The Congress: An Adequate Number of Democrats

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· URBAN AFFAIRS: In 1961 John Kennedy proposed a Cabinet office to watch over the Government's city-oriented programs such as urban renewal and commuter transportation, as well as the federal complex of housing agencies. He was slapped down at least partly because Southern Congressmen suspected he was doing it to get Federal Housing and Home Finance Administrator Robert Weaver, a Negro, into the Cabinet. Weaver is still waiting in the wings, although Johnson has not committed himself as to who will occupy the post if it is created. Johnson will probably get this one through eventually.

Art & Trains. Visionary Stardust glittered from many of the President's other proposals. He wants a modest $20 million to study the possibility of a highspeed (200 m.p.h.) train between Washington and New York, and he will seek federal authority to control industrial air and water pollution. Both measures will probably pass easily. But he will find it harder to get funds to set up his suggested National Foundation for the Arts—if he really tries it. Congress' traditional distaste for spending tax money on culture cuts across liberal-conservative or even party lines.

Beyond the President's program for new legislation, there will be tussles over old familiar issues. The Senate is girding again for its usual argument over reducing the two-thirds vote required for cloture on a filibuster, and Republicans in both houses have prepared proposals that would cancel the Supreme Court's order to reapportion state legislatures on the basis of population only. Foreign aid will be a battle again. In the Senate, two top Democrats—Arkansas' William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Majority Leader Mansfield—are agitating to have the bill split up instead of coming in "one big conglomerate mass." Their aim is to give Congress a chance to vote separately on various types of aid—a method that the White House strongly opposes. Foreign policy in general is already building up as potentially the most important debate in the 89th.

Good Soldier. The President will of course exert constant pressure on Congress, but will leave much of the overt maneuvering of members to House Majority Leader Albert. And Lyndon could scarcely ask for a better man on the Hill. Carl Albert is a fiercely competitive little man who was born to an Oklahoma coal miner, took his first schooling in a tiny woodstove-heated school at Bug Tussle (since renamed Flowery Mound). He worked his way through the University of Oklahoma, made the wrestling team, the debating team and produced a brilliant scholastic record in government, his major field. He won a Rhodes scholarship in 1931, took two law degrees at Oxford, where Secretary of State Dean Rusk was one of his classmates. Albert worked as a lawyer for several oil firms until 1940, briefly set up a private practice in McAlester, Okla., his home town. In 1941 he enlisted in the Army. Assigned briefly to Washington, he met and married a Pentagon clerk named Mary Harmon.