THE CONGRESS: Builder or Wrecker?

"Sometimes I just can't understand Congress," barked Dwight Eisenhower, smashing his fist against the table and glaring at the Republican congressional leaders who had come to the White House for their weekly conference. "I can't understand the House adding a couple of hundred millions I didn't want for defense spending, appropriating millions of lard for rivers and harbors—and then cutting the devil out of foreign aid."

Veins bulging along his left temple, the President poured down his wrath upon the Democrat-dominated House Appropriations Committee, which had sliced $872 million out of the Administration's $3.9 billion foreign aid appropriation request. Soothingly the committee's ranking Republican, New York's John Taber, reported that committee Republicans had strongly supported Ike in the teeth of Democratic opposition. "But what happened is no good," snapped Eisenhower. "This thing is vital to our country's interest."

Horrendous Buckshot. Next day in the House, the Democratic leaders, with many a soaring declaration for foreign aid already on the record, stood aside and let the appropriations subcommittee chairman, Louisiana's Otto Ernest Passman, carry the day for the funds cut on the House floor. As he engineered the cuts, Passman nervously crossed and recrossed his long legs, danced around in his sporty black and white Oxfords, demanded recognition by snapping his fingers into the microphone, once blew a rapturous kiss to a Northern Democrat who paid him a compliment on the thoroughness of his committee work.

Spiking his debate with partisan references to "vicuña" and "Eisenhower recession," Passman—armed with an impressive amount of detail on the program —got away virtually unchallenged with horrendous buckshot charges. Sample: "The defense support part of this program in all probability has been responsible for more bribery, overpricing, conniving and profit taking on the part of officials and friends of officials in foreign nations than any program ever conceived by the mind of man."

Obvious Answer. New York Republican Taber, an old hand at cent-counting, argued that armed foreign troops can defend their homelands far cheaper and better than expensively armed ($3,500 to $4,000 each) U.S. troops. But such sound answers were swept under piles of Passman detail, 19 columns of it quoted from his own hearings. Despite the President's press-conference claim that, by his "understanding," House Democratic leaders would not make the foreign aid vote a partisan affair, they let Otto Passman beat down Republican efforts to restore the cuts, send the mangled bill to the Senate.

The Administration hopes for better things in the Senate. Republican Leaders William Fife Knowland and Styles Bridges say that they will launch a drive to restore the most serious cuts. But they cannot do it without Democratic help. Unless such help is given, the Democratic record would be built on the House shenanigans, which gave a clear, sad answer to the question propounded by Passman himself when he opened the debate:

Am I a builder who works with care,

measuring life by the rule and square,

Am I shaping my deeds to a well-made plan,

patiently doing the best I can?

Or am I a wrecker who walks the town,