Kennedy (62 page)

Kennedy, particularly in his first year—despite the advantages of being the first President in a hundred years to have served in both houses—felt somewhat uncomfortable and perhaps too deferential with these men who the previous year had outranked him. Although his opening State of the Union remarks had called the assembled legislators his “oldest friends in Washington,” he knew that he had always been too junior, too liberal, too outspoken and too much in a hurry to be accepted in their inner ruling circles; and they knew that he spoke a different language and seemed more at home with a different breed of friends. Many of his efforts to bridge this gap seemed futile. In one unusual tribute, for example, the President dropped in by helicopter on Senate Finance Committee Chairman Harry Byrd’s annual birthday picnic. But that did not discourage Byrd from decrying at the following year’s picnic the number of airplanes and other means of costly transportation wastefully made available to the President.

“What would the world be like,” the President meditated aloud to me one day, “if all public officials had to retire at age seventy?” And he rattled off a list of international as well as Congressional leaders who had not been making life easy for him. But when asked at a press conference about an Eisenhower suggestion for reform, floated from the safety of Gettysburg, that Congressmen as well as Presidents should
have a limited number of terms, he replied, “It is the sort of proposal which I may advance in a post-Presidential period, but not right now.”

He knew he lacked the votes to put through any of the sweeping reforms required to enable a majority to work its will in each house, and the spotty success of past reforms made him skeptical of most new proposals. His Department of Justice did intervene strongly in the Supreme Court reapportionment cases, in hopes of ultimately weakening the domination of the House by rural conservatives. But, as he said late one evening in the summer of 1962 as we talked in his office, no reform could end the basic hostility which then existed between the Congress and the White House, and he ticked off the reasons:

1. Most of the Democrats on Capitol Hill had never served in the Congress with their own party in the White House. By custom and Constitution, they thought principally of their own districts and states, not the national interest. They had no experience in the Executive Branch, “yet they look at you fellows as incompetents because you’ve never run for office. What’s more, some of them figure they can make more news by opposing me than by going along.”

2. “Party loyalty or responsibility means damn little. They’ve got to take care of themselves first. They [House members] all have to run this year—I don’t and I couldn’t hurt most of them if I wanted to. Most of them ran ahead of me last time, and most of them had been for Stu or Lyndon for the nomination. They figure I’ve put them in the middle on trade or civil rights or parochial schools, and there’s little the National Committee can do to help them.”

3. “Some of them aren’t as important as they were under Eisenhower, especially in the Senate. A lot of the spotlight has shifted down here now and they get damn little credit for their part. Every time I ask them for more power—over aid or trade or taxes—they think I’m invading their prerogatives.” (“And they may be right!” I interjected.)

“The Congress,” he said publicly a short time later,

That conflict was made all the more inevitable by Kennedy’s refusal to leave the legislating solely to the legislative branch. He spelled out his own legislative program in detail and stirred public and private pressure on its behalf. No major legislative measure was ever presented to the Congress by his Cabinet or passed by the Congress for his signature
without his prior approval. He vetoed minor bills that he did not like, impounded appropriated funds that he did not need, ignored restrictive amendments that he found unconstitutional and improvised executive action for bills that would not pass.

Example:
The Congress specifically exempted the Federal government from the 1961 minimum wage increase, and also omitted private laundry workers from its coverage, but the President directed his agency heads to make certain that all Federal employees, including laundry workers, were paid the new statutory minimum.

Example:
When Congress buried a bill for a Federal Advisory Council on the Arts, he created one by Executive Order.

Example:
Drawing upon a variety of funds and authority, he created the Peace Corps by Executive Order before even requesting enabling legislation from the Congress, with the result that the Corps was in full operation by the time the legislation passed some six months later.

He did not feel obligated to risk unnecessary delay and possible defeat by sending every important international agreement to the Senate for approval as a formal, long-term treaty. Nor did he follow Eisenhower’s precedent of seeking Congressional resolutions of approval for major foreign policy initiatives. He dispatched personal and official advisers on important missions abroad, stationed Lucius Clay in Berlin for seven months with the rank of ambassador, and inserted Maxwell Taylor between himself and the Joint Chiefs of Staff without recourse to Senate confirmation. He told one career servant called to testify on a matter not yet settled by the administration “to tell them you’re sick and you’ll be up there next week.” He invoked the claim of executive privilege to prevent Congressional investigators from harassing State and Defense Department civil servants over the individual deletions or alterations they made when clearing speeches. He resisted the attempts of powerful Congressional committee chairmen to force unwanted increases in his Budget—for veterans’ pensions, research and defense.

The issue of increased funds for defense—specifically for the B-70 aircraft—brought the two branches close to a head-on collision in March, 1962. The powerful House Armed Services Committee, agreeing with Air Force and industry pressures on behalf of a new “RS-70” version of the same dubious project, sought to prevent the President from once again impounding the sums appropriated above his request. Reflecting anger at both the de-emphasis of manned aircraft and the disregard of Congressional will, the military authorization bill was deliberately worded by Committee Chairman Carl Vinson to “direct” the Pentagon to spend nearly half a billion dollars on the RS-70—roughly three times the President’s request. The report not only directed but “ordered, mandated and required” that the full amount be spent, adding: “If the language
constitutes a test as to whether Congress has the power to so mandate, let the test be made…[for] the role of the Congress in determining national policy, defense or otherwise, has deteriorated over the years.”

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
²
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.

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:

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.