Tell Me, Zebra

"Tell me, zebra," said the conductor, "are you a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes?"

"I'm neither," said the zebra. "I'm an invisible animal with black & white stripes so you can see me."*

General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower last week was in Texas for a "social" visit. Before it was over, he had dined in high privacy with San Antonio's wealthiest, had taken to the microphone before some 17,000 Texans in Houston and Galveston, had blasted again & again at the philosophy and practice of the welfare state. To reporters he unblinkingly declaimed: "I don't want a thing to do with politics--but that does not mean that I won't comment on political issues."

When someone asked the general's lady *if she wanted to be a President's wife, she replied frankly: "What American woman wouldn't want her husband to be President?" The Savannah (Go.) Morning News went her one better, proposed a national conservative coalition ticket with Eisenhower as presidential candidate and Virginia's economy-minded Democrat, Senator Harry F. Byrd, as his running mate. Kansas' new interim Senator Harry Darby, a Republican, said that Ike was highly regarded in his home state of Kansas, but "any potential candidate might find himself in bad shape if he waited too long to declare himself." And in Key West, Fla., where all political signals come in loud and clear while Harry Truman is in residence, the President told close friends he thought Ike was 1) a wonderful general 2) an amateur politician building hard toward the 1952 presidential race.

All that seemed undone was for Dwight Eisenhower to confide, as Abraham Lincoln confided to a friend in the spring of 1860: "I will be entirely frank. The taste is in my mouth a little."

*By permission of copyright owner, Capitol Records, Inc.

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