AMERICA-1
Come back, LBJ
JOHN GRAHAM
Washington—`Wanted: strong man, pre- ferably Texan, to round up a herd of un- ruly individuals collectively known as the Senate of the United States. Experience with instruments of gentle persuasion such as bludgeon, blackjack or bowie knife, essential. Start immediately. Apply the White House.
It is just one of those ironies that the man Richard Nixon needs most at the moment is Lyndon Johnson, not as he was when he was President, but as he was during the Presidency of General Eisen- hower. In those days, Lyndon Johnson was Democratic leader in the Senate, and it was only through Johnson's control over other senators and his development of a more or less co-operative system with Eisenhower, that the situation of a president faced by an opposition Congress became a workable one rather than a nightmare.
Johnson was outstanding as a Senate leader, just as his mentor and fellow- Texan, Sam Rayburn, became legendary as Speaker of the House. In their respective spheres, these men understood and practised the political arts. They knew when to cudgel and when to charm, when to whisper and when to whip. They could take a bill sent up by the administration, round up the votes needed to pass it, and make sure that there was no last minute mistake. In- sofar as it was possible, they took large bodies of independent politicians with different constituencies and turned them into roughly pliable, if not pliant, groups. Order was their watchword.
The value of such men to a President, and especially to an opposition President, is incalculable, and it is one of Richard Nixon's most urgent disadvantages that he has no such man. It is doubly urgent for him, since he did not bring to the Presi- dency the dowry of a large majority vote that Eisenhower brought. If he is to stumble through the congressional thickets with nothing more serious than a few scratches, he is going to have to go in for a lot of wheedling, cajoling and plain old- fashioned bullying, and the sooner he finds a heavy, the better.
This is not mere theorising about the nature of the relationship between the ex- ecutive and the legislative arm of govern- ment. It is a matter of the day-to-day ability of the Federal government to have any effect on the lives of actual Americans; it deals directly with the practice of government. That practice can be put in considerable jeopardy by the absence of a strong hand in Congress, and this is pre- cisely what we have seen in Washington over the last few months. A situation is fast developing in which the President is either reluctant or unable to assert him- self.
The disease is breaking out all over the place. So blind, for instance, was the White House to the trouble its tax bill had run into on Capitol Hill that when the bill finally came to a vote in the house it actually lost on the first roll call. Only that morning, in a desperate and un- dignified fluster, Nixon had summoned twenty-six wavering Republicans to break- fast with him, in an effort to buy their votes with the presidential egg. But none of this should have been necessary. That the situation had been allowed to arise at all shows an almost unprecedented careless- ness, with no firmness being shown either in the White House or among the Re- publican leadership, for want of a better word, on the Hill.
An even more astonishing spectacle is offered by the current battle in the Senate over the anti-ballistic missile system. Now it is only to be expected that something as big, new, expensive, dangerous and gener- ally hard to understand as an ABM system should provoke debate. One would also expect that a considerable number of senators would not like the idea. But for a relatively new President who can claim some indulgence by his very newness, to risk defeat on a national security issue that is in his view the most important ever to come before the Senate, and to risk de- feat moreover after putting the full prestige of the White House behind his plan—why, this is not the way politics, or statesman- ship, ought to be.
Mr Nixon may very well not be defeated on the ABM section of his composite bill, or be forced to compromise. But a defeat is by no means unthinkable now, whereas it was some weeks ago. This is the measure of the lack of understanding in the White House. Although he was both a Congress- man and a Senator himself, Mr Nixon seems to have forgotten how to deal with either house. The tax breakfast is a good case in point. The President deliberately re- frained from strong arm tactics. He ex- plained why he badly wanted the bill to pass, but threatened no sanctions on any- one who voted with his conscience. This is laudable no doubt, but risky. The bill did pass, to be sure, but no one can judge every bill so nicely, and sooner or later there will be a vital loss, simply because the pressure was not applied at the right time.
There is even a laissez-faire attitude. The administration refuses to try to persuade the unions to keep wages down; it will not put pressure on the banks not to raise in- terest rates again; it does not consider it right to twist businessmen's arms in an effort to halt price rises. The sort of con- frontations that JFK had with the steelmen, or Liu with the railroad kings, are unthink- able in the present mood of the White House.
If this means that Mr Nixon is reluctant to wield power, then he may find that re- luctance leads to inability. Inertia being the strong force it is, the Presidential muscle will atrophy, the Congress will take over, and any chance of a co-operative pact be- tureen the Congress and the administration, with the direction coming from the White House, will have gone. For eight years, the two houses of Congress have not had to bestir themselves to take the initiative. A pair of highly active Presidents, staunch be- lievers in force-feeding, swamped them with programmes. Now, however, everything has been turned around. The White House is not swamping the Congress with messages, and as a result less legislation has been passed so far by this Congress than by any previous one in a comparable situ- ation.
Congress has now begun to take the initia- tive. Tax reform is an obvious example, with the Senate prepared to hold up the most important bill it has yet received, against the express wishes of the President, in order that it may see what sort of tax reform bill it wishes to draft. There are many other, lesser examples . . . The Con- gress, after all, is itself a ponderous and drowsy beast, and will take its time to change from a responsive to an inceptive posture. Mr Nixon may not give it the time, but someone had better answer that adver- tisement quick.
Previous page
