The Week

It must’ve happened before, but being young we don’t remember a previous example of a Senate leader telling off the President as Lyndon Johnson told off Dwight Eisenhower the other day. Let the President, he said in effect, reconcile the conflicting voices in his own official family, and leave off advising Congress how—and at what pace—to conduct its affairs. The President, he added, will have his answer to recent criticisms of Congress in a voice that the Administration can “hear and understand,” namely: the voice of Congress, which will act “sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably” on the President’s proposals. According, one supposes, as it sees fit, which is of course basic constitutional doctrine. We hazard the guess Mr. Eisenhower hasn’t been talked to like that since he wore bars not stars, and ran a PX not a Leviathan.

Addressing an Armed Forces Day dinner, Ralph J. Cordiner, President of General Electric, estimated that by 1962 the U.S. could be saving $5 billion a year in defense costs if it would adopt a realistic manpower training system. “We now have,” Mr. Cordiner said, “the immensely wasteful expense of half a million men and billions of dollars worth of equipment tied up in repetitive training” while a “Methuselah” pay system based on seniority drives valuable men from the armed forces to remunerative civilian jobs. In the fiscal year 1955, for instance, four thousand pilots resigned. Their training had cost the Defense Department $480 million. To cheat on servicemen’s pay is, Mr. Cordiner believes, to practice false economy, for “the challenge to stay ahead of a potential aggressor means staying ahead in quality of men as well as equipment.”

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It must’ve happened before, but being young we don’t remember a previous example of a Senate leader telling off the President as Lyndon Johnson told off Dwight Eisenhower the other day. Let the President, he said in effect, reconcile the conflicting voices in his own official family, and leave off advising Congress how—and at what pace—to conduct its affairs. The President, he added, will have his answer to recent criticisms of Congress in a voice that the Administration can “hear and understand,” namely: the voice of Congress, which will act “sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably” on the President’s proposals. According, one supposes, as it sees fit, which is of course basic constitutional doctrine. We hazard the guess Mr. Eisenhower hasn’t been talked to like that since he wore bars not stars, and ran a PX not a Leviathan.

Addressing an Armed Forces Day dinner, Ralph J. Cordiner, President of General Electric, estimated that by 1962 the U.S. could be saving $5 billion a year in defense costs if it would adopt a realistic manpower training system. “We now have,” Mr. Cordiner said, “the immensely wasteful expense of half a million men and billions of dollars worth of equipment tied up in repetitive training” while a “Methuselah” pay system based on seniority drives valuable men from the armed forces to remunerative civilian jobs. In the fiscal year 1955, for instance, four thousand pilots resigned. Their training had cost the Defense Department $480 million. To cheat on servicemen’s pay is, Mr. Cordiner believes, to practice false economy, for “the challenge to stay ahead of a potential aggressor means staying ahead in quality of men as well as equipment.”