DEMOCRATS: Ragtime

Harry S. Truman was plunking his give-'em-hell keyboard again last week—only this time he was putting national defense to political ragtime. In one of his jazziest now-when-I-was-President moods, Harry recalled how he had seen the U.S. long-range missile program lagging, called in Chrysler Corp. President K. T. Keller, made him a missiles czar, with "instructions to knock heads together whenever it was necessary to break through bottlenecks." After that, claimed Truman, the missile program made "encouraging progress"—until, of course, the Eisenhower Administration ruined it all.

The fact: the Truman Administration muddled along spending about $1,000,000 a year on long-range ballistics...