Wilbur the Willful

In the midst of Washington's worried deliberations over Viet Nam and Korea last week, Secretary of State Dean Rusk took time out to join Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler on a quiet but urgent mission to Little Rock, Ark. There, in The Coachman's Inn, the two Cabinet members spent a precious two hours and ten minutes with Representative Wilbur Mills in yet another effort to enlist his support for the President's tax bill. Mills, characteristically, was unimpressed.

The Rusk-Fowler trip pointed up the immense importance the White House attaches to both the tax increase and Mills's position as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Lyndon Johnson has lined up his whole Cabinet, the Federal Reserve Board and battalions of bankers, businessmen and economists behind the tax bill. But standing against this seemingly irresistible tide is Wilbur the Willful, an immovable sea wall.

A Lot of Malarkey. A bland, stocky native of Kensett (pop. 905), Democrat Mills, 58, maintains that the tax bill is not languishing in his committee because of his personal opposition. "The Administration," he told TIME Correspondent Neil MacNeil last week, "can have a vote any time. The fact is that they don't have the votes to pass the bill in the House. If I wanted to, I couldn't pass it." Congressional liaison men from the White House and legislative leaders of both parties agree that the House overwhelmingly opposes the tax bill. Republican Leader Jerry Ford believes that 98% of the 187 House Republicans are against it. Says Wisconsin's John Byrnes, the senior Republican on Mills's committee: "This is a lot of malarkey about Mills's holding up this bill. It isn't the committee or the Congress. It's the people." To be sure, the Gallup poll reports that the public opposes higher taxes, but nothing could be less surprising. Nonetheless, there has been no organized general protest against the tax--there has rarely been a protest to any increase since World War II.

O1' Never-Miss. In the Senate, whose members must risk the winds of public opinion only once every six years, sentiment is more favorable to the tax bill. Last week three Senators of markedly different persuasions--Democrat Robert Kennedy and Republicans Jacob Javits of New York and John Williams of Delaware--spoke in favor of a tax increase, coupled with judicious spending cuts. Mills could not care less. Under the Constitution, it is the House of Representatives that is empowered to originate revenue measures, and it is from the House that Mills derives his considerable influence.

Mills has never flatly opposed the tax surcharge. He has simply declined to support it. Largely because of Mills's pressure for spending cuts, Johnson produced a budget so lacking in innovation and inspiration that his chief domestic Cabinet officer, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner, finally resigned in despair. Yet Mills, while generally conservative, is not one of the dwindling company of Southern obstructionists who use the committee chairmanships that devolve upon them through the encrusted traditions of seniority to block anything and everything new. A Harvard-trained lawyer and former judge, he has helped enact much liberal legislation during his 29 years in the House. On roll-call votes during the past three years, Mills backed the Administration 65% of the time, a relatively high figure for a Southern Democrat.

The trouble with Mills is that he simply does not like to lose. In ten years as Ways and Means chairman, he has been beaten only twice on important measures he has brought to the House floor. The initial defeat occurred in 1958, on the very first major measure he agreed to report out of committee. The second came last year, after the Administration blandly assured him that there were enough votes in favor of a bill to raise the debt ceiling. The count was wrong. Both setbacks apparently seared Mills's soul. In between, he built himself a name as "Ol' Never-Miss Wilbur," and he is reluctant to put that reputation on the line for anything as uncertain as the tax surcharge, however necessary it may be.

Painful Pause. Of course, Mills also happens to be completely unconvinced that the tax bill is necessary or desirable. He profoundly disagrees with Johnson's policy of attempting to finance the Viet Nam war and domestic social reforms simultaneously, insists that spending will have to be reduced somewhere. "If I asked the American taxpayer to pull in his belt," Mills said after the. Rusk-Fowler visit, "I would expect the Government to do the same thing." Since the Johnson Administration feels that it cannot sweat anything out of the war budget, the effect of Mills's position has been to bring the Great Society to a sudden, painful pause. Moreover, Mills is being unduly immodest when he argues: "I can't twist arms. The Administration thinks that if I'm for a tax bill, then everybody on the committee will be for it, except a few Republicans. That's not true."

More than a few influential observers--Lyndon Johnson among them--believe otherwise. Such is Wilbur Mills's prestige among his colleagues that his failure to endorse the tax bill has undoubtedly cost it crucial votes. By the same token, should Mills reverse his field, there are those who would take any odds that the rest of the House, within a matter of weeks or at most months would have more than enough votes to pass it.

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