The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

CONSERVATIVES have been talking about the labor bias they expect in the new Congress. But it remains to be seen just how much power labor actually will have. The first test will center on the revived Kennedy-Ives labor reform bill, which passed the Senate last year but died in the House. The Democrats have taken care, in assigning new committee memberships, to make the House Labor Committee safe for labor almost as much as the Senate Labor Committee has been for some years. This was done by adding four liberal Democrats. Thus the key point of delay (though there probably will be lengthy House Labor Committee hearings) now becomes the House Rules Committee.

Speaker Sam Rayburn headed off a Democratic “Young Turk” effort to trim the power of Rules by giving his word to get any bill approved by a legislative committee past Rules onto the House floor for a vote. But the Republicans filled their two vacancies on the Labor Committee with men from the ultra-right wing of the party, assuring a conservative majority by the old coalition of Southern Democrats and GOP Tories. Even so, a bill probably will pass the House as well as the Senate before Congress adjourns.

How much labor reform?

But what sort of bill? The answer has been complicated by a quiet switch in tactics by George Meany and his AFL-CIO. Last year Meany agreed to the welfare fund reforms and other cleanup provisions in the wake of the McClellan Committee hearings, provided the bill also included some amendments of the Taft-Hartley Act. Chief among these amendments was one which would have permitted both strikers and those who replaced them on the job to vote in representation elections instead of only the latter. Another permitted building trades employers to conclude bargaining agreements with unions that have not won representation elections. The first of these changes is widely accepted as badly needed ; the second, however, amounts to sanctification of “sweetheart” agreements between employers and union bosses.

Despite the increase in Congress of labor’s friends, the AFL-CIO hierarchy is worried by the public reaction to the continuing McClellan Committee revelations, and it would like to see the hearings wound up as quickly as possible. That is unlikely.

Therefore Meany figured that the best thing was to get a reform bill through Congress in a hurry, so that he could say that union racketeering and thievery had been curbed. To do this he agreed to strip the Kennedy-Ives bill of the Taft-Hartley changes. This move, of course, would also head off management efforts to get its own Taft-Hartley changes, notably a tightening of the prohibition of secondary boycotts and an outlawing of picketing for purposes of forcing management to accept unionization.

Kennedy’s 1959 bill, as introduced, contained about the same Taft-Hartley alterations as last year, alterations which the senator hopefully labeled “relatively noncontroversial.” He made it clear that he hoped to sell the bill as an antiracketeering rather than as a labor-management measure. His strategy was to get his bill in ahead of the Administration bill, which contains more substantial Taft-Hartley changes sought by management, in the hope that the end result would be a compromise. Congress would pass only the anti-racketeering parts of the Kennedy bill, with labor sacrificing the lesser Taft-Hartley changes.

One fact now seems clear: labor’s gains in the November election have been and will continue to be countered by the continuing revelations of the McClellan Committee to a degree that makes unlikely any outright pro-labor legislation.

Mikoyan’s visit

The American experts, and their counterparts in other free world capitals, have long been convinced that the only alternative to nuclear war is coexistence and that coexistence makes sense only if there is a gradual shift in Communist dogma on the vital question of the inevitability of war. Because Anastas Mikoyan had been here before —• in 1936, when the United States was still struggling to free itself from the Great Depression — because Mikoyan has more firsthand knowledge of non-Communist nations than any other top Soviet official, because he is a man of great intelligence, and because he probably is the only man who can speak the unvarnished truth to Khrushchev, great store has been put on the effect of his visit to the United States.

It should be noted that Mikoyan’s itinerary was not made up by the American government, as is usually the case for high-ranking foreign visitors. He went where he wanted to go and saw much of what he wanted to see, calling on important Americans who had been received in Russia to serve as his hosts. These hosts, and the men they gathered together to talk with him from New York to Los Angeles, for the most part were what the Soviets consider to be people at the “center”; that is, people at the apex of real power in America because of their economic power.

Naturally, Mikoyan spent time with Secretary Dulles, whom Khrushchev correctly credited, in his long Kremlin talk with Senator Hubert Humphrey, with being the architect of American policy. Those with economic power in America, in the Communist view, are represented by Dulles, whose policy is based on their aims and attitudes.

The initial tendency in Washington to worry about the welcome Mikoyan received across the nation was intensified when Senator Styles Bridges and Harry Truman castigated the businessmen for ‘fawning” over the Soviet leader. The Cold War atmosphere probably made this inevitable, but the encouraging point was the keen, though sometimes politically naïve, interest in the visitor. The fact that Bridges was joined by very few others in public condemnation is a tribute to the distance the United States has come since the dark days of McCarthyism.

Both Washington and Moscow were anxious in the Washington talks to get off the Berlin hook: Washington because West Berlin is physically subject to Communist harassment, as the Berlin blockade already had shown; Moscow because Khrushchev’s challenge had put the Kremlin in an untenable position (given the Western determination to stand firm) if it were to maintain its posture as a peace-loving nation.

The shift in American policy

In retrospect it seems probable that Mikoyan came here for two reasons: to find out whether American policy was as rigid as it appeared on Berlin, on Germany, and on European security; and to find out whether the American economy was as lacking in dynamism as the Administration leadership. On both counts he found the answer was no. A muted no in the first instance, a loud and clear no in the second.

Mikoyan’s parting attack on Truman was, in effect, criticism of those American leaders who have been backing the Dulles-Adenauer policy opposing any form of East-West disengagement in Europe as advocated by George Kennan and others here and in Western Europe. Truman for some time has acted as Dean Acheson’s spokesman in opposing such moves, and his article which drew Mikoyan’s fire, Washington observers believe, reflected Acheson’s concern that American policy was shifting.

And American policy has been shifting, as Mikoyan found out despite all the official protestations that the Administration was not negotiating with him. The fact is that to get the United States off the Berlin hook, and in the concurrent belief that Moscow also wants to avoid a direct clash over that city, Washington not only has proposed new talks on German reunification and European security but is beginning to consider confederation as a means toward unification. The State Department also has been searching for new methods to assuage the Kremlin’s fears of a nuclear-armed West Germany. It is on this basis that both sides were moving this spring toward a new East-West conference.

Private vs. public spending

President Eisenhower’s proposal for a precariously balanced $77 billion budget, a cut of nearly $4 billion from the current fiscal year, with no substantial change in defense spending, instantly provided a take-off point for some fundamental arguments over the role of government in American life. In fact, the argument began in December, when the President took the unprecedented step of releasing the overall budget figure before the new Congress had assembled.

This is a subject that has not been sufficiently explored in the United States. And until it is freed of a lot of folklore, it will be impossible to reach a national consensus on how to approach a host of problems, ranging from defense and foreign aid to federal aid for the schools, the railroads, and the cores of the great urban centers.

In answering a question during his National Press Club appearance in January, Eisenhower expressed what John Kenneth Galbraith aptly calls the “conventional wisdom” about the role of government. The President said that “our federal money will never be spent so intelligently and in so useful a fashion for the economy as will the expenditures that would be made by the private taxpayer, if he hadn’t had so much of it funneled off into the federal government.”

The case on the other side has been best put by Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, one of the most underrated but most brilliant men in Washington. Clark argues, among other points, that “fallacy number one” of this sort of folklore (and he spoke before the President had) is “that private spending is inherently good and public spending is inherently bad — and therefore public spending should always be minimized and private spending increased to the maximum the gross national product will permit.” As Clark says, the word “government” is equated with “other nouns having an evil connotation — such as ‘waste,’ ‘extravagance,’ ‘socialism.’ ‘burcaucracy.’ ” He argues that “this is a pernicious tendency. Taxation and public spending are the means by which we divide resources between the public and private sectors of the economy. Those activities which are in the public sector are there not because they are naughty and ought to be destroyed, but because they are essential and cannot be adequately performed by private enterprise.”

The need for study

This sort of analysis is badly needed in Washington. The President’s proposal for a commission to set a series of long-term goals for America has merit. But the Democratic Congress could do a major public service if it would really examine the American economy, including the areas in which the private economy has all sorts of government aid while its leaders loudly denounce the very idea.

A case in point is that of farm subsidies. Urban voters are increasingly unhappy and are becoming more vocal over the rising cost of living and the concurrent massive outpouring from the federal Treasury to the farmers. Over $8 billion is now invested in price-supported surpluses, over $3 billion of it in wheat, with another bumper crop ahead to add to the woes. Yet the various farm interests are at each other’s throats. The feuding of the Democrats with Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson is more bitter than ever as a result of the November election, and the prospects for any farm legislation which the President will not veto seem slim indeed. A good many farm spokesmen are beginning to worry that the fundamental principle of federal aid to the farmer is being endangered. And well it may be, in the view of the urban members of Congress, unless some order is brought out of the increasing chaos.

McCone and the AEC

The Administration in general gives the impression of an elderly group of tired men trying their best to hold fast for the less than two years remaining of the second Eisenhower term. There are, of course, exceptions among the regulars. Of the few newcomers on the Administration side, a notable exception is the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

John A. McCone is a fifty-sevenyear-old California industrialist who held high Pentagon offices under the Truman Administration, though he is a Republican. A quiet, thoughtful man, McCone in many ways is the opposite of his predecessor, Lewis L. Strauss, now Secretary of Commerce. McCone quickly realized that the Strauss feud with the Democrats on the Congressional Joint Atomic Energy Committee was absurd and a danger to the nation because it wasted so much time and energy.

McCone hopes to work out a compromise on the private versus public power aspects of nuclear power by adding government money to private utility funds for a new reactor in the Philadelphia area. More important in terms of national defense, he has a far less suspicious nature j toward critics of the AEC and the nuclear weapons program than had Strauss. And, having served as Air Force undersecretary in 1950—1951, he is well aware of both the aims and the limitations of that service, which has been the chief consumer of nuclear hardware thus far.

Since McCone was named to the job last summer he has been after the Pentagon to bring more order and sense into its nuclear weapons requirements, thus helping to force some much-needed Pentagon thinking on the whole question of roles and missions of the services.

The mood of the Capital

The 86th Congress, with a more than usual complement of new members in both houses — men of considerable promise — began, as expected, so totally under the domination of its Democratic leaders that it is too early to see who will be the rising stars. Furthermore, so much attention is being paid to every move of the numerous Democratic presidential hopefuls in the Senate (and of Vice President Nixon) that the new members do not get much space in the press.