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At the national and international level, then, what is the highest kind of morality for the private citizen represents an instance of political immorality.

And we had the uneasy sense that the cleavage between the moral and the political progressed amid the events which concern us.

For the tone of the editorials which greeted Mr. Eisenhower's original announcement of his running had been strangely disquieting.

Neither the vibrant enthusiasm which bespeaks a people's intuitive sense of the fitness of things at climactic moments nor the vital argumentation betraying its sense that something significant has transpired was in evidence.

Nothing testifies more clearly to that cleavage than the peculiar editorial page appearing in a July issue of Life Magazine, the issue which also carried the second announcement of the candidacy.

The double editorial on Two Aspects Of `` The U.S. Spirit '' was subtly calculated to suggest a moral sanction for gambles great as well as small, reflecting popular approval of this questionable attitude toward the highest office in the land.

`` The Moral Creed '' and `` The Will To Risk '' live happily together, if we do not examine where the line is to be drawn.

`` I may possibly be a greater risk than is the normal person of my age '', the President had said on February 29th of the election year, ignoring the fact that no one of his age had ever lived out another term.

`` My doctors assure me that this increased percentage of risk is not great ''.

But by the time the risk was doubled, events had dismissed from his mind both increased percentages and a previously stated intention of considering carefully anything more serious than a bout of influenza.

Only infrequently did the situation color his thinking.

Ironically no president we have had would have regretted more than President Eisenhower the possibility to which his own words, in the press conference held at the beginning of August, testified: that unable as he was himself to say his running was best for the country, unconsciously he had placed his party before his nation.