DEMOCRATS: The Big Split

The first clear sign of a change in Democratic leadership signals came during a Senate-House conference meeting on the airport improvement bill. For three months, Oklahoma Democrat Mike Monroney, knowledgeable specialist in the jet age, had held out doggedly for the Senate's fat, $465 million airport-construction bill as opposed to the House's $297 million version. Then, one day last fortnight, influential Senator Monroney breezed into a committee session and recommended that the committee forget both bills, simply extend for two years the current airport aid of $63 million a year—only $6.000,000 more than the President had asked. Last week the extension quietly passed both houses.

Just who talked to Mike Monroney is his secret, but it is an open secret on Capitol Hill that the fellow Texans, House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, have made a deliberate new policy decision: the congressional leadership sees no profit in fighting President Eisenhower's legislative program, will go along pretty much with what the President wants for the rest of the session. And the decision, in turn, has signaled the widest and bitterest split in the Democratic Party in years.

Right Turn. It is not the familiar old civil-rights split between North and South (which has been pretty well bridged this session), but a growing, widening fault line between the Johnson-Rayburn moderates and the liberals, who read last November's 283-153 House victory and 64-34 Senate victory as a mandate for massive federal spending programs. The Democratic National Committee, chaired by fiery Paul Butler, has all but broken off relations with congressional leaders. Last week the dolittle, talk-much Democratic Advisory Council (among the members: Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman. Soapy Williams) fired another salvo at Johnson & Co.: "[The voters] expect and are entitled to have in this Congress more tangible results of the mandate they gave the Democratic majority last November than they have received to date."

Even some of Johnson's steadiest fellow Senators are uneasy: word leaked out last week that Massachusetts' Jack Kennedy had joined Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, Pennsylvania's Joe Clark, Michigan's Pat McNamara and Illinois' Paul Douglas in a quiet move last month to draw up their own legislative program —a move that Johnson nipped by incorporating some of their suggestions into the official party program.