Flight from Reality

...There was no fight and little leadership...

...Defenders of the Kennedy Administration are quick to respond to critical judgments of this kind...

...They argue that the President felt the need to proceed cautiously because 1) his margin of victory last November was so slim...

...Examination of the Kennedy chart of achievement revealed that among the thirty-three "major bills approved" were proposals to create an international travel agency to lure tourists to the United States, increase research funds for saline water conservation, reduce tourist customs exemptions, raise the debt ceiling and establish a National Park at Cape Cod...

...The chart purported to prove that Mr...

...Roosevelt, the chart showed, had succeeded in getting only eleven "major bills passed" during his first bout with Congress and Mr...

...Kennedy did what he did, or didn't do what he didn't do, and achieved so much less than he had said he wanted...

...4) he was confronted by the hard fact of the Republican-Dixie Democratic coalition, especially in the House of Representatives, and felt, as a consequence, he could hope to get a little, which is better than nothing, if he didn't demand too much...

...PROGRESSIVE "YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE" Flight from Reality IN THE concluding days of the first session of the Eighty-seventh Congress, two of President Kennedy's chief lieutenants, Theodore C. Sorenson and Lawrence F. O'Brien, unveiled a chart before a selected group of Washington correspondents invited to a cocktail party for off-the-record briefing...

...Whereas Mr...

...Kennedy's happiness with this year's performance declines...

...The President made no effort to carry his case to the country...

...Even The Wall Street Journal, which shudders at the prospect of being hauled to any new frontier, found the legislative program "spotty" and "stunted" and lacking in "dramatic new departures...

...The record reveals a number of notable advances...

...The SorensonO'Brien chart jubilantly showing a three-to-one superiority over the first F.D.R...

...It helps explain why Mr...

...It seems clear from the record that the bold promise of the New Frontier yielded to caution, compromise, and expediency as the session wore on...

...This strikes us as somewhat harsh, although surely a more accurate judgment than the Administration's own estimate of its achievements...

...In the field of foreign affairs, Congress created a semi-autonomous Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, approved legal status and a $40,000,000 fund for the Peace Corps, provided $500,000,000 to implement the Alliance for Progress with Latin America, and passed a revised, consolidated foreign economic aid program which emphasizes development loans instead of grants, long-term planning, and the need for recipient nations to help themselves...

...It is equally hard to believe that the President was "as happy as he can be" with a Congress that had repudiated so many of the significant measures he had proposed and to whose passage the Democratic Party was pledged...

...It surrendered altogether in the field of civil rights legislation by proclaiming that it wanted no action on that issue during the session—although it must be said, to its everlasting credit, that the Administration achieved some superb results in breaching racial barriers through executive action...

...But what baffles and disturbs us is that, instead of recognizing the magnitude of the setback and marshaling its forces for a real fight when Congress reconvenes in January, the Administration is behaving as though the battle has been won...

...The whole episode struck us as an extraordinary flight from reality...

...Some of this is pretty persuasive stuff...

...Although generously endowed with creative brainpower, the Administration revealed itself singularly lacking in the kind of purposeful drive that attracts followers and gets things done...

...2) he has been obliged by the greatly intensified pressures of the cold war to devote increasingly more time and energy to the daily demands of foreign affairs...

...3) he thought he could win wider Congressional approval of his foreign policy decisions, which he felt were more compelling, if he refrained from alienating powerful conservative forces on domestic issues...

...It wavered fatally in the midst of the struggle over Federal aid to education...

...Taken together, these enactments by the first session represent a measure of modest progress, but so modest that it seems more like what we might have expected from a Lyndon Johnson Administration than a Kennedy Administration...

...Kennedy had achieved much more with his first Congressional session than had two of his principal predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Kennedy, the reporters were told, was "as happy as he can be" over the way Congress dealt with his legislative program...

...Eisenhower only fourteen, President Kennedy's harvest was thirty-three "major bills approved...

...The hope for more basic action next year will rise as Mr...

...Nor was there any action of consequence on the central social and economic problem confronting the nation—high and chronic unemployment, nearly seven per cent for the last ten months—despite general business recovery from recession...

...Accommodation and compromise governed White House handling of its legislative program...

...On the home front, Congress enacted the most comprehensive housing program in history, increased minimum wage rates and broadened coverage of the law to include 3,600,000 additional workers, liberalized social security, extended unemployment insurance benefits, approved a program for relief of depressed areas, and provided for water pollution control...

...It seems inconceivable that two men as sharp and able as Sorenson and O'Brien would attempt to palm off the mixed and moderate bag of the Kennedy Administration's first goaround with Congress as 300 per cent superior to the dramatic achievements of F.D.R.'s first "hundred days...

...In this last case, however, Congress struck out the heart of the new program—the Administration's request to finance development lending programs for five years through Treasury financing...

...On the scorecard of achievement which records the steps toward historic greatness, the Congress so far has not advanced the Kennedy Administration beyond the point of standing still...

...Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which serves as a liberal watchdog in Washington, concluded that the record of the first session "is at best one of callous expediency and, at worst, one of astonishing indifference to real national needs...

...Congress and the news that Mr...

...Kennedy is "as happy as he can be" over the legislative record of the first session do little to fortify our faith that he is prepared, when the second session of Congress convenes, to "get the country moving again" toward that New Frontier to which he beckoned us a year ago...

...It was silent when a House committee refused to act on the much promised program of medical care for the aged...

...Another chart, however, one which emphasized quality rather than quantity, would have shown that Congress failed to act in such genuinely major fields as Federal aid to education, medical assistance for the aged, civil rights, tax reform, improvement of conditions for migratory labor, and retraining of workers idled by automation...

...Thus, in three areas of legislation in which so much was expected of the Kennedy Administration because of its campaign commitments, its failure was complete...

...As the ADA rightly pointed out, most of the measures approved were mere extensions of earlier programs and broke no ground for a New Frontier...