THE NATION: Long Beat to Windward

He gave candy to kids, visited supermarkets, talked about getting some da, da, da—yes, yes, yes—into U.S.-Soviet relations. For his apparent good-fellowship, he won applause on the luncheon circuit, handshakes from bankers and industrialists, cheers from many a columnist who should have known better. But when the U.S.S.R.'s First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan got down to business in closed-door meetings with President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles last week, he did not budge by so much as a santimetr from familiar Kremlin positions.

Mikoyan had no answer for U.S. editorialists and pundits, who continually clamor at the U.S. State Department for "new solutions." Behind his mask of amiability, Mikoyan was still one of the oldest power-holding Bolsheviks, committed to freedom's eventual extinction. Inevitably, his outer amiability had stirred U.S. hopes for a new era of friendship. But by the very nature of his cause, Anastas Mikoyan could only dash such hopes in the hearts of all but the most unrealistic optimists.

Ahead of the U.S., after Mikoyan's visit as before, stretched the familiar grim vista of struggle—not quite war, certainly not peace, but a course to which the U.S. had long since become accustomed. Against the standard prospect, President Eisenhower, in the budget and the Economic Report that he sent to Congress this week, stressed the nation's need to look to the health of its basic source of material strength: the U.S. economy under the free-enterprise system. For fiscal 1960 the President submitted a balanced $77 billion budget. In his Economic Report, he asked Congress to amend the Employment Act of 1946 by adding "reasonable price stability" to the other economic goals—"maximum production, employment and purchasing power"—that the Federal Government is pledged to foster. "An indispensable condition for achieving vigorous and continuing economic growth," said the President, "is firm confidence that the value of the dollar will be reasonably stable in the years ahead." What that really meant was that the U.S., in the absence of any reasonable hope for a relaxation of cold-war tensions, must go on trimming its fiscal sheets for a long beat to windward.