"I Need Him"

In three words President Eisenhower stretched the point about his Administration that had made it one of the cleanest in U.S. political history. He permitted an exception to his principle that any member of the White House staff involved in improper conduct in office, however minor, should be kicked out. He decided instead to stand behind a man--his able chief of staff Sherman Adams--on the arguable but shifting ground that the man at the heart of the White House staff system was not only a valued friend and loyal associate but was indispensable. The President's three words: "I need him."

The President thus took up a position that would not be easy to retreat from. The President himself, as congressional and press critics pointed out, would henceforth be involved in the building criticism of Sherman Adams' imprudence. The President might even be involved, if only at third hand, in the still unfathomed life and times of Boston Operator Bernard Goldfine, the man that Sherman Adams vouches for.

It was not the first time that Dwight Eisenhower had stretched the point of principle to stand behind a man who had misstepped, but who was nonetheless deemed indispensable to the nation. He stood behind Lieut. General George Patton in 1943 after Patton slapped a serviceman in hospital in Sicily, a different situation as to public conduct--and as to war--but similar in that critics insisted that Patton must go. Eisenhower stood by Patton; Patton rode on to glory; Eisenhower's wartime decision was justified. Now the measure of the size of Eisenhower's decision to stand by Sherman Adams was that Sherman Adams, in order to extricate his chief from his bitter dilemma, would have to 1) turn in a Patton-size performance from here on out, 2) find a way to settle the enormous political liabilities, or 3) take the action that the President did not take and fire himself.

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