The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

As PRESIDENTIAL convention time nears, one of JV 1 he most engrossing Washington conversation pieces is: “What makes Lyndon run?” For Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Texas Democrat, who wil1 be forty-eight the week after his party chooses its nominee in August, is certain to be a key figure at the Chicago convention. His victory over Governor Shivers in the struggle for control of the Texas delegation has assured that.

If Johnson had not suffered a heart attack, he would by now be a presidential candidate. As it is, he is a major force in his party, perhaps a vicepresidential candidate, and at least a possibility for the top nomination. He says he is not a candidate, hut he gives the appearance of a man who would like to have a go at it.

Johnson came to Congress back in 1937 as a youthful New Dealer and F.D.IL favorite. He won a Senate seat by a bare 87 votes in 1948 but easily won re-election two years ago. He became the Senate Democratic leader in the wake of the Eisenhower election. Johnson is perhaps best described as a politician’s politician. His name is on no major piece of legislation, but many a bill has become law because he found the compromise to collect enough votes from the disparate elements of his party in the Senate. As he has become a sort of modern Henry Clay. another “great compromiser, “ his own views have moved toward the center of the Democrafic spectum.

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Johnson is of the South but not a true Southerner. As a Texan, he has been a special pleader in Congress for the oil and gas industry, and his drive forced through the gas hill, subsequently vetoed hy the President. Along with his Texas colleague and political mentor, Speaker Sam Rayburn, Johnson has effectively protected the oil depletion allowance from the curbs which the liberal Democrats have vainly sought because they consider it an outrageous tax advantage. Originally intended as an incentive to the discovery and development of mineral resources, the depletion allowance, which permits a 27.5 per cent deduction from gross income before taxes, has virtually become a subsidy for the extracting industries. Rayburn has used his power to keep off the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee any Democrat who might be tempted to repeal the depletion allowance.

Johnson has used his power to keep the Senate Finance Commit tee equally pure. Yet he has now granted a seat to Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, an anti-depletion senator, but with the knowledge that the rest of the committee on both sides of the party aisle is “safe.” Such is his ability’ to “give” when necessary, without suffering a real loss.

To Johnson polities is life— politics in the sense of maneuver, of trade, of compromise, of harmonizing the unharmonious. Before he became a member of the House, Johnson was a congressional secretary; and old-timers say that when he went out to the ball game with his boss, he kept his eye, not on the ball, but on the politicians in the ball park. He can be friendly and persuasive; he knows the intricate rules of the Senate and how to use them to advantage, it was Johnson who helped New York’s Senator Lehman gel through a seemingly lost Niagara public power bill.

Johnson, like all Southerners, is held back from having national standing because of the race issue.

He did not sign the Southern Manifesto against the Supreme Court’s anti-segregation ruling, on the ground that as majority leader of his party he should not take sides. In the fight against Shivers his failure to sign was used against him, but he outrode the storm. While Johnson has been given a vast amount of press credit for doing battle with Shivers forces, the truth is that he was, in effect, forced into it by Rayburn, who is still bitter against Shivers for leading his state into the Republican column four years ago.

Lyndon Johnson at Chicago

What will be Johnson’s role at Chicago? At the least, he wants to come back to Washington next year as the majority leader whether or not the Democrats capture the White House. To do so, he must find a compromise on the race issue at Chicago and a candidate who will unite the party sufficiently to make possible the continued Democratic control of the Senate even if Eisenhower is reelected. This is a difficult trick; but if any man can do it, Lyndon Johnson can.

The test may come in the Senate before it quits for the conventions. The White House tactic is to get through Congress some sort of civil rights legislation in order to demonstrate that a Republican President has been able to do what has not been done in some three quarters of a century: break the Southern filibuster. The House is certain to pass a civil rights bill, probably along the mild lines asked by the White House. Such a bill would be likely to have two key elements: the creation of a bipartisan commission, as the President asked, to look into cases of deprivation of the rights of Negroes, especially in voting, but without power to effect changes other than by persuasion; and the creation of a civil rights section within the Department of Justice.

To all-out clvil-righters these are half measures or worse. Yet they are in tune with the moderation tactics of the President and what is taken in Washington to be the mood of the nation. The White House tacticians argue that such legislation can pass the Senate over Southern Democratic opposition because it will not really “hurt” the Southerners the way the Truman civil rights bill would have done.

Quietly, the White House has been working on Senate GOP Leader Knowland to deliver the necessary Republican votes to get such a bill out of the Judiciary Committee despite the chairmanship of Senator Eastland. Knowland can do that if he decides it will be in the party’s interest in November, when the Negro vote will be needed to offset farm defections. In this case, he would break for the first time the traditional alliance between Northern Republican and Southern Democratic conservatives which dominates the Senate.

To do so, Knowland has to reach an agreement with Johnson. It would be up to Johnson to pass the word to his Southern colleagues from the hardcore states of the Old South to make their speeches but to accept the fact that they cannot kill the bill by filibuster this time. T he Southerners are growing old and there are not enough of them to keep a filibuster going if Johnson decides that in the party’s interest a moderate civil rights bill shall pass.

If Johnson wants to wield great power at Chicago, he can best do so by demonstrating his own “moderation” in the way he handles the civil rights legislation. If he also has thoughts of a nomination for himself, passage of the legislation would appear to be an indispensable preliminary. But beyond these personal aspects, it certainly can be argued that Johnson, as the compromiser of his party, will be doing it a monumental service if he can and does remove some of the punch from the GOP drive for Negro votes by pushing through limited civil rights legislation.

Revamping our foreign policy

In the realm of foreign affairs, the biggest news in Washington this summer is the changing nature of Administration policy toward the neutral nations and our foreign aid policy in relation to them. Curiously, the visit of Indonesia’s President Sukarno in May appears to have played an important role. What was conceived by Secretary Dulles as an effort to influence Sukarno worked out the other way as well. It has influenced Washington because Sukarno spoke frankly to Congress and convinced a good many of the members that after all there is something to say for a nation which refused to stand up and be counted on one side or the other in the East-West conflict. Comments from both sides of the aisle, after his hour-long speech, demonstrated that he had put over his thesis that Asia and Africa are dominated by nationalism in the sense of “love of country and the determination to improve it.” They will accept aid from all sides, but they insist there should be no strings attached.

The invitation to Sukarno to visit here before he goes to Moscow and Peiping later this year was proffered by Dulles when lie was in Indonesia.

Dulles and Eisenhower talked about the possibility before the secretary left Washington, but nothing was decided. Once in Indonesia and subjected to Sukarno’s eloquence and the dreary facts of the eroding American position in free Asia, Dulles cabled the President to ask if he could extend the invitation. Eisenhower, as true a believer in personal diplomacy as Franklin D. Roosevelt ever was, readily consented.

There are two major elements in the decision the United Stales must make: whether to distinguish between military ally and neutral in terms of aid offered, and whether to conduct the ful ure aid program essentially as an American affair or to shift a major part of it to international auspices with the Russians given t he chance to join in.

The Sukarno visit and the obvious insufficiency of the “ pactomania” with which Dulles is charged by his critics, at home as well as abroad, have driven the Administration and at least moved the Congress toward a position of equal treatment for all. There is still strong resistance from many in and out of government who contend that to treat all alike is to blunt the moral argument against Communist tyranny and atheism. But Moscow’s tactic of lumping together into what it terms the “zone of peace" all the uncommitted nations, such as Indonesia, India, and the Middle Eastern countries now in such ferment, is forcing our hand.

The other issue — Wheth to channel more aid through the United Nations or some now international agency — is far from resolved. The President has taken a negative attitude in his press conferences. In part this appears ascribahle to a White House feeling that anything suggested by a political opponent (in this case, by Adlai Stevenson) is a political move and thus suspect; in part it is due to indecision in the President’s own mind since such a stance runs counter to other of his statements of principle.

Resistance or ald?

In this period when military clashes between the great powers are out by tacit consent, the United States must decide whether to fight out the EastWest conflict in economic and political fields or whether It will try to blunt the elements of conflict. Is “competitive coexistence” to be a RussoAmerican race in each and every free nation to which Moscow offers aid? Or can the competition, which is inescapable, be conducted more to the advantage of the United States in a joint aid program which includes the Russians? A firm policy is likely to be lacking until the President determines what should be the total American posture toward Russia.

This is perhaps the core of the problem for Washington. As one official put it: “How do you treat a fellow who sticks out one stubby hand with a big smile on his face and says, ' Let’s be friends,’while you know that in his other hand, behind his back, he holds the strings to a military machine capable of clobbering you any momen I ?“ Reflections of t his unresolved problem may be seen in all sorts of issues. How far to go with the exchange ol persons, how much to lower the trade barriers, how to counter the Soviet reduction of armed forces manpower without losing the West’s deterrent power — these are samples.

Looking back on what has happened in Moscow since Stalin’s death more than three years ago, Washingion feels that the new collective leadership, or more correctly the new collective dictatorship, had a hard time mapping out its own domestic and foreign policies. They probably were settled as far back as March, 1955, the intelligence experts now think, and the evidence is that Moscow has boon working hard to put them into effect ever since, with large measures of success both at home and abroad.

The West, especially the United States, has been slow to respond. Yet it is beginning to respond. Dulles, in fact, has made some rather daring public statements on the “forces of liberalism” he sees at work inside the Soviet Union, if one considers the public — and the Republican Party — altitude toward Russia only a few years back. A good many people both in and out of Washington have been and still are impatient at the slow evolution of policy. This summer has begun to show changes, and more are certain to come. Once the election is past, the new Administration, Republican or Democratic, will be freer to make the essential decisions,