The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

THE struggle for the Republican presidential nomination has clearly become a battle for the soul of the Republican Party. Much more is involved than personalities, and much more is at stake than control of the party in 1964. The fight that will rage until a nominee is chosen next summer will determine the character and direction of the party for at least four years.

The extent of the Goldwater boom has come as a surprise to at least two experienced politicians, President Kennedy and Senator Goldwater. Neither expected it to develop as rapidly as it did in the summer and fall, and neither is quite sure that it can last. But neither would deny that it is a highly significant political phenomenon.

Unlike Democratic and Republican moderates who want both major parties to march closely together down the middle road, the Goldwater Republicans, many of whom are more conservative than the senator, want the issues between the parties drawn sharply and even divisively. They think the country is doomed unless it follows their leadership and reverses a host of Eisenhower and Kennedy Administration policies. To the Goldwater enthusiasts, compromise on either domestic or foreign issues means weakness. They dislike the theory of coexistence in all its manifestations. Senator Goldwater’s vote against ratification of the nuclear-test-ban treaty was an expression of that sentiment.

Republican schizophrenia

Although today the anger of the Goldwater followers is directed against the Kennedy Administration, their distrust of the Eisenhower Administration was almost as great. Under Eisenhower, however, they had no alternative but to maintain a degree of silence while working for more conservative policies; under Kennedy they have no such inhibition. The Goldwater boom is in a sense an extension of the Taft boom in 1952, and like Senator Taft, Senator Goldwater has an emotional and zealous following. It is most impassioned in the South and in the Republican heartland of the Middle West, but there are Goldwater supporters in other areas, too. New York provides a dramatic example. Its Republican senators, Keating and Javits, who can be re-elected only if they have strong support in New York City, are openly antiGoldwater. Yet many upstate Republican representatives vote as Goldwater votes. He has more Republican support in the House of Representatives, where rural influence is more pronounced, than from fellow Republicans in the Senate, who depend in part upon city support to be elected.

A major issue of unknown dimensions, which accounts in part for Goldwater’s strength, is civil rights. Kennedy supporters are asking whether it will replace the 1960 religious issue as the formidable beneath-the-surface factor in 1964. No one can tell. And much depends on events. But a visitor to Kansas last fall was struck by the extent of the anti-civil-rights talk he heard in that state, which has only a small Negro population.

Reports from other states, particularly such key electoral states as Illinois and Ohio, indicate a growing uneasiness on the part of many white voters. President Kennedy acknowledged at a press conference last summer that the civil rights issue may have hurt him politically. Governor Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown of California said the issue had hurt the President in California, although he was quick to affirm that the President was right. A survey in Cambridge, Maryland, the scene of much racial turmoil, indicated that an overwhelming majority of white workers there who supported the Democratic nominee in 1960 would vote for anyone else in 1964.

The President’s hope is that passage of a civil rights bill may meet many of the present grievances and persuade the Negro to take his fight off the streets and back into the courts. But because politicians know that in this explosive area anything can happen, their uneasiness is acute. The Goldwater Republicans are convinced that the issue could turn the election in their favor, and the fact that they think so makes for party schizophrenia.

When Governor Rockefeller made a ringing appeal to the party to remain faithful to its historic devotion to civil rights, there was almost total silence from the professional politicians. Most of them have coldly calculated that the Democrats, for the time being at least, have a corner on the Negro vote, and that for Republicans to win they must carry the South. Goldwater is in the best position among the Republicans to do that.

Republicans who want to stop Goldwater recognize the difficulty of their position. Since the decline of Rockefeller’s popularity, they do not have an obvious candidate. But the moderate and progressive Republicans do not want the party machinery taken over for the next four years by the right wing. They think a right-winger could not win in 1964. They think that he would permanently damage the party image. These men, therefore, are determined to deny the nomination to Goldwater. They have been relatively quiet in recent months, but no one believes that they have been idle.

The President’s budget troubles

Washington newspapers were filled with stories in the fall about the overcrowding in the District of Columbia schools and the shortage of teachers. The District of Columbia is a ward of Congress, and it may not hire new teachers without permission of Congress. One newspaper picture showed ninety-seven students crowded into a single classroom at Spingarn High School.

The critical situation was the result of the failure of Congress to enact on schedule the District of Columbia appropriation bill for the fiscal year that began July 1. All of the federal money bills are supposed to be approved each year before July 1. But on this matter, as on many others, Congress has been in no hurry to act, although until it did act the Secretary of State could not know how much money he would have available to maintain embassies overseas, and the Superintendent of Schools in the District could not know how much he would have for teachers’ salaries.

If a corporation executive had to work on such a basis — not knowing until well into the year what funds he would be allowed — he could hardly be expected to operate efficiently. When more than a fourth of this fiscal year was past, Congress had completed work on two regular appropriation bills — Interior and Treasury—Post Office — which accounted for about 7 percent of the federal budget.

The various other government agencies have been kept operating by the passage of continuing resolutions authorizing the expenditure of funds on the basis of last year’s appropriations. The failure to appropriate the funds prevented Washington from employing 344 new teachers it said it needed to handle 5126 new pupils.

President Kennedy’s task is also complicated because in his economic and budget planning he could not make accurate calculations regarding current expenditures. And delay on the tax bill left him without precise information regarding revenues. Even before all of this year’s appropriations are enacted, he must complete much of the work on the budget he will submit to Congress in January for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1964. He will not know until a short time before his new budget goes to press what the final appropriations for 1963 will be. He may not know even then when Congress will pass the new tax bill that is scheduled to take effect January 1, 1964.

President Kennedy announced in the summer of 1962 that he would request a major income tax cut. He submitted details to Congress in January, 1963. The House approved a bill in September. The Senate Finance Committee, which refused even to study the President’s proposals until all work was done in the House, began leisurely consideration of the bill in the first part of October. Whether the bill will be enacted in time to take effect on schedule remains to be seen.

Democratic schizophrenia

Some persons have been quick to blame the House and Senate leaders for the slow pace of the current Congress and for its inability or unwillingness to enact even the essential appropriation bills on schedule. But the cause goes much deeper. The explanation for what has happened lies in the committee system, in which seniority determines the membership of committees; the absence of party responsibility; and the deliberate strategy of delay developed by Administration opponents. Leaders alone cannot impose responsibility on a party as deeply divided as the congressional Democratic Party is today.

The House Appropriations Committee is led by eighty-five-year-old Chairman Clarence Cannon of Missouri. The Senate Appropriations Committee is led by eighty-six-yearold Chairman Carl Hayden of New Mexico. In recent years, the progress of appropriation bills has been slowed by their personal feuding. (Hayden, incidentally, who also is president pro tempore of the Senate, is third in line of succession to the presidency, immediately after the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.)

Cannon works as diligently against the Administration as House Republican leader Charles A. Halleck or Senator Gold water. Yet Cannon is chairman of a major committee because of his seniority and because he is nominally a Democrat. As long as a man is permitted to work consistently against the party leaders and the party platform, as Cannon does, and yet is rewarded by the party with a committee chairmanship, there is no hope for even the beginning of party responsibility.

President Eisenhower encountered the same kind of party opposition during his first two years in office from Daniel A. Reed, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In his new book the former President retells the story of the long fight he had with Reed, but he does not say how such bruising battles between the party leader in the White House and a leading party member in Congress might be avoided in the future.

President Kennedy has personally intervened on behalf of the District’s school budget and its welfare budget. More than once the President has telephoned members of Congress or summoned them to his office for conferences to emphasize the District’s requirements.

And it is a Democrat who has caused him the greatest trouble. Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who will surely have the President’s support for re-election in 1964, has opposed the President on many District matters as well as on the issue of the nuclear-test-ban treaty. Byrd is chairman of the Senate District Appropriations Subcommittee and is a powerful figure on that powerful committee. Because he is a Democrat he can count on the President’s support in an election, whether or not he supports the President in Congress.

Mood of the Capital

The Administration has come almost full cycle from the cry of what can be done to the cry of what cannot be done. In 1960, Kennedy campaigned on the theme that all things were possible in an Administration led by a vigorous and resourceful President. Now he more often talks about the limitations on his power and on the nation’s power. It will be interesting to see what tone he adopts in his re-election campaign to reignite the enthusiasm for the New Frontier and to persuade the country that the dynamism of his Administration has not been lost.

The inability of the United States to influence events abroad has been a theme of a number of Kennedy’s recent comments in news conferences and speeches. In December, 1962, when he was interviewed by three television reporters, the President said that the problems of the presidency had proved to be “more difficult than I had imagined they were,” and that “there is a limitation upon the ability of the United States to solve these problems.” He has also said, “The responsibilities placed on the United States are greater than I imagined them to be.”

These remarks are frank and revealing. Now, with the succession of military coups in Latin America and with the inability of the United States to influence decisively the government in South Vietnam, the stalemate over Kashmir, or the determination of President de Gaulle to oppose the Western alliance, there is an unpleasant air of defeatism in Washington.

Add to these overseas problems the President’s difficulties with Congress, and the gloom that characterizes some of the President’s recent utterances is understandable.