The Mess in Washington

Republicans went to Washington in January 1953, with a mandate to clean out the mess left by a Democratic Party too long in power. In a way, they succeeded: the aura of graft no longer hangs over the U.S. Government. In other ways, they have failed. Some of the Democratic mess remains. And the Republicans have created some of their own.

Dienbienphu and Geneva are symbolic of the Republican failure to free foreign policy from the paralyzing, defensive spirit in which the Democratic Administration was caught. Dulles made brilliant progress in redefining U.S. goals, but the gap between definition and practice is still huge.

At home, the President's ambitious legislative program has bogged down. Hawaiian statehood and Taft-Hartley revision, for all practical purposes, are lost for this session of Congress. The Administration, it now appears, will not fight hard for its foreign-trade program--at least not this year. Eisenhower's farm policy is under withering fire. Foreign aid is in trouble, seems in for deep cutbacks. Housing legislation is holed up in a Senate committee. Meanwhile, the most conspicuous sight in Washington is that of Republicans locked in a death struggle with other Republicans in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

The Washington picture is not only bad; it is worse than it was a few months ago.

Failure in Loyalty. What is wrong? What defects in the Republican Party or its leadership caused these failures and setbacks?

Part of the answer lies in the era 1933-53, when leaders of vastly different opinions were united as Republicans only because they were not Democrats. During this period, the Democratic Party was also sharply divided. But the Democrats were welded by the pressure of an enormous expansion of political power which fired the ambitions of some and nurtured in others a sense of party responsibility. In fact, personal ambition often creates in politicians a sense of party discipline. To get ahead, they have to get along with their fellow leaders, to compromise.

A generation of GOPoliticians missed this lesson because they had no chance to practice it. Unable to attain national authority, the G.O.P. Congressman in New Deal-Fair Deal days had only to satisfy the narrow interests of his own constituency; it was every Republican for himself. It still is. The habit of opposition, born during the years of exile, has not been broken. The appropriate charge against Republican Congressmen is not that of venality, or even of personal selfishness. It is that of a failure to understand the meaning of party responsibility, loyalty and discipline which are fundamental to the two-party system. Examples are numerous and startling.

The harshest critic of Republican foreign policy is California's Republican William Knowland, who is also the Senate majority leader. The most powerful opponents of liberalized foreign trade are

Senate Republican Conference Chairman Eugene Millikin and House Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Richard Simpson. Leader of the unsuccessful fight against the St. Lawrence Seaway was Maryland's Republican Senator John Marshall Butler, and one of his most active allies was Senate Assistant Majority Leader Leverett Saltonstall, an Eisenhower Republican. North Dakota's Republican Senator Milton Young heads the effort to scuttle the Eisenhower farm program. Such Republicans as Nevada's Senator George Malone and North Dakota's Senator William Langer vote against the Administration as a matter of course. The President was able to muster only 14 Republican Senators on the key vote against the Bricker amendment. P: Musing on the Republican dilemma, a veteran Republican Senator, who is against renewal of reciprocal trade treaties, said last week: "Eisenhower is telling all of us to suddenly reverse our field and vote directly opposite to the way we've been voting for years--and getting re-elected." Then, with deep conviction, the Senator added: "The first business of a politician is to get elected, and the second business is to get re-elected." The sense that it is an important part of the politician's business to have his party win--as well as to win himself--is not strong in this Senator, or in many of his colleagues.

P:A Republican Representative from western Kansas fervently believes that Calvin Coolidge was the last solid, conservative Republican leader and that v Dwight Eisenhower is a puppet of Americans for Democratic Action. The Congressman plans to run this year on an anti-Administration platform, although he is not yet sure that he would be wise to attack the President personally. Says he: "You can cuss Eisenhower, and people get sore. You can say the Administration stinks, and they cheer." The Kansan voted only about 35% pro-Eisenhower last year, and his showing this year will be about the same. For a while, he planned to vote for the St. Lawrence Seaway. Said he: "It won't make five votes difference in my district whether I vote for or against it, so I'll probably vote for it. That way people can't accuse me of not being loyal to my party." But he must have recounted and found a ten vote difference because, although his own convictions on the St. Lawrence were nil, he ended up by turning against the President again last week. P: Even New Jersey's Senator Alexander Smith, usually an Eisenhower Republican, last week displayed this same lack of party responsibility. As chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, Smith had the duty of helping steer to Senate passage the Administration's Taft-Hartley revision. But after the losing vote--which was a real Administration, and therefore a Republican, defeat--Smith warbled: "I'm just as cheerful as a dickeybird."

Above Party? President Eisenhower is fully aware of his trouble with the dickey-birds. Time and again, he asks his closest advisers, more in anguish than in anger: "What is this party trying to do--commit suicide?" Yet he must share in the accounting; the trouble does not lie exclusively with Capitol Hill. In the U.S. tradition, the President is a party leader. The Republican Party is Ike's instrument for achievement; to use it, he must be of it. If he does not like some aspects of it, he must try to change them. But Ike has often tried to stand above party--and this in itself is a lofty form of party irresponsibility. The last 17 months have shown that he cannot demand of others what he is unwilling to give himself.

Patronage, that familiar lever of presidential leadership, has today only a minute fraction of its former effectiveness. But other levers lie under Eisenhower's hand. The most powerful is his own enormous personal popularity--unequaled in this century except by that of the two Roosevelts. But Ike's popularity contributes nothing to party discipline unless he can bring himself to use it as a whip on Republican Congressmen who oppose his policies. What the Administration needs most, said one of its top (and most politically astute) officials last week, is "a ruthless s.o.b. to run its politics. Don't misunderstand--when I say ruthless and s.o.b., I mean them as words of praise."

Such a man, recognized as the Presiident's spokesman in things political, would be able to go, for instance, to Nevada's Senator Malone and say: " 'Molly,' you've consistently voted against us. Name anything you want--you won't get it. You are a so-and-so, but the White House latchstring will be out to you--as soon as you change your ways."

Back in the Bottle. The failure of Republican leadership--especially White House leadership--was strikingly seen in the handling of the McCarthy-Army affair. The President himself last week agreed that the best thing to do would be to call Joe McCarthy as the next and last public witness and then cut off the hearings abruptly, in an effort to bury the hatchet. Implicit in the scheme was the lingering hope that McCarthy could still be poured back into the party bottle and, in the future, used only against Democrats. But McCarthy has made it abundantly clear that he is not bound by any loyalty to the Republican Party. He does not even aspire to lead it. He simply disregards it.

Unless Eisenhower makes McCarthy feel the weight of reprisal, Joe--and dozens of other Republican Senators--will go blithely on their way, taking care of their own political fences, but refusing to accept an obligation to follow or compromise with the leader, upon whom Republican national success depends.

On Sept. 4, 1952, Candidate Dwight Eisenhower told Philadelphians: "I have said, and will say again and again, that there is only one issue in this campaign. That issue is--'the Mess in Washington.' " Unless something is done, and quickly, the mess in Washington will be the major issue of November 1954.

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