Suddenly It's Spring

In a busy El Paso shopping center, Will Wilson, the attorney general of Texas, stopped a woman shopper with a question: "What do you think of Kennedy's medical plan for the aged?" The woman looked at him blankly. "I don't know," she replied. Wilson, one of 70 candidates campaigning hard for Lyndon Johnson's Senate seat, tried again: "What do you think about aid to education?" "I don't know," the woman said again. And so it went. "People either don't have any positions on these things," said Wilson, "or else they're not talking about them."

The lack of concern in Texas about concern in Washington echoed throughout the nation, and it emphasized the biggest problem confronting President John F. Kennedy: through the land there is little support for the burgeoning programs that he is trying to get through Congress. There was no question of selling himself: at the end of his first 60 days in office, the energetic young President basked in the warmest kind of public approval. The polls disclosed that as much as 72% of the public liked John F. Kennedy, and approved of the way he was handling his job.

Why the apathy to the Kennedy program? There are a dozen answers, and each has a bit of truth. The U.S. is basically well off after eight Eisenhower years, and the public still remembers--and heeds--Ike's sermons on fiscal conservatism. People are not only measuring Kennedy's performance against Ike's (often to Kennedy's advantage), but they are also asking where the cash will come from, and whether the country really needs the new programs that badly. There is doubt even among some Democrats as to the need or Tightness of some welfare measures. Said Maine's Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie with a sigh: "The minimum wage involves very real problems for farmers and retail merchants." Added to this is the prevailing doubt that the recession is as bad as advertised, and the question of whether the Kennedy panaceas are really necessary. Said a Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce economist: "Businessmen think this is a milder recession than '58, and they don't want pump-priming overdone." Just back from a trip to Washington, Kansas City Editor Roy Roberts wrote: "The people in official Washington very definitely view everything through the glass darkly.

Goodness knows, this nation needs no official exaggeration. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to overpaint a plight that is bad enough anyway." Much of the country is prospering, and the problems of jobless and needy fellow citizens in other parts of the U.S. seem far away and unreal. Said Henry Broderick, Seattle's biggest real estate dealer, "Things are good here in the West, the best part of the strongest nation in the world, and things that are wrong here and elsewhere are necessary evils." Then he added: "If people here seem cool toward such things as depressed-area legislation, you must remember the law that governs the newsworthiness of earthquakes in Afghanistan. No one really cares--not passionately--and no one gets very excited about this kind of story unless it's his own neighborhood that is suffering." Yet even in the places where the recession has cut deep, there is a faint feeling of resentment toward many of the helping-hand proposals from Washington. In economically limping Detroit (see BUSINESS), Alex Fuller, vice president of the Wayne County A.F.L.-C.I.O.. had it figured out: "A man wants a job these days, and doesn't show much interest in the bill to extend unemployment benefits or to raise the minimum wage or give medical care to the aged. Many of our people are benefiting from built-in security--pensions, unemployment benefits, workman's compensation, and so on. It's hard to get people roused up." Adds Michigan's National Committeeman Neil Staebler: "People want recovery, but they don't connect it with specific bills." In Florida, the elderly show no special interest in federal old-age medical assistance. Even the deep-running debate over federal aid to education (see The Congress) strikes strangely on the public mood. "Philadelphia has the best parochial school system in the country, one of the best public school systems, and a number of first-rate private schools," said a Philadelphian. "We're simply not stirred up about school needs. We're not overly anxious to pay higher taxes to help school systems in Mississippi." There was one element to last week's national mood that anyone could readily see. New Yorkers saw it in the bright new kelly green stripe down the middle of Fifth Avenue--marking the site of the annual rites celebrating an Irish saint.

Caroline Kennedy could spot it in the budding forsythia bowing sedately in the March wind along the White House fence.

Blind men could feel it in the warm air that made San Francisco's fogs foggier.

Squirrels and birds sensed it. With the beguiling insistence of a beautiful woman passing by, it turned men's heads and made the problems of Washington seem as remote as the earthquakes in Afghanistan. Suddenly, after a miserable winter, it was spring.

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