THE VICE-PRESIDENCY: How to Shoot Rats

Vice President Richard Nixon had a tough and unwanted assignment: he had to defend the Administration and the President against Adlai Stevenson's criticism, and, in passing, he had to reprove Joe McCarthy and take account of McCarthy's gutter tactics. Nixon handled the assignment with dignity and dispatch. He and the President had agreed in advance, he said, "that this issue is too important to answer in kind with a rip-roaring political tirade before a cheering partisan audience."

Charge No. 1. The Vice President spoke without a prepared text, from nine penciled sheets of notes on yellow, lined paper. He sat alone at a desk in a Washington studio, talking calmly and persuasively in measured, simple language to a radio and television audience estimated at 10 million.

First, Nixon answered Stevenson's charge that the "new look" in U.S. military and foreign policy is sapping the strength of the armed forces in the interests of economy. His answer was the record of Truman: "We found that in seven years of the Truman-Acheson policy 600 million people had been lost to the Communists and not a single Russian soldier had been lost in combat. We found . . . that we were still involved in war in Korea, that it cost us 125,000 American boys as casualties . . . We found that we inherited a budget . . . which . . . would have added 40 billion dollars to the national debt."

Having judged the Truman policy a failure, said the Vice President, Eisenhower & Co. looked to the Kremlin for clues on which to base the new look. "Rather than let the Communists nibble us to death all over the world in little wars," the Government decided to rely "on our massive mobile retaliatory power, which we could use in our discretion against the major sources of aggression at times and places that we chose."

What were the results of that policy? The Vice President ticked them off: "First, the Korean war has been brought to an end. And second, two American divisions have been brought home . . . Third, our budget is approaching a balance, and this means that controls have been ended, that taxes can be reduced and that inflation has been stopped. And fourth—and this is vitally important—we have finally seized the ideological offensive from the Communists all over the world. The President [and] Secretary Dulles . . . have finally placed the responsibility where it belongs—on the Communists—for blockading the road to peace."

Charge No. 2. Answering Stevenson's second charge—that the Eisenhower Administration has not handled the Communist-at-home issue properly—Nixon again compared past and present. "This Administration," he said, "recognizes the danger of Communist infiltration . . . We don't agree with Mr. Truman in kissing off that danger by calling it a 'red herring.' Nor do we agree with Mr. Stevenson, referring as he did to the investigations of that danger as 'chasing phantoms' . . . We know . . . that men like Alger Hiss and Harry White turned over secret papers to the Communists . . . We know that our atomic experts said that the Russians got the secret of the atomic bomb three to five years before they would have gotten it because of the help they received from Communist spies right here in the U.S."