The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

PRESIDENT Kennedy has said that this is the time of the year when newspapers ominously report that Congress has done almost nothing since it convened in January and is unlikely to accomplish much before it adjourns in the summer or fall. This year the start was particularly slow, especially in the Senate, but the President continues to predict success for his tax bill and for the bill to provide health care for the aged under Social Security.

Both bills must go through the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, and the latter will not consider either measure until it has been approved by the Ways and Means Committee and the House. This means that on a measure as complex and controversial as the tax bill the Finance Committee will wait on the sidelines for perhaps the first half of the year. It rejected a proposal that it begin work before the bill passes the House. It refused to hold joint hearings with the Ways and Means Committee.

Besides the intrinsic interest in these bills, they are important because they throw new light on the organizational and structural resistance the President faces in getting his program through Congress. Early in the session, recognizing that the Finance Committee was heavily weighted against the President and was the key Senate committee this year, some Administration leaders attempted to expand the committee’s size to make it more representative of the political complexion of the Senate.

It should be emphasized that the political division and the size of congressional committees vary from session to session according to the strength of the two parties. An attempt is made to give Democrats and Republicans representation on committees approximately equal to the proportion of seats they hold in the total membership. There is always a great deal of skirmishing to give labor a favorable voice on the Labor Committee, business a predominant voice on Finance, conservatives a stronghold on Judiciary, and nonpartisanship the dominant voice on Foreign Relations.

With 67 Democrats and 33 Republicans in the Senate, the Democrats should have a slightly better than two-to-one majority on committees. But this is not so on Finance. There the old ratio of 11 Democrats to 6 Republicans was retained to make certain that the conservative domination continued. A proposal to put 14 Democrats and 7 Republicans on the committee died aborning in the Democratic Steering Committee, despite the efforts of Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield.

Senator Clark’s feud

The refusal to bring the Finance Committee more in line with the division in the Senate was called inexcusable by Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, who has been engaged in a feud with what he calls “the Senate establishment,” as represented on the powerful Steering Committee. Clark said that the establishment stacks the committees to maintain the continued control of the Senate by the conservative coalition.

He told the Senate, in one of his recent attacks on the establishment, that although a majority of Democratic senators were Kennedy supporters, this is “not a Kennedy Congress, and it seems to me that it is not going to be a Kennedy Congress. The principal reason why it is not going to be a Kennedy Congress, so far as the Senate is concerned, is, in my opinion, that we are operating under archaic, obsolete rules, customs, manners, procedures, and traditions — and because the operation under those obsolete and archaic setups is controlled by this oligarchical Senate establishment, a majority of members of which, by and large, are opposed to the program of the President.”

Clark said that of the 15 members of the Democratic Steering Committee, which appoints the various Senate committees, 9 are conservatives (7 are from the South). Yet, he argued, 40 or 45 of the Senate’s Democrats support the President. When it came to passing out new committee assignments this year, Clark noted, 75 percent of the non-freshman senators who voted with the establishment against changing the filibuster rules got the assignments they requested, while only 7 percent of those who voted to change the rules got the assignments they requested.

When the Steering Committee took up the question of the size of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee it decided to increase the number of Democratic seats, despite the protests of Chairman J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who was willing to have fewer Democrats than called for, to maintain the spirit of bipartisanship that has made the committee unique since the days of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg.

In the last Congress, the committee numbered 11 Democrats and 6 Republicans. Some Democrats and some Republicans wanted the ratio to be 14 to 7, so that additional members supporting the bipartisan approach might be added from both parties.

But the same Steering Committee that refused to increase the Democratic representation on the Finance Committee voted to increase it on the Foreign Relations Committee — and to take a seat away from the Republicans. The Steering Committee voted for 12 Democratic seats and 5 Republican seats on Foreign Relations and gave the Democratic vacancy to Senator George A. Smathers of Florida. Republicans gave a vacant seat to Senator Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota. Neither Smathers nor Mundt can claim more than a parochial record on foreign policy. Their appointments to this important committee shocked a good many senators, as well as many close observers of the Washington scene.

For almost a quarter of a century, the Foreign Relations Committee has been composed of outstanding men who insisted on a nonpartisan approach to foreign problems. In recent years, partisan and parochial considerations have influenced the choice of committee members. Each party has mobilized its forces to keep off the committee highly qualified men like Senators Clark, Cooper of Kentucky, and Javits of New York. Instead, assignments have gone to men like former Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana, and Senators Williams of Delaware, Long of Louisiana, Lausche of Ohio, and Dodd of Connecticut.

As the Senate is organized, so does it work. Clark warned that the whole Kennedy program is in danger because the Senate is under the control of the President’s opponents, chiefly the very shrewd, very able Southerners who run the Steering Committee, under the direction of Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia.

Clark pointed out that Woodrow Wilson would not have got his reform programs through Congress in 1913 and 1914 had he not been successful in putting his men in the key positions. President Wilson organized the committees in such a way as to give his men control, even violating the seniority rule to do so. Wilson was able to organize the Senate because the Wilson Democrats cooperated with him to win control of the party machinery. They insisted on using the committees as the President’s instruments. In 1913, the Democrats also resorted to the binding caucus in the House, and for a couple of years there was responsible party government. Today, with much larger Democratic majorities in Congress than there were in 1913, it can hardly be said that a responsible party structure exists in either the House or Senate.

Cuba and the Communist threat

The partisan debate over Cuba, which began in the 1960 campaign and is almost certain to be an issue in the 1964 campaign, haunts the President, disturbs our allies, and causes deep concern in both parties.

It is no defense of President Kennedy, who employed the Cuban issue to his own advantage in the 1960 campaign, to say that Fidel Castro will be a political threat to any Administration in Washington. Neither is it a defense of a donothing policy to say that Castro is one of those irritants that must be suffered as long as he is no more than a political threat. We know from last October’s experience what will be done when he is a military threat. And we know that as long as Cuba is a center for Communist propaganda and the training of saboteurs, vigorous countermeasures should be taken.

But several observers feel we ought to recognize Castro’s limitations, and also America’s inability to do away with him, short of an overt attack. His police system is well organized and has the support of Russian experts. The chances are that Cuba will be a Communist country for a long time.

A strong guard must always be kept against the possibility that Cuba may become a military threat again. At the same time, in the opinion of a number of experts in the Capital, we should recognize that the hemisphere may learn from the unhappy experience with Castroism. A Venezuelan newspaperman recently in Washington said that Communist failures in Cuba have given the hemisphere a decade more than it otherwise would have had to meet its problems. It was his opinion that the unpopularity of Castro’s brand of Communism has been a major setback to the Communist movement in Latin America.

President Kennedy’s trip to Costa Rica was undertaken primarily to express this country’s support for the Central American Common Market. According to Felipe Herrera, president of the Inter-American Development Bank, Latin-American countries can solve their economic problems only if they combine their resources in one or more common markets. He believes that unless Latin-American development is integrated, “it will inevitably find itself condemned to vegetative growth or hopeless stagnation.”

Under the spur of Castroism the United States and most of the LatinAmerican countries are beginning to think much more realistically than heretofore in terms of joint defense, closer political cooperation, and integrated economic systems.

Gilpatric leaves the Pentagon

When President Kennedy was putting his Cabinet together, he asked each prospective member to be prepared to remain in the government for four years. The result has been a remarkable degree of stability at the top. In over two years, the only Cabinet officers to leave have been Abraham A. Ribicoff, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, who resigned to run for the Senate in Connecticut, and Arthur J. Goldberg, Secretary of Labor, who left to accept appointment to the Supreme Court.

There have been more changes in the sub-Cabinet group; and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric is scheduled to return to his law practice shortly. While Secretary McNamara has received more attention than any other Cabinet officer (except possibly the Attorney General) and has seemed to run his department almost single-handedly, he has had unusually strong and able men to help him.

None has been more important than Gilpatric, who knew the department and the ways of government well from previous experience and proved himself an even-tempered and able administrator under McNamara. Gilpatric’s resignation emphasizes once more the curiously wasteful aspects of a system that makes it necessary for a man with his talent for government to feel that he can serve only from time to time.

Mood of the Capital

After the harshest winter since 1936, Washington is welcomingspring with more joy than usual. Spring is a glorious season everywhere, but nowhere more than here. The cherry blossoms, which are by no means overrated in the Board of Trade literature, are only a part of the Washington spring. Azaleas, tulips, hyacinth, and dogwood abound to make one forget the winter snows and the political doldrums that settled down over the Capital shortly after the 88th Congress convened.

Perhaps it was partly the weather, but other events also combined to make the winter a bad one for the Kennedy Administration. De Gaulle, Cuba, the tax-bill arguments, the wrangle over “managed news,”the confusion over the proposed multilateral nuclear force, and the breakdown of the Geneva negotiations on a test-ban treaty undermined confidence in the Administration’s ability to deal effectively with the problems it faces. It will take more than spring to dispel these doubts.