Program: Peace & Balance

Getting nervous because no date had been set, a Capitol Hill Republican last week telephoned a White House aide to find out when the President was planning to hold his meeting with G.O.P. congressional leaders to discuss the Administration's legislative program for the new ses sion of Congress. The answer: "We don't plan to have a meeting, and we don't want one." Dwight Eisenhower saw no need to talk over his program for the congressional session that convenes this week. Reason: he plans no brand-new programs, no departures from the basics he stressed in earlier sessions -- balance the budget, fight inflation, uphold foreign aid, resist crash programs. He has decided to hold the line on the domestic front while concentrating, in his final year in the presidency, on one paramount undertaking: the quest for peace. The President's single-minded objective this year, say White House aides, is to make solid progress toward thawing cold-war tensions and building world peace.

Conciliatory Mood. The President's concentration on the peace issue seemed to mean that, despite their lopsided majorities in Congress, the Democrats would again, as they did last year, find it difficult to get hold of a big, politically rewarding issue. There is little the opposition party can do to change the fact that the voter-stirring issues of 1960 lie in such policy realms as foreign relations, defense and space, where initiative and control belong to the executive branch. Congress may criticize the President's policies and performances in those realms, may even vote more money than he asks, but it cannot take the issues away from him.

Bent on the quest for peace, the President is in a conciliatory mood on domestic issues, eager to avoid battles with the Democratic majorities in Congress. Despite the 116-day steel strike that was halted only by an 80-day Taft-Hartley in junction (due to run out late this month), the President had not decided on the need for additional labor legislation. Even with the $7 billion-a-year farm scandal confronting him as a conspicuous failure of his Administration, Ike was not planning to offer any bold new program for coping with it. "Let the Democrats come forward with something better than we've got," he says, "and believe me, we'll listen to them." Since the Democrats have no solution either, it seems probable that the second session of the 86th Congress will end with scarcely a nick made in the most glaring domestic problem of 1960.

Saddening Fact. Nonetheless the Democrats were out to make records they can point to in their re-election campaigns. Main items in their agenda for the 1960 session:

P:An omnibus housing and urban renewal package that the President will probably find as little to his liking as the two Democratic housing measures he vetoed during the last session.

P: An aid-to-depressed-areas bill.

P: A school construction program calling for direct federal grants to localities; the Administration is willing to see the Federal Government aid school construction by guaranteeing local bonds, but opposes direct grants.

P: A boost in social security benefits (a standard election-year ritual) plus an old-age medical-insurance program; the Administration opposes the insurance program on principle as a needless extension of federal intervention.

P: A minimum-wage increase from $1 an hour to $1.25, with coverage extended to several million additional workers. This is a Democratic must designed to soothe labor leaders who are angry about Democratic support for last year's labor bill. The Administration considers the $1.25 level inflationary.

The saddening fact about this welfare program, in Democratic eyes, is that even if the Democrats get it all past the President's veto barrier, the total political value may be slight compared to the appeal of the President's peace issue. Last week a newsman asked a top Democratic strategist how much he thought the welfare program, if enacted, would be worth to the party's presidential candidate next November. Said the strategist, after a moment of silent thought: "Nothing."

Four Hopefuls. With congressional Democrats conceding in advance that their party cannot hope to make much political headway by fighting Ike, the prospect looms that the fiercest battles on Capitol Hill this session will be fought not between Democrats and Republicans, but between Democrats and Democrats. A bitter intraparty fight seems certain to break out when the liberal Democrats, notably Presidential Candidate Hubert Humphrey (see Democrats), push for a civil rights bill. And the session will doubtless see many a cloakroom plot and fierce skirmish as the Senate's four presidential hopefuls--Texas' Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, Massachusetts' John F. Kennedy, Minnesota's Humphrey, Missouri's Stuart Symington--work for advantage. The scramble reaches even to the House, where Speaker Sam Rayburn is openly committed to Fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson's candidacy.

For Republican members of Congress, the session should prove comparatively relaxing. The Administration can take its stand on the solid, familiar terrain of peace, prosperity and fiscal integrity. With last session's seasoning behind them, the G.O.P. minority-leader team of Illinois' Everett Dirksen in the Senate and Indiana's Charles Halleck in the House should be able to operate even more smoothly and effectively than it did last year. And when not engaged in withstanding budget-unbalancing Democratic programs, the Republicans on the Hill can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of the Democrats' cloakroom-and-dagger feuds.

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