Kennedy (61 page)

Reviewing these dismal figures with Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congressional leaders in Palm Beach, the President-elect decided nevertheless to confront the conservative coalition with an immediate showdown of strength—over control of the House Rules Committee. That committee, dominated since 1937 by the conservative coalition and in more recent years by its wily chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia, had been the chief bottleneck on the Kennedy-Johnson bills the previous August. No bill reported by a House committee could be considered in the regular manner on the House floor, and no bill passed by both houses in differing forms could proceed to a Senate-House conference committee, unless Smith’s committee granted a “rule.” Many “rules” were not granted at all, and others were granted only after long delays and the attachment of conditions or amendments. Although the committee was 8-4 Democratic, neither Smith nor ranking Democrat William Colmer from Mississippi had ever supported Kennedy’s campaign, much less his program, and their two votes, joined by the four conservative Republican members against six loyal Democrats, produced a 6-6 tie on most major issues, guaranteeing, in the President’s words, that “nothing controversial would come to the floor of the Congress. Our whole program would be emasculated.”

The showdown had been building up for years, as Speaker Sam Rayburn found it increasingly difficult to deal with Smith, Colmer and the Republican members. Asking the new President to stay out of the fight, the Speaker took over its command from the House liberals. By threatening to “purge” Colmer from the committee for his support of anti-Kennedy electors in Mississippi, Rayburn impressed upon the Southerners—to whom the seniority system was a sacrosanct source of strength—that he was serious enough to act. Moderate Southern leaders asked Rayburn to compromise. He had not purged Negro Adam Clayton Powell for endorsing Eisenhower. He had not purged other members convicted of crimes. By singling out Colmer, he would so anger the South that no Kennedy bill could be passed. Rayburn, aware all along of these facts, offered a compromise: the temporary addition to the Rules Committee of two Democrats and one Republican, making possible an 8-7
majority on most bills. The moderates were agreeable, but a floor vote was required, and Republican Leader Charles Halleck announced that his party was officially opposed.

The fight was on. Rayburn employed every asset at his command. Kennedy could hardly remain aloof. Rayburn obtained an endorsement of his move in the House Democratic caucus. Kennedy declared at his first press conference that, although the Constitution made it a matter for the House,

The Vice President, the Attorney General, the Secretaries of Commerce and the Interior as well as other Cabinet members, and particularly White House aide Larry O’Brien, used all the influence a new administration could muster—patronage, sentiment, campaign commitments and Federal actions of all kinds. Rayburn and his lieutenants canvassed every vote, staking the deeply respected Speaker’s personal prestige on the outcome. Lobbyists for the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, American Medical Association and American Farm Bureau launched a mail assault against the change, and labor, liberal and civil rights lobbyists were pressed into action on its behalf.

The infighting became vicious. The vote was put off until the day after the President’s First State of the Union Message, in hopes that his eloquence and restraint would win fence-sitters. Moderate Southerners and Republicans were begged not to undermine the President before he was barely under way, not to humiliate the Speaker in one of his last great fights and not to handicap the country at a critical time. The President made several last-minute phone calls. The Vice President urged Texans to stand by their colleague. The Speaker made one of his rare impassioned speeches before the vote. The proposal carried 217-212.

“With all of that going for us,” the President repeated many times in the months that followed, “with Rayburn’s own reputation at stake, with all of the pressures and appeals a new President could make, we won by five votes. That shows you what we’re up against.” Sixty-four Democrats had voted against their President. Only 22 Republicans had voted with him, 17 from states he had carried. Without the votes of more than one-third of the Southern Democrats and one-eighth of the Republicans he would not have won at all.

The meaning was clear. No bill could pass the House of Representatives without somehow picking up the votes of 40 to 60 Southerners or Republicans, or a combination of the two, out of the 70 or so Southerners and Republicans who were not intransigent on every issue.

The situation was better in the Senate, although progressive Democrats there, too, had substantially less than 50 percent of the votes. The President and his Senate leadership decided against intervening in a fight to curb filibusters. The filibuster’s chief damage was limited to civil rights bills, which appeared unlikely of passage anyway; and incoming Majority Leader Mike Mansfield opposed making the fight at that time, certain that it could not be won and that Westerners as well as Southerners would be antagonized by the President’s intervention.

In his continuing confrontation with the conservative coalition in both houses, the President could not afford any additional antagonists. He could not bring the same pressures to bear on every fight that he had brought on the Rules Committee roll call. Just as the experts were predicting that only his housing bill stood a chance, the House approved his emergency farm bill by seven last-minute votes and turned down his minimum wage bill by one vote (a defeat he later reversed).

The Republicans taunted Kennedy for his inability to cash in on his Democratic majorities, but the President made no bones about the fact that Southern Democratic defections made every vote a cliff-hanger. “You can water bills down and get them by,” he said, “or you can have bills which have no particular controversy to them…. But…we have a very difficult time, on a controversial piece of legislation, securing a working majority.” Yet, as Theodore White has pointed out, “More…new legislation was actually approved and passed into law…than at any other time since the 1930’s.”
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For three years, a handful of votes were often decisive. Accelerated public works carried the Senate by one vote. The 1962 farm bill, designed to reverse the absurd, if not scandalous, increases in farm subsidies and surpluses at a time when the number of farms and farmers was declining, lost in the House lacking only five votes, supported by only one Republican (a lame duck later appointed to a job in the Department of Agriculture).

Of all his narrow losses, the most discouraging to Kennedy was the defeat of his “Medicare” bill—the long-sought plan enabling American working men and women to contribute to their own old-age health insurance program under Social Security instead of forcing them, once their jobs and savings were gone, to fall back on public or private charity. The President had pushed this bill hard in the campaign. He had drawn up a new version on the basis of a transition task force report. The cost of his own father’s hospitalization, he told the legislative leaders at break.
fast, made him all the more aware of how impossible it was for those less wealthy to bear such a burden. For three years he kept looking for one or two more votes to sway the House Ways and Means Committee on this bill. For three years he kept after the chairman of that committee.

But Chairman Wilbur Mills had his hands full with other administration bills. Although tentatively opposed to the bill, he told House Majority Leader John McCormack at the outset of the Kennedy administration (and McCormack so reported to the President at breakfast) that “something can be worked out if he is given time” and that the bill might better be added in the Senate to a House-passed measure and then taken up in conference. Kennedy also hoped that Senate passage would make House approval more likely.

With Senate passage as the target, pressure on the “Medicare” fight gradually built up on both sides. With the crowding of the 1961 Congressional calendar with antirecession legislation, it was made a priority item for 1962. The President wanted a vote before the fall Congressional elections. In many a press conference and speech he strongly endorsed the bill. He ridiculed the attacks of the American Medical Association as “incomprehensible” and met with a group of leading physicians supporting his position. On May 20, 1962, nationwide television carried his address to a mammoth rally of senior citizens in Madison Square Garden. It was a fighting stump speech, loudly delivered and applauded. But the President had forgotten the lesson of his campaign that arousing a partisan crowd in a vast arena and convincing the skeptical TV viewer at home require wholly different kinds of presentation. He already had support from the senior citizens; he needed more support from the home viewers, and that speech did not induce it.

The AM A replied with a bitter attack the following night (“I read their statement,” said the President at his news conference, “and I gathered they were opposed to it”), and a further barbed exchange followed in public letters. At the same time new pressures were applied to the House Ways and Means Committee in the hopes of reversing its attitude. But the real arena was the Senate. Early in July the House-passed Public Welfare Bill presented itself as an appropriate vehicle for the “Medicare” amendment. A desultory Senate debate opened on July 2. On three successive Tuesday mornings—July 3, 10 and 17—tactics and tallies on this measure were the first subject of discussion at the legislative leaders breakfast with the President. Senate passage in the previous Congress had failed 51-44. Now there was one more Republican in the Senate, one less Democrat, and few votes capable of being switched. Alabama moderate Lister Hill, for example, a leading sponsor of health legislation, was under too much doctor pressure, and kept his moderate colleague John Sparkman with him. The President’s
personal friend George Smathers, an usher at his wedding in 1953, was aware of AMA influence in Florida. (“Smathers,” commented one of my White House colleagues, “hasn’t stood up for Jack Kennedy since the wedding!”) Moderate Oklahoman Mike Monroney felt bound to stick with his colleague Bob Kerr, the immensely powerful Senator who was floor manager of the anti-Medicare forces.

Nevertheless, on July 10 O’Brien reported a head count of 51-49 in favor. At least four liberal Republicans and one Southern Democrat were switching from their 1960 opposition. On July 17, the day of the vote, he reported a new count: “50-50 at best, and Senator Randolph has a problem.”

West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Randolph’s problems included a concern that controversy over Medicare would defeat the Public Welfare Bill—which contained important provisions for his state—and a commitment to Medicare’s opponents that he would switch from his 1960 position of support in exchange for more welfare aid for West Virginia. Forty-eight votes were solid for Medicare. If Randolph supported it, Carl Hayden would support it out of party loyalty; and fifty votes, with Vice President Johnson breaking any tie, would pass the bill.

The President talked to Randolph. He arranged for West Virginia and national party leaders, labor leaders and welfare group leaders to talk to him. The pressure was unprecedented—and unsuccessful. Randolph voted with those tabling the Medicare amendment; waiting to the end, so did Senator Hayden; and, except for the amendment’s five Republican cosponsors, so did every Republican. The measure was lost, 52-48, and the President went immediately on television to declare that this “most serious defeat for every American family” would be a key issue in the fall campaign. (He also instructed his Budget Director to notify Randolph that a costly and controversial project sponsored by the Senator was being dropped from the Budget, although I have no doubt that Senator Kerr could channel more funds into West Virginia than we could reroute.) The Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses would in time pass more health legislation than any two Congresses in history—including landmarks in mental health and mental retardation, medical schools, drug safety, hospital construction and air and water pollution—but the President never got over the disappointment of this defeat.

Even before the Rules Committee fight, and well before his subsequent setbacks on Medicare and other bills, the President and the Congress regarded each other with misgiving. More than arithmetic or ideology
was at the root of this mutual mistrust. It represented as well a struggle for power between two different branches of the government and two different generations of politicians.

Had John Kennedy remained throughout his public life in the House, or had he remained after 1960 in the Senate, he would by 1963 have been among the exclusive 20-25 percent of Democrats whose seniority usually entitled them to positions of influence in those bodies. But he had not, and the seniority system had elevated into the most powerful committee chairmanships of both houses many men who were not only unfriendly to much of his program but as old as or older than his father. The average member of the House was a decade older than the President, and the average Senator even older. Most of them had known Jack Kennedy as a comparatively brief and youthful member of their legislative bodies. They were less suspicious of him than of the brisk young men around him, and they had no qualms about ignoring his programs while wrangling endlessly with each other. The worst of an increasing number of petty feuds between the House and Senate, which delayed bills and frazzled nerves, was a dispute between Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Hayden, eighty-four, and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Cannon, eighty-three, which held up action on the Kennedy Budget in 1962 for three months while they fought over who should call conference meetings when and where.