THE THICK OF THE FIGHT'
'The Thick of The Fight' The aftermath of President Kennedy's dramatic triumph over Big Steel conceivably could be more important than the event itself. For the first time since he entered the...
...He lauded the United Nations—and agreed with Senator Jackson...
...It is the leader who must lead and the forces follow...
...The evidence to support this sweeping charge was that individual authors advocated policies like demilitarizing Germany (see editorial note, "Strange Bedfellow," on Page 5) and recognition and admission to the United Nations of Communist China...
...If he learns from that experience and "places himself in the thick of the fight" for liberal legislation, we are confident he will find progressive forces throughout the country, now silent and confused, rallying to his leadership...
...This might have been a good and gracious place to stop, but for reasons we cannot fathom, Mr...
...Congress may bury in committee or emasculate by amendment the very measures he has insisted are vital to the national interest, but he will not fight back with anything resembling the fire and intensity that marked his brilliant crusade against Big Steel...
...An avowed liberal himself, he has proposed a liberal program to Congress...
...They are skillfully conceived and superbly phrased...
...There is no reason, the Senator said, why our delegation to the United Nations should "play a larger role in the policy-making process" than U. S. representatives in major world capitals...
...In the face of the wretched record of this session of Congress up to now, the President blandly assured a recent news conference that he was getting "complete cooperation" from leaders in Congress...
...Responding to a press conference question, he ably defended the United Nations and our relationship to it...
...The vigor and clarity of his messages to Congress calling for progressive legislation are often soon dissolved by the Chief Executive's congenital reluctance to embarrass or anger members of Congress by tangling with them, however impersonally, on issues of principle raised in those messages...
...It is a bit hard to understand how Mr...
...Jackson's special target seemed to be Adlai E. Stevenson, U. S. ambassador to the United Nations...
...Our hope is that, having won spectacularly—and enhanced his stature in the process— the President will now be emboldened to employ some of his powers and risk some of his popularity in a showdown struggle with Congress over his liberal legislative program...
...We are not here concerned with the shoddy performance of the Republican high command...
...As Roosevelt put it in his introduction to the book: "The primary function of these essays is to reopen the political forum and reinstate the dialogue of politics in our attempt to lead to new directions in public policy...
...Kennedy displayed so brilliantly in his historic triumph over Big Steel...
...The President, he went on, "converted his personal popularity into political power...
...He went on to say that "Senator Jackson is a very valuable Senator...
...When he fails to fight for it, liberals around the country feel that it would be disloyal to criticize his inactivity...
...Kennedy can believe he is getting "complete cooperation" from his leaders in Congress when they are given to the practice of dolefully conceding defeat even before the battle begins on major issues...
...Certainly liberalism today is pitifully weak as a fighting force...
...But President Kennedy, up to now, at any rate, has preferred to hoard rather than use his personal popularity with Congress and the country...
...But having conceded his point, or rather the point made by Wechsler in his behalf, we hasten to add that Mr...
...It's to be used...
...Together they add up to a great design to get America moving again...
...This is the kind of leadership the country expects and the liberals are hungry for—the kind of leadership Mr...
...The President has sent message after message up to Capitol Hill...
...The quality of Congressional liberalism was on display in the House of Representatives recently following publication of a book entitled The Liberal Papers...
...Their behavior could only have added to his cold-blooded estimate that the liberals are not a significant force to be reckoned with in designing his legislative strategy...
...Emphasis added...
...Thus, Speaker John McCormack predicted in advance that the Administration's "must" bill to establish an Urban Affairs Department was doomed to die, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield proclaimed to the press that "the odds were against" such major White House proposals as enactment of medical care for the aged under Social Security, aid to education, and standby programs to combat recession—even before debate had begun on any one of them...
...President Kennedy must have chuckled when he saw the liberals run for their storm cellars...
...It is to say that the liberal case against him would be far more impressive if there were an authentic coalition of activity and ideas dedicated to a fighting program of progressivism...
...It is President Kennedy who must accept the fact, as Candidate Kennedy did, that a truly effective American President must be prepared to declare war on Congress when necessary, that head-on collisions with Congress are not only inevitable but the very essence of healthy, vigorous government...
...Kennedy, with one or two exceptions, seems content to rest on that record of mere espousal...
...Criticism of the President's failure to fight for a liberal program is sometimes met by the reply that the liberal forces of the nation are, in part, to blame because they are too weak, disorganized, and ineffectual to exert progressive pressure on the President...
...Emphasis added...
...We concur in much of this judgment...
...Kennedy's proposal for a $100 million appropriation for U. N. bonds was under attack in the Senate...
...A group of distinguished scholars, including David Riesman, James Warburg, Charles E. Osgood, Vera Micheles Dean, and Quincy Wright, was commissioned to prepare a series of papers on various phases of foreign policy...
...What concerns us is the response of the liberal Congressmen...
...They feel disarmed, unable to generate thunder from the Left for fear of rocking the boat captained by their leader...
...I believe in a President who will formulate and fight for his legislative policies, and not be a casual observer of the legislative process...
...That's what popularity is for...
...Kennedy must share major responsibility for the plight of liberalism today...
...Kennedy felt compelled to go on to say: "/ do want to point out that on this matter, certainly, there's no disagreement between us...
...To put it another way, I think liberals can begin to demand clear, sharp, and dramatic decisions from the President only when they have put their own political house in order...
...This tendency was most in evidence during the recent episode that revolved around the attack on United States policy toward the United Nations by Senator Henry M. Jackson, Washington Democrat, who was once, briefly, the great hope in Congress of the progressives of the Northwest...
...He's done very effective work and anything he says deserves a good deal of attention...
...The result was twelve essays which were published by Doubleday in a paperback book, The Liberal Papers...
...With only two distinguished exceptions — California's James Roosevelt and Kastenmeier—they scurried for cover, crying out that they had nothing to do with the project...
...In the closing week of the 1960 campaign, Candidate Kennedy taunted President Eisenhower for sending eloquent messages to Congress but doing nothing about them thereafter...
...As for himself, he said then: "I want to be a President who is the Chief Executive in every sense of the word—who responds to a problem, not by hoping his subordinates will act, but by directing them to act—a President who is willing to take the responsibility for getting things done, and take the blame if they are not done right...
...For the first time since he entered the White House, Mr...
...How did the President meet the challenge of the Jackson speech, which commanded front-page headlines around the country...
...In Congress, the liberals, such as there are, are woefully disorganized and remain largely silent in public, however much they may fret and fume in private over the Administration pattern of passivity on the legislative front...
...But once the messages have been dispatched to Congress, Mr...
...Kennedy marshaled the Constitutional powers of the Presidency and drew on his vast reserve of national popularity to slug it out in the open on an issue of great dimensions...
...Kennedy has left undone or that I believe we must have any moratorium on criticism...
...Soon leading Republican spokesmen, armed with isolated phrases from the 354-page volume, opened fire on the Democratic Party's "surrender and appeasement policy" that "not only repeats the Communist line but goes beyond the Communist line...
...Because they trust him as one of their own, or almost one of their own, liberals assume he needs their support, or at the very least, their silence, even when he is appeasing Congressional conservatives as part of some grand political design they do not fully understand...
...Thus, James A. Wechsler, brilliant editor of the New York Post and one of the nation's most articulate spokesmen for genuine pro-gressivism, put it this way recently: "Much of what Mr...
...On occasion he even seems prepared to take a position that would appear to be contrary to his own in order not to disturb a cordial relationship with a member of Congress...
...It's like money in the bank...
...Nor has he invoked, to any measurable degree, "the power of Presidential leadership of public opinion" by taking his case for a progressive program to the people...
...It must be slightly disconcerting, to say the least, for such liberal troops as we have in Congress to be sent into battles that the generals publicly announce are lost before they begin...
...Except for the peace movement struggling for a more creative foreign policy, there is virtually no organized progressive activity out in the country...
...Jackson, as the New York Times reported his speech, "assailed" both the Kennedy and Eisenhower Administrations because they had "attached too much importance to the United Nations," so much so, he charged, that "the United States' decisionmaking has been unduly influenced by the U.N...
...The Republican National Committee put its hatchet staff to work on the book...
...Jackson, now harshly labeled by his critics at home as "the Senator from Boeing" because of his intense preoccupation with warplane orders for the corporation that dominates Seattle, opened fire on past and present American attitudes toward the United Nations at just the moment that the Senate was struggling with the Kennedy Administration's urgent proposal to appropriate $100 million to buy half the bonil issue that organization requires to head off financial insolvency...
...Criticism of the United Nations, and of U. S. relations with the international organization, is always in order and often useful, but here was a leading Administration Senator, a personal friend of the President's who had served him as chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1960 campaign, spitting out his grievances against the United Nations, U. S. relations with the United Nations, and the President's ambassador to the United Nations at precisely the time Mr...
...A President who will not back down under pressure, or let down his spokesmen in the Congress—a President who does not speak from the rear of the battle but places himself in the thick of the fight...
...Kennedy has failed to do in this first phase of his Administration reflects, I fear, not his own indecision but a cold appraisal of the political balance of power in our country...
...It is far from that now . . . This is not to say that the disorganized state of the liberal-labor coalition is adequate excuse for things that Mr...
...Several years ago, Wisconsin's Representative Robert Kastenmeier brought together a dozen young House Democrats in a loose, informal seminar known as The Liberal Project, which was to explore new approaches to basic problems...
...Nobody had expected them to endorse all or any of the individual proposals in the signed essays—Roosevelt and Kastenmeier made their position clear on that point—but what was expected was a defense of the right of free inquiry and responsible public debate on vital issues...
...Senator Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic whip, seemed to be saying just that, while gently prodding the President to action, when he asserted that the outcome of the battle over steel prices had "revealed and emphasized the power of Presidential leadership of public opinion...
...The President's obsessive coddling of Congress in the face of repeated rebuffs sometimes generates considerable confusion on just where he does stand...
Vol. 26 • May 1962 • No. 5
