The State of the Union

The Socialist virtue of self-criticism has never been an American strong-point, and lately it seems to have deserted the Soviet Union as well. Izvestia recently reported the case of a collective farm which claimed that it had over-fulfilled its quota for egg production by 25 per cent; a check disclosed that the farm had no hens.

Meanwhile, on the American front, the President has delivered his final State of the Union message. After some pious words about the "definite necessity" of "self-examination," Mr. Eisenhower expresses himself satisfied with the results of seven years of Republican administration. The President, James Reston said last year, has touched upon all the great issues of the age and has come to grips with none of them; this record is unchanged. As one Southern Democrat remarked after last week's message, Mr. Eisenhower continues to feed the country on a diet of "homily grits."

In his current State of the Union address, the President fails to come to grips with an impressive array of issues: "Peace"--or even "Peace with Justice" is not a genuine foreign policy, and personality can never take the place of policy in dealing with international affairs. The problems of military startegy, subjected to another devastatingly cogent criticism in General Maxwell Taylor's recent book, are not solved by calling weapons of war "sentinels for peace;" and although Eisenhower correctly notes that the inferiority of American space efforts does not mean that the separate military missile program is similarly inadequate, he fails to mention the problem of duplication of effort arising from the separation of the two programs and from continuing inter-service conflicts.

It is quixotic (and poor economics) to hope for a substantial reduction in the national debt (now $290 billion), and outrageous not to put $4.2 billion to better use than paying off the debt. Education, which Eisenhower has chosen as a typical area where a "Federal hypodermic" should not be administered, can and must be aided significantly by the "crash, centralized governmental action" that the President condemns. If 1960 is to be "the most prosperous year in our history," as the President claims, it must show advances in the public as well as the private sector, and in his richly metaphorical tirade against inflation Eisenhower might have instead devoted some attention to the equal danger of stagnation in public services.

The President's message--the last, hopefully, ofthe era of government by slogan--is in many respects typical of the Eisenhower administration's attitude toward the public: instead of rallying the people to an awareness of problems and to a willingness to make sacrifices for their solution, the Administration chooses to act and speak as if all were well with the nation and the world. Eisenhower may get away cheaply in the remaining year of his term, but the issues he has ignored will return to plague his successor, just as the fragile house of Coolidge prosperity crashed down on Herbert Hoover's head.