The President and Congress

...Yet there were many subordinate devices that could well have continued to muster support for Presidential policies which were also scrapped...

...In the course of his long and exhausting drive for the Presidency, candidate Kennedy repeatedly spoke of the need to "get America moving again...

...There were the personal Presidential telephone calls to wavering legislators at voting time...

...There was a recession, and it was rather severe...

...The coalition cost President Kennedy some victories—most notably in the matter of his aid to education bill (where a factor contributing to its defeat was the constant switching of White House signals)— but the President won more often than he lost when he decided to challenge the conservatives...

...But they wonder why the natural gifts which a man like Senator Hubert Humphrey possesses for illuminating the partisan aspects of legislative issues were not used more fully, and with the President's active encouragement...

...f How did Mr...

...Kennedy was acutely aware that he had won the Presidency by only a hair, and that a great many Congressional Democrats ran well ahead of him in the 1960 elections...

...From time to time, the President calls on Bailey to do a little arm twisting when the deed promises to win over a balky Congressman...

...Some were saddled with restrictive or destructive amendments by the House...

...Under the spur of the Berlin crisis, Congress almost by acclamation has given him all he has asked for...

...The complaints seemed merely to echo the old border clashes between the two chambers that frequently flare u p but are soon brought under control...

...His problem, as' he then saw it as President-elect, was to win a post-election "ratification" of his entry into the Presidency by extending the hand of friendship to his adversaries in the Republican Party, by courtesies shown the political heroes of the South, and by appointing qualified Republicans, independents, and pre-co'nvention anti-Kennedy Democrats to some of the highest posts in his Administration...

...New movements initiated in the broad reaches of America's internal life, he implied, would create energies that would lead inevitably to new movements in the broad reaches of America's external affairs...

...But this year the normal air of confusion they brought to the hour was compounded by two abnormal developments that commanded attention at the same time...

...In Michigan right now, union men who are out of work are sardonically repeating in their union meetings the texts of speeches candidate Kennedy gave before their factory, gates—now closed—when he was running for the Presidency...

...It was modest, non-revolutionary, yet it conveyed a sense of new direction and quickening motion...

...There was, in addition, the inheritance of President Eisenhower's eightyearlong sermon on the moral imperatives of balancing the budget and defending the dollar...

...The program had the virtue of being known to Congress, known to himself, and known to the members of his personal staff, many of whom had worked on features of it during President Kennedy's days in the Senate...

...There were several pre-conditions —each tying-in with the other— which President-elect Kennedy faced in the interval between his election and inauguration...

...Kennedy's disposal to drive the program through Congress...

...Yet another distinctive development bearing on the relations of the President with Congress was the extent to which the National Democratic Committee shed its character as an "issue-oriented" committee, a character which it had acquired in the years when the Democrats were out of the White House...

...First, the Berlin crisis was then at a blazing intensity, and in the garish light of the crisis, Congress and the President somehow seemed to suggest that the two lived in wholly separate worlds...

...Reputedly, he felt that the international crisis demanded "national unity," and, in any case, he felt he could not risk the loss of support he might need in the most crucial matters of state by seeking to make partisan political capital out of what he conceived to be secondary issues...

...The forthcoming Congressional elections will have a tendency, as they have in the past, to tighten party lines and to weaken the power of the conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats...

...Yet Bailey's usefulness in such matters seems limited to the Democratic Congressmen from his native Connecticut or from those few other places where there are remnants of the old-style machines run by bosses who are themselves not officeholders—the machines of Governor David Lawrence of Pennsylvania and Senator Harry E. Byrd of Virginia being among the few exceptions east of the Mississippi...

...If the text of his October 26 statement to Cabinet officers and agency heads on the budget outlook for 1962 and 1963 is a fair sign of which way the wind is blowing, he seems disposed to follow the line of "fiscal responsibility" by holding back on any major innovations in domestic policy, while giving free rein to what he regards as the requirements of national security...

...For at this crucial time, a number of key House leaders simply abandoned Washington and returned home...

...It seemed unnatural for Senator Humphrey to come out of a legislative leaders' meeting in the White House and remain under wraps—in contrast to the partisan volubility shown by Senator Everett Dirksen and Representative Charles Halleck when they emerged from similar meetings with President Eisenhower...

...Yet while Mr...

...It seems likely that the greater share of the President's approach as the nation's First Legislator will carry over into the second session of the Eighty-seventh Congress...

...More noteworthy still is the way Congress, without a murmur of...

...It is only at this late date that the air seems sufficiently settled to see clearly what actually happened in the recent session of Congress, and to make an assessment of how President Kennedy bore himself in his initial attempt at the role of First Legislator...

...His articles have appeared in the New York Times magazine...

...Overshadowing the entire scope of the domestic legislative program is the fear that though the country as a whole may come out of the recession, states like Michigan and Pennsylvania may be left with basic unemployment of ten per cent of the total labor force...

...The President's defense plans constitute the one aspect of his program he has had little difficulty extending beyond his original proposals to Congress...

...and, with these pre-conditions in mind, the decisions he made during that period go far to explain his emphasis in the ensuing months of Presidential-Congressional relations...

...and that he had even less appreciation of how an unbalanced budget unleashed "inflationary forces" which bore heavily on those who lived on pensions and fixed incomes...

...If President Kennedy emphasizes accommodation with Congress in the next session, as he did in the last, the role of the White House egg-heads on the legislative front will be no greater next year than it has been this year...

...the folks back home" are insisting that "charity begins at home...

...Indeed, say the opposition leaders, were it not for their own spirited resistance, the Administration would have had an even freer hand to rob honest citizens of everything they cherished...

...President Kennedy's methods in seeking to get his way during the first session of the Eighty-seventh Congress included all the old reliable devices...

...But his naturally exuberant response was tempered by an underlying wariness, as revealed in his admonishment of an intimate who congratulated him at a time when a chorus of praise was rising from all sides...

...Yet the demands of Mr...

...Instead, he demands a quid pro quo in return for any special Presidential request that might imperil the officeholding boss' chances for reelection...

...It is O'Brien who carries in his right hand the request of support for a Presidential measure, and in his left the quid pro quo designed to win that support if there are risks the Senator or Representative might have to run with his constituents...

...Wait," said Mr...

...Several aspects of all this deserve special notice...

...The hard-bitten politicians who dominate Congress have little liking for intellectuals and even less admiration for their progressive outlook...

...There was the stickandcarrot tactic represented in the power to punish or reward in the distribution of patronage...

...His cause in Congress will then tend to be entrusted all the more to men like O'Brien or to politically oriented Cabinet officers like Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, and Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall...

...The distinguished academicians now on the White House staff, although all life-long students of politics, hold little promise of being much help to Mr...

...Kennedy's position at the head of the ticket...

...It dealt mainly with domestic affairs, and while its enactment would cost a few billions more than the 1961-62 Eisenhower budget called for, the costs were far lower than the added $10 billion which Republican sources in the 1960 campaign had estimated...

...The decision in favor of a go-slow policy was reinforced by other considerations...

...Democratic Party professionals in Washington are not inclined to dispute openly the President's judgment on how he should use his personal influence...

...A number of the most liberal Democratic Representatives had been defeated, and their loss was commonly attributed, correctly or not, to Mr...

...For the same reason, the vital point of contact between the White House and these combination boss-officeholders in Congress is White House Special Assistant for Congressional Relations, Lawrence O'Brien...

...From the standpoint of domestic legislation, the first session of the Eighty-seventh Congress can be viewed as a "second run" of the Kennedy program that failed in the resumed session of 1960...

...These were the traditional judgments heard early in September, immediately after Congress had adjourned until January...

...Differences in the President's methods evidenced in the first session of the Eighty-seventh Congress may show up in the second session...

...All this had its intended effect, so that when Inauguration Day arrived, it was clear President-elect Kennedy had won for himself a post-election victory of impressive size...

...For one thing, as a recent study by the Congressional Quarterly revealed, the "conservative coalition" of Republicans and Southern Democrats was more active but less successful in the first session of the Eighty-seventh Congress than at any time in the past five years...

...To other intimates, he expressed the view that the numerous crises in the international arena would repeatedly tax the nation's trust in his leadership, and that he would have to be careful about how often he "went to the bank" to draw on the post-election good will he had accumulated...

...The solution lay in what had come to be known as "the Kennedy program"— the program that got nowhere in the resumed session of Congress held the preceding August, immediately after the nominating conventions...

...It seems timely, therefore, to consider three interrelated questions which may foreshadow the nature of the President's relations with the second session of the Eighty-seventh Congress...

...Kennedy concluded that the American people as a whole would not at that moment respond affirmatively to a bold experimenter in the Presidency...

...Kennedy's campaign left him little opportunity to put together a sweeping legislative program that could in reality "make America move again" in its internal life...

...When all these pre-conditions were assessed, there still remained the problem of putting together a legislative program that fitted in with them...

...Kennedy in the role of pro-consuls where Congress is concerned...

...Kennedy was "fiscally irresponsible...

...The President and Congress by SIDNEY HYMAN WITH THE convening of the next Congressional session only a month away, John F. Kennedy is about to be tested for the second time in his Presidential role as the nation's First Legislator...

...The President-elect knew well that he was himself on trial in the public mind because of his youth, his Catholicism, and his alleged "lack of executive experience...

...He is also reported to be placing his hope—provisionally at least—in the theory that the new expenditures for defense will work their way into the bloodstream of the economy and bring jobs to the hard-core unemployed...

...Through the force of contrast, it could therefore pass muster as a "fiscally responsible" program...

...Aghast at the spectacle, and feeling themselves powerless to check the stampede, angry Senators could vent their frustration only by loudly denouncing the irresponsibility of the House, thus briefly riveting attention on what appeared to be an irrevocable breach between the two Congressional chambers...

...that, as a personally wealthy man, he had no appreciation of what taxes meant to ordinary people...

...The Reporter, The Saturday Review, and The New Republic...

...West of the Mississippi, Chairman Bailey has discovered to his dismay that the "boss" of the "machine" is himself an office-holder—a Senator or a Representative—who cannot be swayed by appeals to his "loyalty...

...Yet the protests Senators leveled against the House initially caused little alarm...

...A second development of that time, unrelated to the first and not nearly so dramatic, also served to sever any sense of a joint Presidential-Congressional performance in the first session of the Eighty-seventh Congress...

...However, a continuing international crisis will make it all the more difficult for President Kennedy to earmark large segments of time for the personal attention so necessary to winning over the marginal votes in Congress...

...Equally striking was the President's seeming reluctance to sharpen the partisan edge of political issues, at least in public...

...It was reasoned that this program could now get somewhere, for instead of a President Eisenhower poised to veto it, all the powers of the Presidency would be at Mr...

...Kennedy, "I haven't done anything yet...

...There were the courtesies of calling in Congressional committee chairmen and ranking members for discussions of legislation while the bills were still being drafted...

...What stylistic aspects of his bearing as First Legislator will probably remain unchanged in the next session...

...In the earlier days of the session, Senators of both parties protested the fate of Senate-approved measures in the House...

...Kennedy entered the White House...

...These charges visibly drew blood from candidate Kennedy, and in the post-election days he defined one of his major political tasks in terms of the need to appear "fiscally responsible"—a need that seemed all the more imperative because the rapid outflow of gold then underway appeared to have some connection with currently prevailing conditions in American public finance...

...SIDNEY HYMAN is the author of "The American President...

...But the economic blight was regionally spotty rather than nationwide in its sweep, and Mr...

...This should ease the President's problem of winning his own party members to the support of his program...

...Some were pummeled in conference committees, where House appointees frequently insisted that Senate appointees accept the House version of the measure at issue...

...However, as Congress moved into its home-stretch drive—during which the bulk of all legislation to be enacted takes its final form at behindjthe scenes meetings of House and Senate leaders—a wholly new note of rancor was detected rising from the Senate in its barbs against the House...

...In any case, Democratic National Committee Chairman John Bailey has steered the Committee into the traditional channels of fund raising and acting as clearing house and broker for the distribution of Presidential patronage...

...With the disciplining hand of the leadership removed, the House charged through the final days of the session like a stampeding herd, unmindful of what it knocked down and trampled...

...Nor did the nation—as in 1933 —appear to be in a mood for a reform on the home front...

...Kennedy expressed his sympathy with a remedy in the form of a comprehensive public works program proposed by Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, he is reported to have felt, for political or fiscal reasons, that the deficits of such a program were unsupportable when added to the deficits of the steppedup defense program...

...It was to be expected that when a Democratic President was re-installed in the White House as the fountainhead of party policy, the Democratic Advisory Council to the National Committee could not very well continue in the same business...

...Even under "normal" conditions, an objective summing up of a President's legislative performance at the close of a Congressional session is made difficult by the partisan hyperboles that ritualistically mark the moment and obscure realities...

...But this time around, with the exception of the aid to education measure and medical care for the aged, and with some important refinements of detail, the program was enacted substantially as it was formulated before Mr...

...protest, has backed Commander-in-Chief Kennedy's callup of military manpower—an action that was thought to spell sudden political death in the Eisenhower Administration...

...f If changes are in the offing, what are they likely to be...

...Kennedy carry himself in this role during the first session of the current Congress...

...T h e r e were the White House breakfast and luncheon meetings with legislative leaders of both parties, plus an occasional late afternoon or evening soiree with selected individuals...

...Moreover, there were Richard Nixon's charges in the Presidential campaign that Mr...

...On the one hand, the President and his legislative leaders traditionally insist— and this Administration is no exception— that what happened in the months preceding adjournment added up to the most creative Congressional session within memory, as proved by the volume of legislation enacted...

...A mood of this kind is not going to make it any easier for Michigan Congressmen to vote in the next session for a renewal of reciprocal trade agreements or for foreign aid appropriations...

...Yet the detail— the area redevelopment bill— has something to say about the distance that must still be traveled before a major domestic problem is brought merely within view of a solution on the far horizon: It is estimated that the funds the measure provides for retraining the "hardcore" unemployed can reach little more than 10,000 men, while there are hundreds of thousands of men who need to be taught new employable skills...

...Some of these measures were rudely shot down by the House committees...

...But whereas the Berlin crisis made the Presidential preformance appear to be all that mattered, the impact of the second event led to a brief refocusing of troubled attention on Congress itself: There seemed to be an open breach between the Senate and the House as coordinate Congressional institutions...

...Under the less idealistic spur of vested Congressional interests in certain aircraft industries, it has even given him more than he asked for, and more than the Defense Department wants to spend...

...It may not be fair to single out one detail as representative of the domestic side of the program...

...Opposition legislative leaders, on the other hand, traditionally insist that the Congressional session just ended was a monument to the incompetence of the President and proved —if proof were still needed—that he and his party are unfit to govern the nation...