THE FIRST KENNEDY CONGRESS
The First Kennedy Congress When the Eighty-Seventh Congress adjourned recently, President Kennedy hailed its record as one of "positive and progressive accomplishment" unsurpassed "in our time." If...
...Kennedy beckoned us in 1960, but it did constitute a modest beginning...
...The liberals in Congress, except for a handful of courageous souls, found it more socially comfortable and politically secure to play on the Administration team than to fight openly for a progressive program...
...But no accounting of its stewardship would be complete without chronicling the areas in which it failed to act...
...All in all, this was not an impressive Congress...
...Drug Control—The uproar over thalidomide pushed a previously reluctant Congress into enactment of legislation that strengthens Federal authority to protect the public against hazardous drugs...
...Other casualties in this Congress were the wilderness bill so ardently sought by conservationists, the President's wide-ranging plan to modernize the whole structure of government regulation in railroads, airlines, and other basic forms of transportation...
...During its first session, 1961, and especially during the honeymoon days of the Kennedy Administration, the Eighty-Seventh Congress passed a landmark housing program, widened Social Security, extended minimum wage legislation, liberalized unemployment compensation, created the Peace Corps, established the Alliance for Progress, and set up a semi-autonomous Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...
...This hardly added up to the New Frontier to which Mr...
...Federal aid to public elementary and secondary schools died in religious dispute during the 1961 session...
...The Administration made no effort to revive it this year—despite the fact that the President told Congress: "No task before our nation is more important than expanding and improving the educational opportunities of all our people...
...Its intense preoccupation with Cuba resulted in adoption of a resolution calling for war if necessary to prevent the extension of aggressive or subversive activities by the Castro regime...
...The Administration measure to provide Federal aid for college scholarships and classroom construction was defeated in another church-state dispute...
...A far more meaningful proposal to restrict the arbitrary use of literacy tests to prevent minority groups from participating in elections was filibustered to death in the Senate...
...See editorial note on Page 7.) Employment—Aside from a modest proposal authorizing the President to channel $900,000,000 in public-work projects to areas of heavy unemployment, the only legislation in this field created a three-year, $435 million program to retrain unemployed workers as a partial answer to the ever-mounting challenge of automation and the persistent presence of nearly six per cent unemployment...
...The measure was killed in the Senate, where the Democrats have a two-thirds majority, and did not even achieve the dignity of a vote in the House...
...This, then, greatly telescoped, is the record of the Eighty-Seventh Congress...
...The two-year record of the Eighty-Seventh Congress defies generalization...
...Kennedy meant the past decade, his estimate has more meaning as a bitter judgment of the do-little days of President Eisenhower's eight years than as an accolade for his own first Congress...
...Taxation—Congress passed a tax bill which not only failed to plug old loopholes, as intended, but created new ones...
...James A. Wechsler's superb interpretation of this struggle appeared in the October issue of The Progressive...
...the bill to provide a second extension of unemployment compensation for those who have exhausted their benefits, and the President's program for Federal aid to help finance a mass transit plan for metropolitan areas...
...The measure gives the President long-term authority to cut all tariffs at least fifty per cent and remove many completely, and is designed, in part, to accommodate American trade to the challenge of the European Common Market...
...The appropriations for the Department of Defense totaled $48.1 billion, which is $7.8 billion more than during the last year of the Eisenhower Administration and even $129,000,000 more than the Department of Defense thought it needed and could possibly spend...
...Communications—Crushing a liberal filibuster in the Senate, the Administration got what it wanted when Congress voted to establish a private corporation to develop, own, and operate a communications satellite system...
...With only an occasional exception, the Administration's defeats were far more spectacular and decisive than its victories...
...The hope that the second session would prove more fruitful was crushed by the dominance of the coalition of Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans and by the Kennedy Administration's failure to fight and its eagerness to compromise on a number of basic issues...
...Subsequently Congress passed a much milder measure extending existing voluntary controls for a year, but providing for mandatory production curbs on wheat alone for the following year...
...But Congress marred an otherwise fine performance by writing into the bill crippling restrictions on the President's power to deal with Poland and Yugoslavia...
...On the contrary, measured by the dimensions of the challenge with which we are confronted, it did little to accept and act on its responsibilities...
...The legislation cleared the appropriate committees of both houses but was strangled by Representative Howard Smith, chairman of the all-powerful House Rules Committee, when he learned that the bill would apply to Negroes and that the youth corps activity camps would not be segregated...
...Still, President Kennedy not only signed it but acclaimed it as a measure "which will stimulate the economy and provide a greater measure of fairness in our tax system...
...The reasons for this heavily negative response to some of the most meaningful provisions in the President's program seem quite clear: • The antiquated rules of Congress lodge dictatorial powers in the hands of a half-dozen or so tired, feuding, old Southern Bourbons whose calendars show the year 1862...
...Kennedy seemed to understand, most notably in his Yale address, the urgent need to abandon ancient myths and to generate new forces designed to revive our sluggish economy and "get the country moving again," but he failed to get that message across to Congress and the country, in large measure because much of the rest of the time he was working at placating the business community and appeasing the conservative forces on Capitol Hill...
...The Kennedy Administration, for all its good intentions and brilliant prose, revealed a reluctance to fight, a quickness to compromise, and, on more than one occasion, a lack of commitment to progressive principles that gravely impaired its leadership in the legislative struggle...
...the truth-in-lending bill (see Senator Paul H. Douglas' article on Page 12 of this issue...
...Nor would it consider legislative tax reduction as an anti-recession step...
...It worked tirelessly and fought furiously to achieve the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the most forward-looking foreign trade bill in American history...
...The country itself exerted little if any pressure for a better program because it was apathetic and unsure of what it wanted and where it wanted to go—a condition which might have been healed by more aggressive leadership...
...Armaments—Congress speedily approved, without a dissenting voice and often without debate or discussion, the largest peacetime armament budget in our history...
...Congress hacked more than a billion dollars from the President's foreign aid program, and sought constantly to limit the President's constitutional mandate to conduct foreign relations...
...If Mr...
...Congress refused to grant the President standby authority to initiate public works and reduce income taxes to prevent or combat economic recession...
...Agriculture — The Administration's drive for strict production controls on wheat and livestock feed grains was defeated in the House...
...The Kennedy proposal to establish a Department of Urban Affairs with Cabinet rank was killed— in large measure because Southerners feared the appointment of a Negro to the Cabinet...
...The only enactment was a constitutional "amendment to outlaw poll taxes as a qualification for voting for Federal office...
...Many of the "achievements" hailed by the White House represented greatly watered-down versions of the original legislation—sometimes to the point that the final version represented just about the opposite sought in the original measure...
...members...
...An analysis of current Federal spending revealed that seventy-nine per cent goes for defense, past wars, space, and technology, while seven per cent is earmarked for health, education, and welfare...
...Foreign Affairs—The Eighty-Seventh Congress was surly and belligerent in this field...
...His heart was set, it seems, on the seven per cent investment tax credit for industry—a bonanza for big business that will cost the rest of the taxpayers a billion dollars a year...
...Its only affirmative act was to authorize the purchase of as much as $ 100,000,000 in United Nations bonds—but not more than the total bought by all other U.N...
...Thus: • The Kennedy Administration's top priority measure in domestic affairs was a program of hospital insurance for the aged under Social Security...
...Poorly led, dominated at many decisive moments by cranky, quarrelsome old men, and manipulated by as brazen a band of lobbyists as ever swarmed over Capitol Hill, the Eighty-Seventh shirked many of its responsibilities, but somehow managed to patch together a record whose total impact is somewhat better than one would have suspected from following day-to-day developments...
...The amendment, which must now run its tortuous course through the state legislatures, will have little impact because only five states now require poll tax payment as a condition for voting and only two use the tax to any extent as a race barrier...
...A survey of the accomplishments of this second session shows the following results in capsule form: Foreign Trade—This was the Administration's finest hour...
...not only failed to raise new revenue, as intended, but resulted instead in a loss to the Treasury of several hundred million dollars...
...Racism was responsible for the death of the Youth Employment Opportunities Act, a sort of domestic Peace Corps...
...Race Relations—Neither Congress nor the President was disposed to wage much of a fight in this explosive field...
Vol. 26 • November 1962 • No. 11
