the solemn and mighty. At the same time, let’s not overlook the fact that Estes Kefauver is the worst of the Presidential candidates. His style is less flamboyant than Huey Long’s, but at the rate he is going he may set some new demagogic records before he is finished. He promises anyone anything, but beneath the mishmash of his folksy speeches there runs a dark leftward-heading current of statism at home and capitulation abroad.