REPUBLICANS: Candidate in Crisis

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As the highest man in the White House councils with practical political savvy, he found himself in occasional disagreement with Administration policy, and his situation was touchy. Sometimes he openly battled for his viewpoint in the councils of the Administration. During the 1957-58 recession, for example, he recruited Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell and Interior Secretary Fred Seaton in his losing struggle to persuade Ike that, with the 1958 congressional elections looming, the Administration should take more dras tic antirecession measures, even at the cost of further unbalancing the budget. On some issues, notably his disagreement with Agriculture Secretary Benson's farm policies and his concern over budgetary decisions and defense expenditures, Nixon decided to let the public in on his dissatisfaction by leaks to newsmen, which have sometimes reverberated.

The Kitchen Debate. Nixon did not always have an easy welcome at the White House. During the Administration's early years, Ike's peppery chief of staff, Sherman Adams, kept him at arm's length. But Nixon's standing soared during the months following the President's heart attack on Sept. 24, 1955. Confronted with a trying situation, in which even the appearance of undue self-assertion might have seemed a grabbing for power, Nixon conducted himself with poise and modesty, presided at Cabinet meetings from his customary chair instead of from the President's. When he had to confer with Cabinet officers, he went to their offices instead of asking them to his.

Nonetheless, in 1956 Sherman Adams told Nixon that it might be better if he took a Cabinet post rather than stand again for the vice-presidency. Later on, Ike himself suggested that it might help Nixon's political career to serve in a Cabinet post. Nixon seriously considered quitting Government, but abandoned the idea and told Ike that he preferred to run for Vice President again. Adams was toppled into ignominy in 1958 by the Goldfine affair, and Nixon found firm White House support from Adams' successor, Wilton B. ("Jerry") Persons, a genial Alabamian, and from ever influential Jim Hagerty.

Ike himself was much impressed by Nixon's conduct during the heart-attack crisis, his courage in the face of Communist-led mobs in Lima and Caracas in 1958, and his steadiness in the famed "kitchen debate" with Khrushchev in Moscow last year. Early this year, Ike made it clear that he wanted Richard Nixon to succeed him in the presidency.