Power Without Leadership

...Administrative assistants of liberal Senators are inclined to boast how well "their" Senators get along with George, and he received fulsome praise for his opposition to the Eisenhower tax program...

...Under the heaviest of pressure, he stuck to his guns and fought his program through to substantial victory...

...This session has been characterized by considerable liberal wooing of the Southerners, a tendency first noticeable after the Democratic Convention of 1952...

...It is this last issue which perhaps most clearly highlights the shortcomings of the Eisenhower Administration and of this Congress...

...The times, however, are not normal: the dangers (which the President, to the benefit of his popularity but not of bis place in history, does not force on the people's attention) are great...

...It is logical to leave the Eisenhower program and its fate to the end of the story, because it has not figured very much in Congressional conduct...

...Vice President Nixon and Assistant Attorney General William Rogers offered him the full facilities of the Government in uncovering juicy "Truman scandals" for his Government Operations Committee, but they failed to unstick the whistle...

...The Premiership, however, has remained vacant...

...McCarthy is not getting the headline breaks he used to enjoy, and the steady barrage to which he is being subjected is likely to erode his strength...

...Labeled "positive" and "dynamic," it deserved neither of these terms, but showed a degree of responsible conservatism by not aiming, as many Republicans in Congress hoped it would, at undoing the New Deal...

...This was at first a general tendency among Democrats, even liberal ones...

...After having failed to see the President with his protest against compelling the Atomic Energy Commission to buy private power for TVA, Senator Cooper was near despair...

...It now looks as if they would have done well to follow Leon Keyserling's oft-proffered advice and make their record on the question of Government responsibility for continued economic expansion rather than mere stability...

...Except for Byrd and a handful of others, they have always been like the parson's egg—good in parts...

...The November election results will show the consequences of Benson's calculated risk...

...the nominal Majority Leader, has failed to transcend his parochial attachment to Formosa and to act for a larger constituency...

...Had he lived, Senator Robert A. Taft might by now have been the real ruler of the United States...

...On international issues, they are generally helpful...

...On the far Right, the most attention has been attracted by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who is, fortunately for the country, a buccaneer rather than a leader...

...In the past twenty months, in fact, the country has had the look of a constitutional monarchy...

...Senator William F. Knowland (R.-Calif...

...The most surprising Administration victory was the ending of rigid price supports for farm products and their replacement by flexible supports...

...Meanwhile, he has had his ups and downs...

...The opportunity offered by Republican confusion for the Democrats to make their own record has been largely missed...

...Eventually, most came to realize that little political advantage lay that way, since Eisenhower found no Republican candidates too reactionary or mediocre to endorse (even permitting himself to be photographed with the ineffable Paul Troast in New Jersey...

...This was shown most clearly in Eisenhower's repudiation of the U.S...

...it might not matter to have a benign...

...In retrospect, the mistake was letting Lyndon Johnson of Texas take the Senate Minority Leadership almost by default...

...is against McCarthy, and has changed its course to conform...

...He has served neither as a transmission-belt for the White House nor as a real leader in his own right...

...Off stage, the tone has been set by Adlai Stevenson's various diplomatic missions to the South: on stage, the fashion has been to cast Senator Walter George of Georgia in the role of a revered elder statesman...

...The consequence has been that the junior Senator from Wisconsin has remained a demagogue with a large but unorganized following...

...The most articulate group in the Senate has been the band of a score or so who have carried the New Deal-Fair Deal standard...

...But, although they had been in the forefront of the drive for Eisenhower's nomination, they were passed over by Ike even before his election, at the "Morningside Munich" with Taft...

...The bulk of the Republican delegation in the Senate, right of center but not 50 far right as to be completely out of sight, has thrown up no authoritative, recognized leadership...

...In spite of a barrage of the most mischievous and misleading propaganda, descending to charges that the whole system was a fraud upon the American people, the Administration not only accepted this key New Deal achievement but succeeded in having its coverage widened by 9 million people and its benefits slightly increased...

...his election went uncontested...

...By contrast, the high-price-support lobby failed to make its case either with the American people or with the politicians...

...Facing an uphill fight for re-election against the popular "Veep," Alben W. Barkley, snubbed by his leader, and saddled with official Republican coolness to TVA in a TVA constituency, he was on the point of pulling out of politics...

...But there have been consequences of lasting importance...

...Johnson, who had won his first election as Senator by a mere 79 votes, worked constantly under the influence of the strong Eisenhower sentiment in Texas, dogged by the fear that Governor Allan Shivers's machine might enter a strong challenger against him in the Democratic primary...

...With the "jinx" which has in recent years been attached to this post (both Scott Lucas of Illinois and Ernest McFarland of Arizona were defeated for re-election after assuming it), there was little competition for it, and Johnson was the only Senator who wanted it badly enough to do some energetic canvassing in advance...

...Under a weak President, Congress always tends to fill the power vacuum, and one of its more powerful leaders (nowadays generally a Senator) gives its authority shape and direction...

...The Cabinet's other strong man...

...The various committee chairmen have simply pursued their own hobbies and entrenched themselves in their own private realms of power, without presenting a coherent conservative case to the country...

...Without such a leader, Senate Republicans are divided among obscurely struggling factions...

...Chamber of Commerce effort to wreck the Social Security system...

...Much credit must be given here to Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Benson, a stubborn and determined man...

...Their most consistent handicap has been their inability to establish adequate communication with the very people whose interests they are seeking to defend...

...The Southerners are little influenced by it...

...Because of the odds against them, the battles these Senators have fought have been mostly rearguard actions, aimed at slowing up the retreat from the Fair Deal...

...This may be, particularly among retired people, the Administration's best vote-winner in November...

...To the outside observer, this is likely to appear a futile and onesided romance...

...Fully aware of Senator Johnson's inadequacies, liberal lobbyists on and about Capitol Hill did their best to find an alternative candidate...

...Phis is the overriding challenge of our time, and the one to which Congress most dismally tailed to measure up...

...Even in Washington, the McCarthy television circus seems all but forgotten...

...Senate liberals made a valiant effort to increase the number of divisions from 17 to 19, only to be beaten down...

...In the end...

...Humphrey, however, must also bear the responsibility for another calculated risk—the decision to pare defense costs by cutting the number of authorized Army divisions from 20 to 17...

...If the present recession conies to an end before November, the voters may well conclude that he has been right...

...One big thing can be put down to the credit of the Democrats in Congress, however...

...They found no one willing to challenge the commanding lead in commitments which Johnson had by then rolled up...

...The Senator was offered a golden opportunity to break out of his narrow specialty of anti-Communism...

...They have met regularly every fortnight to coordinate their tactics and objectives, and on alternate weeks their administrative assistants have gathered for the same purpose...

...He soon earned the nickname of "Lyin' Down" Johnson by his timidity and patent eagerness to ride Eisenhower's coattails...

...on domestic economic questions, there have always been "good" Southern votes cast, the number depending on the issue...

...The urban majority wants lower food prices and has not been convinced that farmers are badly off...

...But no one has shown the ability to fill his shoes...

...Also, too much attention was concentrated on the peripheral TVA contract and too little on the complex issues raised by the industrial application of atomic energy...

...Knowing the uncertainties of economic forecasts, the Democrats have refrained publicly from being "prophets of gloom and doom,'' but privately have pinned great hopes upon the recession continuing through November...

...Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, has had his way in cutting expenditures and reducing Government intervention in the economy...

...Urban members of Congress, who for many years have voted for high food prices against the desires of their constituents in an effort to woo rural support for their party nationally, have become wean of the fickleness of the farm vote...

...The habits of responsibility which they acquired during twenty years of power have generally continued in opposition, particularly in the realm of international affairs...

...He was not the only one, of course, who sought to establish the reputation of being more for Eisenhower than the Republicans...

...While Congress has fiddled with "Fifth Amendment Communists' at home, the power of Communism abroad has steadily grown...

...Thus, in the atomic-energy battle the debate largely missed fire in terms of public relations...

...Knowing that the Senate Democrats were not in the majority liberal, they tried for a middle-of-the-road candidate...

...But these have been the consequence of Southern traditions and pressures, not of liberal wooing...

...Their morale and prestige has dropped lower and lower, reaching its nadir when Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, one of the best of them, was actually refused access to the President, becoming the only Republican of any shade of opinion who has, in effect, been repudiated by Eisenhower for re-election...

...It was a classic instance of Ike's habit of coddling his enemies and cold-shouldering his friends...

...By their present conduct, the liberals (and most of all Stevenson himself) are running the risk of being burdened with the Southern record on civil rights, at a time when the Eisenhower Administration can point to a positive, if modest, record in this field...

...In a time of "normalcy...

...golf-playing President and a squabbling, indecisive Congress...

...The Republicans, on the other hand, have behaved very much as if they were still in opposition, as shown notably in the many weeks wasted on Senator John W. Bricker's effort, by constitutional amendment, to tie the hands of the nominal leader of his own party in negotiations with other nations...

...The greatest, but perhaps the most inevitable, disappointment has been the so-called "liberal" Republicans...

...Willi real support from the White House, they might have given the GOP a new and more attractive face...

...A large portion of the press has gained the impression that the White House, however vaguely and indecisive...

...Bevanism as it originally appeared in Britain—i.e., the idea that the amount of armaments should be determined not by the magnitude of the Communist threat, but by domestic economic and budgetary considerations—was thus made Eisenhower policy as well...

...It was reported in the semi-comic form of cots carried in for weary Senators and shorthand reporters collapsing from fatigue, rather than in terms of the great issues involved...

...The ever-popular President Eisenhower has capably filled the role of a modern king, reigning but not ruling, while various of his courtiers have had a try at grasping the levers of power...