70 Year Magazine Archive

Not for This No-Man.

by Willmoore Kendall

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A story must have a beginning, and Eisenhower: The Inside Story, by Robert Donovan (Harper, $4.95) begins after lunch on a historic occasion in the Commodore Hotel. The President-Elect of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, is surrounded by the statesmen of whom he is later to say that “never in the whole of American history had there been a cabinet like this one,” and he has just finished reading to them the latest draft of his inaugural address. Applause resounds through the room.

“I read it,” Mr. Eisenhower says in his best “Aw, shucks” manner, “far more for your blue pencils than for your applause”—thus, as you and I—but not Mr. Donovan—may notice, not flatly excluding the applause. And he wants them to know why: “At first, in our attempt to state a philosophy of government and of intent, we were not close enough down to our daily living… [so] we have been gradually rewriting it.”

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