That must have been some airplane ride down to Georgia! Mrs. Charlie Wilson sat stiffly by herself the whole trip long, reading a book, a wisp of steam coming out of her nostrils every now and then, while the boys sneaked away and disported, nervously, in one of the staterooms. When they landed, General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower tiptoed past Mrs. Wilson to get his hat. When he noticed that the book she was reading was called How to Like Ike and Like It, they rushed off and put in a call to Paul Dudley White.
To the surprise of nobody, Leon Keyserling, who used to be Harry Truman’s favorite economic haruspex, has written an article for the New York Times Magazine called “The Case for a Big Budget.” Mr. Keyserling thinks that as a country gets richer, its budget must increase even more than proportionally. We don’t doubt that the more money people have, the more you can take away from them. It is Mr. Keyserling’s calm assumption that the federal government has a first lien on every man’s income and that planners operating a budget can do better than the market to meet people’s needs in practically everything. “First things first,” says Mr. Keyserling. Or, the better to emphasize the tacit element in Mr. Keyserling’s thinking, “First things first—with the planners first of all.”
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