New Mood in the Capital

...And the open break between Russia and Red China looks more and more like a permanent split-which serves our interestbetween the two camps of Communism...

...To that extent, it was a triumph for Kennedy...

...The deeper implications of the President's quarantine of Cuba are scarcely visible today...

...No, the disappointments of 1962 were not in the area of foreign affairs...

...The performance on Capitol Hill revealed once again that top-heavy Democratic majorities, even when buttressed by all the patronage powers of the White House, do not often translate into top-heavy majorities for a Democratic President's slightly left-of-center program...

...This happy posture is not due entirely to the Soviet retreat in the Caribbean...

...The President came into office like a fleet runner, impatient to be off and confident that he would round the course in record time...

...What is needed is something far more comprehensive than a simple expansion of the House Rules Committee...

...reports from Washington as a correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune...

...The President has already adopted a similar approach in an effort to reverse the declining fortunes of foreign aid...

...Failures in the Soviet economy have suddenly ended the debate about growth rates, in which we saw ourselves implacably losing our traditional position of world leader...

...One can hope that these fatal overtones were enough by themselves to prevent a recurrence anywhere else in the South, but one cannot have the slightest confidence of it...

...and the creaking machinery of almost every other aspect of work on Capitol Hill...

...The more important side is the fantastic loss of production that unemployment bleeds out of our economy and the misery it brings to the unemployed...

...If 1961 was truly a year of "achievement," the President's public relations staff must be looking in the dictionary for superlatives to describe 1962...

...No single objective of government today should take priority over a higher rate of economic growth...

...But Soviet failures are only one side of the problem of U.S...

...This, it seems to me, is where the Kennedy Government, including the Democratic majority in Congress, is most vulnerable to criticism...

...Elsewhere on the domestic scene, there were ample disappointments and failures to go around, two of which deserve mention: First, the tragedy of Oxford, Mississippi, which, with fatal overtones, repeated former President Eisenhower's sad experience in Little Rock five years ago...

...The 1962 election did nothing to disturb the balance of inaction between the White House and Congress on most of the issues that failed to pass last year...

...position in Southeast Asia...

...The psychological effect of the Bay of Pigs has now been expunged, as an evil spirit is exorcized, and it may not be too much to say that the earlier mood of supreme confidence and acceptance of challenge has been wholly restored...

...The President's Administration is substantially unchanged from January 1961...

...But except for a few substitutions of liberals and moderates for outright conservatives in both parties, it will not have much effect on the voting patterns in the House, where the President needs more strength...

...The Chinese attack on India has shaken the confidence of the so-called "neutral" countries...

...It pigeonholed without study the President's request for stand-by income tax powers to offset shifting trends in the economy...

...He can be expected to do the same for other major bills: use a highly specialized form of White House or peoples' lobbying to offset the well-financed lobbies working against him...

...With the next Presidential election less than two years away, there is a good prospect for new initiative and harder work on this question in the year ahead...

...posture abroad which holds great promise for the future...

...The United States has come out of the year just ended with its prestige at a new high and that of the Communist world at a new low...

...It scuttled the President's proposal for a Department of Urban Affairs, which would have given our decaying cities the attention they deserve...

...It was, of course, his decision to risk the ultimate in human disaster in an effort to compel Premier Khrushchev "to abandon this course of world domination" and remove his long-range ballistic missiles from the Western Hemisphere...

...nuclear deterrent, will carve the widest channel...

...His closest advisers then are his closest advisers today...

...FROM THE BAY OF PIGS TO THE CUBAN QUARANTINE New Mood in the Capital By Rowland Evans Jr Washington A year ago, John F. Kennedy confided that the "most disappointing event" of his first year as President was not the invasion fiasco in Cuba but his failure to reach agreement with the Soviet Union on a nuclear test ban...

...Last year, the success of the trade bill-the most conspicuous of all the President's successes in Congress-was partly due to the operation of the President's special trade committee, a White House-financed publicity operation that propagandized the issue for months before it came to a vote...

...The imminence of the 1964 election may also gain him some votes he lost last year...

...The new United States initiative in Vietnam, coupled with an admittedly fragile accord that ended the civil war in Laos, has improved the American position in that part of the world...

...Unused productive capacity lies mouldering about the country...

...growth...

...And Democrats who tend to be conservative will take note of Kennedy's new popularity, and its possible benefit to them in the 1964 election, when Kennedy will again head the ballot...

...Last year at this time, the President claimed for his Administration a "year of achievement" in foreign affairs...

...This lesson, driven home year after year, will be studied more keenly now that the first Kennedy Congress has once more demonstrated its truth...

...There remains only a word or two about the mood and tone of Washington at the end of the first half of the first Kennedy term...

...The humiliating setback in the Bay of Pigs changed all that...

...In the currents of history that flow out of the year just passed, however, this bold act of statesmanship, based solidly on the credibility of the U.S...

...Congress also turned its back on the old-age hospital program financed by social security...

...Viewed from this perspective, 1962 was a year of great change in the U.S...

...The defeat there cut deep into the bone and marrow of the triumphant mood established in the White House before it happened...

...The Kennedy Gallup Poll rating, however, has moved back toward its early high mark...

...in the ever-expanding areas of chronic unemployment, millions look for work that is not to be had...

...The demands for Congressional reform are certain to become more insistent in the 88th Congress, but they will concentrate on the same old targets: the seniority system, which gives life-and-death power to the Congressional oligarchs who happen by accident of seniority to control key committees...

...His own new strength is reflected in the men around him-McGeorge Bundy, Theodore Sorenson, Kenneth O'Donnell and Lawrence O'Brien-and the department chiefs who handle the big military and foreign problems...

...And it voted millions for rivers and harbors but scarcely one cent for fallout shelters...

...These men talk modestly of the days ahead, but between the lines a new impatience to act and a newly felt competence comes through loud and clear...

...Moderate and liberal Republicans who often voted against him, at the behest of the conservative Republican leadership, may find it expedient to vote a more liberal line now that Governor Rockefeller is waiting in the wings to run for President...

...We do not know what he would characterize as his greatest disappointment in 1962, but there is not any doubt about his greatest success...

...The level of unemployment is still close to the average of the last half dozen years, almost 6 per cent, and far above the "acceptable" 4 per cent which candidate Kennedy talked about so assuredly in 1960...

...But since no one in the White House really expects anything to be done, plans are being made to pressure Congress through other means...

...The second-a failure of government more than a disappointmentwas another year of Congressional refusal to pass a single one of the President's major education bills...

...It was an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the Democratic party, and it reversed the off-year trend against the party in control of the White House...

...What this means is that the conventional approach to Congress and the business of government of 1962 is likely to be replaced by a new boldness, a new dash, which will color all the important Presidential offensives in the year ahead...

...No one in the White House is yielding to a mood of euphoria, but from the President on down, the mood is one of new hope and expectation and of restored self-confidence and a thirst for new challenge...

...This indication of popularity will give his program an extra boost in Congress...

...They came in the failure of the Government to solve the basic question of economic growth here at home...

...This was a somewhat surprising appraisal against the failure of the Cuban invasion in April 1961, the building of the Berlin wall and the steady erosion of the U.S...