POLITICAL NOTES: Blood on Whose Hands?

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Side Shows & Windmills. The debate did not end there, nor would it end soon. All over the nation, G.O.P. orators pounded at their new issue. In Des Moines, G.O.P. state chairmen from twelve states demanded the resignation of Acheson and Secretary of Defense Johnson for "demonstrated ineptitude." Out in Illinois, where Majority Leader Scott Lucas was hard-pressed for reelection, his opponent, ex-Congressman Everett Dirksen, shifted his campaign from economy and attacks on the Marshall Plan to the Korean war. Among the heat-shimmering, cotton-candy wheels and fried-chicken stands of Illinois's State Fair, Dirksen reminded fairgoers that only eight months ago the President had said that the state of the union was good. "It is not good now, Mr. President," cried Dirksen, "because of your neglect of our defenses . . . The blunderers and stupid policymakers sowed the seeds of war in Washington. That's why young people die today."

Next day, the Democrats mustered 5,000 faithful from Chicago, and Vice President Alben Barkley, to whoop it up for Lucas. "Oh, yes, my opponent has the answer to Yalta," Lucas shouted. "He wants to repudiate the Yalta agreement. But why didn't he come forward with this proposal when he was a member of Congress ?"Illinois's Governor Adlai Stevenson added the other half of the Democrats' rebuttal. "There is no room now," said Stevenson, "for side shows and patent medicine, for epithets and slander, for diversions and nonsense . . . Our problem is to fight Communism, not windmills."

No one knew better than the Democrats, however, that victories in Korea, not arguments, was their best hope now.