Remodeled Housing
Hours after the Democratic congressional landslide rumbled down last November, nimble Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson proposed to build upon it "a bold housing program" suitable to the big-spending tastes of his party's enlarged liberal wing. He gave it top priority when the 86th Congress convened in January, threw aside the President's modest request for a six-year, $1.6 billion program, hammered a $2.6 billion plan through the Senate by early February. Then Dwight Eisenhower's budget battle began to take hold, and the companion House bill, delayed until mid-May, was cut to $2.1 billion. Most of the House cuts were kept in Senate-House conference, but the "omnibus"' bill sent to the President last fortnight still looked to the White House to be strong with costly gadgets.
Last week the President, as expected, refused to buy. "To my disappointment," he wrote in a blunt veto message,* "the Congress has presented me with a bill so excessive in the spending it proposes, and so defective in other respects, that it would do far more damage than good." Specific objections: an "excessive" $900 million for urban-renewal outlays coupled with a cut in the share borne by local governments, a brand-new direct loan scheme to build homes for the aged, subsidized loans to build college classrooms, looser requirements on certain classes of FHA loans. In sum, the bill carried an "inflationary" total of $2.2 billion spending obligations telescoped into two years, which, the President wrote, would "drive private credit from areas where it is urgently needed," and damage an industry now abuilding at near record levels.
The veto rattled Democrats in both halls of Congress. Senate Leader Johnson attacked "vetoes and vetoes and vetoes," chided Ike for requiring Congress to pass his proposals "without crossing a 't' or dotting an 'i.' " But the odds were high that Eisenhower, riding the tide of thrift, would eventually get what Johnson knew the White House wanted: a housing law that renews the nearly exhausted FHA mortgage-insurance authority, extends home-improvement and military-housing loan insurance programs and costs about the $1.6 billion the President asked in the first place.
Last week the President also:
> Saw his artistic preferences upheld when the United States Information Agency, stung by the boss's mild criticism of the modern art in the big U.S. fair in Moscow (TIME, July 13), hastily dropped its ban on U.S. art prior to 1918, gathered up 25 to 30 famed American canvases painted before the 20th century, rushed them off to Russia to supplement the moderns in the big show. Among the late starters: Gilbert Stuart (one of his portraits of Washington), George P. A. Healy (his study of a beardless Lincoln), Copley, Inness, Whistler, Sargent, Remington, Mary Cassatt.
> Signed the agricultural-appropriation bill, with its $50,000 ceiling on loans to each farmer for each crop; also a $13.5 million bill to finance the White House and several general Government agencies, and 36 other minor bills.
> Told visiting Young Republican leaders that when telling bedtime stories to grandson David, he thinks of the Government debts being built in this generation and passed on to David's generation as "a mortgage on their future."
> Handed out silver dollars, White House match books and ballpoint pens to the three children of Democratic Congressman Jimmy Roosevelt, who came for their first look at the office their grandfather occupied for twelve years.
* His 16th major veto in seven years, his fourth in 1959. The other three this year: REA, wheat, tobacco bills.
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