There were, however, deeper reasons for steering the energies of the Vice-President in other directions. If Kennedy had allowed Johnson to conduct his congressional relations, he would in effect have made the Vice-President the judge of what was legislatively feasible and thereby have lost control over his own program. This was something no sensible President would do. Kennedy therefore relied on his own congressional liaison staff under Lawrence O’Brien, calling on the Vice-President only on particular occasions. Could Johnson have been used more? He thought so and used to say privately with sad incredulity about one or another administration measure or tactic in Congress, “You know, they never once asked me about that!” But in public he remained cooperative and steadfast.
4. KENNEDY AND THE CONGRESS
As Kennedy’s comment on Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson as against Polk and Truman had suggested, he felt that in some sense the real test of a President was his ability to get his program through Congress. In the mood of the early sixties this would be the hardest test of all.
Madison had written of the Congress in Federalist No. 48: “Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with the greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the coordinate departments.” Recent developments had borne out Madison’s fear. In the years since the Second World War, Congress, through its enlarged use of its powers of appropriation and investigation, had become increasingly involved in the details of executive administration, thereby systematically enhancing its own power and diminishing that of the President. A comparison, say, of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 and its lump sum appropriation of $4.8 billion to be allocated pretty much at presidential discretion, with the tangle of stipulations and restrictions written into the foreign aid legislation of the sixties made the point. Moreover, the more foreign policy required money, the more Congress acquired a means of veto. In the realm of hemisphere affairs, Monroe could promulgate a Doctrine, Theodore Roosevelt wave a Big Stick and Franklin Roosevelt become a Good Neighbor without reference to Congress; and, if Congress disapproved, there was little it could do. But the Alliance for Progress, since it needed appropriations, was at the mercy of Congress every step along the way. No one wished to change the system; but it was hard to deny that contemporary Presidents, hedged round by an aggressive Congress and an unresponsive bureaucracy, had in significant respects notably less freedom of action than their predecessors.
On top of this, Kennedy’s margin in Congress was exceedingly nominal. The figures looked fine—64 Democrats to 36 Republicans in the Senate, 263 to 174 in the House—but were deceptive. For one thing, in a number of states Kennedy had run behind the Democratic candidates for Congress. “The people in Congress do not feel that they owe the President anything,” a Democratic Congressman told U.S. News and World Report. “A good many of them were elected in 1960 in spite of his presence on the ticket rather than because his name was there. They feel that they have more of a mandate for their point of view than he does for his program.” Moreover, the apparent Democratic majorities in both House and Senate included many members of the old anti-New Deal coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans. “Some Democrats,” as the President observed in 1962, “have voted with the Republicans for twenty-five years, really since 1938 . . . so that we have a very difficult time, on a controversial piece of legislation, securing a working majority.”
He could never escape the political arithmetic. The Democrats had lost twenty seats in the 1960 congressional election, all from the North, nearly all liberal Democrats, nearly all defeated because of the religious issue. Many times in the next two years Kennedy desperately needed these twenty votes. Without them he was more than ever dependent on the South. The old Confederacy was represented by ninety-nine Democratic Congressmen and twenty-one Democratic Senators. This meant in the House that, if the administration carried every northern, western and border Democratic vote, which it rarely did, it would still require a minimum of fifty-five southern votes to preserve a Democratic majority. It meant that he had hardly more Democratic Congressmen from the northern and western states (132) than from the border states and the South (131). Moreover, the old Confederacy, by virtue of seniority, controlled most of the critical committee chairmanships and thereby had further leverage over legislation. The legislative progress of the New Frontier was thus largely in the hands of aging men, mostly born in another century, mostly representing rural areas in an urban nation (and, indeed, mostly coming from states where less than 40 per cent of persons of voting age had cast ballots in the 1960 election). For an edifying four months in 1962 a feud between Representative Clarence Cannon (eighty-three years old) and Senator Carl Hayden (eighty-four years old), each of whom angrily declined to go to the office of the other, held up House-Senate agreement on appropriation bills and left a number of government agencies without money to meet their payrolls.
Nothing brought the precariousness of the administration’s position home more grimly than the first congressional battle—the fight in January 1961 to enlarge the House Rules Committee in order to make sure the administration would have the power to bring its program to the floor. In spite of Kennedy’s victory in the national election two months earlier, it took twenty-two Republican votes and a personal plea by Speaker Rayburn from the well of the House for the administration to squeak through by five votes. Sixty-four southern Democrats were on the other side. It was a close and bitter business, and the memory of this fight laid a restraining hand on the administration’s legislative priorities for some time to come. Every President, moreover, has to husband his bargaining power for its most effective use. Thus in 1962 Kennedy decided—perhaps mistakenly—to use his for the trade expansion bill first of all; he thereby had less left over for other parts of his program.
Kennedy used to quote Jefferson: “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.” Nor was he one to see great virtue in losing. “There is no sense,” he once said, “in raising hell, and then not being successful. There is no sense in putting the office of the Presidency on the line on an issue, and then being defeated.” Yet, despite such aphorisms, he did, in fact, submit to Congress an astonishing number of innovations, doing so less perhaps in the expectation of immediate enactment than in the knowledge they would never be enacted without a long campaign of congressional and national education. I doubt, for example, whether he really counted on getting Medicare in 1961 or 1962. But he knew that if he sent up a message and a bill, there would be debate and hearings; Congress would begin to accustom itself to unfamiliar ideas; the legislation would be revised to meet legitimate objections; the opposition would in time expend itself and seem increasingly frantic and irrelevant; public support would consolidate; and by 1964 or 1965 the bill would be passed. This is not to say that he would not have preferred immediate results, did not fight for them (while always balancing them against desired results in other areas) and did not, in many cases, achieve them. But, even if he did not get action on all his requests, the educational processes thus set in motion would make the passage of most of them inevitable in the years to come.
Yet one result of his flow of proposals was very likely to increase congressional anxieties. There were too many new ideas, coming too fast, couched in too cool and analytical a tone and implying too critical a view of American society. Instead of being reassured, many Congressmen felt threatened. And the President himself, despite those fourteen years in Congress, had always been something of an alien on the Hill. This had been especially true in the House, where he had had least contact with the leadership, where his experience was most out of date and which now confronted him with his toughest problems. Even in the Senate, where he was liked and respected, he had never been one of the cloakroom boys. He did not act, talk or look like a Senator, or regard the Senate as the climax of human evolution. Now he had shot up over the heads of his seniors, and the congre
ssional elders, who had been great men when he arrived as a gangling first-termer, were sometimes discomfited by dealing with him as President. A few resented his intellectualism, his wealth and the style of his world. A country Congressman from Tennessee told David Brinkley in 1962, “All that Mozart string music and ballet dancing down there and all that fox hunting and London clothes. He’s too elegant for me. I can’t talk to him.” This was perhaps a bizarre reaction, but it suggested the sense of distance.
On his side, Kennedy cultivated his congressional relations with diligence and cheer, though with a certain fatalism. He enjoyed the Tuesday morning breakfasts with congressional leaders, often had congressional groups at the White House and threw himself with necessary vigor into the congressional battles. He particularly liked and valued Mike Mansfield, approved of Mansfield’s announced principles of “courtesy, self-restraint and accommodation” and considered him underrated because he did his job with so little self-advertisement and fanfare. He liked Carl Albert, the House leader, for the same reasons. He also liked and was entertained by Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate. He respected the standards and the craftsmanship of the Hill. When Tom Wicker asked him why his effort to establish a Department of Urban Affairs in 1962 had gone down to such dismal defeat, Kennedy replied, “I played it too cute. It was so obvious it made them mad.” He spent more of his time than people realized working with Congress. But it cannot be said that this was the part of the Presidency which gave him the greatest pleasure or satisfaction.
This made his congressional liaison staff all the more important, and it served him well. Lawrence O’Brien, a man of great decency and character, assembled a first-class group of people—Henry Hall Wilson, Richard Donahue, Mike Manatos, Charles Daly, Claude Desautels—and gave the White House a more organized legislative role than it had ever had before. F.D.R. had avoided a formal White House legislative office, fearing that, if the President’s staff went into the liaison business, it would end up a routine service agency for Congressmen and departments alike. This was indeed what happened when Eisenhower established the first White House legislative office in the fifties. But Kennedy was prepared to pay this price if it would increase presidential influence on the Hill. He sometimes said himself that in his fourteen years in Congress he had had little useful contact with members of the White House staff, and he wished to change that now.
Moreover, where F.D.R., as part of his looser system of presidential management, did not want the White House accountable for all the proposals of his administration (he would sometimes say to cabinet officers with bills of their own, “It is all your trouble, not mine”), Kennedy, with his taut ship, sought to centralize the organization of legislative pressure. While the departments and agencies retained primary responsibility for their bills, each gave O’Brien every Monday morning a report on activities and plans. Digested and analyzed, these reports went to the President before the Tuesday breakfasts.
O’Brien did not have the most enviable job in the government. From the congressional perspective the White House agents on the Hill were always doing too much or too little. Complaints about absence of presidential leadership alternated with complaints about excess of presidential pressure. Larry suffered the constantly shifting winds with equanimity and worked for the program with tact and devotion. It remained a constant battle. “The Congress looks more powerful sitting here,” the President said at the end of 1962, “than it did when I was there in the Congress. But that is because when you are in Congress you are one of 100 in the Senate or one of 435 in the House. So that the power is so divided. But from here I look . . . at the collective power of the Congress, particularly the bloc action, and it is a substantial power.”
The fact that he accepted his congressional compromises and defeats fatalistically instead of raging back in the manner of the Roosevelts led some observers to suppose that, if he had only fought harder, he would have had greater success. But Kennedy, knowing the arithmetic of Congress and the entrenched power at that time of the conservative coalition, knew that he just did not have the votes for his more controversial proposals—and that he could not afford to alienate Congressmen gratuitously if he wanted to save his less controversial bills. Nor did he rest great hope in the measures for congressional reform urged by Senator Joseph Clark and others. Not only would these be among the most controversial of all; but Kennedy remembered that the Rules Committee, the committee staffs and the seniority system itself were all off springs of earlier reform movements. He was ready for minor tinkering, like enlarging the Rules Committee; but he was basically resigned to the existing structure and hoped to make it work by getting better people in Congress. In September 1962, when James MacGregor Burns submitted a resolution to the American Political Science Association proposing a presidential commission to investigate executive-congressional relations, Kennedy remarked that this seemed to him the wrong approach; Congress had to be persuaded to reform itself, and there was very little the executive could do about it. It would help greatly, he added, if we could gain a few seats in the election; but nothing really fundamental could be done until after 1964. “We can make loyalty to the ticket the test in 1964, and then we can deal with those who failed to support the ticket.”
Congress remained his great frustration. But the extent of that frustration has been exaggerated. The myth grew up in later years that, for all the loftiness of its design, the New Frontier was unusually ineffective in enacting its proposals. While Kennedy did not get everything he wanted, he knew that in many cases the ground had to be sowed in 1961 and 1962 if the crop were to be harvested in 1964 and 1965. And the things he did get even before the 1962 election constituted a legislative record unmatched in some respects since the days of Roosevelt.*
XXVII
The Bully Pulpit
THE MOST COMMON CRITICISM of Kennedy during his Presidency was that he had failed as a public educator. It was said that he concentrated on ‘selling’ himself and his family rather than his ideas; that he was excessively preoccupied with his ‘image’; and that he was unwilling to convert personal popularity into political pressure for his program. He was compared invidiously with the Roosevelts, Wilson and other Presidents celebrated for their skill in rallying the electorate behind controversial policies. “He has neglected his opportunities to use the forum of the Presidency as an educational institution,” wrote Carroll Kilpatrick of the Washington Post. “I think it is the President’s fault,” said Howard K. Smith of CBS-TV. “. . . Every great President has been also a great teacher and explainer. . . . Today [October 1963], in lieu of really important explanations by the President, the papers of America are full instead of the speeches of Goldwater.” “He never really exploited his considerable gifts as a public educator,” concluded James Reston of the New York Times.
Yet in later years the age of Kennedy was seen as a time of quite extraordinary transformation of national values and purposes—a transformation so far-reaching as to make the America of the sixties a considerably different society from the America of the fifties. And, instead of hearing that Kennedy did too little as a public educator, one heard more often in retrospect that he had tried to do too much too quickly, to put over too many new ideas in too short a time, that he had unnecessarily affronted the national mood and pushed ahead so fast that he lost contact with public opinion. Clearly the paradox of Kennedy and public education deserves examination.
1. PUBLIC EDUCATION: THE CONVENTIONAL THEORY
First impressions often crystallize into lasting stereotypes. It is instructive to recall that Kennedy had been in office for only a few weeks before the proposition about his delinquencies as a public educator was becoming a cliché in the newspapers. I discover a memorandum of mine to the President as early as March 16, 1961:
There is increasing concern among our friends in the press about the alleged failure of the Administration to do as effective a job of public information and instruction as it should and must. Lippmann
had a column about this last week. Joe Alsop has been haranguing me about this over the telephone and plans to do some columns about it soon. Lester Markel is going to do a long piece about it in the Times Magazine.
Markel had brought his complaint directly to the President, who called me one afternoon to ask how many fireside chats Roosevelt had given. “Lester has been in here saying that I ought to go to the people more often,” the President said. “He seems to think that Roosevelt gave a fireside chat once a week.”
Markel’s remark suggested part of the problem. Memory had left an impression of F.D.R. as incessantly on the air and of Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson constantly using the White House, in T.R.’s phrase, as a “bully pulpit.” Compared to these glowing recollections, Kennedy’s efforts seemed meager and perfunctory. In fact, memory considerably improved the record of the past. By the most liberal possible interpretation, Roosevelt had given only thirty fireside chats in his twelve years as President; before the war, he averaged no more than two a year.* In three years, Kennedy made nine television reports to the nation from the White House, therefore averaging 50 per cent higher than F.D.R.’s peacetime rate; and he gave far more public speeches each year than the Roosevelts or Wilson had given. He also held frequent private meetings at the White House with editors, businessmen, labor leaders, organization representatives and other panjandrums of the opinion mafia. And he used television and the press with skill and resource.
Like all modern Presidents, Kennedy found the newspapers a major educational instrument. Only 16 per cent had backed him in 1960; but the working press had been strongly for him. Kennedy liked newspapermen; they liked him; and he recognized that they provided him a potent means of appealing to readers over the heads of publishers. In Pierre Salinger he had an engaging and imaginative press secretary. While Salinger sometimes lacked the total knowledge of high policy which his very able predecessor under Eisenhower, James Hagerty, had enjoyed, and while newspapermen claimed he lacked Hagerty’s proficiency in making their technical arrangements, he admirably conveyed Kennedy’s own insouciant spirit to the White House press room, bore patiently with Kennedy’s occasional outbursts against the press and prescribed an open-door policy for newspapermen in the White House and throughout the government.
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