Kennedy: The Classic Biography (64 page)

McNamara urged the President to do battle against the wording. Democratic leaders urged him not to tangle with Vinson. His lawyers advised him that he could ignore the language if it passed, relying on the Constitutional separation of powers. O’Brien advised him that any floor fight against Vinson would be lost, and costly in future fights.

Kennedy attained the one course his advisers assumed was impossible: he persuaded Vinson to withdraw the language. He did it by inviting “the Swamp Fox” to the White House for a private chat and a walk in the garden on the afternoon before the debate. “Uncle Carl,” he said in effect, “this kind of language and my ignoring it will only hurt us and the country. Let me write you a letter that will get us both off this limb.”

McNamara and I drafted the letter that afternoon, and O’Brien and I immediately took it in draft form to Vinson’s office. We could not know what his reaction would be. The letter strongly restated the President’s constitutional authority, urged deletion of “directed” and promised nothing more than a restudy of the RS-70
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in the interests of comity. But Vinson liked it; the formal letter was sent that night, and Congressmen gathering for a bloody antiadministration battle on the floor the next day were disappointed to hear Vinson and his committee meekly withdraw the “test” language. The President, refusing to crow, said only that it would be “chaotic” if each branch pushed its powers to the limit.

WOOING THE CONGRESS

Vinson, moreover, was one of the key Southern leaders upon whom the President depended. The Rules Committee fight had made clear that he could not win hotly contested bills without substantial Southern Democratic or Republican support. Kennedy set out to seek both, in effect building a different coalition of his own on each bill.

The labor and civil rights lobbies, the National Committee, even his own promises of campaign help meant little to Southern Democrats more concerned about their conservative-dominated primaries. Prior to 1961, the ninety-nine Democratic Congressmen from eleven Southern states had consistently voted at least three to one, and often five to one, against their party. But working through Vinson and other old friends in the House, through Kerr and Smathers in the Senate, and through O’Brien and Henry Wilson on his own staff, Kennedy obtained a majority of the Southerners on four out of five major issues.

Every gain has its cost. During 1961-62 Kennedy concentrated his civil rights efforts on executive actions. He increased price supports on cotton, rice, peanuts and tobacco. He added overly enlarged rural aid provisions to the Depressed Areas and Accelerated Public Works bills.

Neil MacNeil, author of
Forge of Democracy
and one of Washington’s shrewdest observers of the House, has written me:

For me the most astonishing thing about President Kennedy’s dealings with Congress was his ability to pull those Southerners into his camp after their quarter-century of wandering in the conservative camp. This was well underway by the end of 1961, reached its fulfillment in the 1962 session and didn’t erode until the civil rights disturbances in 1963 began to spook those Southern Congressmen. I mention this only because some of our “profoundest” observers here now are saying that Kennedy didn’t know how to deal with Congress…. That, as I’m sure you know, is patent nonsense.

Kennedy’s attentions to Democrats could not be confined to Southerners. He gave preferential recognition—in his speeches, trips, invitations to White House dinners and ceremonies, patronage and seats in the Presidential box—to all those whose votes he appreciated or sought. He wrote letters of “appreciation” to helpful Congressmen facing primary fights in which he could not officially take sides. He conferred in his office with each Democratic committee chairman, occasionally with all the Democrats on a committee. A series of White House receptions covered all Democrats in both houses in groups of fifty, and at the beginning or end of each session, the full Democratic membership of each house was brought in for a Presidential pep talk, complete with graphs and charts. In his individual conferences he was not good at the small talk which most Congressmen relished, but several told me how amazed they were at his knowledge of a bill’s detail.

Patronage, the President said candidly, “does give us some influence…[but] there are not many jobs.” There are, he might have added, more headaches. Patronage squabbles in several states gave him more enemies than friends. Three-quarters of a century earlier, seven thousand out of every eight thousand Federal jobs were non-merit-system appointments. By 1961 the ratio was more nearly twenty out of eight thousand, and only four of those twenty were Presidential appointments. A large proportion of the twenty, moreover, required trained experts at low pay. But occasionally, with Republicans as well as Democrats, a specific personnel opening at the time of a crucial vote enabled both the President and a key legislator to please each other.

Kennedy was generally unsuccessful, however, in his efforts to woo Republican votes, particularly on domestic policy. After 1961 only his gains with Southern Democrats enabled him to continue winning four out of five roll calls on the House and Senate floors. But on foreign policy, civil rights and a few other issues, his good relations with conservative GOP leaders Dirksen and Halleck were rewarding. He liked both men, respected them as fellow professionals and enjoyed bantering with them over their successes and defeats. In fact, by 1962 his relations were so good with Dirksen—whom he had always found entertaining and at times movable by invocations of patriotism (or patronage)—that both men had to reassure their respective party members that each had not embraced the other too much. The President went campaigning in Illinois for Dirksen’s opponent and the Senate Minority Leader protested good-naturedly that he had not “gone soft on Kennedyism.”

No fight better illustrated both the necessity and the difficulty of winning Republican votes than the annual battle over foreign aid. Kennedy’s hope in 1961 was to obtain long-term borrowing authority for his reorganized AID program, thus permitting a new nation’s development to be planned on a more orderly basis than one year at a time. It also would have facilitated a more precise determination of how much other nations should contribute and how much self-help was expected from the recipient country. But Congress not only denied the long-term financing, relenting only to the extent of permitting long-range commitments without money to back them up; it also forced the President to fight a major battle each year to prevent heavy slashes in the program.

Seeking Republican help, Kennedy included legislative leaders from both parties on foreign policy briefings, relied heavily on his Republican appointees in top posts, obtained statements on the AID bills from Eisenhower and other G.O.P. leaders, and publicly recalled the support he and his party had given Ike in earlier years.

Seeking Democratic support, he talked to key members by telephone or in his office, rounding up votes in much the same manner as he once rounded up delegates: “I know your district, Sam, and this won’t hurt you there…. This is a tough one for you, Mike, I realize, but we’ll go all the way with you this fall…. Vote with us on recommittal, where it’s close, Al, and then you can vote ‘no’ on final passage.” He agreed to help with their pet projects or to speak in their districts. On one California trip he pointedly excluded the local Democratic Congressman from the platform for consistently deserting him on the foreign aid bill in committee, and another recalcitrant found the new Federal Office Building scheduled for his district suddenly missing from the Budget. More than one visiting prime minister from a new nation, the President remarked to me one evening, had confessed his inability to understand why a Democratic President could not tell what a Democratic Congress would do on foreign aid.

Seeking public support, he repeatedly promoted the program in his televised speeches and press conferences and in his talks around the country. The opponents of foreign aid, he said,

should recognize that they are severely limiting my ability to protect the interests of this country. They are not saving money…. Our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3.5 million Allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers. A successful Communist breakthrough in these areas, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program.

In proportion to our effort in the early days of the Marshall Plan, he added, his program was one-fourth as burdensome, yet the need was greater. “I don’t understand why we are suddenly so fatigued,” he told his last news conference. “The Congress has its responsibility, but…I cannot fulfill my responsibility in the field of foreign policy without this program.”

But Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Otto Passman of Louisiana felt
his
annual responsibility was to cut back foreign aid as sharply as possible. Immune to the President’s personal pleas, and aided by members of both parties, North and South, liberal as well as conservative, Passman had no difficulty in finding examples of waste and error in a program rendered incapable of consistently maintaining efficiency and attracting quality by constant Congressional carping, constant executive reorganization, constant appropriation delays and constant shifts in emphasis among its most fervent advocates. No powerful constituencies or interest groups backed foreign aid. The Marshall Plan at least had appealed to Americans who traced their roots to the Western European nations aided. But there were few voters who identified with India, Colombia or Tanganyika.

Each year Kennedy lost more ground to Passman, and each year the President blasted a little more sharply “those who make speeches against the spread of Communism…and then vote down the funds needed…to stave off chaos and Communism in the most vital areas of the world.” With what he privately acknowledged to be a “calculated risk,” he named a panel of conservative private enterprise skeptics to review his 1963 AID request. That panel, under General Lucius Clay, recommended cuts while strongly defending the program. Passman and Company ignored the defense, accepted the cuts and made still more cuts—and Kennedy’s gamble backfired.

Kennedy was not embittered by his legislative defeats. He had no difficulty working with Kerr or Mills or Dirksen the day after they had successfully worked against him, just as his administration had room for those who had opposed his nomination. He often reminded his wife and brothers not to be bitter against those who fought or failed him, voicing two political maxims: “In politics you have no friends, only allies” and “Forgive but never forget.”
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His margin, however, was too narrow to grant him the luxury of attacking all Republicans or all Southerners. “I have to have the Congress behind me,” he told one interviewer, pointing to the list of mounting world crises. “I can’t afford to alienate them.” Legislative defeats, and the drop in his Gallup Poll rating which usually accompanied them, were accepted as part of the job. “There is a rhythm to a personal—and national and international—life,” he said, “and it flows and ebbs…. If I were still 79 percent fin the Gallup Poll] after a very intense Congressional session, I would feel that I had not met my responsibilities.” When I congratulated him on an October, 1961, Gallup Poll showing he would defeat Nixon 62-38, he replied that the margin would rise and fall many times before his re-election. He knew it was no coincidence that both his personal morale and his Gallup Poll ratings rose each time Congress adjourned for the winter. But the sheer volume of bitterly contested administration bills required each session to be longer than the one before. “It is much easier in many ways for me,” said the President frankly to a news conference, “when Congress is not in town. But… we cannot all leave town.”

His legislative leaders warned him that he was sending to the Congress more than it could digest—a record of 1,054 requests in three years—but he wanted to lead, to set forth the agenda, to begin. “They are only going to pass part of what I send up anyway,” he said to me as we readied his 1963 program in Palm Beach. “If I had sent up half as many major bills in ’61-’62, they would have passed only half as many as they did.” Unless it was “completely emasculated…a shadow of success and not the substance,” he preferred a compromise to no bill at all—“compromises of our political positions but not ourselves…of issues, not of principles.”

Example:
He deeply disliked dropping laundry workers—whose plight he had often cited in the campaign—from the extended coverage provisions of the minimum wage bill. But the alternative was no bill at all and thus no protection for millions of others.

Example:
By personally persuading Senator Eastland to report out a drug reform bill broader in its consumer protection provisions than the Kefauver drug bill, he gave both Kefauver and consumers a notable victory. Kefauver had been consulted all the way, but the Tennessean’s aides denounced the administration for not including their patent proposals, which would clearly have blocked the whole bill.

1962 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS

No compromise or setback, moreover, was regarded as permanent. Each one, Kennedy promised, would be an item for a future, more favorable Congress and an issue in a future campaign. In the 1962 Congressional campaign, however, his task was to keep the Congress at least as favorable as it was.

Within his own party he attempted no purge of those voting against his program but made clear his intention to campaign only for its supporters. Inasmuch as most of the Democrats who opposed him neither wanted nor needed his help in their one-party districts, this was hardly, as some claimed, a “purge” in reverse. He also gave indirect help in primary fights to those who had helped him, even when it meant helping an “old guard” Democratic incumbent against a “reform” challenger. Reformers moaned, for example, when a testimonial dinner-for Bronx Boss Charles Buckley received a laudatory wire signed “Joe, Jack, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy.” Although he had earlier snubbed New York’s “old guard” leaders, he generally paid little attention to such labels. The “old guard” bosses who once ordered his defeat now gladly took orders from him, he noted, and the reformers tended to become the old guard once they were in.