Holiday for Builders

Friday, Oct. 29, 1965

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"And now, Mr. Speaker, there being no further business," drawled Acting House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana, "it is my honor and privilege to move that the first session of the 89th Congress do now adjourn." The clock stood at 12:52 a.m.; the Senate had quit two minutes earlier. To a chorus of yahoos, Speaker John McCormack banged his gavel, and the 40-odd members still on the floor headed jubilantly for the exits.

Thus, at long last, Congress wound up a first session whose record of legislative achievement (see box) was unsurpassed in bulk or scope by that of any other Congress in U.S. history —even by Franklin Roosevelt's celebrated 73rd. In a heartfelt thank-you message to his congressional lieutenants, Lyndon Johnson predicted: "What you have done will find a shining residence in the history books."

Words: $3,000,000. The Congress had also set records for the bookkeepers. In all, the 89th spent $119.3 billion—a total unprecedented in peacetime and one that will require decades to pay off; interest on this year's national debt alone came to $11 billion. With its oratorical blast, the session had filled more than 33,250 pages of the Congressional Record, another record, which cost the taxpayers only some $3,000,000.

As adjournment fever gripped the Hill, a constant flow of bills shuttled between the Capitol's wings, to be acted on within hours by both House and Senate. Energetically sweeping out the legislative leftovers, the two houses sped through dozens of bypassed bills on matters ranging from authorization to fly the U.S. flag 24 hours a day in Lexington, Mass., to approving medals for the 250th anniversary of San Antonio in 1968.

Pork Prize. More substantive measures authorized a $1.4 billion vocational-rehabilitation program, a $178 million-a-year 10% increase in disabled veterans' pensions, and the traditional pork-barrel prize for the Congressmen themselves: 140 pet rivers-and-harbors projects in 41 states, at a cost of $2 billion. And, as always with the 89th, the week saw one major Administration victory: final passage of President Johnson's $2.3 billion higher-education bill establishing the nation's first undergraduate federal scholarships.

With its supporters in no mood to haggle with the opposition, the White House also suffered some last-minute reverses. In the $4.7 billion appropriation measure, House-Senate conferees knocked out the $13 million needed to launch a National Teachers Corps —which Administration opponents had tried unsuccessfully to eliminate from the original higher-education bill. Also dropped in the Senate for this year was the Administration's controversial rent-subsidy scheme, whose funds had been denied by the House the week before.