THE PRESIDENCY / NEVER SAY NEVER? : A Good Bush Role Model? Some Suggest Eisenhower : Ex-general balanced three budgets and kept inflation, joblessness low. He succeeded partly by cultivating Congress’ top Democrats.

“Please, dear God, keep sending us Dwight Eisenhowers to clean up budget messes like the Congress and the President face today in Washington.”

This plea from Maurice H. Stans, President Eisenhower’s budget director, was offered up last week at a symposium marking the 100th anniversary of the late President’s birth last Sunday.

Few of the politicians, statesman and scholars who gathered at Gettysburg College were as fervent about “Ike” as Stans. But most who gathered in this town, where Eisenhower spent his retirement years, seemed to agree that the lessons of the Eisenhower presidency should serve as a valuable guide for George Bush as he struggles to resolve the current budget deadlock in Washington.

In his eight years in the White House, Eisenhower balanced the budget three times and came close twice more, held average inflation below 1.5% and unemployment under 5%, never had to order a shutdown of the government and left office as he entered it, standing high in the polls and in the hearts of his fellow Americans.

Faced Democratic Congress

After his first two years in the White House, Eisenhower, like Bush, had to contend with a Congress controlled by the opposition Democratic Party. And, like Bush, Eisenhower tried to blaze a trail down the middle of the ideological road, a course that sometimes led to problems with conservative members of his own party, such as Bush has had to endure during the budget controversy.

Eisenhower biographer Stephen E. Ambrose recalled that Eisenhower once complained to his press secretary, James Haggerty, about an unfavorable story written by a reporter whom he had thought of as a friend.

“You don’t understand, Mr. President,” Haggerty told him, “that reporter just doesn’t like Republicans.”

“You know,” Eisenhower replied, “he has a point.”

As even Eisenhower partisans acknowledge, the 34th President had certain advantages when compared with the 41st chief executive.

“Eisenhower came to office as a hero who was able to extend his strength to the presidency,” said Stephen Wayne, Georgetown University presidential specialist. “Bush came to office as a shadowy figure who has had to try to use the presidency to build his strength.”

Time of Discipline

In dealing with Congress, Eisenhower had an easier time of it than Bush, said presidential scholar Herbert Parmet of New York’s Queensborough Community College because “party discipline was much stronger then.” The two top Democrats on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn, “could hold their people in line.”

Because of the power of those two Texans, Eisenhower “could count on things getting done,” Fred McClure, Bush’s chief congressional lobbyist, said in an an interview here. “But we don’t have that luxury now.” Today’s Democratic congressional leaders, McClure contended, “don’t have that kind of control.”

Eisenhower worked hard to promote his relationship with the two Democrats, his former speech writer, William Ewald, recalled.

“He didn’t particularly like Lyndon Johnson and he didn’t particularly like Sam Rayburn,” Ewald said. “Nevertheless, he knew he had to work with them. He told Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn to come down to the White House whenever they wanted to. They could go upstairs to the mansion and they would have a drink with the President and they would kick things around.

“So he leaned over backwards to work together with them without abandoning his basic goals.”

One reason Eisenhower’s popularity and prestige remained high, according to Eisenhower scholar Fred Greenstein of Princeton University, was that he was skillful at protecting it. On controversial issues, Greenstein said, Eisenhower “used intermediaries to be up front” and take the heat.

Avoided Trouble

On proposed civil rights legislation, for example, Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell Jr., recalled that the President once instructed him: “You present it to Congress as a project of the Justice Department, not as an Administration measure.”

Also, Eisenhower spared himself trouble, Greenstein believes, by following a rule he once laid down for himself: “One of the things we never say is never.” That maxim, Greenstein believes, would have kept him from uttering the controversial words that have recently given Bush a case of political indigestion: “Read my lips, no new taxes.”