Helping Tito

If Senate doings were accompanied by background music, a fitting theme for last week's most notable and ignoble performance would have been the tune of the old song that runs: Oh, the noble Duke of York, He had ten thousand men, He marched them up to the top of the hill, And he marched them down again.

Up the Hill. One deceptively quiet afternoon, the Senate was considering that familiar bale of hay, the foreign aid authorization bill. The speechmakers droned away in a nearly deserted chamber. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield was off in his own office, conferring with a passel of Democratic Senators about the Administration's tax-revision bill. The only firecracker expected to make any noise in connection with the foreign aid bill was Wisconsin's Democrat William Proxmire's amendment to bar aid (but not shipments of surplus food) to Yugoslavia for one year. Even Proxmire's staffers admitted that they did not expect the amendment to pass.

All of a sudden, Ohio's scratchy, unpredictable Democratic Senator Frank Lausche reared up and offered an amendment to the Proxmire amendment.

Lausche's proposal: Ban all kinds of U.S. aid, including surplus food, to "any country known to be dominated by Communism or Marxism." That would include Poland (which was to have got $60 million worth of surplus food) as well as Yugoslavia (which was to have got $80 million in foodstuffs, plus other aid).

After 20 minutes of lackluster debate, the clerk began calling the roll for a vote on the Lausche amendment. The Senate's Democratic leadership was caught flat-footed--not for the first time this year.

When word of what was going on reached Mansfield's office, the meeting abruptly broke up, and Democrats scurried toward the Senate floor. Just after the clerk finished calling the roll, some two dozen Democratic Senators surged into the chamber, began gesturing to get their votes recorded. Amid the confusion, many Senators got only a sketchy notion of what was being voted on, and since the amendment seemed to have carried anyway, several of them decided to play safe and vote against Communism. Final tally: 57 for the amendment. 24 against.

Down Again. In the State Department, it is an article of faith that aid to Yugoslavia and Poland helps the West by lessening those countries' dependence on Russia--a belief that has survived Tito's numberless demonstrations of hostility toward the U.S. So the Administration, predictably, put up a brisk fight against the Lausche amendment. President Kennedy himself telephoned Majority Leader Mansfield and Minority Leader Everett Mc-Kinley Dirksen. White House staffers and State Department officials, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, called other Senators to ask for help.

Republican Dirksen came stalwartly to the Administration's rescue, agreed to cosponsor, jointly with Mansfield, an amendment to restore the President's authority to send surplus food (but not other kinds of aid) to Communist countries. In his speech supporting this amendment, Dirksen showed once again why colleagues consider him the nimblest of them all. Observing that he had voted for the Lausche amendment the day before, Dirksen said chucklingly: "This is not the first time I have been confronted with an awkward situation." Snorts of laughter sounded on both sides of the aisle. In 1959, Dirksen went on, he opposed President Eisenhower on a major issue. "I remember when the President was red-faced at the White House when some of his own leaders refused to sustain his position, and when he looked at me and asked, 'Will you carry the flag?' I replied, 'Mr. President, I will carry it for you.' And today I want to do as much for the present President as I was willing to do then for the President who bore the label of my party."

The upshot: 14 Democrats and nine Republicans who had voted for the Lausche amendment turned about and voted for the Mansfield-Dirksen amendment. It carried, 56 to 34. Tito will continue to get U.S. surplus food. But the Agency for International Development will have to postpone, for a year at least, the $10 million economic-development loan it had planned to give him.

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