“Fighting Chance” Of Return Given Dulles

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28822, 17 February 1959, Page 13

“Fighting Chance” Of Return Given Dulles

(Rec. 9 p.m.) NEW YORK, February 16. Mr John Foster Dulles’s doctors yesterday gave him a “fighting chance” of returning to at least parttime duties as Secretary of State, the “New York Times” reported today from Washington. The report said officials close - to Mr Dulles quoted the doctors as saying that a final judgment would have to await hjs reaction to treatment for his recurrence of intestinal cancer.

Radiation treatment was expected to begin in a few days, the “New York Times” said. Mr Dulles was believed to have offered to resign when President Eisenhower visited him at the hospital yesterday, it said. The President had refused to consider it. Mr Dulles’s only other official visitor yesterday was the Undersecretary of State, Mr Christian Herter, who is running the State Department in Mr Dulles' absence. Mr Herter spoke to Mr Dulles earlier on the telephone, and the Secretary asked his deputy to visit him in person.

Mr Herter and the Under-Sec-retary of State for Economic Affairs, Mr C. Douglas Dillon, began yesterday to take over the duties Mr Dulles assigned them when he left the State Department for the hernia operation last week.

The “New York Times” Washington Bureau reported that some Administration officials believed Mr Eisenhower would be content to leave Messrs Herter ' and Dillon -in charge until the longterm outlook on Mr Dulles' health was known. ' The Secretary then would be given a role he felt would be

commensurate with his strength. A line of thought -on the secretaryship, widely heard in private in Washington in the last few days, came into the open yesterday, the newspaper said. Representative Emanuel Cellet, a Democrat from New York, said it was necessary to have “someone in the driving seat," and proposed the twice-defeated Democratic Presidential candidate, Mr Adlai Stevenson, be made Secretary of State. . The “New York Times’s" political news commentator and analyst, James Reston, said today in a report from Washington that there were several reasons why President Eisenhower preferred to leave direction of the State Department to. Messrs Dillon and Herter.

One was, that the President had himself survived a heart attack, a stroke, and an attack of ileitis; He therefore had reason, even beyond the considerations of affection and respect for Mr Dulles, to expect the Secretary of State to return to his desk. A second reason was that it was very late in President Eisenhower’s term to break in a new team. "The President will retire in IMO.