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 missilery (while a lot of the progress was made by Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, paying for experiments on the Atlas ICBM out of its own pocket). Moreover, Chrysler's able Keller, far from being a czar, was an "appraiser" of the missile program, did his able job within that limited authority.

But the facts made little difference to Harry Truman. By the time anyone caught up with them, he was off in Los Angeles assaulting the Republicans for letting the U.S. defense "go to pot for a mess of pottage called a balanced budget."