THE PRESIDENCY: Say It Is Or Isn't So

To President Eisenhower's bedside one morning last week came the week's most constant caller with the week's most pressing executive business. Businesslike Sherman Adams, pushing a twelve-hour day as White House No. 1 while Ike is away, reviewed the matter quickly. If the U.S. showed a favorable attitude, said he, invitations to visit Russia would be forth coming to all Chiefs of Staff, not merely the Air Force's General Nathan Farragut Twining. Two hours later Russia's Colonel Sergei A. Edemsky called at the Pentagon, learned the U.S.'s attitude: such J.C.S. visits are impractical just now; future chances will hinge on Twining's treatment in Russia next week. In any event, the Chiefs would not visit as a group (presumably because the U.S. would never put its four top-ranking military men in Russian hands at one time). So went Dwight Eisenhower's first major decision since he entered Walter Reed Hospital for surgery.

Advised of the presidential ruling by a tired, taut and testy Jim Hagerty, newsmen realized that Ike still had a Levin tube down his throat, a needle in his arm for feeding, a temperature and pulse only "essentially" normal. By Hagerty's own description the President still "did not feel like doing a jig." Had he actually, they pressed, made the decision himself? Or had he assented meekly to a judgment already made? Said Hagerty: "The President certainly made the decision. He sure did." On Capitol Hill the question was echoed by Congressmen considering what to do about legislation spelling out the point at which a President should be relieved as incapacitated. (Their decision: do nothing until after November.) Only one question was more gripping at that moment: whether Ike would decide not to run. When neither no nor yes to that one filtered down from Walter Reed's presidential suite last week, the world did its own guessing and grumbling.

Unhealthy Prognosis. In Chicago Democratic Chairman Paul Butler purpled over the unequivocal approval of a re-election campaign given by Ike's surgeon, Major General Leonard D. Heaton, a scant ten hours after the operation (TIME, June 18). Butler condemned Republicans for practicing a "new science of politico-medicine." In Chicago Dr. David Allman, who last week was chosen president-elect of the American Medical Association, burbled (without examining any of the subjects) that the President would now be "in better physical condition than any of his opponents—Republican or Democratic—have been at any time in their lives." He got a quick rebuke from the Milwaukee Journal, among others, for making "a political mockery of medical science."