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University Daily Kansan
Friday. Jan. 4, 1963
Congress: No Equal for Sheer Complexity
By Richard Bonett
An electronics technician must feel pretty smug after having installed a complicated piece of equipment that is capable of doing everything but whistle "Yankee Doodle" in E-flat.
He has reason to feel pretty smug. After all, he understands the inner workings of an amazing apparatus. But there is an area of conquest ever beyond his own private Mount Olympus.
If that technician, or any of his scientific counter-parts, really wants a challenge, he might put himself in the place of a U. S. President.
For sheer complexity, not to say contrastiness, there is nothing quite like a U. S. Congress. And a president who dreams of advancing any type of legislative program has no alternative but to learn the intricacies of this strangeest of complex machines.
THE SUCCESS or failure of a President's administration can depend on his ability to "handle" Congress. Better a U. S. President have no program at all than that he have a program but lacks the sensitive talent necessary to steer it through legislative enactment.
If a President has no program, sooner or later the Congress will work out its own program. But if a President does not comprehend, or is unable to cope with, the subtle forces at work in Congress, the most enlightened program ever devised may never become the law of the land.
The relationship that exists here has enthralled political scientists and historians of government for centuries. Still, no pat formulas are possible, least of all in the American governmental structure.
Time and temperament are the factors which, while always present, are never constant in the formula for effective government. Thus in a real sense, an effective president must possess the sensitivity of an artist as well as the skill of a technician.
AN EXAMPLE of the delicacy of the President-Congress relationship is present in the administration of John F. Kennedy. The ingredients are all there.
A conscientious student of the office which he presently occupies, Kennedy increasingly shows signs of appreciating the difficulties which confront him as a President with a clearly defined program which he hopes to implement.
It is interesting to note that apprenticeship in the legislative branch is no guarantee that a president will be successful in dealing with the Congress. Harry Truman was the best example of this in recent years. For while Mr. Truman has probably been greatly underrated as a national leader, it is a fact that he had a less than brilliant record in the area of domestic legislation — the area in which Congress is traditionally hardest to deal with.
Briefly sizing up President Kennedy in this department, it is notable that in his first two years in office his biggest legislative success was passage of a new trade bill. Despite some domestic grumbling over that measure, it was presented to Congress more on its merits as an instrument of foreign policy than for any domestic benefits it might entail.
CONVERSELY, Kennedy shattered his biggest legislative threat in measures that were purely
domestic in character. The most important of these were medical care for the aged, federal aid to education, the proposal for an urban affairs cabinet post, and his initial farm program.
It has been said that Kennedy is intelligent and flexible enough to change his tactics when things don't work out as planned. A recent statement he made would seem to support that analysis. In a television interview he commented that Congress looks "much more powerful from here than it did when I was in the Senate or House."
When Kennedy first took office,
he tended to act as though he were a "nonresident member of the Old Capitol Hill Club where he would be remembered sympathetically" in the words of one Washington correspondent.
Later, in the heat of legislative activity last year, the press was filled with accounts of administrative "arm twisting" as legislators complained openly of raw pressure being used to bring about their support of administrative proposals.
Neither of these tactics worked and the result was one of the longest, most drawn out, and seemingly most disruptive and disorganized sessions of Congress since the late 1940's.
Kennedy then set out to stump for a larger liberal majority in Congress in the recent elections. His effort was stopped short by the Cuban flare-up. The actual outcome of the election was less than he had hoped for but better than many observers would have thought possible in an off-year election.
The makeup of the Congress was not altered appreciably and Kennedy is aware of this. There certainly will be no less opposition to his controversial programs in the coming session.
Thus the President will have to search for another formula if he hopes to be more successful with the 88th Congress than he was with the 87th. His technique with Congress in the next two years will be watched closely. His chances for re-election may well be decided on the basis of his performance in this touchy area.
John F. Kennedy
IN HIS FIRST two years in office, Kennedy was criticised for defining his program in terms of the ideal rather than the possible. In his zeal to "get the nation moving," he asked for everything at once, thus overwhelming legislative committees.
Furthermore, observers have criticised Kennedy in his first two years for presenting every issue with the same urgent rhetoric and no sense of priority, throwing an intolerable burden on congressional leadership.
The President is caught in an interesting dilemma. He is convinced that technological, social, political, and economic change is so rapid in this century that only great innovation and flexibility can meet the challenge.
Congress, an equal power under the Constitution and extremely jealous of its power, is made up largely of men who are not innovators but consolidators. Complicating the situation still further is the fact that the power in Congress is not in the hands of a manageable few, but is fragmentized in the hands of committee chairmen.
IT IS CONCEIVABLE that as the opening session of the new Congress approaches, President Kennedy would rather bargain with Premier Khrushchev than with some of the men with whom he will have to do business on Captol Hill.
And that constitutes just one of the problems a President of the United States must face to govern this nation today.
Castro: Too Much, Too Fast?
By Arthur C. Miller
"Condemn me! It doesn't matter!
History will absolve me!"
As the new year emerged, the year of 1959, it appeared that history would indeed absolve the young revolutionary. Scarcely six years before, on July 26, 1953, he and a small band of ill-equipped followers had attacked the crack forces at Moncada Barracks. They were defeated and those who lived were tried and imprisoned.
BUT IN 1958 he had made a successful return, through the underbrush and over the mountains, striking swiftly, conquering and moving forward until at last the ed.
Sty's win to resist was destroy. On the first day of the new year, a Latin American dictator had been dithered. Fulgencio Batista fled the island nation, finding refuge in the Dominican Republic. Batista the dictator, Batista the egomaniac, Batista the sadist, had been knocked from his high pedestal and no longer could exploit the people and no longer could sap them of their energy and wealth.
History would surely absolve Fidel Castro Ruz!
The promise of a fruitful future echoed in the mind of nearly every Cuban as the people joyfully welcomed Fidel Castro. The future was to bring "government by popular election" in one year, and "absolute guarantee" of freedom of information, press, and all individual and political rights. There were the promises of grants of land to small planters and peasants, with indemnification to the former owners; a greater share of the cane crop to all planters; and confiscation of all illegally obtained property.
CUBA WAS once again to taste freedom. There would be a minimum governmental program that would "guarantee the punishment of the guilty ones, the rights of the workers, the fulfillment of international commitments, public order, peace, freedom, as well as the economic, social and political progress of the Cuban people."
Such were the promises that Fidel had made. And aside from Batista, his followers and a few American industrialists, there were few in this or any other country
who did not believe that history would absolve him.
Jules Dubois, in his biography "Fidel Castro," written shortly after the revolution, reflected the attitude held by most Americans and Cubans during the summer of 1959. He wrote:
"CASTRO HAS a deep reverence for civilian, representative, constitutional government . . . He did not fight the five-year war against Batista to don the cloak of a tyrant, for he well knows that many of the same people who fought so hard with him in Sierra Maestra and in the cities, towns and villages in the underground, would be the first to turn on him and demand that he go."
Yet time replaced the sheepskin, and Castro emerged as something more fearful than a mere lion.
On Oct. 22, 1959, Castro told a rally that leaflet-dropping planes which flew over Havana the previous day were U.S.-based.
On Nov. 2, 1959, the U.S.-owned King Ranch was seized as the Agrarian Reform Institute began its move on U.S. properties.
On Feb. 13, 1960, Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan signed a trade agreement with Cuba extending $100 million in credit.
ON MARCH 4, 1960, the French freighter La Coubre, carrying munitions, blew up in Havana harbor and Castro, by inference, blamed the United States.
On March 29,1960,Castro pulled out of the Inter-American Defense Treaty.
On Aug. 7,1960,all U.S.-owned property in Cuba had been nationalized.
On May 11, 1960, pro-government unions began the seizure of independent newspapers.
On Sept. 18, 1960, the Havana government announced the Soviet Union would give CIA MIG fighter planes and heavy tanks.
On Dec. 2, 1980, the U.S. government officially designated Cuba as Communist-controlled for the first time by making Cuban refugees eligible for mutual security funds earmarked for refugees from "Communist-controlled" nations.
ON JAN. 3, 1961, just two years after Castro's victory, the U.S.
severed relations with Cuba.
In early 1961, then, the image of Fidel Castro had taken new shape in the eyes of many of those who had praised his successful overthrow of Batista. Theodore Draper wrote in March of that year:
"Fidel Castro—as much demagogue as idealist, as much adventurer as revolutionary, as much anarchist as Communist or anything else—was suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted into power without a real party, a real army or a real program. . . His power and his promises were from the first incompatible, and this contradiction forced him to seek a basis for his regime wholly at variance with that of the anti-Batista revolution."
Fidel Castro
AND SO FIDEL Castro became the whipping boy of the Western Hemisphere. He had broken his promise for popular election of government. He had not paid for the property he confiscated. But he did build schools, and he did distribute the land and he did establish medical centers, and he did win the backing of the Cuban people.
Some critics sav Castro was led astray by his National Bank president, Che Guevara. They say Castro could have found it possible to take an alternative course, in opposition to Guevara. They say a great majority of the men and women in Fidel's armed forces and nearly all of them in his first Cabinet were non-Communists, if not anti-Communist. They say Castro's story, his deviation, is a tragic record of opportunities ignored.
Yet it is difficult to say whether he was led astray or whether he was in fact always a Communist. Castro himself declared on Dec. 2, 1961, that he would be "a Marxist-Leninist until the day I die," and he added that he had hidden his Marxist leanings for years.
FOR HISTORIANS the question that may forever go unanswered is whether Castro coldly and cynically planned a Communist state in the Caribbean or whether he was the product of forces and circumstances he couldn't control. Perhaps the answer will become one of the great mysteries of modern man.
It is saddening to think of what Castro could have done had he fulfilled his promises. There would have been a totally new Cuba, with an honest government, with a broadened and unshackled economy. The oppressed one-third of its people would have been given a new hope and the means for realizing it, and its rich one-tenth would have been deprived of much power and wealth. It would have been a moral, clean and healthy Cuba, inviting assistance and investment from a Western world willing to make such offers to elevate the status of unfortunate people.
Fidel Castro was a talented product of the Western world gone astray. Perhaps he sought too much too fast. And the West lost a gifted son.
ALITHOUGH NOT intended as seuch, Irving Pflaum has coined an appropriate epitaph for Castro's demise:
"It is perhaps the final tragedy and the last word to be said about Fidel of Cuba, that was a young man with old ideas. Iron rods for the people and prison for the opposition predate the Pharaohs. What is there new in a vassal state seeking a new master?"