Business & Busyness

THE PRESIDENCY

Lyndon Johnson plainly was out to show the world that the U.S. has at its helm a President as active and vigorous as ever before. After three weeks in office, he had more than made his point.

Last week, mixing solid business with image-making busyness, Man-in-Motion Johnson was in top form. Although the widow of New York's Herbert H. Lehman had begged the President not to run the security risk, he made a 2-hr. 28-min. descent on Manhattan for the funeral of his ex-Senate colleague, as some 2,500 New York City cops and uncounted federal agents maintained the tightest security precautions in memory. Back in Washington, Johnson sent a draft bill to Congress to put John Kennedy's profile on the U.S.'s 50-c- piece, wrote a letter to congressional leaders supporting a joint resolution to name the proposed National Cultural Center after J.F.K. He motored across the Potomac to address top Pentagon staffers on the virtues of cutting costs (see following story), breakfasted on tea and Spanish melon with congressional leaders to drive home the point that Defense Department expenditures had to be trimmed.

The President dispatched Adviser Abe Fortas to Atheneum Publishers with a collection of his speeches to be turned into a book, ordered early payment of $234 million in veterans' insurance dividends to get more cash into circulation. There was a long lunch with Dean Acheson, followed by high praise for Acheson's outlook on foreign affairs, and there was a long private talk with a few reporters about what a crackerjack Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is. The President talked so convincingly of tight budgeting with visiting U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Edwin Neilan that Neilan, a registered Republican, emerged from the oval office to say that he might even vote for Johnson. "I don't always vote a straight ticket," he said, smiling. "I think I'll reserve judgment."

Under One Roof. Johnson also announced that responsibility for setting oil policies would revert to the Interior Department, where it lay during the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. Under Eisenhower and Kennedy, the responsibility had been divided among the Commerce Department, the Federal Power Commission, the Office of Emergency Planning and the White House itself. Now the complicated job of determining import quotas will be done under a single roof. Johnson's motives were partly political: as an oil-state politician, he wanted to avoid possible charges of favoritism. All the same, the result was hailed by the Independent Petroleum Association of America on the grounds that the Interior Department is "the only agency staffed with specialists and technicians capable of providing complete and authoritative information on the industry."

Looking far southward, Johnson also let it be known that setting U.S. policy on Latin America will no longer be a divided and diluted function. Despite, or perhaps because of, President Kennedy's deep interest in the area, U.S. attitudes and policies were set more by such White House luminaries as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin than by the man nominally in charge, Assistant Secretary of State Edwin M. Martin. Moreover, U.S. aid to Latin America has been administered by yet another official, Alliance for Progress Coordinator Teodoro Moscoso. Moscoso's talent for development planning is considerable, but his prestige has been dulled by a powerful feeling throughout the rest of Latin America that the appointment of a Puerto Rican as overseer of U.S. aid is downright patronizing. Last week Johnson replaced Martin with Thomas C. Mann, 51, Eisenhower's last and Kennedy's first Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and lately U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. Pierre Salinger reported that "it is the President's intention to place Ambassador Mann in charge of the overall policy coordination of all aspects of Latin American policy under the direction of the President and the Secretary of State."

A Setback from Otto. There were money dealings with Congress--a field in which former Senate Leader Johnson should shine. The Senate did approve and send to the White House legislation providing $1.2 billion worth of construction and rehabilitation aid to colleges, plus $1.5 billion to extend the 1958 National Defense Education Act and to help vocational schools and schools in districts heavily populated because of federal installations. But Johnson had little to do with it. Instead, he focused attention on the foreign aid appropriations bill, under heavy attack by Louisiana's Democratic Representative Otto Passman, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations.

Congress has authorized a $3.6 billion foreign aid program--but authorizations and appropriations are different matters. Early in the week, Johnson made an unexpected evening visit to Capitol Hill for Speaker John McCormack's informal "Board of Education session of congressional leaders, dropped in on House Democratic Whip Hale Boggs as well. Later he invited Passman down to the White House for a talk. He told Passman he wanted the full $3.6 billion for the program and found the pared-to-the-bone $2.7 billion that Passman was aiming at entirely unacceptable. Johnson offered the same sort of deal that Eisenhower and Kennedy tried to strike with Passman. If Passman would compromise, Johnson would promise to prevent an open fight on the House floor--a fight that could, Johnson insisted, end in Passman's humiliating defeat.

Passman seemed singularly unimpressed. After the meeting, he snapped: "I'll go to the White House when I'm invited, and I'll be polite and I'll listen. But if the day comes when I have to yield my own convictions, fully supported by facts, then I'll go home." Instead of going home, he went straight back to his subcommittee and forced through a cut of $800 million, from the $3.6 billion authorization to an appropriations recommendation of $2.8 billion. Johnson was furious, called in reporters for a statement: "The proposed reductions in foreign aid funds would put our foreign policy in a straitjacket. I cannot believe the Congress intends to require the United States of America to follow policies of weakness and retreat."

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