Chipping & Chiseling

Like a hoarse echo from the prewar days, Indiana's stubborn William Jenner leaned against his back-row desk in the Senate chamber last week and shouted that the time had come for the U.S. to get out of Europe and stay out. "Spending in Europe is no longer needed," he cried. "This so-called bipartisan foreign policy . . . leaves the Republican Party and the American taxpayer holding the bag."

The object of Jenner's wrath was the $5.5 billion authorization bill to carry ECA through its next 15 months of operation (see INTERNATIONAL). All week long a little knot of Republicans chipped and chiseled away at the whole tripod of U.S. foreign policy--ECA, the North Atlantic pact, the arms program for Western Europe. Their weapon was an amendment drafted by Nebraska's Republican floor leader Kenneth Wherry, which would lop $1.9 billion off ECA's budget and extend it only a year.

Free Toupees. Jenner was outraged that U.S. dollars should go to socialist Britain. "In England," he declared, "if individuals are unfortunate enough to have lost all their hair . . . they obtain free toupees." The Republicans' ponderous Gene Millikin, whose bald dome glistens like a submerged boulder in a Colorado stream, rose in mock dismay: "What would make a man so depraved that he would want to cover an honest bald head?"

In the Republican 80th Congress, Jenner and his fellow isolationists had felt duty-bound to tone down their opposition to party--and bipartisan--policy. With the Democrats back in control, their coats were off.

For part of one afternoon and all of the next, Nevada's windy ex-prizefighter George Malone held forth, relieved at intervals by such helpful colleagues as Missouri's stuffy James Kem, Montana's Zales Ecton and Washington's Harry Cain, the great friend of the real-estate lobby. North Dakota's intransigent Bill Langer even dragged Winston Churchill into the debate, accusing him of serving with the Spanish forces against the U.S. in 1898.*When Churchill refuted the charge in a wire to Texas' Tom Connally, Langer exploded in almost unintelligible rage. Churchill, he roared, "is not an enigma wrapped in riddle; he is a cold-blooded foreign propagandist wrapped in a bag of aristocratic wind inside a worldwide graveyard which he helped to create and in which he feels so thoroughly at home that now he wants to do it all over again and get us into one more big war."

By the seventh day of debate the Senate had taken on all the rash-marks of a baby filibuster. But this time the opposition could not muster the votes. At week's end 23 Republicans lined up behind Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg to help 45 Democrats defeat a milder version of the Wherry amendment, 68 to 14.

Haggling. Meanwhile, Republican Robert Taft had moved in. Teaming up with rebellious Democrat Dick Russell of Georgia, he wanted to cut the ECA 10% for economy's sake only. "I do not believe the scale on which we are spending money can be economically justified," said Taft. "If we are not willing to cut ECA ... we cannot cut any other expense."

It was a futile effort. Sensing the moment, old Tom Connally ripped into Taft's logic as the kind of "haggling which takes place in a secondhand clothing store:

" 'The price is $10.'

" 'No, I will give you $9--no. I think I will give you only $8.'"

Majority Leader Scott Lucas drove the point home: "A 10% horizontal cut, without a single fact or figure to back it up, is preposterous."

By a vote of 54 to 23 the Senate agreed. This week it was still struggling with another cloud of cluttering amendments, but there seemed little doubt that the authorization would finally go through, substantially untouched.

-A young subaltern out of Sandhurst, Churchill had served as a British army observer with the Spanish army in Cuba at the end of 1895, 2-4 years before the Spanish-American War broke out.

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