Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  For three years, a handful of votes were often decisive. Accelerated public works carried the Senate by one vote. The 1962 farm bill, designed to reverse the absurd, if not scandalous, increases in farm subsidies and surpluses at a time when the number of farms and farmers was declining, lost in the House lacking only five votes, supported by only one Republican (a lame duck later appointed to a job in the Department of Agriculture).

  Of all his narrow losses, the most discouraging to Kennedy was the defeat of his “Medicare” bill—the long-sought plan enabling American working men and women to contribute to their own old-age health insurance program under Social Security instead of forcing them, once their jobs and savings were gone, to fall back on public or private charity. The President had pushed this bill hard in the campaign. He had drawn up a new version on the basis of a transition task force report. The cost of his own father’s hospitalization, he told the legislative leaders at break. fast, made him all the more aware of how impossible it was for those less wealthy to bear such a burden. For three years he kept looking for one or two more votes to sway the House Ways and Means Committee on this bill. For three years he kept after the chairman of that committee.

  But Chairman Wilbur Mills had his hands full with other administration bills. Although tentatively opposed to the bill, he told House Majority Leader John McCormack at the outset of the Kennedy administration (and McCormack so reported to the President at breakfast) that “something can be worked out if he is given time” and that the bill might better be added in the Senate to a House-passed measure and then taken up in conference. Kennedy also hoped that Senate passage would make House approval more likely.

  With Senate passage as the target, pressure on the “Medicare” fight gradually built up on both sides. With the crowding of the 1961 Congressional calendar with antirecession legislation, it was made a priority item for 1962. The President wanted a vote before the fall Congressional elections. In many a press conference and speech he strongly endorsed the bill. He ridiculed the attacks of the American Medical Association as “incomprehensible” and met with a group of leading physicians supporting his position. On May 20, 1962, nationwide television carried his address to a mammoth rally of senior citizens in Madison Square Garden. It was a fighting stump speech, loudly delivered and applauded. But the President had forgotten the lesson of his campaign that arousing a partisan crowd in a vast arena and convincing the skeptical TV viewer at home require wholly different kinds of presentation. He already had support from the senior citizens; he needed more support from the home viewers, and that speech did not induce it.

  The AM A replied with a bitter attack the following night (“I read their statement,” said the President at his news conference, “and I gathered they were opposed to it”), and a further barbed exchange followed in public letters. At the same time new pressures were applied to the House Ways and Means Committee in the hopes of reversing its attitude. But the real arena was the Senate. Early in July the House-passed Public Welfare Bill presented itself as an appropriate vehicle for the “Medicare” amendment. A desultory Senate debate opened on July 2. On three successive Tuesday mornings—July 3, 10 and 17—tactics and tallies on this measure were the first subject of discussion at the legislative leaders breakfast with the President. Senate passage in the previous Congress had failed 51-44. Now there was one more Republican in the Senate, one less Democrat, and few votes capable of being switched. Alabama moderate Lister Hill, for example, a leading sponsor of health legislation, was under too much doctor pressure, and kept his moderate colleague John Sparkman with him. The President’s personal friend George Smathers, an usher at his wedding in 1953, was aware of AMA influence in Florida. (“Smathers,” commented one of my White House colleagues, “hasn’t stood up for Jack Kennedy since the wedding!”) Moderate Oklahoman Mike Monroney felt bound to stick with his colleague Bob Kerr, the immensely powerful Senator who was floor manager of the anti-Medicare forces.

  Nevertheless, on July 10 O’Brien reported a head count of 51-49 in favor. At least four liberal Republicans and one Southern Democrat were switching from their 1960 opposition. On July 17, the day of the vote, he reported a new count: “50-50 at best, and Senator Randolph has a problem.”

  West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Randolph’s problems included a concern that controversy over Medicare would defeat the Public Welfare Bill—which contained important provisions for his state—and a commitment to Medicare’s opponents that he would switch from his 1960 position of support in exchange for more welfare aid for West Virginia. Forty-eight votes were solid for Medicare. If Randolph supported it, Carl Hayden would support it out of party loyalty; and fifty votes, with Vice President Johnson breaking any tie, would pass the bill.

  The President talked to Randolph. He arranged for West Virginia and national party leaders, labor leaders and welfare group leaders to talk to him. The pressure was unprecedented—and unsuccessful. Randolph voted with those tabling the Medicare amendment; waiting to the end, so did Senator Hayden; and, except for the amendment’s five Republican cosponsors, so did every Republican. The measure was lost, 52-48, and the President went immediately on television to declare that this “most serious defeat for every American family” would be a key issue in the fall campaign. (He also instructed his Budget Director to notify Randolph that a costly and controversial project sponsored by the Senator was being dropped from the Budget, although I have no doubt that Senator Kerr could channel more funds into West Virginia than we could reroute.) The Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses would in time pass more health legislation than any two Congresses in history—including landmarks in mental health and mental retardation, medical schools, drug safety, hospital construction and air and water pollution—but the President never got over the disappointment of this defeat.

  KENNEDY VS. THE CONGRESS

  Even before the Rules Committee fight, and well before his subsequent setbacks on Medicare and other bills, the President and the Congress regarded each other with misgiving. More than arithmetic or ideology was at the root of this mutual mistrust. It represented as well a struggle for power between two different branches of the government and two different generations of politicians.

  Had John Kennedy remained throughout his public life in the House, or had he remained after 1960 in the Senate, he would by 1963 have been among the exclusive 20-25 percent of Democrats whose seniority usually entitled them to positions of influence in those bodies. But he had not, and the seniority system had elevated into the most powerful committee chairmanships of both houses many men who were not only unfriendly to much of his program but as old as or older than his father. The average member of the House was a decade older than the President, and the average Senator even older. Most of them had known Jack Kennedy as a comparatively brief and youthful member of their legislative bodies. They were less suspicious of him than of the brisk young men around him, and they had no qualms about ignoring his programs while wrangling endlessly with each other. The worst of an increasing number of petty feuds between the House and Senate, which delayed bills and frazzled nerves, was a dispute between Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Hayden, eighty-four, and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Cannon, eighty-three, which held up action on the Kennedy Budget in 1962 for three months while they fought over who should call conference meetings when and where.

  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,

  looks more powerful sitting here [in the White House] than it did when I was…one of a hundred in the Senate…. From here I look…at the collective power of the Congress…there are different views, different interests [and] perspectives…from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other…. There is bound to be conflict.

  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.

  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 Com
mittee, 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.