The Reigning Consensus

Showing that the link between his Administration and poetry amounts to more than a fleeting touch of Inauguration Day showmanship, John F. Kennedy appeared on TV last week in a tribute to Poet Robert Frost. "There is a story," said the President, "that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school. 'Don't teach my boy poetry, he's going to run for Congress.' I've never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart." Poet Frost, too, had some amiable things to say about politics and poetry, summed up the New Frontier as "an Augustan Age* of poetry and power, with the emphasis on power."

Decrees & Democracy. Whether the years of the Kennedy Administration will be remembered for poetry remains to be seen, but the new Administration is certainly much occupied with power and how to use it. Unlike Augustus, the President of the U.S. cannot rule by decree. He has to work through and within the power-diffusing patterns of representative democracy, and the new Administration is finding that translating plans and hopes into achievements is slow, plodding work. So far, the vast differences in style and tone between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations have been matched by no comparable differences in substance. Items:

P:The new Administration's antirecession recipe, a mild goulash containing such stock ingredients as extension of unemployment benefits and reductions in mortgage rates, seems no more daring than what a Nixon administration might have proposed under the circumstances.

P:The welfare programs that the President has urged upon Congress-aid to education, increases in the minimum wage, help for depressed areas, and medical care for the aged through social security-add up to a fairly brisk speedup in the U.S.'s creeping welfarism, but the separate proposals are in scope much the same as Candidate Nixon suggested.

P: In defense policy, the Administration has decided on a buildup of non-nuclear forces to lessen the U.S.'s dependence on nuclear weapons and broaden its range of possible military action in future crises (see Defense), but the buildup is going to proceed pretty slowly. Confronted by an already massive budget. President Kennedy has decided to hold the increase in defense spending to less than $2 billion.

In foreign policy, some applications of Augustan power might well benefit the cause of liberty and justice in the world, but the Administration is learning that many of the U.S.'s frustrations abroad result from factors -the momentum of history, the vanity of foreign leaders, the poverty of foreign peoples -that the U.S., with all its power, can do little or nothing to change in a hurry. Last week Adlai Stevenson uttered forceful words in the U.N. ; Assistant Secretary of State G. Mennen Williams all but went native on a tour of Africa; and the Administration's Peace Corps idea stirred a surge of response (see Youth). But still the Congo slipped a little farther into chaos, and Laos teetered on the brink of it.

Checks & Balances. The absence of any startling New Look in substance behind Washington's dazzling New Look in style reflects an old political pattern: high hopes and grand promises brought down to earth by the realities of office. That happened to the Eisenhower Administration, with its frustrated expectations of decentralization and smaller budgets. The President is bound by some pretty confining realities: Congress, public opinion, the Constitution's checks and balances, the inertia of large nations, the sobering arithmetic of budgets.

For John F. Kennedy, the realities are especially confining. He won by a margin much too slender to give him a mandate for new directions. The election returns, instead of making Congress more liberal in composition, made it a little more conservative. In trying to wield his power, Kennedy is less preoccupied with how to deal with Khrushchev than with how to get from Congress the assent without which he can scarcely move a step toward any new goals. Kennedy is confined, too, by the nation's pervasive mood, not easily changed in the absence of overt crisis. Over the years, the U.S. has developed a prevailing political consensus that it prefers the center, and that consensus binds politicians of both parties.

Goals & Means. But besides reflecting outer realities, the absence of radicalism in the new Administration also reflects the inner John F. Kennedy. For all his activism, he has little personal taste for crusades, explicitly rejects the "liberal" label.

Richard Nixon damaged his own campaign when he said in the first TV debate that "our disagreement is not about the goals for America but only about the means to reach those goals." In saying that, he projected an image of weakness and me-tooism. But last week, with Kennedy in the White House and Nixon house hunting in Los Angeles, that statement seemed ironically true, after all. Both Kennedy and Nixon take their stands within the U.S. consensus. "I'm a centrist," says Kennedy. "Ike was right about the center. The center is where the American people are and where the Congress is." If he is going to move toward a New Frontier, it appears John F. Kennedy is planning to travel along that most crowded of U.S. political routes, the middle road.

*The reign of Augustus (27 B.C.-A.D. 14), a period when the Roman Empire expanded greatly in extent, wealth and power, was also, with Vergil and Horace, the golden age of Latin poetry.

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