President v. Congress

Before a joint session of the 86th Congress went the President of the U.S. to make his annual report on the State of the Union. His message was closely reasoned, bluntly presented with occasional flashes of eloquence, and positive in its nature. Dwight Eisenhower urged and set forth a program for fiscal responsibility, not of the sort that stifles growth but of the kind that can stand as a springboard for national progress.

In another year, in different political circumstances, the speech might have been hailed for its firm stand on principle. But in Year 1959 it was met with coolness by the Democratic 86th, as, for example, when Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, with the television eye on him. smothered a yawn at the very moment that President Eisenhower promised to present a balanced budget.

The President's problem with Congress was partly of his own making, partly the result of inescapable circumstance. He is the nation's first President to be barred by the Constitution (23rd Amendment) from running again. Having earnestly tried to stand above party, he made one of his rare ventures into partisan politics last fall—and the Republicans lost 13 seats in the Senate, 47 in the House. The specter of that defeat peered over his shoulder last week as he spoke to Congressmen who had already weighed the political factors and decided to go their own ways, without particular reference to the desires of Dwight Eisenhower. Items:

¶ A Republican leadership fight in the Senate clearly pointed up the pre-eminent power position of New Hampshire's veteran Senator Styles Bridges, who makes no bones of his personal view that Ike is a political tyro, or of his political view that the center of governmental power should rest on Capitol Hill, not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. ¶ Another Republican leadership fight in the House resulted in a victory for Indiana Republican Charles Halleck—but only after he specifically promised rebel forces that he would be their forceful representative to the White House rather than vice versa.

¶ The Democrats did not even permit the President to deliver 1959's first State of the Union message: as he had in

Sputnik-dominated 1958, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson made his own speech two days before the President's, at the Senate Democratic caucus. Like President Eisenhower, he spoke of fiscal responsibility—but unlike the President, he could afford the luxury of advocating economy in principle and spending in practice. "Fiscal solvency concerns us all," said Lyndon Johnson. "It is a first concern, for no course is honest without the courage of financial prudence. But we cannot afford to bankrupt the national conscience to serve the ends of political bookkeeping." He assured the U.S. that he and his party stood ready to save it from a Government marked by "a deficit of vigor, a deficit of confidence, and a deficit of will."

Confronted by such difficulties both in his own party and in the opposition, President Eisenhower would plainly have to follow his words with extraordinary performance to see the fulfillment of his cherished principles for the good of the nation.