An American Notebook
By BRIA
FRom above—from the gallery of the room in which the Presidential press conference is heid--7.Eisenhower can look disconcertingly like a milder, more disinterested Beaverbrook. We Were attending his conference on Little Rock; and very impressive he made it. He has picked up many of the professional tricks-1 make it a Practice never to . . . I don't think it's wise t° • • . I don't want to talk too much about this because . . .'; and he is quick to shrug off tiresome questioners when he senses that the Pressmen find them tiresome, too. But he does not use the tricks in the way professionals usually do, for their own sake; he manages to make them ^ sound part of himself; the contrast between his Method and, say, Mr. Macmillan's donnish way of handling an audience is most marked.
Listening to him, it was easy to see that what We are inclined to disparage as weakness of will, or even of mind, in fact reflects Eisenhower's Philosophy of Presidenthood. He really believes that he should intervene only in an executive capacity, to enforce the law. He would not con- demn Faubus for what was palpably a breach of
• faith because it was a private breach of faith— because, as he put it, he is not concerned with the interpretation of men's personal motives; only With the effects of their public actions. It is argu- able that this philosophy is as unreal as that of the Civil-Righters who used to argue—does any- body now'?—that Communists ought not to be barred from civil rights organisations; and pos- sibly much trouble might have been saved had a different man been there to handle Faubus- Or McCarthy, for that matter. Still, the mind's- eye picture of Eisenhower as a midweek politician interested only in getting away in time to have eighteen holes at Augusta, Ga, is not one I shall Stick pins into again. Injected into the commercial radio programmes at intervals are news flashes. On the way in from the airport I heard an announcer say that Presi-- dent Eisenhower had not attended church that morning : 'But it is stated that he is not ill; nor is there any national emergency.'
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