The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

IN Robert S. McNamara, the President has the ablest Secretary of Defense to occupy that office since it was created. McNamara is an authentic economizer. He is dedicated to civilian rule. He is vigorously trying to create a modern defense system capable of meeting any requirement. And he has an unusual ability to train subordinates in new methods and to inspire them with his own confidence in a scientific approach to management.

To do these things well in a huge bureaucracy, one must slash away at the underbrush inhabited by vested interests. Sometimes these are congressional vested interests, sometimes military, sometimes industrial, sometimes simply bureaucratic, but all involve at times members of the House and Senate and their standing with their constituents. So while Congress has loudly demanded extraordinary qualities of leadership in a Secretary of Defense, it is offended when an individual as forceful as McNamara exhibits them.

With the three services competing for defense dollars and with different parts of the country and different industries competing for contracts, there would be chaos if a Secretary tried to please everyone. Moreover, there would be an uncontrollable defense budget. This year, even after the service secretaries pared the budget requests of their respective military advisers, the total stood at $67 billion.

In cutting the figure by $14 billion, McNamara disappointed a great many people, some with close congressional connections. In awarding the TFX contract he did not entirely satisfy either the Air Force or the Navy, and he disappointed one major company and those allied with it. It was a McNamara quality, decisiveness, that provoked the outcry. If he had made a similarly tough decision as president of the Ford Motor Company, designed to save the company money and benefit its stockholders, the board of directors would have applauded him.

Since an effective administrator often is the antithesis of an effective politician, McNamara has lacked at times the political finesse desirable in any public figure. There seems to be little doubt, for example, that he was right on the Skybolt decision, but his handling of that international political problem left bruised feelings that have not yet healed. Nevertheless, Congress has never expected that a defense chief should be a politician; it has said he must be a forceful administrator, and McNamara is that.

He also is something more. In 1960, when candidate Kennedy was promising to get the country moving again, he laid great stress on the need for a powerful defense system. Today the President’s campaign promises and his performance are closer in the defense field than in any other area. It well may be that history will record that the President’s emphasis on strengthening and redesigning the country’s defense system was the most impressive accomplishment of his first term.

The President’s inaugural and his first defense message, together with his decision to call up reserves during the 1961 Berlin crisis, laid the groundwork for the buildup that has occurred. The strength concentrated in Europe made it possible to deny any victory to the Soviets and to control the situation in Berlin, if not to solve the problem. And the vast increase in conventional power gave the President the options he needed to deal with the Cuban crisis of October, 1962. The Berlin and Cuban crises demonstrated to both sides in the cold war and to the neutrals the role that the United States has the capacity to play in the defense of freedom.

The President could justly claim in his foreignaid message to Congress this year that “freedom is not on the run anywhere in the world.” It “might well have been without United States aid,” the President said. It certainly would be without a powerful United States defense.

David Bell and foreign aid

The President’s foreign-aid message to Congress was one of the best aid messages in many years. It had to be a positive statement in support of the program, to overcome some of the damage done by the report of the President’s own advisory committee, headed by General Lucius D. Clay. The report contained many excellent proposals and valid criticisms. But the overall effect was perhaps more negative than the committee members intended. The document was hailed by enemies of a program which three Presidents have insisted is essential to the national security and which the Clay group itself said was vital. Just as the President in his message was able to quote from the report to support his objectives, so opponents of aid have been able to quote from it in support of their attempts to curtail the program.

In indirectly replying to the committee’s claims that the United States has attempted to do too much for too many, the President said, “The fact is that our aid programs generally and consistently have done what they were expected to do. . . . Our effort is not merely symbolic. It is addressed to our vital security interests.”

From both the President’s point of view and that of the Clay committee, the country is fortunate in the new director of the Agency for International Development. David E. Bell, who planned to become a physicist but turned to economics instead, has the qualifications and training to provide the kind of dynamic, no-nonsense leadership of the aid agency that McNamara has brought to the Defense Department. The Clay committee expressed confidence in Bell’s ability to do the job. If he fulfills the committee’s hopes and the President’s, he should be the most successful foreign-aid chief since Paul G. Hoffman headed the Marshall Plan.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Bell was prepared for his assignment when he entered the aid agency last December. As a Harvard professor, he had mastered the theory of economic development. As an adviser in Pakistan to the Pakistan government, he had learned the practical problems of a developing country. As budget director, Bell was intimately concerned with the evolution of the aid agency, knew its top officials, and had advised it in the reorganization under the 1961 act.

Bell’s clear and incisive mind and his ability as an administrator early won the President’s admiration. Now, like McNamara, he must face the sharpest kind of congressional attack, unrelenting as long as Congress is in session.

The battle over the debt limit

Congress has been passing a law nearly every year saying that the federal debt must not go beyond a certain limit. So hallowed is the law, although it was first written only in 1917, that no one in politics would dare suggest — as many economists have — that it is an anachronism. Congress votes the money which the government spends, and if Congress wants to reduce the debt, all it has to do is to cut down on the money it appropriates. But that is easier said than done, and after Congress votes billions in appropriations it likes to hold a debate in which it admonishes the President not to spend the money he has been authorized to spend.

This year the problem is more complex than usual because in the last session Congress voted several debt limits to apply to 1963. Until April 1 the ceiling under the law was $308 billion. After April 1 the ceiling was $305 billion. On June 25 it will drop to $300 billion. On July 1 it will drop to the “permanent” ceiling of $285 billion. Congress imposed those ceilings in an attempt to force the Administration to cut spending.

All recent Presidents have suffered through these painful fights over the debt limit, but none more than President Eisenhower. As an economizer, he disliked arguing that the debt ceiling should be higher. A Democratic Congress delighted in forcing him to make the argument anyway, and then it slapped back at him by putting the ceiling so low that his Secretaries of the Treasury were caught in a bind. In 1957 the ceiling was so tight that the Eisenhower Administration was forced to postpone payments due defense contractors. Business Week magazine said in 1958 that the postponement of the scheduled payments “was an important contributing cause of the recession.”

Now Congress is determined to apply the same stringent rule to the Kennedy Administration. According to Treasury officials, the result of an excessively tight ceiling would be mismanagement rather than proper management of the public debt. “This Administration is not asking for an unlimited debt ceiling,” the President said, “but a realistic one.”

If the ceiling is too restrictive, it may prevent the Treasury from entering the money market when it might obtain the most favorable terms; this could force it to pay higher interest rates. If the ceiling is too tight, the Treasury may not be able to use its debt management machinery, as it did once last year, to discourage the flow of short-term funds seeking higher interest rates overseas; thus, there could be a loss of gold unnecessarily.

In the Treasury’s words, a tight debt ceiling has not led to reduced spending but invariably to higher costs. Yet the fight is waged in Congress in the name of economy. The debate affords every congressman an opportunity to speak against the iniquities of a large federal debt. All any administration asks is that the ceiling be placed at a reasonable margin above the actual debt so that the Treasury may have room to maneuver, may be able to keep enough cash on hand to meet its bills, and may enter the money market at the most favorable time.

A delay until the last minute to act on the debt limit and the fixing of a ceiling so restrictive that the Treasury may be hampered in its operation would seem to be beneath the dignity of Congress. Yet it glories in the annual contest, which helps divert attention from more serious business.

Herter’s uphill struggle

Last year’s Trade Expansion Act was written on the assumption that Britain soon would be a member of the European Common Market. When Britain’s bid for membership was vetoed by France early this year, a cloud began to form over work being done under the new act.

Former Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, President Kennedy’s trade negotiator, has been the moving spirit in preparing for the socalled Kennedy round of trade negotiations scheduled to take place in 1964. Herter has made two trips to Europe and one to Japan in an attempt to establish a satisfactory basis for negotiation. His first efforts discouraged him greatly.

A major difficulty is that a Common Market official handles the negotiations for the six members of the Market, but any decision he makes now or in the formal negotiations next year is subject to veto by any member. France can exercise its veto over the trade negotiations just as it did in the negotiations for British membership in the Common Market. In his first efforts, Herter was unable to determine the attitude of the Common Market countries regarding the rules of negotiation, which he thinks it is most important to establish well in advance.

Britain’s failure to gain entry into the Market wrecked for all practical purposes one of the four major features of the Trade Expansion Act. That is the section authorizing the President, on a reciprocal basis, to negotiate an elimination of tariffs altogether when the United States and the Common Market countries account for 80 percent of the world’s trade in a given commodity. With Great Britain excluded, the provision would apply only to airplanes and edible oils.

Mood of the Capital

A mood of wait and see what Congress does, wait and see what the Russians do, seems to have settled over the Administration. It is encouraged by the lessening tensions in the foreign field, discouraged by its failures in Congress. Initiative and momentum seem to be missing in both areas, however. The President talks of ups and downs in popularity, of cycles and rhythms in public affairs as though he were waiting for a tide to sweep him forward.

Despite increasing criticism in Washington, the President’s popularity remains high in the country. He faces the 1964 election, which already is casting its shadow over Washington affairs, with the cautious optimism of a skilled politician. But this is in some ways the nub of his problem. Some people think that the President has proved his ability as a politician more than he has proved it as a national leader.