THE COUNTRY IS READY
PROGRESSIVE The Country Is Ready In this space, last month, we attempted a tentative assessment of the beginnings of the Kennedy Administration. It turned out to be much more of an...
...Gone seems to be the old practice of appointing campaign contributors with no special knowledge of the country to which they are accredited and no real competence in the fields of diplomacy and foreign affairs...
...Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Harvard historian, to a special post in the White House...
...falling business profits and investment...
...George Ball, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, is a seasoned international lawyer and close friend of Adlai Stevenson...
...and Joseph C. Swidler, whose long experience as general counsel of the Tennessee Valley Authority makes him eminently qualified to head the scandal-ridden Federal Power Commission...
...And we are pleased, too, to see the English language restored to official use...
...declining construction—and despite all this, rising prices...
...The White House firmly put a stop to this dangerous nonsense, serving notice that the United States has a unified foreign policy and will no longer tolerate the confusion of counsel that prevailed for so long under Mr...
...Kenneth Galbraith, the gifted Harvard economist, ambassador to India...
...Other appointments that struck our fancy were those of Frank McCulloch, longtime able assistant to Senator Paul H. Douglas, to serve as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board...
...If President Kennedy did not detail a wide-ranging blueprint for action and spell out the sacrifices that such a program will demand from the affluent of our society, he succeeded in striking a refreshing note of realism in contrast to the eight years of complacency and paternal reassurances that went before...
...In the significant area of ambassadorial appointments the President seems to have chosen wisely, for the most part, although there are several selections of doubtful wisdom...
...He must now prove himself a master of timing...
...The Chief Executive has been endlessly active on the legislative front as well...
...But before launching his barrage he acted to secure his left flank by employing the powers of the Presidency to persuade a reluctant House of Representatives to enlarge the membership of its Rules Committee so that the Committee could not continue to exercise a strangling control over liberal legislation...
...We admire the sharpness of his mind, the range of his interests, the clarity of his speech, and, most of all, his awareness of the nation's needs and his commitment to affirmative action...
...an increasing tide of bankruptcies...
...He has fired message after message at Congress proposing action on a wide variety of fronts...
...It seemed to us, and we were by no means alone in this, that the Chief Executive's prognosis was stronger than his prescription...
...Murrow, a distinguished newscaster and analyst who won his liberal spurs in a courageous struggle against Mc-Carthyism, gave up a post that paid more than $200,{)00 a year to serve his country at less than one-tenth that amount...
...Llewellyn Thompson, to remain as ambassador to the Soviet Union...
...We doubt this is evidence of weakness or vacillation, but rather of a shrewd, perhaps too shrewd, political strategy to gain immediately minimal ground from those who are relieved to find they are not called upon to surrender altogether...
...We know how I. F. Stone, the crusading Washington commentator, must have felt when he wrote in his Weekly that his enthusiasm was a bit embarrassing, that it was much like the prophet Jeremiah being caught giving three lusty cheers...
...Frank Coffin, chosen to head the Development Loan Fund, was one of the rising stars in the House of Representatives until he left that body to wage a hopeless fight for governor of Maine...
...That was the clear-cut purpose of the White House decision to crack down on the warlike utterances planned by Admiral Arleigh E. Burke, chief of Naval Operations...
...Our enthusiasm was greater than that...
...His theme was reported to be the total futility of negotiations with the Soviets...
...Roscoe Drummond phrased this point well when he wrote for the New York Herald Tribune that the President fully believes that much more needs to be asked of Congress and the country but feels he does not yet possess the political prestige and the national influence to ask for more at this time...
...Kennedy's predecessor...
...We were especially impressed by {he swiftness and decisiveness with which President Kennedy moved to proclaim civilian supremacy in the formulation of American foreign policy...
...and Charles F. Bohlen, once our brilliant ambassador to the Soviet Union, to act as principal adviser on Soviet affairs in the State Department...
...His solemn pledge to do everything that needs to be done to revive and expand our faltering economy represents a watershed in recent American political and economic history...
...The President's State of the Union address to Congress was a welcome contrast to the lullabies presented by his predecessor...
...Kennedy not only called a recession a recession, but enumerated its profoundly disturbing manifestations: growing, and in many cases chronic, unemployment...
...For the country is ready—ready to follow him in a bold program of social and economic action designed to banish recession and put America on the high road to the goal of equality of opportunity for all...
...Thus, The Wall Street journal was pleased that the economic proposals were "rather modest...
...We take office," he said, "in the wake of seven months of recession, three and a half years of slack, seven years of diminished economic growth, and nine years of falling farm prices...
...All in all, President Kennedy has shown an extraordinary capacity to attract some of the nation's ablest men to government posts by somehow making a career of public service exciting and alluring to men who had far greater security and earned much more money in the positions they are leaving behind...
...We like the style and poise and freshness with which the new President approaches Congress and the country...
...Curiously, in acting as it did, the Kennedy Administration showed that it was mindful of the warning uttered by former President Eisenhower in what was certainly one of his finest hours, his farewell address to the nation...
...For our part, we intend to maintain a critical vigilance, but there is no doubt that our chronic crankiness of the past decade is melting rapidly in the glow of the fine words and good deeds of President Kennedy and his associates...
...The Admiral proposed to deliver an address in which he would personally take a stand for severing diplomatic relations with the Russians, as he has so many times before...
...Kennedy put together in the critical field of foreign economic aid is superb...
...Kennedy's speeches since he became President—a bold statement of the problem followed by a somewhat less forthright approach to the solution...
...Professor William L. Cary of the Columbia University Law School, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission...
...Livingston T. Merchant, ambassador to Canada...
...His opening statement— "Whatever is done will have to stand on a rugged basis of truth"—carried the authentic Murrow ring...
...It turned out to be much more of an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other editorial than we had intended...
...Henry Labouisse, director of the International Cooperation Administration, is one of the outstanding career civil servants of our time...
...This curious note seems to run through most of Mr...
...In fact, there was an audible sigh of relief in conservative circles that the President has been so cautious in proposing action to meet the urgent challenge he presented so boldly...
...Such an appointment, for example, was that of Edward R. Murrow to serve as director of the United States Information Administration...
...And Representative Charles A. Halleck, arch-Tory leader of Republican forces in the House of Representatives, seemed almost to express political disappointment at the softness of the Kennedy approach when he said: "We find no great quarrel with them [the President's anti-recession proposals] but we do not find them earth-shaking...
...Norman Clapp, once secretary to the late Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., to head the Rural Electrification Administration...
...And it has grown...
...He has laid the groundwork...
...The New York Times liked the "cautious approach...
...Kennedy's best selections in this field, in our judgment, were those of George Kennan, ambassador to Yugoslavia...
...The team that Mr...
...As he went about the task of completing his official family, President Kennedy made appointment after appointment that stirred new hope in the hearts of American progressives...
...David Bruce, ambassador to London...
...Two Republican bitter-enders, Senators Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Barry Goldwater of Arizona, raised feeble protests against President Kennedy's "gag rule," but most of the rest of the nation rejoiced in the President's resolute insistence that the military brass must not be permitted, through oratorical broadsides against countries with which we are negotiating, to imperil the President's pursuit of peace...
...Eisenhower rose above partisan issues and personal considerations, to speak up, as a lifelong military man, against the perils of permitting the military to dominate the civil power of the country...
...Ellsworth Bunker, now ambassador in India, to serve in Brazil...
...a declining growth rate, already one of the lowest among the industrialized nations of the world...
...Edwin Reischauer, Harvard's Far Eastern expert, ambassador to Japan...
Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3
