The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THERE is increasing concern in Washington over the Eisenhower Administration’s deterrence doctrine to prevent the outbreak of war. This concern is evident, though soft-pedaled, both within the Administration and in Congress, especially among the Democrats. Criticism is tinged with politics in part but by and large it is sincere.

The first year of the Eisenhower Administration brought forth Secretary Dulles’s massive retaliation doctrine. The resulting criticism at home and abroad and the evolution of nuclear weapons now have led Dulles to a less-than-massive retaliation thesis. But they have not altered the key question: If the Communists accept, the challenge, will the President permit the use of nuclear weapons? Or will the United States back down?

The deterrence doctrine, now public policy in Britain as well as in the United States, has turned Communist efforts towards peripheral or marginal steps in the conflict with the West. For there is no question in Washington that in a big war nuclear weapons would be used by the United States. The President has said that tactical atomic weapons would be used “just like bullets.”

It is because the threat of nuclear retaliation seems to be effective in engendering caution on the other side of the Iron Curtain that it is creating concern in Washington. For it is not the all-out conflict that Washington is worrying about. It is the little war, the probing action, the brush fire set by the Communists — above all by the Chinese Communists — which is the problem.

But as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, there is only one line for President Eisenhower to cross, whether the conflict is big or little: Will the United States be the first to use these weapons — atomic shells, guided missiles, or small bombs, all those “weapons of precision which can utterly destroy military targets without endangering unrelated civilian centers,” as Dulles has described our tactical nuclear weapons? It does not matter that the smallest A-weapon may bring little more military gain than would a massive air attack with conventional bombs. It is the psychological, not the military, effect which is at the heart of the matter.

Mao Tse-tung in January told a Western diplomat that if the United States attacks Red China with atomic weapons, it may be able to kill 100 million Chinese. But, he added, there still will be 400 million left. And he added that China has superiority of manpower, which he called a measure of victory in war because machines do not live and cannot be effective without human direction.

Mao, like Khrushchev, knows that the world would brand America the aggressor if we should use nuclear weapons on what the world would consider less than adequate provocation. Hence, it is widely reasoned in Washington, the Communists seek to provoke us into a step which would prove their charge of American aggression. This danger has been recognized as most serious in the Formosa situation.

The need for conventional weapons

In announcing the adoption of the deterrence thesis for Britain, Churchill was careful to add that “the policy of the deterrent cannot rest on nuclear weapons alone” for “unless we were prepared ... to unleash a full-scale nuclear war as soon us some local incident occurred in some distant, country, we must have conventional forces in readiness to deal with such situations as they arise.”

President Eisenhower has said that the United States should not put too great reliance on one kind of weapon. Yet more and more people in Washington are convinced that that is exactly what the United States is doing. Dulles’s downgrading of retaliation from the massive to the precision bombing level is taken as proof. The sorry story told to Congress by the service chiefs about the loss of trained manpower — especially that needed to operate the machines of modern war, conventional or nuclear — is taken as another proof. And no Washington newspaperman who has ever spoken to a Soviet or satellite diplomat here doubts the thoroughness of their culling of the American press and the Congressional Record.

The President has stressed over and over the need for an East-West agreement on arms. He has taken what could be a useful step in making Harold Stassen his special assistant to search for new methods of approach. There is unquestionably a need for fresh thought — and for breaking through the negative attitude at the Pentagon on any program which might limit weapons experimentation. But any arms control agreement can only be the product of international mutual confidence. And so Washington feels that Stassen’s road is still a long, long trail a-winding.

Economic changes at home

The first two years of the Eisenhower Administration demonstrated that Republicans in power after twenty years in exile would not repeal the social and economic advances of the New and Fair Deals. The second two years will demonstrate whether this Administration is able to cope with the flood of new demands which spring from two inescapable facts of our times.

First is the population surge which already has overcrowded our elementary schools and will soon do the same for secondary school and college facilities. Even now this population increase is adding three quarters of a million Americans to the labor market each year, and it will eventually require us to make provision for a growing number of the aged.

Second is the changing nature of American industry and American business markets. The postwar rebuilding of the nation’s industrial machine is now resulting in increased productivity per manhour but not a comparably increased employment — a change popularly, if somewhat inaccurately, summed up in the term “automation.” Automation is the second step in the industrial revolution. First, machines replaced manpower. Now, because of increasingly complex technology and man’s inability to make decisions as rapidly as the processes require, instruments have assumed the task of decision based on data fed them in advance. The result is more production for less manpower. The temporary dislocations it creates, as management sees it, can be more than met by the new jobs it will create in time. But that time gap, added to the 750,000 new people looking for jobs each year, is bound to create both social and political problems.

European recovery and the strong re-entry of West Germany and Japan into the world’s markets concurrently with the decrease of American foreign aid have together contracted, relatively speaking, the ability of American farms and factories to ship their products overseas. As a result there is increased competition for what must be our everexpanding home market.

President Eisenhower is fond of quoting Lincoln’s reference to the legitimate object of government: to do for the people what needs to be done, but what they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves. Today’s needs of Americans are immense and burgeoning. Individuals cannot meet them. Local governments, even state governments, likewise cannot, or will not, for the most part.

After the depression experience, no Administration will long remain in power in Washington if it does not reasonably satisfy such needs. However high the Eisenhower rating may be today in the Gallup poll, it cannot be sustained if the voters become convinced that their government is letting them down. More and more Democrats in Washington have reached the conclusion that somewhere in this massive domestic problem lie the seeds of political issues —and the only real possibility of defeating a second Eisenhower candidacy.

The new South and the tariff

The battle over extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act this spring has been indicative of the Administration’s problem and its approach. The President assumed that because the Democrats historically had supported the trade program, a Democratic Congress would readily vote to extend and improve the law. Yet it had been apparent here for at least a year that declining economic activity at home (which was partly responsible for the election of one Democratic Senator and perhaps a dozen Democratic Congressmen last fall) would bring new pressures for protection.

The surprise, when the voting began, was the extent of new protectionist sentiment among the Southern Democrats in whose territory new industry was demanding help, and the free trade sentiment among Midwest Republicans whose farmer constituents seek foreign markets.

More than two years ago the Bell Commission’s Trade and Tariff Policy Report, still the best document on the subject, put its primary recommendation in these words: “That decisions on trade policy be based on national interest, rather than the interests of particular industries or groups; that in cases where choice must be made between injury to the national interest and hardship to an industry, the industry be helped to make adjustments by means other than excluding imports — such as through extension of unemployment insurance, assistance in retraining workers, diversification of production and conversion to other lines.”

The Randall Commission, however, did not go so far. The Administration did nothing. As a result, a Democratic Congressman with a genuine case of an injured industry in his district recently spoke up about the management and workers of the firm in these words: —

“They are not isolationists and they believe that this country is best off when we can enjoy a greatly increased two-way international trade. But they dislike the suggestion that they should be asked to drop dead, without any thought being given to how to cushion the impact on them of the policy of expanding international trade.” Even at that the Congressman stuck to his principles and voted for the trade extension act.

“Ike and Dick" again?

The Republican anguish at Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler’s suggestion that Mr. Eisenhower might not choose to run in 1956 was an index of how completely the GOP hopes are with Eisenhower. Practically every politician in Washington in both parties has assumed now for some time that the President would run again.

Most of the politicians assume, as a corollary, that if the President does run he will require that the ticket be “Ike and Dick ” again. The President has constantly volunteered the most friendly and protective remarks about Vice President Nixon. Nixon himself, when not out on a presidentiaily inspired tour, has occasionally turned up in the National Press Club bar in what is taken as an effort to demonstrate that he is one of the boys.

But a good many Republicans, and especially independents who voted for and support Eisenhower, are most unhappy over a second term for Nixon. They know that the President would be past seventy at the end of a second Administration, the most advanced age ever reached by any President in office. They wince whenever Eisenhower publicly refers to his age. They know he is conscious of his advanced age, however proud he is of his vigor.

According to the hoary rules of American politics, any strong presidential candidate can pick his running mate. Yet Vice Presidents have been dumped. Roosevelt dumped two: Garner for being too conservative, and Wallace because the party politicians insisted he was a drag on the ticket. And one of the leading congressional Republicans has been heard to remark that “Vice Presidents are expendable.”

Still, you can’t beat somebody with nobody. And those who would like to dump Nixon, who feel he is too risky to be so close to the Presidency and who believe he would lose many independent votes on an “Ike and Dick” ticket in 1956, have so far failed to come up with an alternative. It is well known that the President thinks highly of former GOP House Majority Leader Charles Halleck, a conservative who went down the line in the last Congress. George Humphrey’s name has been mentioned but he is increasingly a target of Democratic attack.

Senate Minority Leader William E. Knowland seems more and more unlikely, as he has veered further and further from the President on foreign policy. Yet Knowland and Governor Goodwin Knight, both of whom dislike Nixon, will control the California delegation in 1956.

Right now, Washington feels that those who ward a substitute for Nixon to run with Eisenhower have two almost unsolvable problems: to find an adequate replacement, and to convince the President that Nixon would be a liability on the ticket.

The new Harlan

The Senate confirmation of Justice John Marshall Harlan, after six months of delaying tactics chiefly by Southern Democrats fearful of his vote on the non-segregation issue, has been one hopeful spring note. Harlan is judged a man of dignity, discretion, and competence in the law despite limited judicial experience. He is known to feel a compulsion to live up to the reputation of his grandfather of the same name, the great Chief Justice who in 1896 wrote the famous dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson which was the basis for the decision against racial segregation.

The only reservation regarding Harlan was that at his confirmation hearing he depreciated his relationships to organizations favoring limitation of national sovereignty in the interests of world peace. There was general approval of his decision to resign from all political organizations, however. The judges of the Supreme Court must be especially careful not to take sides on any issue outside their judicial function.

MOOD of the Capital

The squabble over tax reductions and the row about the Yalta papers returned Washington to the normal routine of politics. They demonstrated once again the problem of conducting a government with different parties in power at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

As a result, the Capital expects more of the same from now until election day, a year and a half from now. The necessary domestic bills will pass Congress, of course. And the bipartisan foreign policy, rewelded in the January crisis over Formosa by Secretary Dulles and Senator Walter George, will continue. But the air of mutual suspicion has been heightened, and more outbreaks of politics in both foreign and domestic affairs are expected in both parties.