Washington Report

DUSCHA, JULIUS

WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By Julius Duscha Eisenhower's Firm Stand Influences Congress in Labor, Housing Debates PRESIDENT EISENHOWER continues to confound the political experts as well as his partisan...

...The Landrum-Griffin labor bill might have been approved by the House even if the President had not taken to television with a plea for the legislation...
...In 1947, the Hartley bill, which was whooped through the House, was considered to be a highly mischievous measure by such a conservative Senator as the late Robert A. Taft...
...No one with any real influence on Capitol Hill has tried to explain to either Congress or the voters that the expenditure of Government funds is not necessarily a plot against the best interests of the nation...
...In addition to the usual House attitude toward labor legislation, the temper of the times must be taken into account in evaluating the sizeable majority mustered by the Landrum-Griffin bill, the stiffest of the several labor measures that went before the House...
...If even some of the reports of the pressure put upon Representatives by both businessmen and labor spokesmen are true, perhaps it is time for another of the periodic Congressional investigations to delineate the difference between fair and foul lobbying tactics...
...Whether the Eisenhower who is now once more fascinating the rest of the world as well as the nation is old or new, the President seems to have a better grasp of his job and more zest for it than at any other time since he entered the White House...
...Despite the pressures which the nation's real estate interests and the construction industry can build up in Congress, the U.S...
...Even after six-and-a-half years in the White House, Eisenhower is difficult to dislike, whatever one may think of his stewardship in office...
...By Julius Duscha Eisenhower's Firm Stand Influences Congress in Labor, Housing Debates PRESIDENT EISENHOWER continues to confound the political experts as well as his partisan foes...
...The President's seemingly new-found interest in his job has served to magnify still more the basic impression that he has always made of an intensely sincere man doing his duty as best he knows how for God and country...
...Yet some of the proposals in the legislation which he has criticized would have no effect on the current Federal budget and not much of an impact on the 1961 budget...
...But in his dealings on domestic legislation with Congress, Eisenhower already can point with pride to some achievements which seem highly significant...
...The Democratic leadership in Congress has tried to avoid the spender label as assiduously as if it were equated with, say, the advocacy of Communism...
...On the other hand, a few of his sunshine admirers have tried to point out that Eisenhower himself has demolished the aloof image he has projected from the White House and has reverted to his more forceful World War II self...
...So it was easy to repair to the standard of law and order and decency which the President had raised, reportedly after persistent proddings from House Republican Leader Charles A. Halleck of Indiana, who is anxious to prove that he is a worthy successor to Joe Martin of Massachusetts...
...Eisenhower's role in the approval of the bill by the House ought not to be exaggerated, however...
...A majority friendly to the interests of organized labor has always been difficult to put together in the House, which still has a disproportionate share of rural-oriented, small-town lawyers with little or no appreciation of the achievements of the labor movement...
...There is by no means unanimous agreement in the capital that the President has changed...
...The outcome of his personal diplomacy must await Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the United States and the President's trip to the Soviet Union...
...But Eisenhower gets practically all the credit for almost everything that happens in Washington, as have most Presidents before him...
...The President also has got pretty much the kind of budget he set forth last winter when he aligned himself and his Administration defiantly against the proclivities of the spenders...
...The intensive lobbying by both sides during the House debate on labor legislation was probably one of the great Congressional power struggles of the decade...
...The extraordinary agreement which Eisenhower wrung out of the Democratic Congressional leaders in exchange for his approval of the Tennessee Valley Authority self-financing bill is the sort of quid pro quo that the President would never have sought from Congress during his first term...
...If it did nothing else, the President's speech gave a wavering Representative a fairly solid rock on which he can now stand in explaining his vote for the Landrum-Griffin bill to his constituency...
...Some Congressmen who were undecided about the bill undoubtedly were swayed by Eisenhower's television address...
...The White House fight for an economy-model housing bill has been based almost entirely on the President's preoccupation with fiscal stability...
...Eisenhower still seems to be at his best when he is himself and not consciously trying to repeat what James Hagerty or some other advisor thinks is a proper statement for public relations or political reasons...
...The protracted investigation by the McClel-lan Committee into the misdeeds of some union officers, notably in the Teamsters Union, had created a climate of public opinion in which Congress hardly dared to adjourn this year without enacting legislation that ostensibly would prevent further abuses of the kind that had been exposed...
...Few members of Congress understand even the workings of the labor movement, much less the labyrin-thian ways of labor law...
...is getting pretty much the kind of half-hearted housing legislation that the President thinks it should have...
...Eisenhower may not be able to claim all the credit for the outcome of the labor debate in the House, but he has been by far the dominant influence on the up-again, down-again housing bills which seem this year to have frustrated Congress the way a 34-inch yardstick would torment a carpenter...
...Nevertheless, the President did call upon the House to approve the bill, and the House responded to his plea by passing it...
...Late in his second term, he has become a stronger leader rather than a weak lame duck, as the experts had predicted and as his foes had hoped he would be...
...So far, Eisenhower's new approaches to foreign policy have produced only speculation and no concrete results...
...During most of the summer, the President has been so much of a take-charge guy that there has been considerable discussion in Washington about the "new" Eisenhower...
...The generally harmonious relationship between Congress and the White House this year is as much a result of the essentially middle-of-the-road majority on Capitol Hill as it is of the President's new or renewed vigor...
...Eisenhower signed the bill only after both the Senate and the House went on record in support of an understanding which the President believed was necessary to preserve some vestige of Executive control over TVA financing...
...The sophisticated may snicker, but, as the upward climb of his Gallup Poll popularity index demonstrates, the people still seem to like Ike...
...Indeed, some of his most fervent journalistic and political admirers seem to be shocked at the suggestion that Eisenhower hasn't always given his all to the Presidency...

Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 32


 
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