The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

The Kennedy Administration began with a blaze of publicity — the moving Inaugural Address, the first televised press conference, the State of the Union Address, and a mass of White Mouse announcements. The flood of news kept reporters busy and happy, but it left the Republicans with a feeling of frustration over how to put before the public the opposition’s point of view.

This is indeed a problem, for an active President such as Kennedy can dominate the news, and quite obviously Kennedy intends to do just that. The White House is a mighty forum which Kennedy, like Franklin Roosevelt, knows how to use for his own purposes. The Republicans, however, can expect that the nation’s newspapers will not spare the rod on the Kennedy Administration once the honeymoon period is over. Kennedy, in turn, knows that television will be his means, just as radio was for F.D.R., of breaking any lock on news coverage by the predominantly Republicanoriented press.

Probably more serious is the problem in Washington of managed news or news suppression. Both the President and his efficient press secretary, Pierre Salinger, stoutly deny any desire to inhibit news gathering. But the new Administration has sought to “coordinate" the flow of news, Salinger said, in the laudable hope of avoiding such confusion as took place last May when a U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union.

Washington is always suspicious of efforts to manage the flow of the news so that only the good facts see the light of day. Any Administration is powerful enough to suppress much that is unfavorable, especially news that makes the government look bad. Kennedy has promised not to hide governmental mistakes; but the urge to stamp “secret” on both mistakes and unhappy facts often has overcome such promises, as the Moss Committee of the House has amply demonstrated in its well-documented public hearings.

It is certainly true, as Congressman Moss has said, that isolation of the people and their representatives from the facts can be disastrous in the missile era. More than the security of the nation is involved; if the time comes when only those “in the know” can be entrusted with the reins of power in America, democracy as we know it will perish from the earth. This is a somber thought with a new Administration in power so obviously devoted to using all the channels of public information to sell its views to the American people. The point is, however, that while the public must be informed — and Kennedy has a tremendous self-interest in seeing that the public is informed of his view on both foreign and domestic affairs — it must have the sour with the sweet.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk began by calling for quiet diplomacy — that is, a return to full use of normal diplomatic channels for exchanges with governments in both the Communist and the free world. This has its virtue, of course, but it must not be carried to the extreme of cutting off a flow of information to the public on the general trend of relations with foreign governments. Allowance should be made for the desire of the new Administration to run things shipshape; indeed, commendation is in order. But the watch on the Potomac for the cover-up can never cease.

Arms control

Central to the Kennedy Administration’s foreign policy is the problem of arms control; it overrides all other issues, for, as Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, the one point of EastWest common interest is to avoid a war of annihilation by either design or accident.

This is the reason that Kennedy sought the services of a senior statesman, John J. McCloy, to head the disarmament agency housed in the State Department. McCloy agreed to head a team to work out a new arms-control proposal (as distinct from doing the actual negotiating with the Communists and the allies), but his original thought was that this would be a one-shot effort and that he would do much of the work in his New York home rather than in Washington. But there has already been grumbling in the Capital that McCloy started out too independently of both State and Defense.

It will be interesting to watch the activities of Secretary of State Rusk and those members of the White House staff concerned with foreign policy. This latter group is headed by McGeorge Bundy, the former Harvard dean, ably assisted by Walt Whitman Rostow, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economic historian, who is very close to the new President, and it includes the President’s adviser, Jerome Wiesner. Kennedy had intended that Rostow, a man with a brilliant and versatile mind, would head the State Department policy-planning staff. But Rusk said he preferred to have someone with whom he was more closely acquainted. Kennedy thereupon made Rostow Bundy’s deputy. It should be noted, in viewing this area of possible conflict, that Kennedy had given the most serious consideration to naming Bundy, instead of Rusk, as his Secretary of State.

It is hoped that the National Security Council team under Bundy and Rostow, and Wiesner as well, will work in close harness with the RuskBowles-Stevenson group at State. Kennedy intends to make far more use of the N.S.C. machinery than Eisenhower did. Instead of using it in an effort to produce pre-agreed positions, Kennedy wants the N.S.C. to be the forum where the most critical policy issues are argued out in his presence before he makes the decision. In such a procedure, the N.S.C. becomes a government-wide agency nestling under the protection and prestige of the presidency, whereas State is but a single department, though the most important one.

Much will depend on the personalities involved, and above all on the Kennedy-Rusk relationship. And that will take some time to reach a point of stability, given the fact that Kennedy met Rusk for the first time just before naming him.

The need for time

On the specific issue of arms control — and it is worth noting that Kennedy used that term rather than the misleading word “disarmament” in his Inaugural Address —it will take the work of many minds to come up with the “serious and precise proposals” of which the new President spoke. It was most heartening to those in the Capital who have labored long in this field to hear him suggest that in the past neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has really been serious about its disarmament proposals.

Such an opinion has been widely held in Washington, but to put it on the public record in the President’s initial statement of policy served to increase the pressures for proposals satisfactory to the various segments of the American government and to our principal allies. At best, it will take months to do the job; to rush it would be fatal. Word to that effect has been informally transmitted to the Soviets.

There will be less time, however, for decisions on the nuclear test ban issue. This is being handled separately from general arms control, although it is related, because the American-SovietBritish negotiations have been going on so long. Kennedy will find that, like Eisenhower, he is faced with advisers with widely varying views on the efficacy of a test ban, assuming one can be negotiated.

Congress and the new President

There are majorities in both Senate and House to implement much of the new Administration’s program. The honeymoon spirit toward a new Chief Executive is traditional, and it is not lacking this year, despite the closeness of last fall’s election. However, Congress is a reflection, sometimes imperfect, to be sure, of forces in the nation which shape and limit public policy. It is worth considering some aspects of these forces against which both Kennedy and the Congress must work.

The coming of automation, together with the increasing middle-class nature of American society, has limited the growth of trade unionism and created a problem of seemingly perpetual unemployment for millions. Indeed, for the first time in nearly a quarter century, union membership has been declining as employment in the key massproduction industries has contracted, in part because of the new technology.

This is likely to be a continuing problem throughout the Kennedy Administration, giving impetus to programs to increase unemployment insurance, aid to depressed areas, and other welfare measures. In general, the recession will tend to force the Congress to support the President’s federal programs to stimulate the economy, despite an ingrained suspicion against such governmental action.

The technological revolution on the farms, long apparent, has created an agricultural crisis of resounding proportions. The mounting and expensive surpluses are now more likely to be used to further foreign policy objectives, something the experts long have sought.

Whether Kennedy can persuade the Congress to come to an agreement on some new forms of farm control to get the surpluses in hand is not yet certain. But the pressures on the budget and the suspicions of the increasingly urban-suburban population are likely to make easier the enactment of stricter controls, which are the only hope, regardless of how much the nostalgia still lingers for the small family farm and the farmer’s traditional independence.

The South

C. Vann Woodward of Johns Hopkins University has aptly described the change which is taking place in the South as the “bulldozer revolution.” The increasing industrialization has ended the long period during which the South was the bulwark of free-trade philosophy and internationalism in foreign-policy thinking. As Woodward says, the South is replacing the Middle West as the center of isolationist thought. In time, when the South has reached the national level of industrialization, this philosophy doubtless will change, but the change is years away.

Hence the current pressures in Congress — where the Democrats must count on Southern votes to put over many of the Kennedy measures — to find compensatory means to protect and extend the South’s growth without affecting national objectives in foreign policy.

In the civil rights field, Woodward rightly says that the campaign for law enforcement has passed through two major phases — voluntary compliance with desegregation in the border states and compulsory desegregation in the upper South and Florida — and is now moving into a third phase in the big urban centers of the deep South, such as New Orleans and Atlanta. The fourth and most difficult phase must begin in the Kennedy years, the campaign for desegregation in the smaller towns and rural areas, where fears, emotions, and prejudices are the most intense.

Kennedy has wisely sought to work at first in the civil rights field by exploiting the powers inherent in the presidency, as well as those available under the two recent congressional acts. But there is little doubt that by next year, if not by the latter part of this session of Congress, the President will have to ask for new legislation.

It was due partly to this method of approach, as well as to his desire to begin with a harmonious relationship with the Southern wing of his party in Congress, that Kennedy did nothing to alter the Senate filibuster rule in the pre-inaugural weeks of the new Congress. The liberal forces were disappointed, but their disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that he would act with executive vigor.

Mood of the Capital

The problems, both foreign and domestic, facing Kennedy are indeed immense, but the new President has begun with a surefooted - ness which bodes well both for the management of his own executive branch of government and for support of the bulk of his program in the Congress.

Things are humming all across Washington as they have not done since the war years. More important, there is a new sense of enthusiasm from the White House down, and the lights burn late. The fact is that Kennedy quickly set a standard both of competence and of élan. This and the high caliber of the men he has gathered together presage movement instead of the immobility which was evident during so much of the past eight years.