Word: bensons
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...Card for Drew. Thus fortified, Benson endures violent criticism with the demeanor of a Boy Scout leader (which he is) in a den of noisy cubs. He also turns the other cheek: last Christmas, he took pains to send a card to one of his most vitriolic critics, Columnist Drew Pearson, whom he studiously skips in reading the newspaper...
...line with the Mormon concept that the family should share the father's business, the Bensons have made the U.S. farm problem their problem. As the result of long discussions at home, the Secretary's wife once got him to publicize milk-dispensing machines to help relieve the dairy-product surplus. Flora Benson attends many of his press conferences, and occasionally finds time from her duties at home (she has no maid, does her own housework) to make a speech. In Toledo last week for a speech at a Republican women's meeting, she said...
Lesson in Zigzag. Like many another member of the Eisenhower Cabinet, Benson went into his job with his firm convictions, and then discovered that Washington had something to teach him about the kind of give-and-take that makes government function. In his first major policy statement in 1953, he said that "price supports should provide insurance against disaster" and that "inefficiency should not be subsidized in agriculture." Today, without being so doctrinaire, he says: "I have been confident all the way along that what we are doing is best for farmers. I have no interest other than that...
...after Benson abruptly cut dairy support prices by 15 parity points, the President called his Secretary of Agriculture to the White House and asked whether the action might not have been too abrupt. Then Old Soldier Eisenhower drew some lines on a piece of scratchpaper to show Old Farmer Benson that, in military action, there are two ways to reach an objective-the direct way, and by a zigzag approach. Advised Ike: try to understand the merits of the zigzag...
...Rising Above Principle." Benson has since done some zigzagging. In 1954, he issued orders that a farmer would have to comply with all acreage allotment rules and marketing quotas to get price supports on any of his crops, e.g., a wheat farmer who cut his acreage to get into the wheat support program could not turn around and plant an unsupported crop on the land and thus contribute to another surplus. Under pressure, Benson later canceled this "cross-compliance" order which, though difficult to administer, would have put sharp teeth in acreage control...