What troubled the President was not so much the civil rights provision as the call for increases in the defense budget. (“There must be no price ceiling on America’s security,” Rockefeller and Nixon had declared in their joint statement.) Disgusted, Eisenhower protested to Nixon by telephone. How could Nixon expect to run on the Eisenhower record of peace and prosperity and also pander to Kennedy’s charges that Eisenhower was betraying the nation’s security? How could he run as a fiscally sound Republican and also run up deficits to buy new weapons without military justification? A squirming
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