THE SECOND YEAR
The Second Year As he embarked on his second year in the White House, President Kennedy demonstrated that he commands all the ingredients of successful progressive leadership—except fire and fight....
...But even before a day had passed, the word went out from Democratic sources that the President was in a mood to compromise rather than to crusade for his program...
...Kennedy the moderate confined specific proposals to the need for reform in voting rights...
...Representative Carl B. Albert, Oklahoma, the new Majority Leader of the House, is an amiable and able enough Congressman, but he lacks the stomach for a fight on economic issues and has a positive distaste, to put it mildly, for civil rights reform...
...Thus, there are: • Kennedy the "rhetorical radical" —the Kennedy of the campaign, of the Inaugural Address, of the whole concept of the New Frontier, and the stirring challenge at home and abroad...
...He likes—and in moderation this is not a fatal defect—to operate without stirring up hard feelings...
...Kennedy the "policy liberal," who proposes legislation for education and welfare, and aid to developing countries...
...It may be good politics to hoard his Gallup Poll popularity, but we find it hard to believe that the author of Profiles in Courage and the candidate who beckoned us toward the New Frontier does not recognize that principle may be at least as important as popularity...
...The Wall Street Journal, after commenting on the President's capacity for compromise on progressive legislation, observed: "One consolation for Mr...
...It is this "understanding" that robs the progressive forces in Congress and out in the country of their voice, their vigor—and their influence on the Kennedy Administration...
...Even the latter was thought by White House circles to be expendable and, it rejected, would make a fetching campaign issue in the Congressional elections this year...
...It,is only a fighting faith in a progressive program that has any hope of achieving victory over these enemies...
...that sometimes demands audacity...
...This mood of defeatism seemed to envelop many other measures proposed by the President in his State of the Union message...
...Liberal lawmakers who, a year ago, were privately denouncing the President as lacking imagination in his legislative program and as tending to follow Eisenhower Administration policies are more understanding today...
...Moreover, the Kennedy Administration can count on little militancy among Democratic leaders in the House in pressing for enactment of a progressive program...
...James Reston, chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times, who has exceptional access to the President's thinking, reported the other day that the Chief Executive "has been saying recently that the major pressures are now on the Right...
...For example, in the field of civil rights, Kennedy the rhetorical radical marked the approach of the 100 th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation as a time for action...
...Essentially satisfied with the system as it is, he would rather try to energize it than change it...
...It was his "furious lobbying for parochial school assistance," said The Wall Street Journal, no friend of Federal aid to education, that "helped fan the religious issue that spelled the downfall of the Administration's public school aid bills" during the last session...
...Kennedy, like many of us, is a man of many moods...
...As the New York Post put it: "The large question is not whether the President is right in narrowing his objectives...
...Although the Democratic Party commands comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress, most of the key committees are dominated by Right-wing Southerners...
...The truth," it said editorially, "is that Mr...
...In the process he may have to give up a few percentage points in his popularity rating, but the great mass of Americans who constitute his basic support will love him for the enemies he makes...
...As the consequence of their silence in the face of compromise and surrender the President tends to become confirmed in his belief that the "major pressure" comes from the Right, and this, in turn, generates a new cycle of abandoning vital progressive objectives without a struggle...
...that sometimes requires a willingness to stand against voluble special groups and insistent interests...
...Less than a day later, Administration sources revealed that the fight for the bill had been abandoned in the hope of capturing support for less controversial legislation on education...
...He will be surprised to discover how much of the country is ready to follow him across the New Frontier...
...Let the President, as he begins his second year, sound that trumpet again—and stand firm to its summons...
...His State of the Union message, for example, was a beautifully conceived creation, and while it didn't ring with the blood-tingling challenge of his Inaugural Address, it revealed an extraordinary awareness of the problems we face and the policies required to meet them...
...There is little articulate or organized pressure from the progressive forces of the nation, and this makes the drift toward compromise and retreat a less troubling process for the President...
...Even the New York Times, which is perched in the moderate middle, has frequently felt obliged in recent months to complain of the passionless character of the Kennedy Administration...
...Even those goals for which he is prepared to fight are endangered by this overly cautious strategy...
...But this may not be the best way to win the hearts of the people...
...In the House of Representatives, which has become the graveyard of liberal legislation, the difficulty is compounded by the disproportionate influence of Northern Congressmen representing conservative rural constituencies...
...But in urging passage of the controversial program for Federal aid to public school construction and teachers' salaries, which was killed last year, he could only say he saw "no reason to weaken or withdraw that bill"—hardly a fighting summons to action...
...The President's instinctive reluctance to wade into the struggle is nourished, unfortunately, by the silent acquiescence of liberals in Congress and the absence of thunder from the Left out in the country...
...His gifted biographer, Professor James Mac-Gregor Burns, has discovered "at least four Kennedys" during the first phase of the Kennedy Administration, ranging from the radical, through the liberal and moderate, to the conservative Kennedy...
...Some moods are at war with others...
...For if this session begins in that mood and tone of defeatism politely characterized as 'realism,' there is every reason to believe that his adversaries will be emboldened to undermine even his selective goals...
...and Kennedy the conservative was silent on major specific desegregation measures pending in Congress, especially the platform-promised Clark-Celler bill, which would require segregated public school districts to submit within six months a plan for first-step integration by 1963—the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation...
...Kennedy, a gifted student of the prevailing political winds, is quick to sense, and respond to, political pressures...
...We do not for a moment underestimate the immensity of the roadblocks in President Kennedy's path...
...The result of this inequitable distribution of seats is to vest ever greater power in the hands of the ruling coalition of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats...
...Speaker John W. McCormack has never been accused of being a crusader for liberal causes...
...It is our guess that Mr...
...This, Burns, believes, is "the most authentic Kennedy...
...All four Kennedys were on display in his State of the Union message...
...Kennedy would welcome pressure from the progressives as a countervailing force against the clamor from the Right...
...Most well-informed correspondents went so far as to predict, on the basis of private talks with Democratic leaders, that of all the excellent measures it proposed, the Kennedy Administration would be quite content if it succeeded in winning approval of its plan for liberalized foreign trade and its program of medical care for the aged under Social Security...
...Kennedy the "conservative" in governmental and political organization...
...It is whether he has increased or diminished the possibility of achieving them by virtually letting it be known that he expects nothing to be done in so many other areas...
...Kennedy sometimes seems to be avoiding trouble when he should be seeking it...
...In the field of education, the President's rhetoric rang with eloquence as he warned that "civilization is a race between education and catastrophe...
...They sympathize with the plight of the President...
...Vigorous and widespread demand for enactment of the progressive platform on which he campaigned might well embolden the President to fight and, conceivably, it might also waken some of the liberals in Congress from their nodding acceptance of retreat as a way of political life...
...But it doesn't make sense to us, even in the Administration's chosen realm of "realism," to call retreat before the battle starts...
...It is time for the liberals to speak up, \o make it clear to the President that their silence does not give consent to a policy of appeasing the Right...
...Given lieutenants of this caliber, and committee chairmen of even less progressive persuasion, President Kennedy would at best be confronted with an almost impossible assignment in seeking enactment of liberal legislation, but the difficulties are magnified many-fold, it seems to us, by the Administration's strategy of attempting to appease, rather than fight, the forces of reaction...
...Kennedy: His inclination to shy away from various projects dear to liberal hearts is drawing a minimum of thunder from the Congressional Left...
...The failure of state legislatures to reapportion Congressional districts on the basis of population is in large measure responsible for the lopsided power wielded by rural Representatives...
...They are reluctant to rock the boat of a liberal Administration...
...In a remarkable display of unanimity that must have been inspired by some central source in the Administration, the best informed of the Washington correspondents reported less than forty-eight hours after the speech that the President was not greatly concerned, for the moment, about many of the proposals he had urged, and that he would settle for a substantially reduced legislative program...
...Kennedy the "fiscal moderate," who wants to balance the budget even as he proposed heavier spending programs and "hesitates to take the strong steps necessary for full economic growth while seeing the long-term need for it...
...Given the fact of life on Capitol Hill—a conservative, often cantankerous Congress—no progressive would dream that all, or nearly all of the President's program could be enacted into law...
...If the President is prepared to jettison parts of his program in the hope of salvaging others, he can hardly hope to be in a strong bargaining position by permitting the word to go out, unchallenged, that he feels no urgent need for much that he had just proposed for this session of Congress...
...Kennedy the policy liberal called for legislation...
...It is time, too, for the President to take his case to the country, to translate some of his immense personal popularity into influence with Congress on major legislation...
...It was only a year ago that John F. Kennedy thrilled his countrymen by saying: "Now the trumpet summons again [for] a struggle against the common enemies of man—tyr-any, poverty, disease, and war itself...
...The style was there, as always, and so was the substance...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
