The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THERE events contributed to the remarkable record established by the second session of the 85th Congress. They were the Soviet Sputniks, the economic recession, and the President’s order sending American marines and soldiers into Lebanon. These impelling events opened the way to a great deal of legislation on matters both foreign and domestic. But the formidable record of legislation could not have been accomplished without leadership. The American governmental system historically has functioned best with a strong President in the White House, a man who laid down a program for the Congress and then coaxed, cajoled, and threatened until he got most of what he wanted.

President Eisenhower by nature is not that kind of man, and he did not provide that kind of leadership except in the case of the Pentagon reorganization bill and, to a lesser degree, in the matters of foreign aid appropriations and reciprocal trade extension. The gap in leadership was filled by the Democrats in Congress, specifically by Senate Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn. This Texas team, with the younger Johnson giving the lead to his mentor, did the coaxing, cajoling, and threatening with remarkable results. One of those results was legislation which met many of the Eisenhower Administration’s hopes, but with Democratic embellishments which the President had to accept.

As the senators and representatives departed from Washington, however, there was an uneasy feeling that not enough had been done to face up to the growing military and political power of the Soviet Union. The feeling of inadequacy was shared by many responsible leaders of both parties, but it burst into public view only sporadically in such critical speeches as those of Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright on foreign policy in general and Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy on the nation’s increasingly bad military posture.

The limits of legislative action

In these fields, then, what Congress did was to demonstrate the limits of legislative action. It did reorganize the Pentagon and create a space agency; it did vote $815 million more than the President asked for defense, and it came close to his minimum on foreign aid money. It voted an adequate trade law extension, a four-year lease on life which was longer than any previously voted since Cordell Hull created the program back in the Depression days.

In the two critical fields of defense and space the Democratic leadership did its best to retain a large measure of control over the Administration’s programs. At Johnson’s motion, it went so far in the space bill as to require the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration to return to Congress for an annual review of what it proposes to do before it can get the necessary money. This, of course, was an effort to force the Administration to go faster and farther into space than it is now prepared to do. Johnson himself will head the congressional watchdog committee on space.

But if Congress can keep its hand on military and related policies through its constitutional control of the purse, there is little it can do about Administration foreign policy. And that policy is central to the purposes for which the United States is spending such huge and constantly increasing sums.

Wanted: a powerful Senate spokesman

The Congress is not blameless, however, in this field. The unhappy fact is that Congress lacks the one thing which in the past has made possible a powerful congressional influence on the executive’s conduct of foreign policy — that is, a single powerful spokesman in the Senate. There is now no William E. Borah, Arthur Vandenberg, or Walter F. George. The important Senate Foreign Relations Committee is headed by ninety-year-old Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, who has contributed little to the field of foreign affairs.

The other ranking Democrats on the committee likewise lack the stature or power of the BorahVandenberg-George periods. Fulbright is a scholar, but he is so disgusted with Secretary John Foster Dulles that more often than not he merely throws up his hands and walks away from the problems. Montana’s able Mike Mansfield is too busy with his duties as the Senate whip. The result has been that Johnson himself has had to step into the breach. This he has sometimes done well, as after the Sputnik launchings, and sometimes badly, as after the landings of American troops in Lebanon.

The fact is that Johnson is not an expert on foreign policy as are Fulbright and Mansfield. He is a skilled back-room operator, not a leader in the sense of being willing to take an unpopular stance, as George did a few years ago when singlehandedly he gave the President and Dulles the impetus both to go to the Geneva Summit meeting of 1955 and to open limited negotiations in Geneva with the Red Chinese.

This is no derogation of Johnson’s skill, to which the record of the Congress this year fully attests. But it demonstrates once again that Congress can do little in foreign affairs, in any positive sense, save when there is a powerful leader whose views are accepted by his colleagues across party lines and who thus is able to move the executive branch, whether of the same or the opposite political party.

More spending

The majority of both houses of Congress this past session was essentially conservative and economyminded. Yet, in the face of the obvious Soviet challenge plus the economic recession, both houses voted for more spending than the President would have liked. Congress went so far, in fact, that Eisenhower for the first time since he entered the White House vetoed a major appropriation bill — that carrying funds for a number of independent offices.

Twice the Administration had to ask Congress to raise the debt limit. What had been estimated last January as a $.5 billion surplus for the fiscal year that ended on June 30 actually turned into a $2.8 billion deficit. There is the added prospect of a $12 billion deficit in the year ending next June 30. And Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson was hinting that the figure might be even higher, given reduced revenues due to the recession and the relatively slow recovery.

The wisdom of a tax cut to end the recession is still a matter of debate among the economists. But Anderson, whose influence on the President has turned out to be far greater than anyone expected, worked with his fellow Texans, Johnson and Rayburn, to hold the line. Only relatively minor changes in the tax structure resulted — one of them being, however, a considerable tax break for small business firms.

Congressional appropriations this year ran about $75 billion for current and future expenses. But the government actually will spend around $79 billion, because more than half the spending comes from money appropriated in prior years for long-term projects. Additional spending also is due to the continued necessity of Treasury subsidies for farmers; supplemental federal unemployment pay caused by the recession; additional housing aid, another recession measure; and further postal deficits despite the postal rate rises finally voted by this Congress.

The new farm bill, lowering price supports on cotton, rice, and corn, was generally rated as a triumph for Ezra Taft Benson. Perhaps it will help trim subsidies for some crops, but it is unlikely to affect wheat, the major crop in surplus. The most important factor in the farm voting was the breakdown of the farm lobby, in part because urban area representatives had finally reached a point where they felt they could no longer face the voters back home — and the urban areas are spreading from the cities far out into what used to be considered rural districts. The farm groups, moreover, have begun to fight among themselves, each trying to save the position of its own commodity or commodities.

Preliminary census figures for 1960 indicated that urban importance will increase after the House is redistricted next time. Here, incidentally, is one major reason for the Democratic effort this November to capture both houses of the state legislatures in such states as California and Massachusetts, where the Republicans in the past so gerrymandered congressional districts as to give themselves a disproportionate number of seats in Congress.

Education and labor

On two major domestic fronts, schools and scholarships and labor legislation, the congressional record was mediocre. President Eisenhower retreated completely from the school construction proposals of earlier years, though the pressing need remains. Instead he backed an aidto-education measure which survived in the House only because it was stripped of scholarship aid. The Senate went considerably further, but the resulting compromise was an inadequate hodgepodge which did have the virtue of finally establishing a federal responsibility in this field.

On the labor front the McClellan committee, in large part owing to the skill and perseverance of counsel Robert Kennedy, the senator’s young brother, laid bare the corruption which has marked the Teamsters Union and a number of other major labor organizations. Contempt citations against Hoffa, Hutcheson, and a number of lesser figures still remain to be settled by grand juries and the courts. But there is little doubt that the Senate committee performed a major public service in exposing the corruption and gangland ties of organizations which exert a powerful influence in national affairs. It also encouraged George Meany, the tough president of the AFL-CIO, to clean labor’s house.

Congress did pass a measure to regulate welfare and pensions funds, both those which are exclusively management or labor controlled and those which are mixed managementlabor types. This has importance because it is designed to protect the rights of labor union members and because these ever-increasing pension funds play a leading role in our economy.

But the Kennedy-Ives bill, a broad labor reform measure which did credit both to the presidential aspirant and to the retiring senator from New York, was scuttled in the House. It is true that Speaker Rayburn shares some blame for the parliamentary way in which he handled the measure. But it was a combination of Southern Democratic and Republican votes which killed the bill.

Labor reform is likely to play an important role in the November election. Since the Senate in the end voted all but unanimously for the bill, House members are apt to be the focus of whatever political recriminations are shown at the polls.

When this session of Congress began early last January, Senator Johnson and Speaker Rayburn and their chief aides made a decision which was to bear real fruit. They decided, regardless oi the provocations, not to risk a head-on clash with the President. This they avoided in all but a few minor instances. And the pay-off was real: an impressive legislative record on which the Democrats could campaign in November, and one which the Republicans would have difficulty in attacking.

Mood of the Capital

The Pentagon reorganization measure, as finally approved by Congress, came very close to what the President had asked. The command structure is being simplified with orders now flowing directly from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to field commands; and these commands are already unified in terms of joint Army-Navy-Air-Force operations. The three service secretaries now become housekeepers for the most part, losing their command functions.

But it will be several months before there is a resolution of the critical issue of American military strategy. Here there is a basic argument, the so-called “small-war” debate, over the kind of forces and weapons the nation should have not only to fight a thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union but to enter any nonnuclear conflict in other areas.

During the emergency Middle East session of the United Nations General Assembly, Dulles tried to make the Russians understand that the United States would repeat the Lebanese performance wherever and whenever necessary. The Navy argues that Lebanon demonstrated an ability to meet such situations. The Army denies this. The Air Force worries lest small-war preparations should trim appropriations for bigwar weapons.

There has been a behind-thescenes argument, for example, over the theoretical case of a Polish struggle with the Soviets should the increasingly uneasy church-state accord in Warsaw actually collapse. The small-war advocates argue that the United States should cancel out in advance any thought of aiding the Poles for fear of involvement with Moscow.

The budget factor is very much involved in these arguments. So far Defense Secretary Neil McElroy has contended that the rising cost of weapons makes it impossible to alter the present nature of the armed forces. But unlike his predecessor, Charles E. Wilson, McElroy is given credit for creating a weapons evaluation group to project the effect of changing weapons on tactics and strategy in all possible kinds of conflict.

In short, while the Pentagon reorganization is viewed in Washington as a much-needed improvement, its real importance will not become clear until the President decides whether or not to revamp basic military doctrine.