NOTES IN THE NEWS
Kennedy and Congress The Washington pundits have been much absorbed of late in attempting to determine whether the President or Congress is to blame for the miserable state of the Administration's...
...But Hoover enjoys an awesome immunity from challenge or criticism...
...This tendency has raised considerable doubt whether the President has charted a clear-cut course and formulated a firm purpose for his Administration...
...It was the first time in history that the two giants of the earth had met across a courtroom to argue a case before the world tribunal...
...His humbug is all the more grating because it is delivered through a vocal instrument so mellifluous that it sounds like the concerted voice of the undertakers and embalmers assembled in national conclave...
...Two men met to argue a case before the International Court of Justice...
...It may come as a bit of a shock to Republicans to learn that the father of their party is also the father of the withholding provision — and, of course, of the income tax itself...
...This forgotten slice of history turned up recently when Norman Runion, a Washington correspondent for United Press International, was doing research for an article that would mark the 100th anniversary of the Internal Revenue Service...
...His address was a remarkable performance...
...The other was Abram L. Chayes, legal adviser of the State Department of the United States...
...Should the Assembly uphold the Court's decision, the financial plight of the U.N...
...The solution, he said, was the election of more Democrats to Congress...
...Its code of conduct, its obsessive concern in guarding the nation, must be, he said, "duty, honor, country," and then went on to say: "Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds . . . Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government . . . The great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution...
...The issue was vital—whether members of the United Nations are required by the Charter to pay their share of the costs of peace-keeping operations in conflict-ridden areas like the Congo and the Middle East...
...It would not have been cricket, of course, for a fellow member of the Club to give the game away by reminding Dirksen that he is now getting free far more medical protection than the rest of us would have received through payment of additional Social Security taxes...
...If the Court's advisory opinion is made binding by the U.N., nations like the Soviet Union, France, and Egypt, which have defied the world organization's special assessment orders, will have to pay up or lose their right to vote in the General Assembly...
...The liberals in Congress have watched uneasily and grown more wary of sticking their necks out as the President has vacillated and compromised on the essentials of his program...
...A power unto themselves as a consequence of seniority accumulated by being elected in one-party states, they see nothing wrong in betraying just about every campaign promise their Democratic Party made in 1960...
...Kennedy, as The Progressive has emphasized repeatedly during the past year, has presented some excellent programs in skillfully polished prose, but there has been no fight in the follow-through, no attempt to educate and mobilize public opinion in behalf of his legislative goals...
...In leading the fight against the medical care program, Dirksen gave as a principal reason the fact that the legislation would apply to members of Congress as well as the rest of the country...
...The International Court of Justice subsequently ruled, nine to five, that assessments to finance U.N...
...Edward P. Morgan expressed it graphically when he said on his nightly ABC newscast: "The trouble is that while many of the President's ideas have seemed to be almost radioactive with energy, there has been a fallout of disappointment in performance...
...Milestone There were few headlines and fewer editorials, but we have a feeling that a quiet scene enacted in The Hague, the Netherlands, last month may command more attention in history than much of the stuff that is getting splash treatment in the press this year...
...As for Congress . . . The Eighty-seventh Congress may not be the worst of our generation but not for the lack of effort...
...The care includes all needed medicines and an annual check-up...
...P.S...
...When Dr...
...The emphasis seems to be more on politics than on programs...
...An Old Soldier's Farewell We have quarreled on occasion with General Douglas MacArthur, but we still regard him as one of the giants of our time...
...Those who were prepared to carry the fight for his school aid bill found Mr...
...Its record, certainly thus far, is negative and reactionary, rather than creative and progressive...
...The Villain When the Federal government first proposed to collect income taxes by withholding them at the source, the scheme was blasted, especially by conservative Republicans, as radical, sinister, and somehow un-American...
...The opinion will be only advisory...
...Recently, he journeyed to West Point to accept the Sylvanus Thayer Award for service to his country and to bid farewell to the army corps...
...Predictably, the rest of the Senate sat silent...
...that we live in this Chamber in a sort of hermetically sealed box, in which, because we like one another—in fact, because we love one another—we move in a mood and an attitude of self-congratulation which is not justified and which may constitute the greatest single threat to the progress of the republic toward our natural goals of social and economic justice and of world peace...
...Moreover, the judgment at The Hague is bound to strengthen President Kennedy's hand in winning Congressional approval to buy up to one-half of the $200,000,000 emergency U.N...
...This year, the Department of Justice introduced a wide-ranging bill to legalize wiretapping—with Hoover's full support...
...For they are themselves the eager beneficiaries of a government-operated and financed medical care program that is pure socialism, as the King-Anderson bill is not...
...But more important than the issue, more important than the outcome, was the confrontation of the two great powers before the bar of justice...
...Said Representative H. R. Gross, Iowa Republican: "I would say this is a goof-off Congress...
...But the Democrats now have top-heavy majorities in both houses—263 to 174 in the House and 64 to 35 in the Senate...
...Speaking without text or even notes, the eighty-two-year-old General talked with deeply moving eloquence of his profession of soldiery...
...There is a proneness to drift and hope, Micawber-like, for something to turn up...
...It was Abraham Lincoln, on whom so much Republican oratory is lavished on his birthday each year, who invented the principle of withholding and secured its enactment, as part of the nation's first income tax, just a hundred years ago...
...In the years following passage of the Communications Act of 1934, Hoover was one of the country's most aggressive opponents of the practice...
...Members of Congress have access to Walter Reed Army Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital at greatly reduced rates, with a substantial part of the bill paid by the taxpayers...
...There was hardly a peep in the press, and no Senator or Representative dared rise in Congress to demand an explanation for this shoddy performance involving a convicted Soviet spy...
...Although he said he was prepared to "concede that the telephone tap is from time to time of limited value in the criminal investigative field," he went on to say, "I frankly believe that if a statute of this kind were enacted, the abuses arising therefrom would far outweigh the value that might accrue to law enforcement as a whole...
...Of course the man has a right to change his mind, but what strikes us as rather curious—and a bit frightening, too—is that no member of Congress has dared to ask him why he has reversed himself so completely...
...There has been only a sputtering approach to the urgent problems on the domestic front, with results that are little more than dismal...
...There has been little or no significant debate on the great issues of foreign policy, largely as a result of the stampede to conformity created by the tensions of the cold war and the pressures of the far Right...
...It would be comforting if they pondered and acted on his sage counsel...
...Said Senator Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania Democrat: "I suggest that our trouble is now, and has been for some years, and may be for some time to come, I fear, that Congress does not measure up to its responsibility...
...peace-keeping operations through military intervention are "regular dues" to be paid by all members...
...will be greatly relieved with the payment of back assessments...
...They might then think differently of their current campaign to weaken the supremacy of the civil establishment by endowing the generals and admirals with a voice in the making of American policy...
...If this sort of thing becomes contagious, it is conceivable that our century may yet see the briefcase replace the bomb in international disputes...
...In a recent press conference, the President lamented the lack of prog-tess in Congress...
...what does matter decisively is the election of Democrats who believe in what the New Frontier professes to stand for...
...Two recent episodes illustrate how extraordinarily untouchable he is...
...The forces of the far Right in Congress and the country have enormous admiration for General MacArthur...
...bond issue...
...A study of the benefits of socialized medicine available to and widely used by members of Congress shows: ¶Members of Congress get medical care from attending phys cians, at taxpayers' expense...
...He cheered progressives in and out of Congress by his bold statesmanship in standing successfully against Big Steel's price increase, but soon thereafter was found trying to appease the unappeasable barons of big business...
...For a time he seemed to support Senator Kefauver's long-needed drug control bill, but then he retreated to less controversial ground...
...And the equally friendly Americans for Deomcratic Action tartly observed that recent White House reverses "make it even more obvious that Presidential appeasement of the Southern and conservative elements of his own party is a losing game, and an almost certain guarantee of the defeat of the liberal objectives of his Administration...
...Wiretapping, he said then, was an "archaic and inefficient practice" which "has proved a definite handicap or barrier in the development of ethical, scientific, and sound investigative technique...
...I will carry my own load if I can," he told the Senate, omitting all reference to the truly socialized benefits to which he as a Senator is now entitled at taxpayers' expense...
...that it does not appreciate how much the world has changed...
...Robert Soblen, the convicted Soviet spy, broke bail and fled the country, the responsibility rested squarely on the FBI, which was supposed to keep him under constant surveillance...
...It is the worst do-nothing Congress in my fourteen years in Washington...
...The fatal weakness in the President's tactics and strategy has been his curious unwillingness to take his case to the country...
...The next time your Senator or Congressman tells you he is voting against medicare—a minimal and quite inadequate program for the rest of us—in order to protect you from "creeping socialism," why not ask him if he feels corrupted by the far more generous benefits of the true socialism he has voted for himself...
...This means the President will have to fight in this Fall's Congressional election campaign as he fought in 1960 but rarely has fought since...
...Kennedy and Congress The Washington pundits have been much absorbed of late in attempting to determine whether the President or Congress is to blame for the miserable state of the Administration's legislative program...
...Kennedy doesn't like the word "liberal...
...From where we sit, it would seem that there are ample helpings of blame for both...
...Double Standard Members of Congress who oppose medical care for the aged under Social Security because it might "socialize" medicine are hypocrites...
...The precise adjective, of course, doesn't matter...
...Moreover, the withholding provisions was made to apply to the tax on "interest and dividends paid by all railroads, banks, trust companies, and fire, marine, life, inland, stock, and mutual insurance companies...
...Members of Congress are also eligible to participate in the broader coverage of the Federal Employes Health Benefits Program which provides comprehensive health insurance plans, including catastrophic as well as basic protection...
...The need, of course, is for more liberal Democrats, not just Democrats of the kind that controls Congress now, but Mr...
...It could hardly have required the feats of a Nick Carter to keep tabs on this cancer-ridden old man, but he made his getaway as easily as an innocent tourist boarding a plane at Idlewild...
...What struck us as most significant because it spoke directly to a conflict raging in our country today was his recurring reminder that the business of the military was the defense of the nation and not the making of political decisions on foreign and domestic affairs...
...Judgments on the Eighty-Seventh Congress were passed recently by two of its own members—one a Midwestern, conservative Republican rep resentative and the other an Eastern, liberal Democratic Senator...
...The dispute will doubtless drag on long after the Court passes judgment...
...Lincoln's revenue act of 1862 gave the country its first income tax— and required that all government paymasters take out the proper tax from salaries of everyone in the military, naval, and civil services, including Congressmen...
...The second recent incident involves Hoover's somersault on the issue of wiretapping...
...Number One Hypocrite Among all the hypocrites in Congress, Senator Everett McKinley Dirk-sen, Illinois Republican, is doubtless without a peer...
...Much the same treatment has been accorded the Kennedy Administration's current proposal—recently rejected by the Senate Finance Committee—to extend the withholding principle to Federal taxes on interest and dividends...
...In only one sector of the legislative front has this Congress shown a positive passion for action: It has whipped through to quick passage, often without a word of debate and sometimes on a scale even greater than that demanded by the Pentagon, the largest military budget in the peacetime history of the United States...
...One was Professor G. I. Tunkin, director of the Judicial Treaty Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry...
...The Untouchable J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, lives a life apart...
...Even the most sympathetic students of the Kennedy Administration, especially among the Washington press corps, are stunned by the alacrity with which the Presidential forces compromise and surrender, often on basic principle, before the battle begins...
...It is not only permissible but traditional to pillory the President, curse the Congress, and demand the impeachment—and, recently, the hanging—of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court...
...There are some excellent men and women in both houses, Republicans as well as Democrats, but their number is pitifully small...
...Its leadership has been hopelessly inept on occasion...
...Kennedy in no mood lor the struggle...
...Up to half the premium is paid by the taxpayers...
...Its powerful committees are dominated by aging Bourbons from the South living in a time and world that have passed them by...
...presumably no member of Congress wants to embarrass "The Untouchable" by reminding him of his militant opposition to wiretapping in the past...
...He has preferred to deal with members of Congress by cajoling them, entertaining them, trading with them—or even blackjacking them on occasion—without first building up a backlog of public opinion to support his proposals...
...It is presumably safe to conclude that the paternity of the income tax and of its withholding provision will remain on that long list of Lincoln's words and deeds which no good, loyal Republican would dream of mentioning when the Party faithful gather each February 12 to celebrate the birthday of their first President...
...He has acted, noted the friendly New York Post, "as a political broker rather than as a fighting leader...
...nor will he use the term "progressive"—whether because he doesn't like it, or because former President Eisenhower has taken to tossing it around, is not clear...
Vol. 26 • August 1962 • No. 8
