Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Next Four Months The next four months will answer some of the questions and resolve at least a few of the doubts of...
...We can conceive of no greater rejection of the platform on which he ran than for Kennedy to succumb to this kind of humbug, and we feel reasonably confident he won't...
...His is now the power to lead in that direction, however slim the margin of victory, and it would be a bitter betrayal of the very forces in America that did elect him if he should be conned into believing and acting on the notion that the nearly fifty per cent who voted for his opponent were opposed to the liberal program on which Kennedy staked his candidacy...
...Tad Szulc, who roams Latin America for the New York Times, wrote from Brazil: "The makings of a revolutionary situation are increasingly apparent across the vastness of the poverty-stricken and drought-plagued Brazilian Northeast...
...The crisis over the Congo is boiling toward a new showdown...
...He can do this by persuading to his side two powerful Texans, Vice President-elect Lyndon Johnson and Speaker Sam Rayburn, whose whole-hearted cooperation could spell the difference between victory and defeat...
...The pressures from the far Right and the cautious moderates are tremendous...
...We found much to criticize in Candidate Kennedy's utterances on foreign policy, but near the end of the campaign he spoke out far more affirmatively in emphasizing negotiated disarmament, in placing greater emphasis on the social and economic rather than the military aspects of the struggle with world Communism, and in proclaiming that "our great role in history [must be] that of peacemakers...
...A few days after the election, the Journal asserted editorially that "the narrowness of the vote is the central fact of the election...
...To argue that Nixon's strong showing in second place represents a nearly fifty per cent rejection by the people of the liberal Democratic platform ignores the readily demonstrable fact that Nixon felt obliged to embrace a "me too, but—" position on the progressive pledges of his opponent...
...It will be met only by a new and far greater emphasis on the social and economic aspects of the struggle between the Soviets and ourselves...
...Our "victories" in the United Nations are becoming less frequent and more Pyrrhic...
...Despite the loss of two Senate and twenty-four House seats, the President will command substantial Democratic majorities in both chambers...
...The heart of his victorious appeal to the electorate was that we must "move ahead" toward progressive goals...
...Kastenmeier, who represents The Progressive's home district, won despite the Wisconsin trend toward Nixon and in the face of a vicious, McCarthy-style Republican campaign that sought to equate his vote against conscription, his struggle for disarmament, and his leadership in behalf of a National Peace Agency with "appeasement" and "softness on Communism...
...But there will be helpful clues during the next thirty days when he makes his major appointments, and thereafter during the first one hundred days of his Administration when, by his own judgment, he must, for the rest of the long road, chart the course and set the style of his Presidency...
...The situation in Algeria is worsening...
...The struggle over Berlin remains unresolved...
...The generation for which I speak has seen enough of warmongers —let our great role in history be that of peacemakers...
...See James A. Robinson's "The Coming Conflict over the House Rules Committee" on Page 29 of this issue of The Progressive^) Despite pressure from Senators Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and Paul Douglas of Illinois—the latter two were re-elected by majorities far greater than Kennedy received in their states—Candidate Kennedy declined during the campaign to proclaim an unequivocal commitment to rules reform, doubtless because he did not want to offend the nabobs of the South...
...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Next Four Months The next four months will answer some of the questions and resolve at least a few of the doubts of those who voted for Senator John F. Kennedy with hopeful hearts and troubled minds...
...But there was no indication that he was prepared to move to higher ground, or that he understood the extent to which the Cuban revolution, for all its backwash of repression and hate, has captured the imagination of the hungry, the homeless, and the hopeless peoples throughout Latin America...
...The Communist-infiltrated Peasant Leagues, organizing and indoctrinating, have become an important political factor in this area...
...There is the compelling need to leave all doors, at all levels, open at all times for negotiation...
...To be peace-loving is not enough—for the Sermon on the Mount saved its blessing for the peacemakers...
...Thus: % Adlai Stevenson, returning from a recent journey in Latin America, reported: "It is a grave mistake for us to underestimate the popularity of the Cuban Revolution throughout South America...
...Cuba's Premier Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung, Communist China's party chairman, are being presented as heroes to be imitated by the peasants, workers, and students...
...This is one of the hard facts we must live with and the new President must act on—this irresponsible surge toward something resembling the affirmative aspects of the social revolution of Castro's Cuba that dominates the hemisphere in which we live, no less than the new countries of Asia and Africa...
...There is the challenge, as Kennedy pointed out repeatedly during the campaign, to abandon the slothful and almost schizophrenic way in which we have approached conferences on disarmament...
...To accomplish these [platform] goals will require . . . improved Congressional procedures to safeguard majority rule...
...But the casualty list includes some of the most forward-looking freshmen in the old House, including half the members of the Liberal Project, established to serve as a progressive pressure force within the Democratic Party...
...There is much more, of course, that confronts the Kennedy Administration in the realm of foreign affairs...
...The next four months, by his own estimate, should give us something to judge, however tentative...
...In the area 20,000,000 people live on an average annual income of less than $100...
...Like it or not, we are locked everywhere in a supreme struggle with the Soviets to influence the choice of roads that will be taken by countless peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who are determined not to slog along much longer in the mud of their present dead-end street...
...Two of the Project's ablest and most articulate spokesmen for liberalism at home and a more creative foreign policy abroad, Representatives William Meyer of Vermont and Byron Johnson of Colorado, fell before the Republican tide that ran heavily in their states, although both ran well ahead of Kennedy...
...Happily, however, the chairman of the Liberal Project, Wisconsin's Robert Kastenmeier, one of the brightest stars on the freshman team of 1958, won handsomely, more than doubling his margin of two years ago...
...But Kennedy affirmed again and again that he was running on the Democratic platform, and that platform pledges: "In order that the will of the American people may be expressed upon all legislative proposals, we urge that action be taken at the beginning of the Eighty-seventh Congress to improve Congressional procedures so that majority rule prevails and decisions can be made after reasonable debate without being blocked by a minority in either House...
...It may not work...
...They are anxious for social change...
...Laura Berquist, who was jailed in Cuba during her researches for Look, emerged with this warning: "We seem to be driving Castro ever further into the Soviet bloc...
...The fatal ambivalence of those who insist that Kennedy's tight squeeze means the country does not want a liberal program was best illustrated by one of our ablest and most honest defenders of the status quo, The Wall Street Journal...
...That is why the most compelling task confronting the new President even before he moves into the White House is to throw the full power and prestige of his office into the struggle to liberalize the rules of Congress in order to break the stranglehold of the Tory-dominated committees, especially the Rules Committee of the House...
...To them, the word 'freedom' has only one meaning, freedom from poverty, freedom from groveling...
...Premier Khrushchev's cordial response to Kennedy's election holds out some hope that fruitful discussions may be possible in the near future...
...We should make one last effort to establish good relations with Castro...
...We believe that President-elect Kennedy should announce his determination to reverse the reprisals, so self-defeating in any event, that we have invoked against Castro's Cuba and proclaim his determination to seek, in concert with all the other Americas, negotiated settlements with Castro's regime...
...Kennedy seemed to sense the enormity of his blunder and backed away and then abandoned his position...
...It says, in clear voice, that the package of the New Deal-Fair Deal philosophy...
...If Kennedy doesn't try aggressively, or if he tries and fails, much of what he said during the campaign and nearly all of the platform on which he ran will be reduced by the coalition to just so much campaign oratory...
...It may be too late...
...And for the longer haul and the wider landscape, the new Administration can afford to lose no time in embarking on a program of Marshall Plan dimensions that recognizes the legitimate social aspirations of the people of Latin America and seeks to channel their revolutionary surge along democratic lines...
...He can exercise his power and harness his prestige to creative ends even as he stands in the wings waiting for the curtain to go up...
...But we have little to lose by living up to our bigness...
...It doesn't quite square with some of the other things he said, but as incorrigible optimists, we are in a mood to hope that President Kennedy will act on Candidate Kennedy's eloquent summons to America to play the great role of peacemakers...
...But two columns away on the same page of the same issue, the same paper acknowledged that if the "New Deal-Fair Deal philosophy" did not sweep the whole country with Kennedy, it swept the rest of the country with Nixon...
...Conservatives everywhere," said The Wall Street Journal, "winced as he [Nixon] proposed proposals to match every liberal Kennedy program...
...The rules of the House of Representatives should be amended so as to make sure that bills reported by legislative committees reach the floor for consideration without undue delay...
...We should have some notion by then if the man in the White House is standing on and fighting for the platform on which he ran and won...
...We have lingered on Latin America not only because that time-bomb is ticking away so close to home but also because the problems of those countries and the challenge with which they confront us now are much the same as those we encounter in the rest of the world...
...no longer has the power to sweep the country...
...This challenge will not be met by sweetening the pot for the Pentagon...
...He warned that Communism is making massive inroads, not as a Marxist ideology, but as a force for reform holding out hope to the impoverished masses by preaching land reform, social justice, progressive taxation, and industrialization...
...Differences persisted, to be sure, but on almost every issue Nixon finally promised something almost as liberal as Kennedy had...
...We concur heartily in Miss Ber-quist's plea for "one last effort...
...People all over Latin America are restless...
...Jack Anderson, associate of Drew Pearson, reported from south of our border: "Among the restless, seething, hungry millions in these Latin lands, it is no longer Uncle Sam's white beard but Fidel Castro's black beard which has become the symbol of liberty...
...Southern Tories dominate the major committees and can strangle liberal legislation before it gets to the floor...
...The importance of Cuba is much bigger than Cuba...
...No one, it seems to us, who has read Vice President Nixon's campaign speeches, and more importantly, his position papers, can evade the conclusion that for weeks he edged and then in the final days galloped toward a progressive position designed to close the ideological gap between Kennedy and himself...
...Their misery is exploited by the rising Leftist influences in the overcrowded cities...
...The evidence is everywhere, and everywhere overwhelming...
...Emphasis added...
...Wracked by chronic malnutrition and rampaging disease, they seldom live much beyond the age of thirty...
...It is on this last problem that Candidate Kennedy performed most miserably during the campaign...
...And most urgent of all, in our judgment, is the deepening conflict with Cuba and its potential for disaster throughout all Latin America...
...They are contending that the extraordinary closeness of the outcome robs President-elect Kennedy of a progressive mandate and demands of him the formation of something called a "national government" which would freeze the status quo for the next four years...
...Kennedy's commitment to a progressive program at home—especially in the fields of civil rights, social security, aid to education, medical assistance for the aged, and increased minimum wages—will encounter its greatest obstacle in his own party...
...This paragraph packs a powerful hope...
...Perhaps the best way to sum up the task confronting the new President is this quotation from his San Francisco speech November 2: "We can push a button to start the next war—but there is no push-button magic to bring a just and lasting peace...
...All the massive problems in foreign relations that existed before the campaign began are still there, some of them magnified and exacerbated by ineptness, inattention, or indifference on the part of the present Administration...
...In the critical realm of foreign policy, the new President will be less dependent on Congress, for here the Constitution provides considerable room for maneuver and decision by the Chief Executive...
...In Southeast Asia, Laos and Vietnam have presented us with new and urgent problems...
...His call for strengthening "anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro" was a clear-cut violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of Articles Fourteen and Fifteen of the Inter-American Treaty which specifically forbid any intervention, political or economic, in the internal affairs of any of the American republics...
...It will take much longer than that, of course, to form a considered judgment about the Kennedy Administration...
...Here is the first great test Presidentelect Kennedy faces, for the issue will be resolved in the opening days of the new Congress, a fortnight before Kennedy becomes President...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
