Washington

on the World Today

AN EFFECTIVE President is a decisive President. Lyndon Johnson has shown that he can and will decide and act. He was hardly re-elected when he bruised the feelings of many in the banking community by asserting that there was no reason to increase the bank-lending rates. It was a relatively minor skirmish with his business friends, and he handled it smoothly. But he took a firm position and held to it against opposition — an invitation to more criticism.

The President affirmed his determination to seek new avenues of trade to Eastern Europe. Although Senator Goldwater had charged repeatedly that it was little short of treason to do business with Communist regimes, President Johnson lost no time in saying that he welcomed overtures from countries of Eastern Europe that desired closer ties with the United States. Every evidence of genuine willingness on the part of the governments of Eastern Europe to cooperate with this country in joint endeavors would be welcomed.

“We wish to build new bridges to Eastern Europe bridges of ideas, education, culture, trade, technical cooperation and mutual understanding for world peace and prosperity,” the President said. Declaring that “history is again on the march in Eastern Europe, and on the march toward increased freedom,” the President said that the United States understands the longing of Eastern Europeans for more natural relations with the West and intends to respond to it “in every way open to us.”

Strengthening congressional leadership

On Capitol Hill, to be successful the President needs to overcome many built-in obstacles designed to frustrate his leadership. Senator Monroney and others are embarked on a serious attempt to modernize the rules to make Congress a more responsible and a more responsive body. They have before them the excellent report of the American Assembly, “The Congress and America’s Future.” The recent sessions at Arden House which produced the report were attended by some of the leading students of Congress, including Senators Clifford P. Case of New Jersey and Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania. If even a third of the eighteen specific proposals in the report were put into effect. Congress would more easily carry out its duties and the President’s burdens would be lightened.

Most important, the Assembly proposed a strengthening of the leadership of the House and Senate and the removal of obstacles to the carrying out of the will of the majority. Proposing that the Speaker be made chairman of the House Rules Committee, the Assembly said that “the Rules Committee of the House must be at all times an instrument of the leadership of the House.” To give the Senate Majority Leader effective power to lead, it proposed that a motion of his which designated any bill a major item of legislation, and was approved by majority vote, would require the committee holding the bill to report it within thirty days.

In addition, the Assembly tackled the problem of the seniority system by proposing that the choice of a committee chairman be made either by the leaders of the house or “by secret ballot in the caucuses of each party, in either case from among the three senior party members of each committee.” Moreover, the Assembly proposed that hereafter no one be permitted to remain a committee chairman, the Speaker, or the floor leader after reaching the age of seventy.

These modest reforms would go a long way toward modernizing Congress and making it an effective instrument of government. The country would no longer have to endure the spectacle of Chairman Howard W. Smith of the House Rules Committee announcing that he would cooperate with the President until he stumped his toe. No President in recent times has established himself as a greater master of congressional intrigue than Mr. Johnson. If anyone can win battles without unduly creating chaos in Congress, this President can. But his energies should not be exhausted in the petty and unseemly fights now required to move the unwieldy mass on Capitol Hill.

The cost of campaigning

One of the Assembly’s recommendations proposed new ways of dealing with the “waste, deception, and corruption” in campaign costs. No more insidious threat to American democracy exists today. The Assembly mainly deplored the problem, contenting itself with an endorsement of previously made proposals for ceilings on expenditures, proper reporting of contributions, the extension of free television time, and amendment of the tax laws to encourage contributions by a larger number of persons. All these things and more must be done to prevent the rising cost of campaigns from undermining democratic elections. Sensible attempts by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy to meet the challenge got nowhere in Congress. It may be that a bipartisan congressional investigation is needed to focus greater attention on the seriousness of the problem.

Not many years ago it was estimated that a half million dollars was needed to conduct a senatorial campaign in a large state. In 1964 in New York, Senator Robert F. Kennedy spent almost $2 million in his successful effort to unseat Kenneth B. Keating, and the latter spent almost as much. In the small state of Maryland, to cite one other example, Joseph D. Tydings, the successful Democratic candidate for the Senate, reported that he spent $284,113 for his election campaign. He spent almost that amount in his primary campaign, bringing his total to more than $500,000.

Of course, additional, unreported amounts were spent in his behalf. Exactly how much was spent no one, not even Tydings, knows. When the election was over, he reported that he had unpaid bills of $142,808. Obviously, no one can claim complete independence when he must rely on large campaign contributions to be elected. Across the river from Washington, one candidate for the Arlington County Board spent $8264 on his campaign; his defeated opponent spent $6710.

Mexico‘s new Foreign Minister

The appointment of Antonio Carrillo Flores as Foreign Minister of Mexico was welcome news in Washington, where he served six fruitful years as ambassador. Carrillo Flores is one of the reasons why so many persons in Washington remain obstinately hopeful about Latin America despite all the discouraging news. Not only was he an outstanding ambassador, but he is also an expert on the economic and fiscal problems of the developing countries. He taught many persons in Washington much about Mexico and Latin America and also about the needs of the Alliance for Progress. He played a leading role in bringing about an improvement in Mexican-United States relations at a time when they might have grown worse because of disagreements over Cuba.

“It isn’t always necessary to agree,” Carrillo Flores often said. “But it is always necessary to understand the other person’s point of view.” He helped make it possible for President Kennedy and President Adolfo López Mateos to reach agreement on the Chamizal border disputes which had poisoned Mexican-American relations for years. He also was instrumental in helping to bring a temporary solution of the Colorado River salinity problem.

Fortunately, Carrillo Flores was not alone. Latin America has sent some exceptionally able men as ambassadors to Washington in recent years. One who was like him, and who also had a firm grounding in economics, was Roberto de Oliveira Campos of Brazil. He left Washington last year and is now Minister for Planning, a key post in Brazil‘s revolutionary government.

Newspaper strikes

Washington’s newspaper corps has become acutely conscious of the damaging effect of labor disputes in the newspaper industry. In the last few years, prolonged strikes have closed newspapers in major American cities, including New York, Cleveland, Detroit, and Minneapolis. In neatly every instance, it was one or two of the dozen or more unions a newspaper must bargain with that were embroiled in the disputes leading to the strikes. Now the New York City papers face important new bargaining sessions. Detroit was without newspapers from mid-July, at the time of the Republican National Convention, until after the election. Two relatively small unions, the Paper and Plate Handlers’ Union and the Printing Pressmen’s Union, called the strike.

Whatever the merits of the arguments, it would seem that reasonable men on the side of management and labor should go to extraordinary limits to prevent the shutdown of all the newspapers in a metropolitan area. But each side apparently concluded that a test of strength was necessary, and the entire community, especially other employees on the newspapers, suffered. Collective bargaining often is brinkmanship to a high degree on both sides, with neither budging from extreme positions until midnight of the day the contract expires.

Attempts to make the public interest felt in preventing strikes in major industries have sometimes been successful in recent years. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a public-be-damned attitude too often prevails in unions, management associations, medical associations, and in any of the hundreds of other associations represented by lobbyists in Washington.

Some other industrial countries, in an attempt to protect the public interest, have resorted to compulsory arbitration. But in the United States neither labor nor management is prepared to accept it. Mediation has been successful to a heartening degree, however, and has prevented many threatened work stoppages. The number of man-days lost from strikes in this country has been substantially reduced in the last quarter century. But last year the number of strikes increased. According to the Labor Department, the first ten months of 1964 showed a five-year high of strike activity. Idleness totaled twenty million mandays, the highest since 1959.

McNamara economizes

President Johnson likes to tell a story about an argument that took place in the Kennedy Administration between Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and a group of generals. After the discussion, which was both lengthy and heated, Mr. Kennedy leaned over to his Vice President and said, “Lyndon, the founding fathers certainly showed great wisdom when they gave civilians control over the military in our form of government.”

No civilian head of the Defense Department has exercised his authority more effectively than McNamara. Moreover, he has had Mr. Johnson’s complete support as he has tackled one difficult problem after another. As the civilian head of a vast military bureaucracy, McNamara has fought not only for higher pay and better housing but also for efficiency and the modernization of the services.

Those in both parties who complain about his zeal for economy and reform forget that one of the basic duties he has to the nation is to root out the wasteful and the shopworn so that greater resources can be devoted to things that are essential, McNamara is the one man in the Department of Defense who must be able to see both the forest and the trees. Those more intimately involved in routine cannot be expected to take an overall view. Fortunately, McNamara understands his responsibilities to the nation better than his critics do.

Mood of the Capital

Anyone who has had the privilege of hearing President Johnson speak privately of his interest in education and natural resources will testify to his intense and abiding concern for these subjects. His evangelistic fervor is probably explained by his Texas heritage and his early realization that education and the protection of natural resources are basic to the cause of humanity. Once, recently, when he was lecturing Cabinet officers on the need for economy, he told Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall to increase the effort to find a satisfactory way to desalinate seawater. “Spare no cost,” the President said to the surprised Udall. In Johnson’s view, if seawater can be used by man, it can make deserts bloom and become an instrument to help eradicate old conflicts between nations.

As a senator, Lyndon Johnson showed two traits that will serve him well in the White House. The first was a consuming determination to get something accomplished, a step at a time if necessary. The second was an abiding distrust of the extreme right and the extreme left. The country will come to recognize these traits as fundamental to his nature as it gets to know him better.