REPUBLICANS: Zestful Leader

Cheerleaders bounded and bounced in a political harlequinade, and Republican dignitaries lined up with grins wide enough for tooth inspection as the presidential Columbine III touched down at San Francisco's International Airport just ahead of the fog bank rolling over the San Bruno hills. Dwight Eisenhower, his face ruddy with returned strength and alight with expectation, stepped lightly from the big airplane, faced microphones and told why he had come a day ahead of schedule to the scene of the Republican National Convention. "I suddenly discovered this was too interesting a place to stay away from," he said. "I just read the names of too many friends in the paper, and I wanted to see them."

The simple statement told a lot about the Eisenhower of Election Year 1956; the military hero who walked so gingerly for so long in the political world has become a zestful party leader who thoroughly likes that world and its political inhabitants. Last week, by his every word and act, he proved it.

The Whole List. San Francisco was like wine to Ike. As he came close to the heart of the city on his run from the airport, he ordered his Lincoln stopped so that the Plexiglas bubble-top could be pushed back. There he stood in the rear waving, first with his left hand, then right, then both, to the heavy crowds who lined the streets and packed Union Square in front of the downtown St. Francis Hotel. His Secret Service escort moved narrow-eyed and tense through the surging, shouting lobby throng, but the President was clearly delighted as he and Mamie Eisenhower made their way to the elevator for the ride to their two-bedroom suite on the sixth floor. There President Eisenhower received brief courtesy calls from California Republican leaders, chatted with his family, retired early.

He was up early Wednesday morning, ready for anything. And the first problem was unscheduled: from Vice President Nixon came an early-morning call reporting his father seriously ill in La Habra. Said Ike: "You've got to go."

The day's regular order of business began with an 8:30 breakfast with Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall. After Hall, in rapid order, came California's Senator Bill Knowland, Convention Chairman Joe Martin, Platform Committee Chairman Prescott Bush and a string of others, including Detroit's Mayor Albert Cobo, who is running for governor of Michigan. Dick Nixon's Republican critic, haggard Harold Stassen, appeared on the sixth floor, conferred for an hour and a half with Presidential Staff Chief Sherman Adams before seeing Ike for ten minutes. The immediate aftermath of Stassen's visit: the first live TV presidential press conference in U.S. history.

His Own Strength. When Ike slipped through a butler's pantry into the Italian Room of the St. Francis, Washington newsmen who had been away covering the conventions were astonished by the change that two weeks had made in his looks and outlook. He seemed muscular, his normally high color had returned, his eyes had brightened. Harold Stassen, said the President, had become "absolutely convinced that the majority of the delegates want Nixon," and had therefore asked to "second the nomination of the Vice President."