The Press: The First Tiff

"The honeymoon is over," snapped the Republican Cleveland Plain Dealer. Said pro-Eisenhower Publisher John S. Knight in the Detroit Free Press: "President Eisenhower's popularity should not suggest that he is immune from criticism." Texas' San Angelo Standard-Times, which backed Ike in 1952 and 1956, complained: "The Administration has not only gone back on its promise of government economy, it is not entirely frank with the people." Across the U.S. last week, Ike-minded newspapers raised voices in the first general criticism since the Eisenhower Administration took office in 1953. The chief cause was the familiar cause of many a marriage's first tiff—money. The predominantly (62%) pro-Eisenhower press was upset over President Eisenhower's $71.8 billion budget, biggest in peacetime history.

The spectacle of newspapers expressing alarm at heavy government spending was not new. Still, the reaction against Ike's budget was so widespread that some Democratic partisans were quick to suggest a considerable disenchantment with the President. In Cervi's Rocky Mountain Journal, a Denver weekly, Democratic Publisher Eugene Cervi crowed: "Big business and its willing handmaiden, the fat metropolitan dailies . . . loved Ike as long as he was a 'weak President.' Now that the President's social conscience is beginning to bother him, the harlots of journalism are screaming." More realistically, the Atlanta Constitution's Editor Ralph McGill thought that "Mr. Eisenhower's usually sugar-sweet press support is here and there becoming shrewish," but only because the press "failed from the beginning by setting up an impossible climate of perfection," and because "some elements of the so-called G.O.P. press were never really for him."

"Fantastic Thinking." For example, the right-wing Chicago Tribune, which has never wholly concealed its distrust of many Eisenhower policies, in recent weeks has lunged directly at Ike for the first time, sneered that " 'modern Republicanism' is just a variant of New Deal recklessness." But ardently pro-Eisenhower papers also expressed concern that Ike's philosophy was shifting to the left. Many conservatives, said the pro-Ike Dallas Times-Herald last week, "fear that Eisenhower believes the only way the Republican Party can prosper is by outdoing the Democrats in so-called liberalism."