The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

“THE first year is a learning time, the last year usually a stalemate. Whatever personal imprint he can hope to make is usually reserved for the short span between.” This judgment of a President’s service by Columbia University Professor Richard E. Neustadt, a keen observer of the office of Chief Executive, is widely accepted in Washington. By this test, President Kennedy, two and a half years after taking office, should by now have given the nation and the world at least the outlines of his imprint on history, even assuming he wins re-election and serves a full eight years.

Yet it is extraordinarily difficult at this juncture to describe that outline. Liberals in his own party in Congress openly grumble that he is too cautious and too hesitant. Conservatives both in and out of Congress generally see the President as a sort of stereotype liberal who has never had to meet a payroll. Walter Lippmann has called Kennedy “a conservative” who “does not want to be unpopular anywhere . . . with anyone,” a leader who is afraid of risking a bloody nose in battle.

Probably no other sentence he has uttered has proved more embarrassing to the President than his eloquent inaugural plea: “Ask not what your country will do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” That simplicity of phrase brought a chorus of “What do you want us to do?” to which there has been precious little response other than that young men and women could join the Peace Corps. Join the Peace Corps they have, both old and young, and with a will and enthusiasm which demonstrate what a deep river of conscience exists in this nation, if only it is tapped.

Yet most of the other answers Kennedy has tried to give have often seemed too complex and too remote: improve the rate of economic growth, fight juvenile delinquency, increase American exports, improve civil rights, engage in physical fitness programs, and so on. Indeed, the Kennedy campaign promises have provided the Republicans with numerous political barbs to throw back at the President.

Too much caution?

A major example is in the field of civil rights. A recent broadside by the National Federation of Republican Women quoted Shakespeare to plague the President: “His promises were, as he was then, mighty; But his performance, as he is now, nothing.” And on civil rights the Republican women point to a campaign promise that a civil rights bill “will be among the first orders of business when a new Congress meets in January.” This was to be in January, 1961, but the President has relied not on new legislation but on persuasion and use of existing legislation to move the nation forward in this field.

Often he has acted apparently because of pressure from the more militant Negro groups, as was the case in Birmingham, Alabama. AttorneyGeneral Robert F. Kennedy has more than once complained that the militants were being too militant. Yet it probably is true that this very militancy has been the major instrument by which the Kennedy Administration has been able to use its good offices in breaking down the racial bars in both North and South.

In the economic field the President has prodded Congress for new instruments with which to improve the nation’s economy and to lower its far too high rate of unemployment. But he has often first sounded the high note, only to retreat later and compromise, before his own allies in Congress have had a chance to do battle for his cause. Tax reform, he knows, is long overdue, but the fate of tax reform in this session of Congress, his associates frankly say, is almost totally up to the will and whim of the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Wilbur Mills.

Kennedy argued valiantly at Yale against conventional myths about the American economic system; yet he quickly retreated from his own analysis that the country needed a sizable tax cut as soon as possible and agreed to a cut spread over three years. The indications are that the cut will be neither big enough nor quick enough to prove or disprove the very argument Kennedy was advancing, that a planned deficit now can be spurred into an economic boost which in time would produce far greater federal revenue.

Kennedy’s anger over the abortive attempt to raise steel prices in early 1962 showed that he would stand and fight only when cornered. The steel magnates were so foolish as to try a sneak play, which the President felt was a public show of bad faith that he simply could not condone. The political and business repercussions of that episode had a great deal to do with Kennedy’s approval of selective price rises in steel this year, perhaps as much as the economic advice he received that the economy could take the price changes without undue effect.

The force of public opinion

The widespread attitude in Congress against deficit spending and for budget balancing is indeed a reflection of the public mood, and Kennedy has indicated privately that he agrees to a considerable extent. At times the country is driven to break away, as when Soviet spectaculars led it to approve a multibillion-dollar man-on-themoon program. But it does not take long for the public to drift back to the conventional wisdom, as indicated by the mounting criticism of the moon program when so much remains to be done here in the United States.

“Every President must be a keen judge of public opinion — to distinguish its petty whims, to estimate its endurance, to respond to its impatience and to respect its potential power,”said Kennedy’s special assistant Theodore C. Sorensen in a recent speech. No President, said Sorensen, can simply respond to all the public pressures. “He has a responsibility to lead public opinion as well as to respect it — to shape it, to inform it, to woo it and to win it.”

Yet Sorensen has been among those close Kennedy advisers who tend to cry politics at every criticism and advise the President not to make too many appeals to the people, especially over the head of a balky Congress. “Presidential appeals for public support,” he said, “must be at the right time and with the right frequency, if they are to be effective.” This often cautious approach has led many critics both in the Capital and around the country to contend that the President and his Administration are more concerned with their public image than with the substance of policy.

It is true that the President proposes and Congress disposes, at least to a large degree, despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. Yet Kennedy’s argument is that by careful cajolery and fancy footwork at the Capitol the Congress has passed, and will pass, many a bill by a slim margin which otherwise would have been lost, if a frontal assault on Congress or a plea to the public over its head had been tried. It is now well established that the President’s approach is to avoid the head-on collisions at almost all costs.

Perhaps history will record that in domestic affairs Kennedy pushed and prodded the nation as far and as fast as anyone could have done. However, the fact remains that far too little has been accomplished on the domestic front in relation to the needs of a growing and more affluent population.

Kennedy’s foreign policy

The President is not a free agent in domestic affairs, and he is even more restricted in foreign affairs. The avoidance of thermonuclear war is, of course, his major accomplishment, and history is likely to give Kennedy good marks for his contribution during the Cuban crisis last fall.

Less certain, however, is the answer to this question: has he done all he could to come to grips with the Soviet Union on the nuclear-test ban, arms control, and measures to prevent accidental war? Much of the evidence on these points is buried in top-secret messages and policy papers. The essence of the long wrangle over the test ban, both in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, has been the matter of risk-taking. Both men, as only Presidents can, have seen the grim road ahead if there is no halter put on the arms race. Yet Kennedy, like Eisenhower, has tended to shrink back at the risk-taking involved in coming to a decision on a test ban. It may very well be that the proposal has outlived its usefulness as an instrument to slow down the arms race. If so, the Kennedy Administration has done next to nothing to find a substitute approach.

It is far easier, as it was under Eisenhower, to blame Soviet intransigence and to refer to congressional fears and pressures. Both of these factors are hard and real, now as then. But neither is a total explanation. Unfortunately, Kennedy’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, one of his campaign promises, has been overstaffed and has been loaded with mediocrity and foreign service officers waiting out other assignments. And its chief, William C. Foster, often seems more influenced by congressional pressures than by the ever-present shadow of nuclear holocaust.

The conduct of foreign policy under Kennedy is an improvement over what it was under Eisenhower. The President is often too immersed in details, but there is a better esprit in the State Department. Secretary Rusk is viewed in the Capital as even more cautious than the President. Every problem is surveyed to death; every statement is a mass of platitudes; often decisions are painted as though they would solve the problems of humanity, whereas they are at best only peripheral.

The one strong man in foreign affairs, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, has been pilloried for doing what Congress has so often demanded — being decisive. There is reason to believe an effort has been afoot to isolate him and cut him down to size, an effort springing from that political-military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned so eloquently in his farewell address. But so far Kennedy has never stated the issue to the public in that light.

Republican troubles

The spate of Republican presidential-candidate talk a year before the GOP convention of 1964 is, in part, a reflection of a growing feeling among the politicians that the Republicans have a chance to win in 1964, thus making Kennedy the first one-term President since Herbert Hoover. However, in many ways they are as divided as the Democrats, and the tendency, despite all the brave words about unity in the party, is toward more division.

The GOP upsurge in the South, led by eager young conservatives and fed by Democrats discontented with the course of desegregation, is forming a strong far-right wing in the party, with Senator Barry Goldwater as its hero. Governor Rockefeller’s divorce and marriage to a divorcée have ended the talk that the New Yorker was a shoo-in for the 1964 nomination. But the odds are still very much against the Republicans’ doing what so many of their leaders so often have wanted to do: nominate a true conservative, this time Goldwater, to test the thesis that the Republicans can indeed triumph nationally if there is a clear choice for the voters between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat.

Mood of the Capital

There is clear evidence that as the Soviet Union resolved its postCuban crisis, its decisions called for more, not less, hostility toward the United States. Grim is the word for the attitude of our policy makers, and no change is in sight.

This does not mean that Khrushchev is expected to abandon the peaceful-coexistence theme in favor of Mao Tse-tung’s more militant demands. But it does mean that the tendency in Moscow is in that direction. Peiping’s pressure on Moscow has been immense, and Peiping’s ability to capture, or to threaten to capture, world Communist leadership in the myriad parties outside the bloc itself is seen as very worrisome to Khrushchev and the Soviet Union.

It is discouraging that at such a time the Western alliance is at an impasse over defense, economic, and political policies. There has been a good deal of you’re-to-blame talk between Washington and Paris, uneasiness in Washington about the increased Communist vote in the Italian election, a growing worry over the course of West German policy after Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s departure, and a high degree of uncertainty about Britain with a Labor government in prospect. All this has tended to produce a wait-and-see atmosphere.