RETREAT TO YESTERDAY
PROGRESSIVE Retreat to Yesterday Friends and financial supporters of President Johnson, along with members of the White House press corps, were able to spend the New Year's weekend browsing...
...The Selective Service Act was extended for four more years with all its inequities left intact...
...The House righteously expelled Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., leaving his Harlem constituency without a voice in Congress...
...Will the war abroad continue and expand while we at home are engulfed in a different but no less frightful kind of war...
...A measure to equalize Congressional districts was mutilated beyond recognition in conference, then mercifully strangled in the Senate...
...Johnson, Luci and Patrick Nugent and their baby, Lynda Bird and Charles Robb, and Lyndon Baines Johnson...
...It is unified in its fundamental purpose: to provide new hope for the needy, new achievement for all, new greatness for the nation...
...In a passionately partisan speech to the AFL-CIO convention in December, he accused the members of the "other party" of lining up "like wooden soldiers of the status quo" and riding the "old Republican buggy . . . backwards, downhill...
...That cynicism is continually fed and renewed by the rage of people who expected too much and get too little...
...For the Federal "model cities" program— another attempt to apply a Band-Aid to a gaping wound—Congress appropriated $312 million of a requested $662 million...
...The marathon first session of this Congress managed to produce a few gains...
...Johnson requested...
...Moreover, Congress added regressive provisions that will curtail aid to families with dependent children...
...But, given the President's obsessive preoccupation with Vietnam, his campaign concerns, the feeble quality of liberal leadership in Congress, and the obstructive power of the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition •—given these hard facts of life, the preview of this second session of the Ninetieth Congress points to a further retreat to yesterday...
...The trouble is that the nation's problems will not be held...
...This has been a pretty good Congress thus far...
...Chairman Wilbur Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee scoffed at those who protested the amendments: "My goodness alive...
...But past performance gives little basis for hope that it will address itself in meaningful fashion to the critical problems on its agenda...
...Preserved between hard covers are Mr...
...Presumably he was referring to the text, not the pictures...
...In pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of consensus he has allowed his own considerable influence to erode...
...The President's proposal for Federal assistance to state and local police departments, enticingly labeled the "Safe Streets Act" to appeal to middle-class fear and prejudice, was thwarted because of Congressional suspicion that Attorney General Ramsey Clark harbors respect for Constitutional guarantees of due process...
...Early in Mr...
...In a session that lasted 340 days— the fifth-longest since World War II —and that produced 453 public and private bills, Congress managed to ignore, slight, shelve, or stifle measures addressed to some of the nation's most pressing needs...
...If he asks that question again and again in 1968, and if he answers it as he must know he should, we will look forward to a revised and extended Johnson book late in the year—one that can truthfully be called No Retreat from Tomorrow...
...Johnson, senior citizens, young workers, small children, the President, Vice President Humphrey, members of the Cabinet, governors, the Chief Executive, Negroes, Indians, scientists, teachers, Peace Corps volunteers, the Commander in Chief, soldiers, slums, laboratories, farms, spacemen, submariners, Mrs...
...You would think that the American way of life was built on a dole system...
...He is confronted by a conservative coalition that has gained strength from the past performance of his Administration...
...This is the Congress that grumbled and groused about the war in Vietnam but cheerfully and almost unanimously appropriated every penny requested for the war, while penuriously pruning domestic programs and appropriating the lowest sum ever—$1 billion less than the President requested—for foreign aid...
...The $9.3 billion authorized for Federal aid to education in fiscal 1969 and 1970 was accompanied by further weakening of the already feeble Federal structure designed to enforce the desegregation requirements in the Civil Rights Act of 1964...
...It turned its back on every meaningful economic proposal to combat the root causes of domestic conflict and it refused to enact the civil rights bills that the President proposed but decided not to press...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...With the remarkable elasticity that characterizes so many of its statistical efforts, the Administration compiled tables and charts demonstrating that the President had achieved seventy per cent of his program in the first session...
...PROGRESSIVE Retreat to Yesterday Friends and financial supporters of President Johnson, along with members of the White House press corps, were able to spend the New Year's weekend browsing through a beautifully illustrated, expensively printed volume of Presidential prose that arrived in the holiday mail, courtesy of the White House, the President's Clubs, and the Citizens for Johnson and Humphrey...
...either figure was all but meaningless in the face of an acute and long-neglected shortage of low-income housing...
...His Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John W. Gardner—a Republican—warned recently that "we are in deep trouble as a people," and that neither the Congress nor the public "is fully aware of the alarming character of our domestic crisis...
...The Administration's record in the first session of the Ninetieth Congress might better be recorded in an austere brochure entitled Retreat to Yesterday...
...The pitifully inadequate $1.77 billion appropriation for the War on Poverty that was grudgingly approved in the final days of the session was saddled with a rider turning over control of local community action agencies to city halls that have often displayed more talent for fighting the poor than for fighting poverty...
...In the Senate, the coalition was in operation on fifty-six roll calls, and won thirty of them...
...But neither chamber managed to find time to complete action on a code of Congressional ethics that might spare the nation—and the Congress— from the embarrassing spectacle of recurrent scandal...
...The book is entitled No Retreat from Tomorrow, and its text consists of twenty-three messages and reports submitted by the President last year to the first session of the Ninetieth Congress...
...Christian was accurately reflecting the President's mood—and his great virtue as a press secretary is that he usually does—Mr...
...The pictures portray Mr...
...The answers depend on the priorities and commitments adopted by the President and the Ninetieth Congress...
...The substance of the President's proposals was less ambitious—cautiously cast with an eye to the vanishing national "consensus" and a Federal budget distorted by the $30 billion bulge of the calamitous adventure in Vietnam—but even this conservative program was too radical for a Congress that seemed determined, as The New York Times recently observed, to demonstrate that it was living in "the age of Calvin Coolidge...
...Even when it enacted components of what was once called the Great Society, the Ninetieth Congress could not resist the temptation to mar its work with retrogressive amendments...
...For rent supplements, Congress appropriated $10 million of the $40 million Mr...
...He denied any interest in a "name-calling contest" and acknowledged that he had supporters and opponents in both parties...
...The Subversive Activities Control Board was given a new lease on life just when the President's appointment of a former secretary's husband promised to bring about the demise of that useless remnant of the Joe McCarthy era...
...He is surely aware of the dimensions of the job that needs to be done...
...Even if he addresses himself with vigor, determination, foresight, and generosity to the problems that beset the nation—as he conspicuously failed to do in 1967—Mr...
...Johnson reacted with characteristic ambivalence...
...There is little time left for the President to reassert the legislative leadership on domestic matters that he has so forcefully applied to prosecuting the war...
...Are we to witness another season of deepening disaffection and widening disorder in our cities...
...He can count on no help from a feeble and often foolish Congressional leadership...
...To this sorry record Mr...
...I think the second session of the Ninetieth Congress will take up matters that the President has recommended this time, which we did not succeed in getting," White House Press Secretary George Christian said...
...A revived coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats appeared on fifty-four roll call votes in the House, according to Congressional Quarterly, and won thirty-eight of these tests...
...Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Presidential rhetoric, to be sure, was almost unexceptionable...
...Johnson's Presidency his advisers cautioned him against endangering his prestige by making an all-out fight for a civil rights bill that seemed headed for defeat...
...We have not seen, at this writing, the President's new State of the Union message or the proposed Federal budget for fiscal 1969, but we were not encouraged by the indications that emanated from the Texas White House early in January...
...It has the opportunity in 1968 to undo much of the harm it did last year, and to do much of the good that was left undone...
...But beyond this handful of accomplishments the record of the 1967 session was largely barren of forward-looking legislation...
...In a letter accompanying the gift volumes, Special Presidential Assistant W. Marvin Watson wrote: "In this record of legislative proposals for 1967, you see a many-sided program for action...
...The year is a crucial one not just for Mr...
...Johnson's book is not a testimonial to new hope, new achievement, and new greatness, but a costly monument to failure...
...While cities burned and embittered Negroes turned in frustration to the strident slogans of black nationalists, Congress refused to face up to the urban crisis...
...Johnson's stentorian appeals for equal justice under law, for aid to the needy at home and abroad, for conservation and consumer protection, for health and education and modernized government...
...Johnson will win no easy victories on Capitol Hill...
...If Mr...
...Johnson's future but for America's...
...It is half over...
...The President's proposal for a ten per cent surcharge on income taxes, which should in all logic have delighted the fiscal conservatives preoccupied with budget-balancing, was sidetracked because they preferred to demand further slashes in domestic spending...
...Ratification of the Soviet Consular Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty were noteworthy achievements in the field of international relations...
...Johnson plans to conduct a holding operation in this election year...
...The Ninetieth Congress reconvened recently, burdened with a 1967 record that constitutes a shameful flight from the realities...
...Characteristically, the President went farther: He heaped praise on Congress for its achievements and described it as one of the most productive in recent history...
...The Secretary added: "No observer of the modern scene has failed to note the prevalent cynicism concerning all leaders, all officials, all social institutions...
...The President, it has been reported, answered them by asking, "What's the Presidency for...
...A modest measure of progress was recorded on the home front with passage of the Clean Meat Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Public Television Act...
...But when the reaction came from Capitol Hill—Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield observed that "this is a Democratic Congress and you do not eat your young" —the President beat a hasty retreat...
...The Senate censured Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut...
...Although it approved the greatest dollar increase in the thirty-two-year history of the Social Security program, this barely meets the advance in living costs experienced by senior citizens over the past dozen years...
Vol. 32 • February 1968 • No. 2
